First of, Hi, i'm new here and i have no idea if you debate such topics here on AR forum and whether it should be a religious vs atheist debate or an atheist-atheist discussion. Help the newby.
1-So i'm intrested why the majority of Christians / Muslims are against abortion. My idea is that the less babies there are, the less brainwashed adults there will be and religion needs people. So why do you think religion is against abortion?
2-I'm intrested also in your opinion about abortion too. I seem to have made up my mind up to the 27th week (by the time the feutus' brain connections develops the ability to process pain), that abortion is definetly okay. But after that, i can't seem to decide, i know abortion decisions don't usually happen this late in pregnancy, but, hypothetically, if you have a perfectly sane baby 27+ weeks old, would you abord it? My opinion is just swallow the 11 weeks left and give it up for adoption, but what if you have to, is it ethical? Maybe anesthesia?
I'm assuming that pain and the amount of suffering is the basis of my moral compass
And no i'm not a pregnant teen, i'm a very curious MAN.
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Believe it or not, the majority of them are for it (at least in the US).
Over 70% of abortions are done on Christians. You're thinking of people like the Westboro Baptist Church, who have been known to protest everything from abortion to homosexuality to skinny jeans. Most moderate Christians could care less, if they're not at least against the practice verbally. Now Republican senators? They're a different breed entirely. Don't get me started on them.
Some people are against abortion because they believe that every life is precious, only their God of preference should be allowed to terminate life (it's not murder if it's death by the divine), believe that every life should get a chance, or simply because they think babies are cute. Take your pick. I call most of the people that are against abortion pro-birthers. They care about a baby being born but after that, they usually don't worry about its care or how he/she will fare out in life.
"They care about a baby being born but after that, they usually don't worry about its care or how he/she will fare out in life."
Exactly.
Hello Chab.
Even in a modern hospital, abortion is a risky, unpleasant procedure.
Contraception and contraception education should be freely available, but the people who oppose abortion also tend to oppose contraception as well. The decision about whether abortion should go ahead has to be left to the woman concerned, but she should also be offered other options, such as facilitated adoption.
In another life I once stood as a candidate for political office. At a debate all the candidates were asked for their views on abortion. When my turn came I said the price for an abortion should be one testicle from the biological father. Then maybe men would take more responsibility for their actions.
My understanding, it is pretty simple: most of those that are against all forms of abortion are the ones that believe god created life the moment the egg is fertilized. That it is god's plan, the egg has a soul, etc. etc. etc.
To them, a fertilized egg is already a human, one of us, with all the rights all humans should have.
To them having an abortion is the same thing as brutally murdering your own 3 year old child. To them having the "day after pill" is the same as murdering a 3 year old kid and against god's plan/will.
Science and rationality of course says different. A fertilized egg is just that, a fertilized egg, that is simply a billion years of evolution of mitosis function cells have. Highly evolved, to better the chance of succesful growth and further reproduction/dividing. Science also says 40-60 percent of all fertilized eggs never make it all the way to birth. (Most dying within the first day or 2.)
While a fertilized egg has the potential to be a human one day, if it beats the odds, it is absolutely dependent on the host body for any chance at survival. To me during this phase the rights of the mother far supersedes the rights of this potential for human.
I personally draw the line on abortion once the growing fetus inside the mother can survive w/o the mother, and still have a good chance at leading a normal life. Medical science has had great success in giving premature babies a real shot at normal life. Which is generally around 28 weeks. Fortunately in the US, well into 3rd term abortions almost never happens. No established abortion clinic will do them, unless it's an extreme/weird case. (Such as the mother's life is in mortal danger and the baby cannot be saved.)
Here's some weird facts about abortion in Japan.
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2009/10/20/reference/abortion-still-key...
