Abortion: A Choice, Not Chore

[Crodevillian Team]

Women should have full control over their reproductive organs. Sorry for those still saying the father should have a say. I agree it's messed up. However when men can carry a pregnancy to term in place of a woman, then perhaps I'll be more concerned.

I agree 100%.

So, it would be right to kill a newborn? Or a child a few months old?

That wasn't my point. My point was that you said "even though we -know- they'd be against it." I was responding to that, saying that we definitely and most assuredly DO NOT know how they feel, because even -they- don't know how they feel.

I'm actually very reluctant about abortions due to rape, I really think adoption is a much better choice in these cases.

I think it would be absolutely awful for a woman to have no choice but to carry the child of a rapist. Not only would it be a nine-month 24/7 reminder, but how do you deal with people asking about you? Rape would be traumatizing enough, but to have to deal with that is unthinkable for me.

We spend a lot of money keeping alive people in irrreversible comas or terminal diseases even though they have no perspective of life, or even awareness of their state

The difference is, these people have -had- a perspective of life at some time. Based on this, it can be discerned whether or not they would choose to be euthanised or sustained on life support. Many people make stipulations such as "If I'm brain dead, I want to be taken off life support." That's why we also have Hospice and "Do Not Resuscitate" orders- to ease with such things.

I am saying that unhappines is a fact of life, and killing people before they are born because we think they will be unhappy is not going to make things better.

I'm sure there are millions of women who have had abortions that could tell you the complete opposite; it can and does make things better.

I doesn't make sense to me that one day before being born someone has absolutely no rights, and just after they leave the womb is that they star being people.

Because until they leave that womb, they are a part of a woman's body; it is not only physically contained, but physically connected -and- dependent on the woman for survival. It is therefore her right to decide what to do, and that is what it ultimately boils down to.

[Raerlynn]

Originally Posted by Nietz

I'm actually very reluctant about abortions due to rape, I really think adoption is a much better choice in these cases. Also because and adopted child doesn't have to know her biological mother was raped, nor do their adopting parents. In cases of rape, there's also the day-after pill, which will likely prevent conception if used after the sexual act.

I want to first start off saying you think abortion is wrong. That's your call. Now let me point out something: Nowadays many children have been adopted. These kids, once they have the disposable income, spend money hiring Private Investigators to find their biological mothers. It's more common than television or the news makes it out to be. I have a friend whose mother was raped, and my friend being the byporduct. When she found out (during court when her biological mother was trying to regain custody), she was depressed and attempted three suicides. After that, she had an absolute hatred of both the biological and the foster parents. Both Foster Mother/Father and Biological Mother/Father. She hated her foster parents for lying. She hated her biological father for the actual crime, and she hated her biological mother for not keeping her. So...no I don't think adoption is a good thing for a rape victim.

[LeefRyder]

I'm curious if anyone of you are really thinking about something that is bigger than alternatives to this and that. DO YOU have the right to tell someone else what to do with their life? For every decision we make there are consequences. Good and bad. But I really don't want someone taking away my right to make my OWN decisons. Course I've said this before in abortion threads and I'm consequently ignored because people would much rather argue on details that are end results or what ifs.

[mepersoner]

Originally Posted by krylo

Also, that's 1 in 100, if they're used properly. 99% chance of preganancy using just one of those. Pill or condom. However, let's put this in perspective. The average american has sex 134 times a year. That means in one year, the average american, if they use ONLY condoms or pills is going to knock someone up or get knocked up.

That isn't how it's calculated. Calculations for birth control are done with 100 couples over the course of a year. The if 5 of the 100 couples get pregnant over the course of a year then the birth control is 95% effective.

So no, if it's 99% effective that means 1 in 100 couples will become pregnant using it over the course of a year. If you wanted an actual chance of conception per number of times a person has sex with 99% effective rate, you'd have to calculate it out.

100 couples * 134 times a year = 13,400 sexual activities are done for every one pregnancy when using birth control that is 99% effective. So using birth control that is 99% effective the average couple would get pregnant once every one hundred years. Each uses time the couple would have a 1/13,400 chance of getting pregnant.

