roberts confirmed

kjh wrote:

Xipe, you sidestepped both questions.

No, I didn't, as you well know. The first - "At what exact moment does life begin?" is unanswerable to the collective satisfaction of virtually any group of people (medically trained and otherwise), and the answer to the second is as obvious as the question itself is pointless. I wouldn't be here, and I doubt very much this would concern the person who's now typing these words.

Answer me this, kjh, where would you be if someone had dropped a piano on your mom from a great height while she was pregnant with you? No dodging, now!

Try turning the question around. Where would a legion of fatherless toddlers with impoverished, drug-addicted mothers be had someone wised up and pursued an abortion? Probably not suffering every day of their starving lives, I'd bet.

Is there a point to your line of questions? If there is, you've concealed it well. Why don't you research the exact point at which human life can be said to begin and report back with your unqualified answer.

Keep trying Xipes.

You conveniently omitted this key factoid amidst your barnstorming of dictionaries to come up with all those insults:

The JAMA article did not mention the lead author of the report is a medical student who former worked for pro-abortion stalwarts NARAL as an attorney. It also failed to mention another author runs an abortion facility at a San Francisco hospital.

Experts in fetal pain dispute the contested study's findings.

Neurologist Dr. Paul Ranalli of the University of Toronto says the 20-30 week child in the womb may even feel more pain than an adult. He adds that the "pain impulse connections in the spinal cord link up and reach the thalamus (the brain's reception center): at 7-20 weeks."

Coming from someone of your stature, I'm sure I'll be thoroughly stung when the gravity of your comparing me to a female's post-coital cleansing sinks in. As an aside, I've never heard that before. There's a site--you might know it (it's called Dyestat)--where that insult is most popular amongst 13 year old boys.

By all means keep drumming up your fanciful medical journals, your "evidence," and whatever else you need to convince yourself. The pictures that others posted tell a far better story that is irrelevant to the stage at which a fetus feels pain. Viablity, as has been show, is also irrelevant. And your myopic definition of what constitutes a person is also irrelevant. I'm still confused as to why you're so firmly convinced that your opinion matters or why you can't see that all the fanato-religiosity you accuse others of propogating can be flung directly back in your face. If you want to see a display of fanatical extremism, hop a plane to Washington DC next April and watch Whoopie Goldberg wave a coat hanger and scream hysterically into a microphone for 30 minutes. That'll get your ovaries riled right up.

As for my queery about Silent Scream, as I suspected, you've obviously not seen it. You've not only not seen it, but you've already made a judgment about its validity based on...your opinion.

And as we've quite clearly established, your the validity and relative worth of your opinion grows dimmer with each word you type.

And you failed to admit that you drummed this up from LifeNews.com, a site that, in ots own words, "specifically devoted to reporting news that affects the pro-life community." You also didn't note that Paul Rinalli has been published in National Right to Life News and is regarded as a radical within the obstetrical community. Every discipline has outliers, and I'm not surprised your fervent scrambling uncovered one so quickly.

Rather than play appeal-to-motive games, why not accept that the JAMA article was peer reviewed and published in a respected journal? Obviously some will dispute its findings, perhaps rightfully so; that's what science is about. But to dispute it as a result of despising its implications, as does your pro-life haven and your less-than-objective doctor, is nothing more than a fart in a kazoo.

Well, JAMA may not be NEJM, but I'm not surprised you would term it "fanciful." You came to this discussion convinced of your pro-life bunk, so it's not as though facts are apt to dislodge you from your position.

Your queery, yes. Actually, I have seen it. I'm sorry I wasn't as biased by this bit of propaganda as you believe I should have been.

Don't you wish! The royal "we" is always worth a try, though.

I'm not "pro-abortion." I know few who are, or could be. But people who are actually "pro-life" can look beyond pictures of excised quasi-human slime and at the broader implications - the realities of unwanted children in a country that gives increasingly less of a hoot about them.

Xipe Tot^c wrote:

kjh wrote:

Xipe, you sidestepped both questions.

