Debate Abortion

Japan is not a 3rd world nation, yet is extremely crowded.

Yes, we CAN use overpopulation as an argument. A recent study showed that if China decided to live lifestyles that North Americans and Europeans lived, Earth wouldnt be able to support it.

I will give you that the majority of overpopulation is in 3rd world nations, but an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

 

You mean the "spend it all, waste the planet and make lots of irrecyclable garbage" style of life? Please, don't use the American way of Life (which sucks, by the way) as an argument against abortion.

Of course, there will always be poor people. But if you've seen the state of mysery that zones like India or Africa have, you'd understand my point.

Sure, you can show me a "recent study" about overpopulation, but I can also show you other studies, like the one's in http://www.overpopulation.com/ - there's always two sides for every issue.

 

I never said it was a perfect way of life, just the one most nations would like to have. We all wish for a perfect, wasteless society, but if wishes and buts were candy and nuts, we'd all have a merry Christmas.

I -have-. And you dont think a birth control program of some sort would assist in the overcrowding? While the poverty is a factor out of the general populaces hands, that really doesn't do anything -against- abortion, as it isn't like that everywhere. You also ignored my point about Japanese overcrowding.

Here is the report. Apologies for not posting earlier. http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/science/07/16/china.un.reut/index.html And..... wait, whats this? Theres two sides for every issue?

You mean like religion and abortion? Oh my! What a startling revelation ;P

 

Actually I didn't see the point in there. It's overcrowded, sure, but they've managed to organized themselves.

And for Africa: You think their problem _IS_ overpopulation? No way. They're not poor because "what they have doesn't give for everybody", but rather "they don't have AT ALL".

Because poor countries cannot sell their products due to "quality assurance policies" of rich countries, which only allow the rich countries to sell to the poor, and not otherwise. Poor countries have enormous debts (where are they gonna get that money?), their industry is stalled, because they're told to invest in condoms instead of industry and education.

And people die there because they're being sold condoms instead of antibiotics.

So... if you really want to debate abortion, please leave overpopulation aside.

 

You do know that that argument in North America really doesn't work though, so what is the excuse here? The baby boomer generation is going to be one of the largest age groups in North America. When you look at it too, according to statscan.com, families are only having on average one child each. So when the baby boomers die off our population will decrease significantly. This will affect our society greatly because our countries(Canada and America) rely on money to run.

If anything people in third world countries could always be taught about safe sex and the issue on overpopulationn in their countries. Though, when our countries were developing as theirs are, we didn't worry too much about over-population... who here has 25 aunts and uncles on both sides as I do? They have a greater need for people because they aren't as advanced as we are. Some may still need large families to run farms or other businesses.. In the past of North America before urbanization was big families needed more children to tend to farms.

Neph, I'm glad that Samantha is doing well and I wish the best for the other girl and I'll pray for her.. also refer her to the right to life office in Chatham, or anywhere because they help young mothers get started with diaper packages and food and I think even some financial assistance, or help getting financial assistance ^_^x *wonders if there are pro-choice organizations that do that.. if so someone enlighten me*

 

Neither girl is in Chatham (or even this province, actually). And yes, there are pro-choice organizations that offer counseling. ITs essentially like a pro-life clinic, they just present the option if they see it as possibly necessary.

Now, as for overcrowding: It wasnt my argument anyway. Its called covering for a bud. But to keep it alive: are you saying we should just let the population keep going until we really do need to intervene? I'd rather see our world with baby lisences than a world covered in smog and low on resources and available healthy farming ground where we have to cull the chaff from the wheat. (1 ounce prevention = 1 pound cure)

Granted overpopulaton -could- theoretically boost technology a bit, like asteroid mining. But thats a gamble I'd rather not see.

And before anyone labels me a merciless bloodletter, please keep in mind I only see abortion as a true last resort.

And That Guy, you never did respond to the fact that not everybody gets support and/or is able to really support/give up a kid. Your prayers are appreciated, but we should focus on the issue at hand.

 

"Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them?" - Gandalf

I believe that when life is at hand people should at least give their baby a chance to live. They can't just assume that they won't have support and their child will not survive.. Once that child is aborted their life is taken away and will never return to them. A firefighter may go into a burning building knowing that he or she has a fifty percent chance of dying but to save a life is more important to them.

Not everyone needs a rich life like we may have. Just because they can't live the "socially accepted" lifestyle of North Americans doesn't mean that they shouldn't be given that chance to live the life that the child would have.

 

Semen is not actively developing nor growing like a fetus does. A sperm cell isn't human . . . it only contains half of the genetic material necessary for a human to exist. A fetus, on the otherhand, just grows . . . just how a baby grows into a child which grows into an adult.

