Originally posted by: Pale Rider
Originally posted by: Cerpin Taxt
Originally posted by: ric1287
Originally posted by: Atomic Playboy
Originally posted by: Pale Rider
The logical conclusion is that abortion is at a minimum manslaughter.
If the logical conclusion is that abortion is manslaughter, what's a miscarriage? Also manslaughter? Manslaughter can be involuntary (just look at vehicular manslaughter), so the logical conclusion is that miscarriages are manslaughter. And I say, good. Lock these barren wenches up. How dare they kill a baby, even unintentionally.
Then consider it murder since it is intentional.
Nonsense. A fetus does not have more rights than those of actual persons, and so it cannot be permitted to occupy the body of another unconsenting person, since that would be a violation of the rights of that person -- in this case, the mother.
Using that argument would it be legal to kill a baby being developed in a test tube?
If it has developed the ability to think, then yes, but it couldn't do that in a test tube. Carl Sagan tells me so.
"If the fetus at a certain stage of gestation would be viable outside the womb, the argument goes, then the right of the fetus to life overrides the right of the woman to privacy. But just what does "viable" mean? Even a full-term newborn is not viable without a great deal of care and love. There was a time before incubators, only a few decades ago, when babies in their seventh month were unlikely to be viable. Would aborting in the seventh month have been permissible then? After the invention of incubators, did aborting pregnancies in the seventh month suddenly become immoral? What happens if, in the future, a new technology develops so that an artificial womb can sustain a fetus even before the sixth month by delivering oxygen and nutrients through the blood--as the mother does through the placenta and into the fetal blood system? We grant that this technology is unlikely to be developed soon or become available to many. But if it were available, does it then become immoral to abort earlier than the sixth month, when previously it was moral? A morality that depends on, and changes with, technology is a fragile morality; for some, it is also an unacceptable morality.
And why, exactly, should breathing (or kidney function, or the ability to resist disease) justify legal protection? If a fetus can be shown to think and feel but not be able to breathe, would it be all right to kill it? Do we value breathing more than thinking and feeling? Viability arguments cannot, it seems to us, coherently determine when abortions are permissible. Some other criterion is needed. Again, we offer for consideration the earliest onset of human thinking as that criterion.
Since, on average, fetal thinking occurs even later than fetal lung development, we find Roe v. Wade to be a good and prudent decision addressing a complex and difficult issue. With prohibitions on abortion in the last trimester--except in cases of grave medical necessity--it strikes a fair balance between the conflicting claims of freedom and life.
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http://www.2think.org/abortion.shtml