Nature isn't pro-life...?

In my humble opinion,

it is not a child until the fetus can survive

outside the womb without artificial means.

This means it is just a bunch of cells on

their way to become something not yet born

and to me, it is not murder.

You cannot murder something that doesn't

exist completely, as of yet.

I know what it's like to have an illegal abortion

and if the government takes away women's

rights to have an abortion, they will not cease.

They will continue to have abortions, legal or not.

Many times a woman will miss a period or two,

she may even be pregnant, if her body goes into a spontaneous abortion, by a moralist way of thinking,

this could well be considered manslaughter.

What if a woman falls down a flight of stairs

or has a bad auto accident and miscarries,

is this also manslaughter.

Will the courts file suit against both parties

involved in the wreck, will the building where

the fall occurred, will the management, owners ,

contracters, and or architect be liable for the

death of this fetus,

I'll bet they won't even be charged,

let alone be notified.

And what about men who donate

their sperm to a sperm bank, should they

be charged with neglect, they don't know

who got the sperm, if the child was born.

Are they going to be sued for child support?

This sperm donation may have had problems

in part of the DNA, if mixing an egg & a

sperm together causes a birth defect,

who gets the blame, will all parties involved

have to share the responsibilities of that child.

Maybe the child is born with no brain cells that

function, she could have had an abortion early

on and now this woman will be punished by

having to watch her brain-dead child kept

alive my artificial means.

These are more reasons for Pro-Choice

and I have taught my children to think of it

in these same ways.

They all know Mom had an abortion

and it's no big deal. Somethings are just

not meant to be.

You make a brilliant argument here. Thank you. I am pro-choice. I didn't think to make the analogy of what CEOs and government officials do. Wow. That is brilliant. edit: Protect the unborn child? To let the child grow up in poverty or with parents that don't want the child? To cause a woman to die in order to possibly save the child? To bring a child into the world that may have catastrophic medical problems? To take away a woman's decision on what she does? To limit her choices? This would be fine if they believed in helping people and held CEOs/Governments accountable for their actions that cause death and destruction. Resources are finite, not infinite.

Every time a pro-life person loads their children into a car, they are putting them at a real, statistical risk of being killed. This isn't a "what if" scenario. Of every 1000 children loaded into cars each day, a few are going to die.

How can they make such an irresponsible, careless CHOICE? Don't they revere life enough to protect the lives of innocent children at all costs?

EVERYTHING in life is cost vs benefits. Humans knowingly do things that will kill other humans. It's a fact. We always have, we always will, and we will always find a way to justify it IF the benefits outweigh the costs - moral or otherwise. To say any different is to be supremely hypocritical.

If a pregnancy is ended by a natural cause such as miscarriage, then it is not an individuals decision, but something that is obviously meant to be. But if it is ended by man then it is a matter of trying to change God's will. Every birth is a miracle and we should never take that for granted.

I think, nature is pro-life because the number of natural births is sufficient to sustain the life on the earth.

Natural abortions can be considered a part of the process of natural selection.

I do think it is a personal choice, but for me having miscarried several babes, makes the ones that lived more precious and I could never make that choice to end a pregnancy

here is why I think abortion is, for the most part, wrong.

I have thought about this quite a bit over the years. The wide spread of opinions is incredible, matched only by the passion of the activists on all sides. This is an issue that few people are even able to have a civilized discussion about. Complicating it further is that there are few that hold a black-and-white few of the issue. The majority of people in the US see abortion as a giant grey area with varying degrees of abortion considered acceptable. Very few people hold the position of unlimited abortion access or no abortion under any circumstances. Below is the process I went through to come up with my position on the matter.

First, I asked myself the question at what point does a human being obtain "personhood" and as such gain all the legal and moral protections that status entitles them to? There are some who say that the point of personhood is 28 days AFTER birth, at which point you still should be allowed to abort. In fact, there is a professor of ethics at Princeton University that actively advocates this position. This is the position that spurred “Born Alive” legislation that says if a woman has an abortion and the baby survives, that doctors cannot withhold care and let the baby die on the operating table. Others say up to the point of birth. These folks would hold that partial birth abortion is a reasonable procedure. Or perhaps just before while the mother is in labor. Or 6 months of gestation or 3 months or three weeks. I wrestled with this for a long time.

