** Is it wrong! It s right! It is human It is not. If that is what you constantly want to go back and forth about, I’m not going to stand in the why of your pleasure. But, can you take a minute out and answer me why you think so many women want to have abortions? **
Yes, but it is also clearly a separate organism with its own heartbeat, brainwaves, blood type, genetic code, etc. Wrong. See http://www.nrlc.org/abortion/pba/keymedical.html. Read some of Kandahar's posts. He (like Princeton bioethics chairman, Peter Singer) denies that newborns are truly persons.
From a philosophical perspective I deny that newborns are truly persons. From a legal perspective, of course they are persons and should remain as such.
Your mature comments, not to mention the great logic you used to back them up, have reduced my opinion to shambles.
Who's going to go through pages and pages of this info only to find some number claiming that partial birth abortions are more common that what has been previously suggested. Well, I will make it easier for anyone looking for the numbers. And it is from a respectable source. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/backgrounders/abortion.html "The late-term abortion discussed in the “Partial Birth Abortion Ban” legislation make up only 1.2 percent of the 1.4 million abortions performed in the United States." "Less than 10 percent of abortions are performed after the first trimester; less than one percent are performed after the twenty-fourth week."
Balbus, You cited these reasons for abortion in one of your previous posts: --too young/immature/not ready for responsibility(32 %) --economic(21-28 %) --to avoid adjusting life(16 %) --mother single or in poor relationship(12-13 %) --enough children already(4-8 %) (www.johnstonsarchive.net/policy/abortion/abreasons.html) I think that many of these can ultimately be attributed to personal immorality and irresponsibility. Someone who is: --too young/immature/not ready for responsibility(32 %) or --mother single or in poor relationship(12-13 %) should not be sexually active. If people insist on pursuing sexual gratification apart from a committed relationship suitable for raising children, then "society" cannot be blamed for their unwanted pregnancies. Likewise, I cannot countenance the "right" to kill one's offspring in order: --to avoid adjusting life(16 %) People who are unwilling to alter their lifestyle to care for their kids should place them for adoption with one of the many families on 1-2 year waiting lists in every major US city. The same is true of people with: --enough children already(4-8 %) Raising kids requires great personal sacrifice, beyond mere economics. No public policy can change this. However, the law can prevent children from being killed for the sake of convenience.
.012 x 1,400,000 = 16,800 babies who are partially delivered (feet first) then have their skulls punctured and brains sucked out every year.
And how many of those were done to save the mothers life? I'm guessing approximately 16,800. You may be pro-fetus-life, but you are definitely anti-human-life if you want the would-be mother to die for your ideology.
How is that wrong, Huck? CDC data indicates that 1.5% of abortions are third trimester. Of those third trimester abortions, a significant percentage are to save the mother's life. I too, have to agree with Garp; it seems that anti's want to make partial-birth abortions appear as the main way doctors perform all abortions in an attempt to make an emotional impact. btw, I did read your links, and didn't see that contested anywhere....
The ban signed by Bush included an exception to protect the life of the mother. The pro-abortionists insist on an amorphous "health" exception that would render the ban meaningless. The actual abortionists themselves had admitted that most partial birth abortions are elective: http://www.nrlc.org/abortion/pba/AMA%20News%201995%20Hern.pdf http://www.nrlc.org/abortion/pba/AMAFitzimmons1997.pdf See above, as well as: http://www.nrlc.org/abortion/pba/pbafact13.html http://www.nrlc.org/abortion/pba/Koop%20on%20partial-birth%20abortion%201996.pdf I know of no case in which it is necessary to kill an unborn baby at this late stage in order to save the mother's life.
Why would you not consider a newborn to be a person? I have a 2month old son and would like to know in what way you think he would be less of a person than a 20 year old.
No. It didn't. Don't make shit up. Any time you cite "facts" from the NRLC, I'm not going to read them and neither is anyone else who has the slightest understanding of what "objective" means. In other words, women should die because of your ignorance. How very "pro-life" of you.
Are the mentally-ill persons? How about coma patients? How about when we sleep? At what age do they become persons? Would it be morally wrong to harm, take advantage of, or neglect a non-person? If so, why?
OH MY GOD!!!! Have you ever spent any time with two month old babies? Of course they THINK!(What do you think they are doing when they give you that look when you are making noises or faces at them? They are trying to figure you out! Anyone who has spent time with a baby knows this.) Of course they are self aware! (They know when they are hungry or scared or lonely or wet.) They have plenty of "rational capacity." They have the capacity of a two month old baby. Two month olds are viable humans, with the capacity to breathe, live and function independently. Of course they need help with feeding, self care ect, but they are viable.
It depends on their condition. Generally speaking, no. Yes. I don't know. I don't believe there is any sudden transition from non-personhood to personhood. Instead, I think there are a lot of gray areas where older infants have some semblance of self-awareness but to a lesser degree than adults. Psychologically, human babies aren't fully self-aware until they're about 30 months old and sometimes well after that. Erring on the side of protecting human life, I think the legal definition of "personhood" should remain at the moment of birth. Again, I think it depends on the circumstances. It'd be morally wrong (but not to the same degree as murder) to harm, say, an infant because A) there are people who care about the infant, and B) this opens up a slippery slope as to what is considered a person under the law. I don't believe you can paint the world as black-and-white as you seem to want to.
The previous paragraph is completely devoid of any rational arguments and is almost entirely an appeal to emotion. Do you understand the definition of the words "function independently"?
Me? You've just stated that it would be morally wrong to a greater degree for someone to murder me as opposed to an infant... Coma patients are not persons, mentally-ill might not be considered persons? You decided that the ability to rationalize and reason were the end-all definition of personhood?
That's about as far from painting things black-and-white as imaginable, but anyway... Do you have a better definition of personhood? I'd love to hear it.