No, I didn't, as you well know. The first - "At what exact moment does life begin?" is unanswerable to the collective satisfaction of virtually any group of people (medically trained and otherwise)

I think you're missing the point here -- you defend abortion, claiming that it doesn't end human life, yet you can't tell me when life begins.

The second question isn't pointless. If you'd answer it instead of, um, yes, avoiding it, the answer would be that you'd be dead. Yes, I would also be dead if someone had killed me some other way when my mom was pregnant with me -- the same as if I'd been killed through an abortion.

As to your question, it's not up to you or me to decide if someone's life is worth living. Everyone deserves a chance at life. With your reasoning we would have aborted Abe Lincoln because he grew up in a house with a dirt floor to illiterate parents that had questionable means of supporting him. Many of the people I hear use this argument are subtle racists, thinking the brown people are reproducing too much.

The point of my line of questioning is to try to get you to acknowledge that the unborn are people. They are in an early stage of development, yes, but they are people.

Is it in the pro-lifers credo to admit that quality of life matters, in the least?

I don't think anyone who thinks "life is sacred" understands how unlikely it is that they are conscious and perched in front of their computer arguing for the sacredness of what is biologically, clearly, not. There is nothing special about any specific combination of chromosomes, except to parents who want children like themselves. Under what grounds can you say that one gametocyte created from your parents' gametes is more valuable than another? One combination of gametes necessarily means infinitely many others were not conceived in its place. What about all those ‘children!?!’

Besides, conception naturally doesn't always mean a live birth; miscarriages are common. If life were sacred I’d expect nature wouldn’t snuff out so many lives before they began. Human life, as the entire natural world, is sloppy and imperfect. It's backward to insist women with rights, goals, and desires (or an inability to care for a child) go through with a pregnancy; it's the living person who is important, not the biological potential for a person. It can be a mercy to not have been born. Just as, for all humans, some day it will be a mercy to be dead.

It's development through experience and memory that makes our lives anything more than the moment-to-moment existence of other animals. Fetuses are inferior to developed persons in that they lack the experience and neural development to create storylines of their lives, form values, desires, and memories; they lack selfhood.

The potential to become a person is something, of course, but it's not much; not if you’re not healthy or there isn't a nurturing environment eager for you.

myoki wrote:

Besides, conception naturally doesn't always mean a live birth; miscarriages are common. If life were sacred I’d expect nature wouldn’t snuff out so many lives before they began.

Under natural conditions, fewer than half of fertilized ova implant in the uterine wall. A significant fraction of those that do end up miscarrying. Some of these are karyotypically (think chromosomally) normal, while many are not. If the bloodthirsty wing of the pro-life crowd needs to demonize someone or something for vicious abortion practices, try Mother Nature - evidently she doesn't share in the belief that every potential life is worth a second look, much less "sacred."

1)At what exact moment does human life begin? Doesn't seem too scientific to me to just say that human life in an early stage of development isn't human life.

I don't recall having said that it wasn't. What I did say was that it was extra-utero non-viable life. In other words, if the person who is supporting that embryo decides that she does not wish to continue that support-the embryo will die. You may classify this as immoral, but I classify it as her own business, in the same way that your choice not to support starving little children in Africa who are dying, in the same manner as that embryo, through your lack of willingness to support them is your own business.

2)Where would you be if your mom had had an abortion?

Dead. Why? Where would you be?

Before 25 weeks, a zygote/embryo/fetus cannot survive outside the mother's body (I think we've pushed that to 24 weeks now, actually, but the monetary cost was enormous - I bet some people would rather cover 24 week old fetuses than real, suffering poor people, though).

Before 25 weeks, I believe that a woman has a right to end her pregnancy for any reason. Because the child cannot survive without that symbiotic relationship, I do not consider it alive or to have rights. More importantly, it is not my place to tell a woman what to do with her body - and it is her body, because the fetus is completely dependent upon her - is like a leech on her (that's a blunt and harsh comparison, but fairly accurate.. of note, I don't consider children leeches, except maybe my nephew who asks for money everytime I see him).