Abortion was legalized in Japan in 1949, but the birth pill has only been legally available for about 10 years, and abortion remains a major form of birth control. They do about 300,000 a year. There are no religious objections to either abortion or the pill. The Japanese medical establishment continually opposed the legalization of the pill on the grounds that there were health hazards. I think there were two other reasons. First, the pill gives a woman complete control over her own fertility, since she can take it without the knowledge of her husband. Second, it's more profitable to carry out abortions than prescribe pills. In one doctor's office, I saw a sign listing termination prices according to months of pregnancy.
The attached image is a kokeshi doll. These dolls are popular souvenirs from Japan, but they traditionally represented a child lost through abortion, miscarriage, or infanticide. The name means "erase the child."
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Interesting article you posted.
Funny that, in the much more open abortion system of Japan, they have less than half the abortion rate per 1000 women that the US does.
Once again pointing out the anti abortion methods these religious whackjobs try to implement actually makes the problem worse from their own perspective. Not very surprising, that all the hand wringing these religious whackos just makes the problem worse, not better for all sides and everyone involved.
Of course, most any anti abortion legislation mainly harms the poorest and most vulnerable among us. If you are rich, going out of state/country to get an abortion is no big deal you can even do it without getting harassed by said religious whackjobs.. But if you are poor, suddenly that option is not nearly as readily available, and frequently the poor are the ones that can least afford/handle having an unplanned for child.
My approach to abortion is...eh, well it's not something I'd go around advocating, but I'm not going to push my own personal emotions on the matter into legislation and make everyone abide by them
I don't usually chime in on this issue BUT.....
I think a woman has a right to choose and I will fight for their right with my dying breath.
Monty Python made a comment about the absurdity of the religious nuts on this subject in their movie 'The Meaning of Life'. Watch the video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUspLVStPbk
Thanks for the input guys! Some intresting facts and opinions; I'm glad i signed up for this.
@mykcob4 i'll make sure to watch the video tonight
I find it strange that the discussion is so black and white. Personally I think abortion should be heavily controlled with laws. For example, I think only certified medical practitioners should be allowed to do abortions. Also there should be a limit after which you cannot abort a fetus/baby. Certainly you should not be allowed to abort a baby that is ready to be born.
Now, at least where I live, the laws we have allow abortions, but there are a lot of regulations that I think are good. I just don't understand why the discussion is so black and white.
Laws make it black and white. Discussion in my opinion makes it much more open to interpretation.
It is a unique argument, because it really comes down to how do we define human life? Most theist define it very differently, even amongst themselves.
It is nearly universal that you cannot murder a 3 year old child because you decided to "change your mind."
But when do you decide it is no longer: "the possibility of human life" and that is a human life that all human rights should be conferred upon this human life. Is very open to interpretation. I personally like my line of: When a baby has reasonably good chance at a normal life w/o the host mother's body. Which medically is around 28 weeks. But as technology improves, that number could shrink drastically raising new ethical questions about "what is human life?"
I think around where I live, you can have an abortion for a seriously deformed fetus up to week 24. The reason for this is that these problems become visible in the fetus around week 20. If you just want to have an abortion, you need to decide much sooner, I think it's at week 12 to 16.
It has been a while since I look at these things so my information may be out of date, but the point is that there is a lot more nuance than "pro life" vs. "pro choice".
We also have a lot of people who would like to adopt a baby, so if we could move the fetus to an artificial womb and give it to some other loving parents, that would be nice. It may well also be reality in the future - I just read that animal trials with artificial wombs are progressing slowly.
Yeah, i get your point. We tend to make things binary. Maybe after a certain amount of weeks, other options should be presented to the mother. It depends ultimately on what the mother wants and her freedom to choose.
I think it just really comes down to the woman receiving the abortion. Personally, I am pro-choice, but that doesn't mean I am against either abortion or letting the growing child be born. I really think that whatever a woman wants to do with her body is her choice, and nobody else's damn business.