Getting into issues like whether masturbation or using condoms are is right or wrong strays too far away from the subject at hand. I think our worldviews differ too much, underscore, for me to change yours or vice versa. I guess that's just the way it is.


Kudos to That Guy! for recognizing Piaget.
-Odin

 

Hypothetical situation: 13 year old girl with straight A+'s who helps out in the community and does charity work is raped and impregnated. Doctors discover she WILL die if she gives birth. What do you do?

Certainly she deserves life, no? None of that was her choice.

I had typed out a big huge excerpt from Calculating God by Robert J. Sawyer, but M2A automatically logged me out after being inactive (while typing) so Im just going to reproduce the jist of it.

Abortion shouldn't even be a moral issue because we have effective birth control. (it doesnt say anything about people who are too stupid to use contraception, Im assuming that the particular character would say "give them up for adoption" and I agree) However in extreme cases (such as rape and incest) the mother-to-be should be allowed the option of abortion to regain control of her reproductive biology as much as she desires, as she did not have a chance to exercise her rights in the act. When told that some humans believe that contraception is immoral, the character simply says "You humans sure do go out of your way to make moral issues. Theres nothing immoral about contraception." No explanation is given but Im assuming its essentially that sperm and egg cells are not effectively humans anyway, nor are they intelligent.

 

Some people are like talking to a brick wall. Parents do have rights over their children who are underage and other reasons too. So any child in any country that is underage (not an adult) dont have real rights. It will not be pro-choice if someone can choose for that woman considering she is underage. I think atleast That Guy gets it. I'll drop it here because lack of inteligents for any of their countries laws on some peoples parts.

I am not for abortion but I am not against it.

GOOD REASON:
1. mother could die
2. doctor said too
3. did drugs or anything harmful to the fetus and didn't know about being pregnant
4. baby could have birth defects
5. still birth
6. miscarriage (when this happens the fetus needs to come out)

BAD REASON:
1. didn't want it
2. didn't want to go for adoption
3. did drugs and knew about the pregnancy
4. cannot afford the child
5. rape victim (she should be able to look into the eyes of this child and realise that its her own blood and not a cause of rape)

As a mother myself, I do believe that a child is percious. My ex was considering adoption or abortion but I turned them both down. We brought this child into this world and now we need to take care of it. (Too bad he doesn't understand the we part.) I could tell you horror stories of what happened to me or people I know and what not but I won't. My son is my strength and he keeps me going. The only thing he wants from me is for me to be his mommy. I try to give him that the best I can everyday.

No one should tell anyone to go for adoption or abortion. It is not right (even if its the parents or by the law they can). The girl has all the right to deceided in my opinion. But I am not pro-choice because the fact is there isn't some that really fit into that catorgory because of the stupid laws.

As far as being "special" goes and wanting to keep the fetus that is highly irresponsible of the mother. Has anyone ever been near a "special" child or adult? Face it that the child or adult will never change. BTW there are other ways that make a child "special" after birth. I know some that had them happen to them. Can you really give up your whole life? A "special" child can never be fixed. She/he will live their whole life like that.

Has anyone ever went to Special Olympics or watched them train for it? I have been to the training. The parents there get angry over little things (like dropping the ball). It has been years and years of fustration of seeing their child not live a "normal" life which makes them vent out like that. Face it humans cannot be completily patient. It was hard for me to go there and help out. i knew people who made fun of these people. Now I had to see them struggle and try their best at what would be easy for me to do. Parents getting mad at their child for stupid reasons and other parents getting mad at that childs parents for yelling at them. Its in my opinion irresposible for the mother to let her child face this and she knew about it while it was a fetus. GOD did not make the child like that the mothers body, the fathers bad genes, or something went wrong in the pregnancy. There is no way that the doctor would let you keep a still birth fetus. THE FETUS IS DEAD.

I am a little against adoption. There are ways for the mother to support the child. Some reasons I can see why they would go for adoption. Being a rape victim is the worest of all. If the mother can't see past the rape to the eyes of her beautiful child (her own flesh and blood) then she should be shot.

Some of you people don't have all the facts about pregnancy. There are many things that can go wrong while the lady is pregant. A certain amount of iron is needed thats one of them to less or to more can cause a brain disorder. The doctor does know what he/she is talking about with the technology now they are right. Why take the chance and keep the child?

I think we should all think about the problems of birth along with abortion. We should get away from over population and GOD when it comes to abortion. One person can easily live in one square mile (or KM) while 30 could also. If the population gets way to out of hand then yes there should be only allowed so many kids to a women but that is for the governmen to deciede like in China. (As a side note after a women has a c section its best for her to only have two kids more.) God is the stupidest thing of all in my opinion. God cannot tell you to have sex or not. Sex is a sin. Well then having a child come out of an exist should also be. Plus to not have an abortion. There are many things that could go wrong at the fetus stage and abortion is the only option.