Originally Posted by LeefRyder

I'm curious if anyone of you are really thinking about something that is bigger than alternatives to this and that. DO YOU have the right to tell someone else what to do with their life? For every decision we make there are consequences. Good and bad. But I really don't want someone taking away my right to make my OWN decisons. Course I've said this before in abortion threads and I'm consequently ignored because people would much rather argue on details that are end results or what ifs.

At the same time, you'd be taking away your child's right to any decisions. That's hypocricy at it's best.

Mashirosen says: mepersoner, please don't double-post. See the forum rules for an explanation of double-posting and why we don't like it.

[LeefRyder]

At the same time, you'd be taking away your child's right to any decisions. That's hypocricy at it's best.

do you actually read anything anyone posts in the thread before you make your arguments? Please back up your arguments, because to my knowledge no one has scientifically proved when life starts, AS I've already said, and I'm sure others have said. The child is not a child, but a POTENTIAL child and therefore has no rights as a person. If you believe that they do thats all well and good for you but you cannot force me to agree with you or believe the same things that you do so your argument is pointless. No one has the right to force their beliefs on another person. Just because you believe life starts wherever doesn't make it a FACT.

[Krylo]

Calculations for birth control are done with 100 couples over the course of a year. The if 5 of the 100 couples get pregnant over the course of a year then the birth control is 95% effective.

So no, if it's 99% effective that means 1 in 100 couples will become pregnant using it over the course of a year. If you wanted an actual chance of conception per number of times a person has sex with 99% effective rate, you'd have to calculate it out.

100 couples * 134 times a year = 13,400 sexual activities are done for every one pregnancy when using birth control that is 99% effective. So using birth control that is 99% effective the average couple would get pregnant once every one hundred years. Each uses time the couple would have a 1/13,400 chance of getting pregnant.

Then they calculate like idiots.

Every usage is a chance of it working or not working. If it's used 134 times, that's 134 times it could have not worked. It has that chance of working per use, in the statistic I read. Not "People have a ____ chance of becoming pregnant over the course of a year with consistant and proper use of ____." Which would be how you would word something calculated like that. Math story problems help you understand things like what wordings people use when they've calculated something a certain way.


HOWEVER

99.97%

I forgot who said that. But you're right. I remembered the numbers wrong, and I apologize. It's actually likely to cause pregnancy 3 times out of every 10,000 times. Or, about, once out of every 3,333 times.

Now, let's do some math to put THAT into perspective. I'm not sure if this will end up supporting me or not, but I'm going to post it anyway. Because I'm just that kind of guy.

Originally Posted by http://www.census.gov/cgi-bin/popclock

U.S. POPClock Projection
According to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, the resident population of the United States, projected to 7/14/2004 at 8:22:39 PM EDT is

293,739,002
COMPONENT SETTINGS


One birth every.................................. 8 seconds
One death every.................................. 12 seconds
One international migrant (net) every............ 24 seconds
Net gain of one person every..................... 11 seconds

Doing some quick math (7.5 babies a minute*60 for an hour*24 for a day*351 for a year), I get: 3,790,800 babies per year. Now, this won't be perfectly accurate because abortions aren't, yanno, birthed (so don't use these numbers in any other discussions unless you show all the work that validates them. They're worthless without the work). But, lets try to find out how many children are unwanted anway. I'm going to decide this mofo by 80. Why? divide by 4 for all the people who are too old/too young to have babies or just aren't screwing, then 20 to remove all the people who want kids or are too stupid to use contraceptives properly. That's 47,385. Now, let's divide the number of births into this to get the percentage. That's 1.2% of all births. Not much, but still a respectable number.

Now, let's check out how many abortions are had in a year.

How? Well, let's look at the ACTUAL numbers for abortion statistics. Now, obviously, they're going to be a hell of a lot different than mine, because I kinda half-assed some of the math, and guessed for certain things. Although, I'm still not sure where my birth count went wrong (the original, before I divided people out). If you see the mistake, tell me.

Well, here they are.

Originally Posted by http://www.abortiontv.com/AbortionStatistics.htm

Some 2.1% of all women aged 15-44 in 2000 had an abortion.