@Chab: First, the argument that believers give against abortion always has to do with the right to life. The reality is another, that is, if there is sex and pregnancy that is a new life and involves a new family, because, beware, if there is no family we are talking about the disgrace of the woman and her family, That is why contraceptive methods are frowned upon, because they prevent the creation of new families, in general religion sees sex as a trap for those who practice it and contraceptive methods avoid the trap and even the venereal diseases that, as we all know, are the divine punishment against those who have orgasms outside the sanctity of the family thalamus.
Second, I'm sorry, I cannot agree with you about the 27 weeks. While I fully agree that a woman should have a right to her body and one of them is to decide whether or not to abort, any abortion over 16 weeks exceeds what I think to be acceptable in relation to the abortion of a nasciturus.
I'm curious, I didn't know that abortion was legal beyond 16 weeks, unless the life of the mother is in danger. Is abotion legal after week 16 in US?
@SBM the divine punishment against those who have orgasms outside the sanctity of the family thalamus.
Lmao
I have no idea, i'm not american. In my country, non-life threatening abortion isn't even legal.
But I think that the right to abortion should be respected the first and 2nd trimester.
The third trimester is another story in my opinion.
@Chab: Although you don't believe it I heard "the sanctity of the family thalamus" to a Christian fanatic in a discussion about marriage, really, the glamor of the conferences with little respectable people.
Sorry, I cannot agree to abortion beyond week 16, unless the mother's life is in danger, but I cannot for good reason. while I'm pretty sure that the nasciturus until week 16 is just a set of cells that try to specialize, I also know that from week 16 the brain cells have almost succeeded in forming at all. That means that there's an almost complete nervous system functioning. Personally I'd not go beyond week 16. I'm not a woman and would never deny a woman's right to an abortion, but if someone asks me where to put the temporal limit... well, I would put it there.
@SBM neuraltion amd organogenesis starts way earlier than that. *Almost* everything forms by week 11. Brain cells formed but they're not fully functional yet, they're mostly there but not wired properly. That's why the embryo can't process pain before the 3rd trimester. (It can start to process touch by week 8 but processes it fully by week 32 ) And brain cells are just... cells, "electric cells". They're no way more special. It's their wiring that gives rise to complex brain functions.
16 weeks is an ambiguous line drawn.
@Chab: One of the greatest problems we had in our country in order to combine the right to life (Article 15 of the Spanish Constitution: Everyone has the right to life and to physical and moral integrity, without, under any circumstances, being subject to Torture or inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. The death penalty is abolished), with the right to abortion.
The Spanish Constitutional Court dictated that, although the right to abortion was a woman's right that could not be ignored, it should be combined with the right to life. For this purpose, the Constitutional Court took into account the abortion laws of the countries of our environment and medical reports that would give a temporary measure that differentiated between said right to the interruption of pregnancy and the right to life, when exists -zygote, embryo, fetus and baby.
A product of this became a law that, today, until 16 weeks of pregnancy, all women over the age of 18 can choose to have an abortion of their own free will, whatever the cause. Although pregnancy may be interrupted until the 22nd week if there's a risk to the life or health of the pregnant woman, that there're serious anomalies in the fetus or that anomalies incompatible with life are detected.
That doesn't mean that we haven't problems related to the exercise of the right to abortion. For example, if the pregnant woman is a minor, she has no opportunity to have an abortion unless her parents give permission. Imagining what happens when your parents are Muslim, or radical Christians isn't difficult.
But I can assure you that the Spanish feminist associations, FEMEN included, don't question the medical basis of the law. I don't either and the limits established in the law don't seem to me medically ambiguous at all.
16 weeks does seem like a reasonable amount of time to detect, and decide on wanting an abortion. And if some rare medical issue comes up outside those 16 weeks considerations are made. But I believe even in the US, 95+% of all abortions happens before 16 weeks as well.
It is too bad that a minor under the age of 18 does not get to decide for themselves on that though. It is quite a decision for a minor to have to decide on, but ultimately I still believe the girl has a right to decide what goes on with her body.
I view the Christian Right's "movement against abortion" as just another version of same old long term agenda: To grow their religion by increasing population.
