Why do so many people think that abortion is acceptable?

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I've said before that it's possible these lines of thought could be extended before fertilisation, into the sanctity of every sperm and egg but I cannot myself make the leap. It would be an issue of whether it was moral or not to create more human life wherever and whenever you can. My postings are only about protecting humans as soon as they are created, regardless of how they are created.

Besides I was careful with how I worded it. A sperm or an egg alone cannot be or become an individual human being, they must fuse with one another to do so, it's only after that point my statement becomes relevant.

And that didn't indicate to you that those "lines of reasoning" might do that because they are incorrect?

A sperm is meant to go in a woman's vagina to combine with an egg, that is what it is designed by nature to do. So you masturbating and not putting the sperm where it belongs is equivalently immoral, by your own reasoning, to an abortion, because of the "human interference" (ie. your interference jerking the sperm out of yourself rather than depositing it in a woman to make a child, where it naturally belongs and where a person would eventually develop) which would be equivalent to the interference of an abortion doctor removing the fertilised egg from the woman's womb. I am using your logic, so tell me why it's incorrect at the level of masturbating but somehow magically correct when applied to the sperm after it has entered an egg? You admit yourself it's a leap, yet you can't accept how patently false your reasoning is. It's mind-boggling, the mental gymnastics you must be doing to make this make sense to yourself.

i think micah is being unfairly targeted, but some folks do believe as wilburforce states. and this is funny:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0kJHQpvgB8

No it's not Wilburforce. Wordy as I was all I have done is given an argument that a human life begins at fertilisation in natural conception and made a possible exception to that for artificial fertilisation based on what will happen if humans do not interfere with its development. It's a leap to take that argument alone and say we must create as many humans as possible and therefore that wasting sperm and eggs with callous disregard is genocide.

You have some options if you actually wish to debate the point and I will listen and comment diligently:

1) Provide an alternative starting point for human life.
2) Accept that human life does start at fertilisation and argue that human life in itself is not worthy of protection alone, and other criteria need to met.
3) Basically accept my premise and argue about the circumstances in which a human life can be morally ended due to the circumstances of the mother.

i already posited viability as a starting point. before that it's a potential life, but not a life on its own merit. it's more of a parasite. possibly a wanted parasite, but a parasite, nonetheless.

A human life is a human life when it is self-supporting (ie. no longer relying on the mother's organs and system to stay alive)--so when a baby is viable outside the womb is when I call it a human life. Most doctors seem to agree with me.

It is exactly that, a parasite that is reliant on the mother's body to survive. Anything that is living off my body is within my power to decide whether it can continue to live off my body or not, because I don't have to share my organ function with anyone I don't want to. It's basically the right to self-autonomy, the right to decide who gets to use my organs and who doesn't. If you were a woman and had a womb, this would be obvious to you--the choice what happens inside it is the choice of who the womb belongs to. Viability is the standard that most sane people accept as the beginning of human life. It is so difficult to reason with people coming from a place of ownership over someone else's body, it's like trying to argue with someone that water is wet, when they keep insisting on how obviously dry water is to them. How can there be sane debate about the wetness/dryness of water? How can there be sane debate whether or not an adult human woman should have the choice of what happens inside her own body? It feels so futile, trying to argue a perfectly sane and blatantly obvious truth to those who refuse to see said blatantly obvious truth.

Life begins at conception.

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.

There can't be a proper debate about choice until there is a satisfactory understanding of what the entity is inside her.

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.

Just because we disagree does not mean that I'm ignorant and I do not need your pity. Also, if life begins outside the womb, than why do unborn babies move around inside the womb. Do I really need to post a video to show you proof? I don't need to be enlightened, because I already am. You must really enjoy ripping apart heart aspies.

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 was physically ill when I was raped, and wouldn't have been able to fight him off even if I had years of training because I couldn't stand or walk or move without throwing up because of the fever I had. You can't tell me I should have to carry a baby for 9 months and birth it because of that, you have NO RIGHT to tell someone what they should have to do with their body when they have already been raped.