So, that's about double the amount of responsible unwanted births. That's without looking at responsible people that had an abortion, however. So, given the error margin, especially with MY math, we can safely assume, that almost all abortions are done by people who have tried all other alternatives to stop themselves from having a child, and yet failed.

[Nietz]

I think it would be absolutely awful for a woman to have no choice but to carry the child of a rapist. Not only would it be a nine-month 24/7 reminder, but how do you deal with people asking about you? Rape would be traumatizing enough, but to have to deal with that is unthinkable for me.

Yes, that's, more or less, one of the reasons I put rape in the "maybe" category. It's actually an issue that I'm not completely sure about. So I just assume someone's death as the worse alternative, because I know there ain't no good alternatives in this case.

Now, there's been quite a few misunderstandings about my points. I do have a way of reasoning that involves asking rethorical and hipothetical questions, not as a measure of reality, but as a way of questioning the possible contradictions of a given point.
So, no, I've never heard of last-day abortions or newborn killing, and I certainly hope this never happened (though I actually read something about those kind of things in Nazi camps, but that's not on the subject since is it's not consented abortion). But if the thought of that affects you, maybe you're not sure yourself about a fetus not having rights because it still wasn't born or is still attached to his mother (I could ask, for example, if you would think it's right to kill a baby that has just born but his umbilical cord has not been cut yet.) I also mentioned about asking the baby because we do know that most, in fact almost all people actually want to live, so it's only safe to assume a baby would want to live as soons as he understands the fact, instead of assuming that he doesn't want/doesn't matter just because he can't answer yet and it's convenient for us. I had already said it was a rethorical question.

And Leef, I understand that you have your own point of view on the subject and I'm not saying that you must think different. I'm just saying that I have a different point of view, and why I have it. And, specifically, why your point wouldn't work for me.
About the scientifical definition of life you mentioned, I do have a point on that, since I work in biotechnology research and know a reasonably much about molecular biology.
Life as we know has started about 3.5 billion years ago and has never stopped multiplying and diversing since then. Every individual in the biosfere is essentially a part of the same DNA based life structure. So, what you really want to know is at what precise point individualization happens, and, biologically, that's at the precise moment of fertilization, when the two germinative haploid cells from two distinct individuals unite to form a new diploid individual, different from both of them (assuming that we're talking about sexuated life forms). So, the point you were mentioning about the beginning of life it's not so much about scientific knowledge as much as moral/philosophical/spiritual.

I think the most important issues in favoring abortion are abstraction and convenience. It's just as easy not minding an embryo made of a couple of cells as it is hard being anti-abortion when actually faced with an unwanted pregnancy. That's why it ends up being a mainly emotional discussion about choice and life. I don't like to be emotional, I don't go crying "Baby murder!" or telling people that they are going to Hell. I try to remain logical when thinking about it. I actually don't feel worse thinking about an embyro dying than I feel about some guy I don't know dying in some country whose name I can't pronounce. But that's just abstraction. I know both things are wrong and I don't wish for them to happen, even if I can't perceive them.

So, this is my most basic logical reasoning, in the most literal way I can put it:
-It's not right to kill people that did nothing wrong without their consent.
-It's not right because it would be depriving them of all future experiences they would have: ideas, thoughs, feeling, contribuitions; all the things we define as "living".
(Those are kind of basic points, if you don't agree, them we don't have much chance of agreeing about anything in this thread.)
-It's also not right because it's something we don't want anyone doing to us.
-An embryo or fetus will eventually develop into a baby and a grown person if not aborted, naturally or intentionally.
-Doing an intentional abortion will deprive the individual of the life mentioned in the second point, and also be something we wouldn't want anybody had done to us.
-Thence, it is at odds with the first point. And it's defined as a bad thing.

I don't think I have much more to say on the subject, sorry for the long post. I can say this discussion has made me think a lot on the subject, so I'm glad for it.
Finally, about Otaku's first post: Yes, I do also think that saying the goverment is using abortion as a way to diminish the black population is a very silly thing.

[Krylo]

-Doing an intentional abortion will deprive the individual of the life mentioned in the second point, and also be something we wouldn't want anybody had done to us.

