If a girl is raped and pregnant, should she keep the baby?

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I honestly wouldn't give a flying f**k if it was as smart as Einstein in this case; I'm not allowing the offspring of a rapist to live in my body for 9 months. If any of you guys wanted to volunteer to host the hypothetical thing instead of me, I'd consider transferring it to you rather than suctioning it out. I'd have be convinced that the propensity to rape isn't heritable first, though.

You are trying to measure brain activity (which gives off electrical signals), some distance away from the head of the child. The readings are going to be skewed in favor of saying the child has minimal brain activity.

The brain also starts developing rather early in a pregnency, brain cells are being created at an astronomical rate, the fact the child's functioning is temporarily limited at a particular stage of their life, doesn't make them any less of a human being.

Also I'm getting sick of the coat hanger argument, it's quite frankly like saying people kill their kids anyways, so we may as well make it legal for people to murder their own kids to cut down on jail costs.

Nobody is saying the fetus is property.

However it came about, her body is her own. She is no more obliged to donate it to a fetus than to you or me.

False equivalence, you are saying that people imposing on a woman deliberately is somehow the same as the child in the womb that is only in the womb because a man and a women had sex.

Yes I am. Because it's the same violation of her body and health.

It doesn't matter how it got there. She is not obliged to donate the use of her body, blood system and internal organs. Forcing her to do so is a violation. End of.

The child isn't responsible for any of it though, should the rapist be locked up for life, hell yes, but two wrongs don't make a right. The child is not the perpetrator, if there was a way to put the child in an artificial womb I would recommend that, but unfortunately we don't have the technology yet.

It's not a f*****g child, Inuyasha, it's a zef that is taking over the woman's bodily processes in order to support itself. In this case, it's a zef that is half rapist. It's a zef that, until well into the third trimester, has less brain function than the turkeys most of us eat at thanksgiving - and, no, that's not 'measured at a distance,' that's based on EEGs of premature and aborted feti.

For the love of DNA, NOBODY said the fetus was responsible for anything! She is hardly committing a wrong by choosing not to use her body to support and grow something that has no consciousness! Why should something that has no consciousness get rights that override hers? She is the one who can think, feel, suffer and appreciate exactly what is happening to her!

It's comments like yours which are why I really have a beef with pro-choicers.



So with that line of reasoning we should make it okay to kill anyone whom is under anesthesia, or someone in a coma because they aren't conscious. Quite frankly, while doctors say they know such and such about the brain, they honestly don't. How do we know how a child's brain in the womb operates, we really don't, hell scientists can come up with ideas as to what part of the brain does what, but then there are people where an entirely different part of the brain handles particular functions. It could be that as the child's brain grows (while the child is in the womb) and becomes more developed, processes that were originally in one part of the brain are transferred over to the new part of the brain.

Furthermore, the child isn't receiving much in the way of sensory input, they are in a pitch black environment, maintained at a relatively constant temperature, nothing to smell, nothing really to hear except muffled sounds. A large part of the brain wouldn't be reading much activity because there isn't anything any stimuli to process, which does not mean it isn't capable of processing those stimuli.

Then we have the fact the child's brain is developing at an extremely fast pace which is why alcohol is so destructive to during pregnency, because the brain, heart, spinal cord are the first things that start developing. The child's brain is basically undergoing the equivalent of road construction, while in the womb, that doesn't not mean they aren't human, nor does it mean they aren't a person, in fact unlike someone in a coma, they have less electrical activity because their is an astronomical number of brain cells being added every minute. Now there is a reason why they close lanes while doing road construction, it is so construction workers don't get hit by cars, or a car drives through wet cement (probably not the material they use but fits the analogy). Picture all those electrical signals as cars that are being restricted to certain lanes of a highway while road construction is going on. The fact we see a lot of neural activity later in the pregnency is not that they suddenly just poof became conscious, they probably were conscious a great deal earlier, just the road construction (neural pathways) are now largely complete.

Fun bit of trivia: A newborn baby actually has more brain cells than a typical adult human.

and this



Two links for you. Then you can go back to bleating about how wrong it is to kill a baybeeeeeee. Goddamn, people like you are why I sometimes start to feel aggressive at the mere f*****g mention of the words baby or child.

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/21/20100625/th ... 31572.html

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ar ... 9106001122

And under anesthesia? NO, because they're an existing person. But you would have the right to kill them if they were to try and use your blood, renal system etc.

@ mechanicalgirl39

Your first link doesn't work, and your second wants to charge me money to get the article...


Anyways, I've heard the song and dance about babies not feeling pain. I've also heard that song and dance routine from my vet that our dog wouldn't feel pain when we give her insulin for her diabetes. First hand observations show that yes our dog does feel pain when poked by a needle, and she also can't stand certain types of brushes. So you'll forgive me if I'm rather skeptical of what your sources say.

Honey, we don't have to know much in the way of specifics to know that a zef, until well into the 3rd trimester, just doesn't have the equipment to be sentient, much less sapient. That the data backs up the anatomy is corroboration, not (as you claim) speculation.

However, all of that is beside the point in the case of a rapist. I wouldn't let a conscious rapist subvert my body for 9 months, even if he would die without it, and I wouldn't let the non-sapient offspring of a rapist do the same.

Everything is a bit over the top here. Once again, one side is defending the intrinsic value of a human being while others are saying it should not be extended in these specific circumstances.

I said previously; that I am not sure I would be able to tell a person who had been raped that they 'had' to keep the child. Anyone on the other side, who thinks that the choice is not profound at all and that the child has no rights, is just silly. At WORST, we are talking about a unique being, with its own DNA, its functionality has no bearing on its worth (as is true of any of us); that standard is nonsense.

I have seen some links relating to fetal pain (that do not work), I remain unconvinced as their is evidence that points both ways. All that remains during these discussions is a Sorites Paradox. Where one side shows evidence of pain response, the other says that does not count... no evidence is enough to establish pain to a pro-choicer anyway. In the case of consciousness, I cannot say for certain that an adult has a mind and is a person (good luck discussing the mind with someone like Ruveyn for instance, most hard-empiricists will just deny it even exists), so applying that standard in retrospect to the developing child is deeply flawed. All that we get again in discussing consciousness is another Sorites Paradox.

And there we go, you blame the child for what the rapist did. The child wasn't the one that raped the woman in question, he/she is just as much a victim as the woman.

Thing is, I think the rapist should go to jail for life and be forced to break rocks for the rest of their life and the money they would make should go to the woman and the kid (if the woman decides not to put said child up for adoption.

Thing of it is, I really find claims that the child isn't human to just be the standard dehumanization tactic so people feel okay with killing them.

"Blame" is not the right word. I wouldn't blame a rabid dog for being rabid, but that doesn't mean I'm going to hang out with it for 9 months while it chews on my leg. The offspring of a rapist is intrinsically half rapist. I don't care that it's human (note that that's an adjective, not a noun); I care that it's the offspring of a rapist which is subverting the body of the rapist's victim to survive.

Surely even you can see LKL, that this choice of language does your cause no good. Some very good friends of mine are the product of just such a terrible act. And you think that they are 'intrinsically' half rapist? You must understand how offensive this language is whatever your intended meaning. I understand that you think the right to choose is an absolute right, I think you are wrong, your desire however, to shock others, will not actually have the result that you are hoping it will.

If you can get access to the interview Gay Byrne conducted with Martin Sheen on the subject, I suggest you watch it (I cannot seem to find a consistent link) but there is some information here: http://www.lifenews.com/2011/04/14/mart ... ife-views/