Why do so many people think that abortion is acceptable?

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I will ignore for now the strict definition of parasite. Being bodily dependent on your mother is a part of the human life cycle, usually extending beyond birth in the form of breastfeeding. Prematurely severing that dependence and seeing if the baby can survive is not a satisfactory definition of the beginning of human life. It's saying "if I do this and you survive you were alive all along, if I do this and you die, you were never really alive." If you never did this thing in the first place, it wouldn't even be an issue and from there how would you go about defining the beginning of life?

As an aside, are parasites really alive? If you remove one, and it cannot live independently of you and it dies, was it never really alive? Being able to survive independently of the body of another life form, same species or not, doesn't seem to be a rigid or sensible starting point for defining life in general, let alone where it begins.

You also imply that bodily dependence is so very much different from any other kind of dependence. I'm not saying it's exactly the same but I struggle to view it as a sacrosanct. If you were to try to define the beginning human life as a more general independence from other humans, no one would ever really be alive.

seems like this is just an intellectual exercise for you, micah. having a degree in biology, i can say that parasites are alive, just one of the many problems, some factual, some philosophical i have with your position. the decision to abort or not has flesh and bones and consequences and is far from a thought experiment.

i was pro-life until i came across actual people who needed abortions, a high school senior with a college scholarship on the line who had sex once on prom night and a black woman raped by a white man and whose boyfriend would have killed her if she had a light baby. i don't fault these folks for not throwing their lives out the window.

Why do so many people think forcing rape victims to give birth as acceptable regardless of the mental and emotional trauma the woman has been through? Let us not forget incest as well.

I was at a Pro-Life event a few years ago. A woman who was conceived out of rape made a speech. Her speech was about how she's happy to be alive and how it irritated her that people kept on apologizing to her because her mother didn't abort her.

I also think that all women should be able to take free self-defense classes from an early age, so that they'd be able to fend off and shock such snakes who wish to force their desires on them. I also feel that once someone rapes someone else, they should be locked up in maximum confinement for life.

I'm done with this thread. It just keeps going around in circles.

I'm getting the feeling this conversation is no longer about debate, but rather one person simply arguing with any dissenter, telling them they are wrong.

I see nothing constructive left here and am not likely to check back.