Then I looked at the issue a different way. Does human life have an imputed value or an intrinsic one? If we say that it is imputed, meaning the value is derived from something else, some outside criteria, then any one of the above positions would be equally valid. We as a society would decide what criteria to select. My problem with this is what criteria do you use? On what basis is a baby at 6 weeks more valuable than a baby at 5 weeks? Is a baby that has not yet developed a heart still a baby? This hit really hard on my wife and I when we lost one of our children. Lynne had a miscarriage a few years ago. When people with strong pro-choice sentiments gave us their condolences, they referred to the fetus as a child, even though she (we named her Grace, even though we do not know for sure if she was a she or a he. It made it easier to explain to the children what happened and easier for Lynne and I to grieve our loss) was at the same gestational point, 9 weeks, that they believed abortion was merely removing some unwanted tissue of the mother. So, the criteria used is whether or not a child is wanted. If that is so, then why?

By similar logic, if the value of human life is imputed, it can also be taken away, depending on what some person or group of persons believe that life is worth. So if you happen to be mentally retarded or black or Jewish, it would be perfectly reasonable for you to be killed off for the good of the community if they believe it. I have a friend who is paralyzed from the neck down. There are some in the world who would look at her and say that she has no quality of life or that the money and effort to support her would be better used on others. They would have her die due to her handicap. But knowing her the way I do I find the notion that she is without a quality of life to be ridiculous on its face. She is a writer, a painter, a social worker, and heads up an international charity. I’d call that a pretty good quality of life. So would her husband who married her years after her accident put her in the wheelchair. Thus, the imputed value logic is shown to me to be completely arbitrary. Following any of the “prior to this point it is not human but at this one on it is” positions is likewise arbitrary and does not answer the question of personhood.

But consider the proposition that human life has an intrinsic value. That it is valuable simply because it is human life and no other reason. No measure or quantification of the value of it, it is and that is enough. It is sort of like gold. Gold is valuable because it is gold, not because we as a society stood up one day and said, “we are going to make gold valuable”. Gold has an intrinsic value as opposed to an imputed value, such as paper currency. Paper currency is worthless in and of itself. It has value only because we say it has a certain value.

This position then would support a clear line between human life and not human life. With this position, you are a human at the point that you have a unique genetic code. In other words, at inception. Prior to inception, there was no “you”. The male and female reproductive components in and of themselves are not a unique genetic code, but merely parts of the donors. It is only when they combine to create new life do “you” begin to be a person.

The notion of intrinsic value also carries forward throughout life. My mother-in-law was on dialysis for several months before diabetes finally took her life. There are many who would have said that she should just die and not burden the rest of us. If those persons held the position that human life has imputed value, I can understand. I however, believe that human life is intrinsically valuable and worth preserving and protecting for as long as possible. Thus, we should protect life at the beginning and at the end and at all points in between.

So, we come full circle back to the question of abortion. Should it be outlawed? My answer, since I believe in the intrinsic value of human life, is that for the most part it should. Why only “for the most part”? Because there are times when you have to weigh the life of two humans and pick one to live and one to die. My sister-in-law faced such a problem once. She got pregnant from her husband and it turned out to be a tubal pregnancy. Had the child been allowed to grow inside of her, it would have killed her before the baby would have been able to survive on its own. Thus, in weighing these two lives, one would have to conclude that the baby would have to die in order to save the mother’s life. What about cases of rape or incest? I have 5 daughters (yes, that was no typo) and the thought of one of them being raped is always lurking in the back of my mind. If one of them should get pregnant as a result, the hard decision would be to let that child live. Pregnancy is not the extremely dangerous event of the past. Rarely do people die from giving birth. Many more die as a result of complications after an abortion. But the bottom line is that the child is innocent of any crime, so why punish it? I’m not saying it is an easy choice and I can certainly sympathize with those who have had to make it. Perhaps they even made the wrong choice. But, God is a loving and forgiving God, who can even forgive the taking of a human life. Which is what abortion is.

natural abortion is not wrong it is natures way of disposing of a flawed pregnancy. But a lot of the abortions are healthy baby's, it is a form of murder, there is no other way that you can explain it. Every woman who has a baby taken from her womb should have to see the fetus, so she can really know what she has done.

Is that really the best argument an apparently educated person can come up with?

Historically how many children die before the age of 5 or 10?

Why would you be wrong to choose to kill them up until the age of whatever you want if they were a burden?

Actually, if God is the supreme ruler of the universe, then God has performed or allowed billions more abortions than planned parenthood has.

That's something to think about.