After that, only in the gravest of circumstances - read: mother's life in danger - do I believe abortions are permitted. And, again, I would never seek to tell a woman that she is less important than an unborn fetus. That is, at that point, her decision.

That said, I am anti-abortion and would never offer abortion as an option to someone seeking my advice.

This debate is less about saving the act of abortion than maintaining the right to choose certain things for yourself. I think this would be a much nobler country if everything were completely legal and we chose not to do the things that may harm us or others (smoking, drugs, murder, theft, drunk driving, proselytizing, abortion).

But, not even "good" Christians live that perfect of a lifestyle. So, it returns to our courts and our legislators granting people realms in which they can choose dangerous things without recourse - like smoking tobacco or abortion (and yes, tobacco kills, much more painfully and slowly, even those who don't smoke, so I consider it very equivalent). And because, as I said above, a woman's body is tied to the fetus until it can survive on its own, the debate is very much - dare I say exclusively - about what a woman can do with her body and therefore is a test to what extent personal freedoms are granted or denied in our country (this is, for example, very much tied to assisted suicide, which again, I believe is a choice I cannot make and that which we should not legislate for someone else).

On the topic of Roberts. I believe his reasoning is similar. I'm sure he has personal views that differ from mine and possibly special interests that motivate him in other areas. But, I believe he will be a good judge for both sides of the proverbial fence. Not an idealogue for either side - rather a someone who respects the law (as far as I can tell). But, then again, judges have proved to be unpredictable after they reach the big bench.

you stated my view better than i could...thanks

Totally agree with you...

i'm definantly not infavor of an aboration however i am a male and i don't think it is my right to tell a women that she can't have control over her own body.....

when i had all the fun and she takes all the risks...there is just no way i can understand what she is going through...

He drives a Jap car, a Honda Odyssey. Shows how wicked the Bush regime is. They have to get Roberts a Ford F350 so he can continue to look down on the poor. In the past tough-guy (actually a Chickenhawk) Pat Buchannan was villified in the media for driving a Mercedes-Benz. The foreign car manufacturers have the Bush regime by the balls.

Xipe Tot^c wrote:

myoki wrote:

Besides, conception naturally doesn't always mean a live birth; miscarriages are common. If life were sacred I’d expect nature wouldn’t snuff out so many lives before they began.

Under natural conditions, fewer than half of fertilized ova implant in the uterine wall. A significant fraction of those that do end up miscarrying. Some of these are karyotypically (think chromosomally) normal, while many are not. If the bloodthirsty wing of the pro-life crowd needs to demonize someone or something for vicious abortion practices, try Mother Nature - evidently she doesn't share in the belief that every potential life is worth a second look, much less "sacred."

Just because some people "naturally" get struck by lightning doesn't mean we ought to start zapping people ourselves. Why the personal attack, by the way, I've kept stuff clean, and I'm definitely not bloodthirsty.

Xipe, if you do consider an unborn child human life but are still ok with ending it, I don't see how you can reconcile that.

As for the dependence thing, certainly babies in utero are totally dependent on their mothers. That doens't make them something other than a human being. People who require dialysis (sp? and, for that matter, babies once they're out of the womb are also dependent on others.

Will human life become something more at an earlier stage once technology is invented that can sustain them outside the womb? The distinction you are making seems political rather than scientific.

When you say that 25 weeks is the cutoff, that's just an artificial construction. Is 24 weeks 6 days and 23 hours just not human enough, but an hour later it is?

As for the choice argument, this couches things in the wrong terms. Choice stops being the primary issue when you kill someone else, it becomes a life issue.

As for deciding the quality of someone else's life and whether or not it ought to be lived, I shudder at the thought. My early upbringing had some pretty unpleasant stuff in it, but that didn't mean I would rather someone had chosen I not get a chance for a better existence.

Your wasteing your time discussing what the world has already decided is none of your business. It's up to the individual woman to decide. No mythological, theocratic, or abusive government power can supercede the right of women to make their own decision.

