Abortion.

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Okay let's for a second imagine a 16 week baby (http://www.paternityangel.com/Preg_info ... ekly16.htm) could survive outside of the womb, the chance of survival of course not being related to the state of consciousness. Here we have a baby moving on it's own accord, using it's arms and judgement of distance to stop light irritating it's eyes and moving away from danger such a sharp or pointy objects, as they do in thw womb. Now imagine you have a litter of puppies next to it, showing the same signs of self awareness and learning of it's environment. Now, would you say that attaching a clamp around the heads of the puppies you don't find as cute or are unwanted for whatever reason, or imagine new born humans if you are the type not to care about animals. and using it to shatter their skull into their brains, equivalent to how they kill 16 week babies during abortion, is a reasonable, justifiable decision?

In some places in the US, abortion is legal up to the 24th week.

Yeah, it's fine. They can't feel pain at that stage. Comparing it to puppies is just irrelevant emotionalism.

In addition, the movements made by the fetus are reflexes. There is no personality behind them yet that goes "Gee, that light is annoying, if I move my arm like this I can block it." Fetuses and newborns have a ton of different automatic reflexes that help them survive and cope with the environment. Most of these reflexes disappear as the baby ages and conscious behavior takes over.

They're pretty advanced actions to be reflexes. Reflexes usually are a result from looped nerve signals or basic commands from the brain in responce to stimuli, such as blinking, basic "If this, then do this" commands. To move your arm to a desired location the muscles need to be moved to measures relative to your environment, which is where you need judgement, and judgement is likely the reason we evolved consciousness in the first place.

First, you need to be precise in your terms. Are you speaking of a fetus of 16 weeks gestational age or 16 weeks fertilization age? Generally speaking, unless the date of fertilization can be precisely determined (for example in cases of in vitro fertilization), obstetricians will rely upon the gestational age calculated from the mother's last menstrual period. This age will be approximately 2 weeks longer than the actual age of the fetus. That ambiguity makes a huge difference in terms of developmental state.

Next, why are you calling upon us to imagine the viability of a fetus of 16 weeks of age? Could it be because there has never been a successful pre-term delivery of a premature fetus of that age? The current world record for viability is 21 weeks and 5 days gestational age. (James Elgin Gill, of Ottawa, Ontario) No fetus of 16 weeks (even 16 weeks fertilization age) could ever survive, and the grim reality is that even with a viability limit set at 24 weeks gestational age, survival is far from assured. 90% survival probably doesn't arrive until about 26 weeks gestational age.

I take the view that so long as the limit of viability (conservatively, 21 weeks) has not elapsed, then the fetus has no capacity to survive outside of the uterus, and the mother's right to life, liberty and security of the person continues to prevail. Only when the fetus is potentially viable do I see a reasonable limit on the mother's right.

Yes, abortion is not a nice process once you get past a certain point. I can't imagine wanting to go through with such a procedure.

But if I did want to go through with it, then clearly I desperately don't want this child. Maybe I can't afford it, maybe it will disrupt my education or career, maybe I am simply a callous person who is likely to be a negligent parent. If I really think that it is better to have the foetus cut up into pieces and those pieces removed through my vagina, then the chances are it IS better.

The problem with deciding whether or not abortion should be legal is that the bottom line is that the baby is in the mother's body. It's her body and she can have the baby removed if she wants to. Abortion is legal up to the age of probably viability outside the womb.

"Conservatives always like to go on about the rights of the 'unborn'... ...but once you're outa there... ...you're on your own!"

George Carlin

The critical test is not the complexity of the action, but where the reaction is mediated--in other words, where is stimulus trasferred from the afferent nerve (that is affected by peripheral stimulus) to the efferent nerve (which creates the reaction in the effector organ). Reflexes can be enormously complex actions such as the cross-extensor reflex and the various reflexes observed in the eye.

It also bears noting that there are many reflexes evident in infants that do not appear in typical adults. Given that infants display many more reflex actions than adults, it is not unreasonable to suppose that many of the responses that are observed in utero are similarly mediated.

It's not always about money or being 'callous' - what about the mother's physical or mental health?

The Mother can have the baby removed but it should be transferred to an artificial womb.