 

Kiddies, it's all very well to talk about people knowing how to use contraception, but no form of contraception is 100% guaranteed to work even when used correctly. You don't have to be a teenager to mess up. Fully a third of the women I know in their 30s who've become pregnant for the first time, have had it happen as a shock because they thought they had contraception all sorted out. Although I'll admit for a couple of them it might have been their biological clocks acting through their subconscious... but most definitely not for all.

And it's all very well to talk about how parents should love their children no matter what, but on a day when one mother has been jailed for trying to kill her child in a hot oven because she was jealous of sharing the father's attention, and another woman in Germany is suspected of decapitating her 10 month old son with a kitchen knife in front of his siblings, it's pretty obvious that some people are just not cut out to be parents. Wouldn't it have been great if someone had spotted the danger those kids were in and kept them safe? Not every woman loves her babies, no matter how they were conceived.

Wouldn't it be a lovely world if we all started out infertile by default, and were only permitted to become fertile when - and if - we were ready for parenthood? If we had to have licences to have babies? I'm a parent and I'd support that. But it's not.

I know, in the real world, 4 women who have had abortions. Three of them did in fact become pregnant as teenagers. One couldn't face having to admit to her parents that she'd been having sex with a man who she thought loved her, even though she desperately wanted children and was over the age of consent, so she did it out of fear of being thrown out (a few years later she got married and now has two daughters and sterilisation scars). One planned to remain childless for life and couldn't have finished her degree course (and those of you who believe it's possible to do a degree while caring for a baby as a single parent, of course it is, but only for those superwomen who need very little sleep and have smily happy babies, and babysitters on tap - babies are a LOT of work), she's ashamed of having the abortion and has looked after her contraception ever since. One got pregnant on purpose because she thought it would be a way to get away from her parents and live happily ever after in some kind of middle class luxury with her acne ridden prince charming, but she chose a boyfriend who was soon sent to jail for beating up his previous girlfriend and breaking her jaw, and she panicked when she realised that her baby/home/husband/car dream wasn't going to happen, then she got pregnant twice more trying to follow the same dream and had two more abortions when she saw those weren't going to work out either. And then her nephew was stillborn and she felt it was some kind of divine judgement on her, that because she'd killed her own babies somebody else's babies had to die too. So, the third had her life screwed up by abortions, but she would have quite successfully screwed her own life up no matter what with her desperate longing to marry any man who showed an interest in her, regardless of how he treated her or his potential to be a good father. The other two have dealt with it perfectly well. Abortion doesn't necessarily destroy a woman's mind with guilt and grief, but it doesn't get forgotten either.

The fourth woman planned for her child and wanted to be a parent, but at around 5 months through her pregnancy it was found that the baby had a serious genetic defect and if even if it survived to the end of the pregnancy, it wouldn't live more than 3 months after it was born. Her baby was going to die no matter what, so she made the painful decision to have a late termination. Pro-lifers thought she was a disgrace, to throw away her dying fetus instead of continuing with the pregnancy and going through all the pain of watching her baby die during the weeks after it was born, and pro-abortionists thought that the disposal would be a form of closure and she'd be sad for a couple of weeks and then be ready to try again. But aborting it didn't get rid of the pain that the baby she'd wanted for so long wouldn't live - and at such a late stage it was a nasty abortion too. If her baby's going to die anyway, or have a life that's not worth living, whose decision can it be except for the mother's? How can anyone under those circumstances have the slightest right to disapprove of her choice, whether it be to abort or continue with the pregnancy to full term? How can anyone else say what's the best way to deal with her grief?

It seems to me that anyone's views on abortion are going to be based around whether that fetal lump of cells is a lump of cells that will become a baby one day, or a baby right from the start. Some belief systems state that a baby doesn't have a soul until several days or months after its born, so that if it dies early it's not the same as a whole person dying. Do you think that if a baby dies soon after it's born, that the mother feels any less grief because she's told it didn't have a soul yet? Do you think that if a woman miscarries during the first three months of her pregnancy, that she should scrape together what she can of it and give it a proper burial? That miscarriage is going to be messy and scary and upsetting, but not a patch on the baby that died after it was born. You can't compare the two in the way that the mother feels about them. One had the potential to be her child, the other was her child that she'd given birth to and seen and looked after. The mother doesn't have the same relationship with the fetus that's miscarried as she does with the living baby that died because the fetus was never as real, she never held it and looked at it and fed it. The tiny fetus is not the same as a baby. Not when it's miscarried and not when it's aborted.

Going back to contraception, what about IUD? This basically permits the egg to be fertilised but stops it latching onto the inside of the uterus. Where does that fit into the moral argument? Is it contraception, or abortion?

