Discussion » Statements » When it comes to ethics, we are all over the board. The RIGHT to abortion is SACROSANCT. Not abortion itself, but the RIGHT is.

When it comes to ethics, we are all over the board. The RIGHT to abortion is SACROSANCT. Not abortion itself, but the RIGHT is.

This probably should be a blog, but no one (including me) reads those things.  So here is my blog for you.  

Abortion is never going to be agreed upon. OF COURSE NOT.

BUT?  We, as Americans, do not need to agree upon when a life begins.  

WHAT WE NEED TO AGREE UPON IS THE INDIVIDUAL'S RIGHT TO DECIDE FOR HERSELF.

THAT RIGHT, THAT INALIENABLE RIGHT TO CONTROL OUR BODIES, IS SACROSANCT.  

WE DON'T GO TO JAIL FOR STABBING OURSELVES IN THE GUT IF WE ARE PREGNANT, (WE CAN LIE ABOUT THE REASON AT LEAST) …. WHY WOULD WE GO TO JAIL FOR AN OPERATION?  only one reason.  JOE BLOW'S CONSCIENCE.  JOE BLOW, WHO IS NOT PREGNANT GETS TO DECIDE.  JOE THE CLULESS RICH GOP MORON WHO YOU VOTED FOR BECAUSE YOU ARE TOO LAZY TO LEARN THE ISSUES.

Posted - June 12, 2019

Responses


  • 4624
     I am in agreement with you that all women should have the right to safe, legal and affordable abortion.

    I don't think any woman goes into abortion lightly.
    All of us prefer to avoid an unwanted conception.

    But there are so many ways in which unwanted pregnancies can occur.

    Who would seriously want a return to the days when abortions were universally illegal?
    - when women died from botched back street abortion, or do-it-yourself-attempts, or suicide   
    - or when unwanted babies were dumped on convent or hospital doorsteps to end up abused in orphanages or among the endless failures of social services - later growing up to become psychopaths.

    I believe a man should have a right to his child under specific circumstances:
    1. If the child is not the result of rape or incest,
    and not likely to inherit a severe genetic health problem or disability,
    and not going to be born with drug addiction.
    2. If he can afford to pay for the mother's prenatal and obstetric care
    and is able and willing to raise the child as a single father.

    There will probably always be disputes about the ethical and legal cut off time.
    As medicine becomes ever more able to assist a fetus to develop to full-term in an artificial crib, the arguments get stickier. 
    But evidence shows that such babies suffer serious developmental deficits.
    In my view, the cut-off point should be just before the child can naturally survive outside the womb without medical aids.
    Yet this is far too late from the point of view of the mother's well being and should be for emergencies only.
    The better time should be about 12 weeks - because the mother is more able to return to normal with a minimum of trauma.
    This means that abortion services need to be easily accessible.
      June 12, 2019 5:56 PM MDT
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  • 34415
    Sacrocant: regarded as too important or valuable to be interfered with.

    No, the right to an abortion is not to valuable to be interfered with. 
    An abortion ends a life..and the right to life is to valuable to be interfered with. Your right stops where mine begins and vice versa. And that applies to an unborn child and a Mother as well. 

    Abortion is not legal because of any woman's right to her body....but because of her right to privacy. 
    Why is a person charged with a double murder if a pregnant woman is murdered but that same mother can pay someone to kill that same unborn child? 
      June 12, 2019 6:26 PM MDT
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  • 4624
    A consideration of differing points of view...

    Since Christians believe that all human life is intrinsically sacred and sacrosanct, they should have the right to make their own moral decisions not to have abortions,
    but I would argue that in the USA it is legally wrong for them to impose this moral or ethic on others.
    I believe there will be legal challenges to the new anti-abortion laws which will go to the highest court of the land,
    and the challengers will win on the constitutional ground of freedom of religion.

    ~

    Defenders of women's rights to abortion often call themselves "pro-choice" rather than "pro-abortion," as if it were only a matter of the woman's right to her body, her life and her time and expenses.