It's the very same bullshit as forbidding contraception, even forbidding condoms in AIDS- and Zika-infested regions. Those in power in religions are all too happy to support such nonsense, regardless of the suffering it is causing.
They have flocks of uninformed and impressionable believers to feed their bullshit to, and the flock has no idea that they are just being manipulated.
It's tragic on so many levels.
My personal view on abortion is almost identical to what LogicForTW describes, but it is dependent on circumstances:
- If the human race was dying and we were having a hard time to reproduce successfully, with only a few thousand of us left, I would say that the baby's life is more important than the wishes of the mother.
- In a healthy population with no trouble to reproduce, I think abortion is a right for the mother, up to a limit, somewhere around where the baby could survive without the mother.
- In today's world, with our completely insane population curve, abortion rights might need to be extended to protect established and self aware life, i.e the mother can choose as she wishes up to the point of contraception.
Hi, Prag. Nice to see your smiling, toothy face!
Hi. Just passing by, trying to catch up.
I try not to smile too much though, the numerous teeth seems to scare the children. *grin*
I also want to point out an important point: adoption rates are good for young babies, especially baby girls, it is rare that a baby saved from possible abortion does not get adopted. We all hear about the long waiting list and intense process for parents wanting to adopt have to go through.
However, there many, far! too many older kids that go unadopted. A boy over the age of 8 up for adoption has a very low chance of ever getting adopted. If there is less unwanted babies available for adoption, the chances of older kids getting adopted rises to fill the new unmet need.
It starts getting really ugly when you consider situations when a baby is found to have a serious defect while still in the womb. What rights do the mother have versus this fetus/baby? What if the serious defect is not found until the 3rd trimester? The mother is not in mortal danger, and the baby may live for years, perhaps new advances will eventually help the baby with the defect and give the baby a shot at a semi normal life, but there is no way to tell. Perhaps the parents can not afford to raise a special needs child with large expenses.
Frankly I don't see the difference between condoms and abortions. One kills while the other prevents, both achieve the same result, life doesn't find a way.
You speak about the loose Christians whom make up the 70% of abortions, they don't bother me, they're just people who want to believe conveniently. What scares me are the Catholics, like my mother, who are disciplined in their religion.
Yes organs should be shared to save lives. But if we simply allowed the cloning of organs, then we wouldn't even have to worry about arguing whether or not to share them.
@LogicFTW that's a tricky one. Depends on the severity of the defect and how much of a normal life he's got a shot at.
Abortion is akin to the death penalty in the sense of committing a living thing to death. But, we're rational beings so we measure the validity of things in our small minded ways. We validate this life, invalidate that one, and then someone comes along and tries to reverse it, yada yada, and the circle repeats itself ad nauseam.
In that context -
If a woman wants to abort her fetus, but she has to pass muster with the validating versus the invalidating lunacy dictating its results to her, she has lost control of herself to a political maelstrom of wrong. It's wrong because it assumes control of the woman's biological functions from the moment of conception. This is a work of cloaked compassion for the preciousness of life. The driving force beneath it is some feigned concern for the life of the child which, if delivered after full term, is quickly abandoned and thereby evidences the feigned concern.
Being an atheist, I see no purpose for the existence of the species at all and to elevate it to a certain preciousness slays my sense of WTF. Yes, we have the primordial instinct to survive but no rationale for it. It's simply an animal instinct. There's no purpose for it if the species itself has no credible reason to exist beyond answering that single instinctive trait. On what credible platform are we heaping the excuse that a woman's biological procreative capacity belongs to majority opinion's dictates?
Morality?
Always entertaining.
For me this kind of brings up an alternate but related thought path, is a mother that knows she is pregnant, but commits suicide, is she murdering her baby?
If a mother commits suicide but does not know she is pregnant committing involuntary manslaughter?
What about a failed attempt? Should a mother that knew she was pregnant be tried for attempted murder when she tried to commit suicide but failed?
If you say yes to any of these, doesn't that mean the fetus has more rights then the mother does?
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