 

I'm going to add bit of a question for everyone here, it was one that Garrett Hardin brought up. Pretend you are the other physician in this situation..


Two physicians are talking shop. "Doctor," says one, "I'd like your professional opinion. The question is, should the pregnancy have been terminated or not? The father was syphilitic. The mother was tuberculous. They had already had four children: the first was blind, the second died, the third was deaf and dumb, and the fourth was tuberculous. The woman was pregnant for the fifth time. As the attending physician, what would you have done?"

 

ah yeah, i was looking for this for ages but couldn't remember where I'd seen it

 

Here are some questions I want some people to think about:

The first is: "Is this human life?" As we will see, the answer clearly is Yes. That answer is a medical and scientific one, for we cannot impose a religious or philosophic belief in our nations through force of law.

The second question is: "Should we grant equal protection by law to all living humans in our nation?" or,

"Should we allow discrimination against entire classes of living humans?"

The third question is about Choice and Women’s Rights.



For two millennia in our Western culture, written into our constitutions, specifically protected by our laws, and deeply imprinted into the hearts of all men and women, there has existed the absolute value of honoring and protecting the right of each human to live. This has been an unalienable and unequivocal right. The only exception has been that of balancing a life for a life in certain situations or by due process of law.

Never, in modern times — except by a small group of physicians in Hitler’s Germany and by Stalin in Russia — has a price tag of economic or social use-fullness been placed on an individual human life as the price of its continued existence.

Never, in modern times — except by physicians in Hitler’s Germany — has a certain physical perfection been required as a condition necessary for the continuation of that life.

Never — since the law of paterfamilias in ancient Rome — has a major nation granted to a father or mother total dominion over the life or death of their child.

Never, in modern times, has the state granted to one citizen the absolute legal right to have another killed in order to solve their own personal, social or economic problem.

And yet, if this is human life, the U.S. Supreme Court Decision in America and permissive abortion laws in other nations do all of the above. They represent a complete about-face, a total rejection of one of the core values of Western man, and an acceptance of a new ethic in which life has only a relative value. No longer will every human have a right to live simply because he or she exists. A human will now be allowed to exist only if he measures up to certain standards of independence, physical perfection, or utilitarian usefulness to others. This is a momentous change that strikes at the root of Western civilization. It makes no difference to vaguely assume that human life is more human post-born than pre-born. What is critical is to judge it to be — or not to be — human life. By a measure of "more" or "less" human, one can easily and logically justify infanticide and euthanasia. By the measure of economic and/or social usefulness, the ghastly atrocities of Hitlerian mass murders came to be. One cannot help but be reminded of the anguished comment of a condemned Nazi judge, who said to an American judge after the Nuremberg trials, "I never knew it would come to this." The American judge answered simply, "It came to this the first time you condemned an innocent life."

Ponder well the words of George Santayana: "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to relive it." Wm. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Simon & Schuster, 1959

Is this unborn being, growing within the mother, a human life? Does he or she have a right to live? Make this judgment with the utmost care, scientific precision, and honesty. Upon it may hinge much of the basic freedom of many human lives in the years to come.

I'm Pro-Life all the way!

(By the way, I do eat meat and stuff like that, you crazy people!)


I got all of this information on www.pro-life.com

 

Care to elaborate?

If not then your argument and name calling was totally pointless.


And please look over the rules set out by Bloodberry.
http://www.mangatoanime.com/vbulletin/showthread.php?s=&threadid=8447

edit: doh! But still he was one of the greatest musicians in all of history.. And abortion isn't just a recent thing you know.. the earliest records of abortion date back to 2600 BC!
-http://www.hopeclinic.com/history.htm

 

I would think, at least, that by "no name calling" they meant, really, of other users/posters/members, so on and so forth, not necessarily long-dead historical people that have little to no way of finding what was just recently said about them. ^^;; At least, I think that is who exiztone was talking about when he said "That guy". Not the member, but Beethoven, heh.

Anyways, I think he was trying to point out that, like the past four kids, Beethoven wasn't all there, though I, personally, don't know much about the guy myself, never was a big fan of his.

As the physician, I would've left the decision up to the mother and father. Would've said abortion is an option, and so is birth and pointed out that it's possible for defects to occur and it's possible that the birth could be completely natural and fine.

Edit: All the moreso proving my point; it was around as far back as that time, and there were times when it wasn't even allowed at all, but people still did it, no matter the costs, and it will continue to happen, just like everything that is dubbed illegal. Ain't no stopping it now.

 

he would never have experienced anything because he would not have existed.

you think that is preferable?

 

i don't think it should be done, girls should think about the risk there taking before they have sex.the baby didn't ask to be made they just were because there perents made a mistake so why should the baby be failed at a chance of life when it was the parents mistake

----->>>> no i don't think its preferable its wrong