gadgetlady

What is rude about asking you to clarify why you believe late-term abortions are perfectly acceptable? MY nastiness? When you repeatedly talk about how all pro-lifers want to do is suppress and control women? Give me a break. I understand and have compassion for women who are pregnant and don't want to be. I just don't believe that telling them to kill their offspring helps them in any way. Women deserve better. Portraying me as uncompassionate isn't warranted; you have no idea how I speak with mothers facing unplanned pregnancies. BJean, I have a little news for you. While you may consider me harsh, my fellow pro-lifers feel the same way about you; they consider you shrill. The majority of the American public agrees with neither of us. They don't believe abortion should be illegal in all cases, and nor do they believe that abortion-on-demand should be legal through all nine months of pregnancy for any reason. So portraying me as out-of-touch just as easily applies to you.

That is not the case; very few people have answered the question I asked. In fact, I can think of only one. Other questions have been addressed, yes, and discussions have been plentiful, but I was asking one particular person why she felt a particular way. Her answers may be very different from what yours would be, as her opinions on this matter do differ from yours in other nuanced ways.

I would have liked to dialogue with her about it; why is that so bad? She is entitled to her opinion, just as I am entitled to mine. I don't believe "everyone" is wrong, but I do believe there are people who use flawed logic -- on both sides of the issue.

You said, "If someone invents a contraption that will replace a woman's womb, God forbid, then the argument could change." My question was, then, do you support a ban on late-term abortions, because there is, precisely, a "contraption" that will allow the baby to live outside of the mother's womb? Why is it different because the baby spent 20 weeks or so in the mother's womb prior to viability? If the baby can survive outside the womb without the mother, and your argument is that a mother shouldn't have to be inconvenienced with a baby growing inside of her if she doesn't want to, why should she be allowed to kill the baby if she can simply be "un-inconvenienced" by having the baby removed from her womb alive?

I do not support killing disabled people regardless of whether they might die later or might have a less-than-perfect life. I do support a woman being allowed to abort should carrying the baby to term physically threaten her life. The is the only circumstance in which I support abortion, because it is the physical taking of one life to preserve the physical life of another. That being said, if a baby is viable, there is no reason he or she has to be killed to be removed from the mother's uterus. The procedure for late-term abortion is that the baby is killed and delivered, or partially delivered and killed along the way. It is just as easy for the baby to be delivered alive. Finally, virtually all late-term abortions are not due to a threat to the mother's physical life. And an Alan Guttmacher (a pro-abortion group) study in 2002 found that only 2% of late-term abortions were due to a diagnosis of a fetal problem.

It is implanted in, but it is not a part of. The baby is not the mother's reproductive organ.

You should forward this information on to the Secret Service, then. What they have heard, upon review of footage and tapes, is "tell him" or "tell them". But if you clearly heard "kill him", that's something the Secret Service would like to know about. Quite frankly, I think no matter who wins there will not be unity. Both opposing sides will be livid and dismayed and scared. We have a deep divide in philosophy among Americans, and because the philosophies are so diametrically opposed, I don't believe there is anyone who can unite them. How can someone who believes in socialism be expected to support a capitalist, and vice-versa? How can someone who is pro-life be expected to support someone who's pro-abortion, and vice-versa? How can someone who's anti-war be expected to support someone who believes war is a necessary evil, and vice-versa? The list can go on and on, but the bottom line is that there is very little middle ground between the two candidacies, and I don't think supporters of either will be happy should the opposition win. It is a sad state of affairs and I wish there were a solution, but unfortunately I don't think there is one :eek:

The reason being . . .? I'm happy to have the discussion via PM if someone doesn't want to get into it publicly. But when a statement is made, a question is asked about that, and the question is never answered, it leads me to believe that a reasonable and logical answer isn't available. I very firmly believe that to educate ourselves we need to be exposed to ideas and question our preconceptions, and someone who is unwilling to look at the other side of an issue for fear that their arguments might not stand up to scrutiny is doing themselves a disservice. That being said, I don't feel very good that this has all come down to what feels like an attack on losingjusme. That was absolutely never my intention when I asked the question. My intent, if the question wasn't answered, was not to come back to it again and again and again, and I would not have done so if others did not bring it up. It is well within her rights to just plain not answer the question.

But why, if there is a "contraption" that will replace the womb? If the mother's womb is not required to support the baby, as it is not in the case of late-term abortions, why then doesn't the argument change -- as you said it would above?

I was responding to the claim that the unborn baby is a part of the womb with an analogy. I am not equating the baby with a penis or a finger. I recently had an ultrasound to determine why I was having some physical problems. It was determined that I had a fibroid in my uterus and a cyst on my ovary. The fibroid was not determined to be part of my uterus and the cyst was not determined to be part of my ovary. They fibroid is in and the cyst is on. They are not part of. The claim that the unborn baby is part of the womb is not accurate. The unborn baby is not the mother's body but a separate (not separated, but separate) entity. Right back at 'cha.