Did I at some point equivocate here? I very much don't consider a foetus "human life." You're the one who's calling such things "unborn children." You are essentially having a conversation with yourself, steering it toward your foregone conclusions about the true beginnings of life in the womb.

Let me remind you that all of those wonderful post-abortion pictures posted by Thomas and others are representative of about 1% of all abortions performed. Nearly 90% of abortions are performed in the first trimester, when even the loosest biological definition of "human being" doesn't apply. And the women who do get abortions near or after the middle of the second trimester don't do so for cavalier reasons; generally, they've found that they're going to give birth to a chromosomaly defective organism or that their bodies are not holding up well to the rigors of pregnancy. Anti-abortionists, of course, are typically shameless when it comes to distorting anything and everything as long as it paints abortion and those who perform or undergo them as murderers, so they fixate on the rare "dismembered little boy at 25 weeks" photo ops.

There's no such thing as a "baby in utero" unless you're talking about a creature that could survive outside the womb given optimal technology. Since we're talking here about third-trimester foeti (with astronomically rare exceptions), your comments are outside the realm of the topic under discussion.

Actually, it's the bulk of the pro-lifers who view this in other than scientific terms.

I didn't say anything about a 25-week cut-off, but regardless, you can always play slippery-slope games with whatever numbers are cast out there. That's no more useful than the what-if-your-mom-had-aborted-you hypothetical.

Except - repeat after me - abortion isn't murder. If you believe that it is, it seems that one of us has a problem with the way bioethicists, doctors, and the government currently frame things.

Go spend a year in one of those crap-ass African nations with a 3% annual growth rate and a per capita income of $400 US and see if your ideals don't give way to a more realistic view of "the miracle of life."

The number of couples wishing to adopt in this country falls woefully shy of the number of unwanted newborns. What do you propose to do about this?

There's no going back on this one, just as trying to get drugs and guns out of the general population is a lost cause. If abortion was rendered illegal by federal law, women would continue to find ways to have them anyway, and medical complications would skyrocket. Just desserts, some would say, but now we're talking about maternal rather than foetal health considerations - something with no grey area in terms of personhood.

I admire your blind compassion, if that's what it is. I'm compassionate too, just not in ways you can appreciate.

Kjh, get out while you can. Wasteful morons like Xipe can't penetrate the thick fog of their own mystical self-worship and the ecstasy they derive from meditating upon their own intellects. Murder is the immoral taking of an innocent human life.

From the moment of conception, the zygote has two unique contributions of its DNA from its mother and father. There will never be another person with the same genetic material. Within 3-7 days after conception, according to the late Dr. Jerome Lejeune, one can determine the gender of the developing child.

It isn't possible to determine the gender of a blob of tissue. If Xipe wants to convince himself that embryos and fetuses are "products of conception" and that a woman is entitled to violently terminate the life of the developing conceptus, let Xipe do just that.

You and I and billions know the truth about when life beings--at conception--and why it is wrong to take that life. It is the height of tragic ignorance and pitiable misinformation when someone propogates mistaken theories about the justifiability of taking the unborn child's life, but there is little one can do to change the mind of someone bent on wallowing in mean-spirited and stubborn ignorance.

Well, Salga, you pretty much nailed it. Except for a few minor details.

One, being pro-choice isn't synonymous with intellectual self-indulgence, gloating, mean-spiritedness, ignorance, or being anti-human. Nor is it a call for more abortions. In fact, I seem to recall being the only one in this thread to cite meaningful, easily accesible statistics and research; you guys, on the other hand, have only railed on about murder and idiots and silent screams and the pure unadulterated evil of the entire abortion concept, taking care to invent convenient "facts" along the way. You're entitled to your subjective opinions about the morality of abortion, but that's all they are. Do these self-consoling measures really work for pro-lifers?