    But it is misleading to assume that a woman's right to have an abortion is purely a question of individual liberty, for it would first have to be established that the aborted foetus is not a being worthy of protection. If the embryo is worthy of protection, then laws against abortion do not create 'victimless crimes' as laws against homosexual relations between consenting adults do. So the question of the moral status of the foetus cannot be avoided.

    The central argument against abortion may be put like this:

     1. It is wrong to kill an innocent human being. 
     2. A human foetus is an innocent human being. 
     Therefore it is wrong to kill a human foetus.

    Pro-abortionists usually deny the validity of the second statement. 
    The foetus - though a potential human being - is less emotional, reasoning and aware than the mammals we slaughter to eat on a daily basis. 
    In fact, in its earliest stages of conception, have no ganglia of any kind of nervous system, it has less sentience than an oyster. 
    The dispute about abortion then becomes a dispute about whether a foetus is a human being, or, in other words, when human life begins. 

    Anti-abortionists challenge others to point to any stage in the gradual process of human development that marks a morally significant dividing line. 
    Unless there is such a line, they say, we must either upgrade the status of the earliest embryo to that of the child 
    or downgrade the status of the child to that of the foetus, and no one advocates the latter.

    The most commonly suggested dividing-lines between the fertilized egg and the child are 1. birth and 2. viability. 
    But both are open to objection if we take the state of medical technology into account. 
    It would seem odd to assert that a foetus has a right to life if the pregnant woman lives in Los Angeles,
    but not if she lives in the Amazon jungles or the highlands of Papua New Guinea.

    Pro-abortionists may be on stronger ground if they challenge the first, rather than the second, premise. 
    To describe a being as 'human' is to use a term that straddles two distinct notions: membership of the species Homo sapiens, and being a person, in the sense of a rational or self-conscious being. 

    If 'human' is taken as equivalent to 'person', then the second premise (which asserts that the foetus is a human being,) is clearly false; for one cannot plausibly argue that a foetus is either rational or self-conscious. 
    If, on the other hand, 'human' is taken to mean no more than 'member of the species Homo sapiens', then it needs to be shown why mere membership of a given biological species should be a sufficient basis for a right to life. 
    So then the defender of the right to abortion needs to look at the foetus for what it is - the actual characteristics it possesses - and value its life accordingly.

    I hope you see what I'm getting at in all this - that the relative right or lack of a right for the foetus to grow into a human depends for non-Christians on just how human a fetus actually is. Abortion is not illegal in Judaism, Islam, Taoism or Confucianism. In Hinduism, it is legal up to the seventh month. In Buddhism, there is controversy about it and no Buddhist countries have banned it. Since America asserts freedom of religion as a constitutional right, this must logically include freedom for all faiths as well as for agnostics and atheists. This I would argue that American law, on constitutional grounds, should not have the right to ban abortion.

    I realise that Christian faith has a certain absolutism about it. Despite all the different sects of Christianity and all the millions of differences of opinion about how the Old and New Testaments should be interpreted - it remains that if one has faith, then human life is automatically privileged above all other species. 

    Moses came down from Mt Sinai with the commandment, "Thou shalt not kill." 
    But 40 years later, when the Jews reached the border of Canaan/Israel and Moses was taken by God up to heaven, God commanded Aaron to slaughter every man woman and child in the land of Canaan. Otherwise, He said, the Jews would be at risk of having their new faith polluted and destroyed by the heathen locals. Today we would call this genocide - an international war crime.
    This Biblical event established the precedent that it was okay to murder other human beings if they were not of the same faith and if they got in the way of having land in which to live.

    One might then say, well, that was the Old Testament. In the New, we are commanded to love one another as we love ourselves - and since the majority of us wish to live, we do not have the right to take the life of another. Jesus bids, "a soft answer turneth away wrath" and instructs the faithful to turn the other cheek when slapped - e.i. never lash out in self-defence.
    If this is so, then why are guns and armaments legal, and why keep a standing military?

    If Christians hold that it is right to kill another human in self-defence or in war, then they cannot rightly say that they believe that all human life is absolutely sacred.

    I'd be interested to know what the replies to these thoughts might be.



      June 12, 2019 8:24 PM MDT
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