I know you consider legitimate questions "baiting" and "propaganda". I consider them questions, and more specifically, questions that no one ever answers.

So I take it from this that you support a ban on late term abortions, abortions performed after the baby could survive outside the womb. There are roughly 20,000 of these abortions performed every year in the US.

I would hate to be judged for a mistake my child makes. No sex education method guarantees no pregnancies; if it did, given the explicit sex ed and free birth control currently available in all 50 states (or all 57, if you're Obama), we'd have zero unplanned pregnancies, instead of the ever-increasing annual numbers.

You can stick your finger in someone's mouth, but that doesn't make your finger part of their mouth. When a man and a woman have sex, his sex organ does not become part of her vagina, even for a short time. Yes, the unborn baby does reside in the mother's womb. He or she is not, however, part of that womb.

Nope. Because Bristol wasn't a product of "abstinence only" education (sex ed is taught in Alaska schools). Ergo, she was a product of sex education in schools and still became pregnant. FYI, as an aside, we don't know if she used birth control or not. All we know is she's pregnant. I, for one, don't think we should be judging her.

My goodness! She said something about it here, so I asked the question here. If she wants to, she can answer me in the other thread so this thread can remain "pure". Give me a break.

Yeah, very scary. I have no idea if it's true or false. I can only tell you that the Secret Service would take very seriously someone shouting out a death threat towards a Presidential candidate, and they say it's just flat out not true. My tendency, knowing what I know about the media, is to believe the Secret Service on this one.

Actually, I do not know the answer to the question I asked, because no one's ever answered it for me in a logical, consistent way (most people just say something along the lines of, "that's just what I believe" and/or "that's just how I feel" and leave it at that). I am not trying to be confrontational and accusatory and launch into a lecture. I am asking a question and trying to get an answer. In fact, I said twice in the original post that I am not trying to be confrontational.

Women should absolutely have a right to control their reproductive organs. A baby is not one of a woman's organs.

To put it another way, Jack, life is an inalienable right and should not be denied any living human being. The rights to drink, drive, marry, etc. are not.

You are 100% correct; it is an issue of standing. My point is that legal standing for the right to life should be based on when life begins, not at some other arbitrary point in time -- just as black people, for biological reasons, should never have been defined as 3/5 of a person and been denied rights based on that analysis (interestingly, one of the rights they were denied was the right to life, as their "owners" had the right to kill them if they wanted to; had the basis for their legal standing been biological, they couldn't have been denied these rights).

I have to add one thing: I really hope Obama can defeat all of these charges, because the thought of the rioting in the streets that will occur should he be disqualified gives me a knot in my stomach.

I don't think we should try to employ a religious or spiritual definition in the case of when human life begins, precisely because religious and spiritual definitions are personally, not biologically, determined. We should not base the decision about when life begins on one's personal judgment, because a nebulous "what I believe" judgment isn't medical fact. If Person A believes life begins at conception, Person B believes it begins at 24 weeks, and Person C believes it begins at birth, they cannot all correct. Baby A, Baby B, and Baby C were all alive at the same point in development, regardless of what their mothers believed them to be. There is a point when life actually begins, despite the differences that people have as to when they believe it begins. And that point should be biologically determined, not spiritually. That is exactly my point. Just as black people weren't any different the day before the Dred Scott decision was overturned than they were the day after it was overturned, so also the unborn baby is the same at, say, 16 weeks in 2008 as he or she was at 16 weeks in 1908. The biological facts about the beginning of human life, the same ones we were taught in 6th grade biology, are quite clear. I agree that it is a great improvement, but it also serves to shine a light on the fact that an outside entity can't harm or kill an unborn baby; his or her mother is the only one with that "right."

I agree, and that's what makes me most curious about this whole thing. Here's an excellent summary of the whole thing (to date): 200810222308 | My Mother's Birth Certificate - And Obama's | / | Editorial (long but not tough to read), part of which says While Obama's camp submitted a supposedly authentic birth certificate to the far-left blog Daily Kos, it was found to have been a photo-shopped version of the birth certificate of his half-sister, who was actually born in Hawaii, as Obama claims he was. (perhaps this is the original basis of the Snopes article that TheGh0st found? IDK) Here's an article just released today as well: Newsmax.com , which demonstrates that this is no longer a one-lawsuit-flash-in-the-pan: Lawsuits in Washington and Georgia are seeking state superior courts to force the states’ secretary of state, as the chief state elections officer, to require Obama to produce original birth records from Hawaii, or else decertify him as a candidate for the presidency.

Thanks, green. It is nice when people can take a clearly less-than-perfect situation and turn it around into a blessing. The birth mother is really treating this as a new start for her life, a positive way to get her life turned around by doing the right thing now and in the future as well.