Two, your appeal to the unuqueness of every conceptus is idiotic. This is a purely mathematical consideration. Should all snowflakes be preserved on the basis of their uniqueness as well? You're also not informed enough to understand that a great many of these unique combinations imply a zygote that connot divide, does not have a normal number of chromosomes, or is otherwise useless. This isn't a "miraculous" process at work, it's genetic and biological roulette.

Three, when you write, "If Xipe wants to convince himself that a woman is entitled to violently terminate the life of the developing conceptus, let Xipe do just that," you're acting as though I pulled the very idea out of the air, and are ignoring the non-trivial fact that abortion is legal in the United States, a state of affairs I had nothing to do with.

Who's really caught up in rage and despair here? Somehow I don't think it's the pro-choicers.

Xipe Tot^c wrote:

Should all snowflakes be preserved on the basis of their uniqueness as well?

I think your analogical skills are here exposed clearly for their ineptness. Wow.

Xipe,

Not all of my post addressed just your post, there were others below it. My browser is having trouble witht he quote option, so it's hard to keep track of authorship.

I also wasn't aware that someone had been posting post abortion photos, and have just been responding to the last few posts from you and a couple others.

As far as late term abortions, and "chromosomally defective" babies, I think that's a sick distinction and smacks of eugenics. Should we abort a child just because that person will have Down's Syndrome? I don't know which country you are writing from, but there were cases publicized in the UK where mothers were aborting their unborn children when it became evident that they had things like spina bifida or a cleft pallet. In eastern countries where male children are more highly valued, female babies are aborted. Slippery slope, eh, and shows how this is truly a women's rights issue.

I definitely disagree with you that "there is no such thing as a baby in utero." I'm trying to be respectful, but that statement is patently absurd.

You don't speak for all doctors and bioethicists on this topic, and I don't think should pretend to, either. As for the U.S. government's view, well, the law is and has been wrong on so many things (remember, slavery was legal) that citing current US law does not necessarily equate with the morality of something.

As for your statement that abortion isn't murder, just saying so doesn't make it true, it makes it your opinion. You have yet to show me that life in the womb isn't a continuum. You haven't shown that, all of a sudden, the life that is there suddenly "becomes" human. Now you know why I view that life as a baby the entire way through, and you haven't offered any scientific evidence pointing another way.

As far as crappy African nations, surely there are plenty. There will always be poor people out there, sadly, but the solution isn't to kill them off. That would be like England shipping convicts to Australia, it didn't end crime. We need to work for political change in those countries, because that is the undelying problem.

The adoption question is a new topic. Instead of killing kids rather than having them suffer through the foster home system and orphanages, I say let them have a chance at life. Hopefully I hit on all the points you asked.

Xipe, it's likely this will be deleted, if you're interested in continuing to discuss this I'd be willing to email each other as long as you agree not to sign me up for spam emails.

Are you serious? wrote:

I think your analogical skills are here exposed clearly for their ineptness. Wow.

Please explain. I'm not likening the value of a snowflake to the value of a potential person. However, the other guy's point appeared to be that a mathematical property of gamete fusion imparted instrinsic value to the zygote. That's a crock. Every cancerous tumor is unique for its DNA derangements, too. Please try to catch on.

kjh wrote:

As far as late term abortions, and "chromosomally defective" babies, I think that's a sick distinction and smacks of eugenics. Should we abort a child just because that person will have Down's Syndrome?

I'm talking about fatally defective, kjh. The embryos you never hear about because they spontaneously abort, because they cannot be sustained. This accounts for a fair fraction of concepti and early miscarriages. This isn't a justification of reckless abortion practices so much as as exposure of Salga's high-flown ignorance.

You've come out and said that you believe unconditionally that abortion is murder. Would I have an abortion if I knew I was carrying a Trisomy 21 foetus? I'm certain that I would. You might oppose this, but to vocally intercede on "behalf" of the foetuses of others is wrong, much more so than abortion could ever be. Stay out of people's faces and the world will roll along just fine. And lobby your congresspeople like crazy in order to "murderize" abortion.

It's threads like this that make it clear how few women or men over 21 post here.