But if it had happened to you, would you care? Of course not. You wouldn't be around to care. I still don't see why wearing a condom isn't just as bad if you're going to go with the 'denying the right to live' mumbo jumbo.

If I don't wear a condom, my odds are increased 3333 and one third times of impregnating a woman. This means that I'm denying someone the chance to live and, thus, robbing them of all future life experiences.

Ask someone if they'd have rather they'd been aborted. They'll say no, obviously.

Now ask them if you'd rather their parents had used protection so they wouldn't have gotten pregnant. They'd still say no.

You're keeping someone from being born either way.

Show me the difference between cell a with human dna, cell b with human dna, and small cluster of cells c with human dna. Why is it SO wrong to get rid of one of them, but not the other two?

Besides, a fetus at the stage they are aborted in, is nothing more than a small mass of cells. It's not a person any more than my finger is a person. Sure, my finger has the DNA of a person. That doesn't make it one. It's an incomplete part of a whole, that, by itself, is worthless. Kind of like a fetus at that stage. It's incomplete.

My finger also has all the characteristics of life, until it's cut off and dies. It's still not a human, even if it is 'human'.

[mepersoner]

It doesn't matter if they calculate it like idiots because that's still how it's done. The point is still relevant.

do you actually read anything anyone posts in the thread before you make your arguments? Please back up your arguments, because to my knowledge no one has scientifically proved when life starts, AS I've already said, and I'm sure others have said. The child is not a child, but a POTENTIAL child and therefore has no rights as a person. If you believe that they do thats all well and good for you but you cannot force me to agree with you or believe the same things that you do so your argument is pointless. No one has the right to force their beliefs on another person. Just because you believe life starts wherever doesn't make it a FACT.

Just because an opinion isn't fact doesn't mean it isn't right. As Socrates said, true opinion is in no way a worse guide to correct action than knowledge. It is a fact that human life cannot be created naturally without the sperm entering the egg correct? This is the single thing that begins the creation of the baby. It is reliant upon this one thing whether a child will be created or not. People can have sex and not create a baby, as long as the sperm doesn't enter the egg. No sex can be involved, but a baby will be created as long as the sperm enters the egg. The creation of life revolves around these two things coming together, and when they do, life is created. The argument at this point is whether or not the life is human. What determines whether or not it is human? What determines what a group of cells is when it is just a group of cells, is what it becomes. Upon conception a human is created because that is what it will grow into.

A human child is not an adult, therefore is not a full human being. They're still growing into a potential human being. A child does not have as many cells as a full-sized adult. A baby is even less of a human being, because it isn't even the size of a child yet, etc. etc. This argument is a bad argument and essentially what you are arguing, let me explain.

So your question of when it becomes human can be answered as follows: The point at which a group of cells becomes human is the point at which it has the potential to grow. A single sperm cannot grow into a human being, neither can a single egg, but at the point of conception when the sperm and egg meet it begins it's grown into a full human being. Which is no different than a fetus, a baby, or a child, or a teenager who is continuing to grow towards their full potential. All of which are considered human beings.

I apologize for the double post, I read the forum rules, I just get a bit excited sometimes.

edit:

But if it had happened to you, would you care? Of course not. You wouldn't be around to care. I still don't see why wearing a condom isn't just as bad if you're going to go with the 'denying the right to live' mumbo jumbo.

If you shot me in the head in my sleep I wouldn't care either. I wouldn't be around to care.

Just in case you were wondering, that's bad logic.

[LeefRyder]

Originally Posted by mepersoner

This argument is a bad argument and essentially what you are arguing, let me explain.

Actually what I've BEEN arguing for ages is that it's not right for you or anyone else to force what you believe on me, imposing a law that would stop me from having an abortion for whatever reason I want, because you believe it to be murder is imposing your beliefs on me. There are many things that are "alive" that are not considered people. But that isn't really my argument. If I don't want to carry a pregnancy to full term that is nobody's business but my own and whomever I choose to share it with. The end. I'm gonna keep reading this thread, but I'm not going to bother to post in it anymore because it's become the equivalent of running face first into a brick wall over and over again, pointless, painful and fruitless.