There are many reasons why women choose abortion, as a man it's very easy for me to make claims of a pro-life nature while being fully aware that I would never find myself in a position of being pregnant.

The choice is with women and only they can choose either way, to abort or continue to full term.

Those most vocal in the pro life camp (IMO) seem to be male and I would suggest have no right to impose their mostly religious views (and if they got their way LAWS) on those who would not make a decision to abort without just cause.

The medical community has set the parameters for abortion and your comments are unsubstantiated emotional claims & scaremongering, not medical facts. You profess to understand the feelings of the fetus while ignoring the feelings of the woman who has to make such a difficult decision as whether to abort or not.

Either male, or religious lesbians/asexual women.

I say this as LGBT woman who is pro choice. I notice a lot of the women who are strongly against abortion are either close to 100% gay, or don't have sex at all. This is true on WP. You get lesbians who are very pro choice as well, before anyone jumps on me.

Only a tiny minority would ever believe such a thing.




The link I posted was based entirely on medical facts, as for the abortion procedure, breaking the skull wiith some kind of clamp is how the vast majority of these stage abortions are performed.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZVL1YdwPOc[/youtube]

I'm not "ignoring the feelings of the woman", I'm just pointing out that woman feeling uncomfortable for 9 months while her child is born alive for the rest of it's life ahead is preferable to having the woman comfortable while her child is killed. Plus the negative feelings often get outweighed by the possitive "motherly love"



Woah, that is a bit of a generalization there. From your logic I could just say "All pro-choices are feminists and are sexist pigs", but I dont know or quite frankly care how true that is, and the whole "You're either on the side of the religious or the feminists" thoughtline is nonsense, people should be allowed to believe whatever they want without having labeled themselves and for the most part, this is the case. In fact in most Christian govern countries abortion is legal, while places where abortion is mostly illegal are scattered. As for the gender relivence, just under 50% of woman are against abortion, and before you start saying "they should leave the majority alone then" opinions aren't as black or white as that, for example people like myself think that abortions should be legal but only under certain circumstances, such as during the very early stages of pregnancy or if it is a danger to both it's own and the mother's life. And besides we shouldn't define morals as the majority view, by that logic people would have been moraly sound to use slaves or burn people alive in the past. As our understanding improves it could well be the case that 90% of both men and woman show opposition to the abortion law.

Last edited by robo37 on 03 Jan 2013, 6:17 am, edited 4 times in total.

And then what? Who will care for it after birth? There are already many kids without parents going from fosterhome to fosterhome. And unfortunately, these kids often do not get the same opportunities in life as kids growing up in a stable family (there are of course exceptions to the trend). So is it really more ethical to condemn a child to a high risk of an unhappy childhood and the consequences that has on the rest of its life than it is to prevent the child from ever coming into conscious existence?

I dont think its a reasonable, justifiable decision. But we already had laws in all countries, that forbid abortion. So we do not need to argue about the alternative, we know what benefit we had: The same amount of abortion as now, just illegal without the knowing of anyone around them, and making a lot of already born children to half infants because of their mother dying by an illegal abortion.

Its not an decision between strawberries and s**t. Its between s**t and greater s**t. So forced to decide between the s**t of legal abortion and the greater s**t of illegal abortion, i choose s**t.

If it makes you less sad, even with legal abortion the life of an unborn child is much safer and appreciated nowadays, then it was earlier. Not even 100 years have passed and nurses who was specialised for birth carried in their bags an hammer and a chisel. So if the child got stuck during birth and didnt move about hours, so that the mothers life was in danger because of not getting the child out or part of the body of the mother could die because if the great pressure of the childs bodies that stopped the blood from circulating in the pressured areas, the nurses were forced (to cut the child out of the belly was only possible in hospitals, so if you were not living in a bigger city, that was no option if everything went well until the birth) to crush the childs head with the chisel and the hammer, so that the head got smaller and then pull the rest of the body and the body parts out. 9 months old living babies because there was no other options earlier.

So i am sad about the babies that die through our nowadays medical possibilities. But i think there are lots more of babies, that are allowed to live because of our medical possibilities today.

Last edited by Schneekugel on 03 Jan 2013, 7:20 am, edited 1 time in total.