Abortion

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If life is the most precious thing in existence, then why should we intentionally and forcefully deny anyone the chance to live? Why should we not allow everyone to live, love, and add their own beauty to the world and our short time in it? At least under a religious mindset, an aborted fetus would have some afterlife. But without such, isn't the denial of a life, especially one already growing on its only trip, that much more cruel?

Why would someone being born and growing into a fully conscious, living being only to have that inevitably snuffed out be less cruel than preemptively stopping that from occurring?

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I believe life starts from conception. There is only one exception in my views, when a mother's life is endangered.

I've thought out the rape, and incest things too, but I decided I can't support those exceptions. I can't tell a daughter who was conceived from rape that her mother had a right to kill her in the womb.

My opposition to Abortion isn't just based off a religious basis. Hell,  that's only about 40% of why I oppose abortion.

As someone who has babysitted a lot of kids, and wants to have kids of my own, I cannot support the murder of the unborn. Kids are really the greatest thing about the human race.

Also, I believe the right to life is defined in the Constitution. ("Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness")


Oh, and unlike the candidate who I am supporting for President, I do support the use of contraception. Sex should be for enjoyment too, but it's primary purpose is to reproduce.  

There's so much more I can say, but I don't really have the time right now

This actually isn't that different from my own views, honestly. I mean, I'll concede it's somewhat ambiguous whether you can call someone without a brain, heart, etc. a person but I don't really see how someone could say a fetus isn't "a person" without playing silly semantic games or using logic that leads you to extreme conclusions like say, Peter Singer's position.

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G-d

Pardon the tangent, but I've seen people do this before - leaving out the 'o' in 'god' - what's the reason?

Belief that saying God's name is forbidden. Which is sort of bizarre, since God isn't even his/it's name anyway going by the bible.

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My view is that, as long as the fetus can't survive outside of the womb, it is still quite literally a part of the mother, and her right to bodily autonomy should be absolute.  At the point where the fetus has developed enough to survive outside, which I guess is around the beginning of the third trimester in most cases, then it makes sense to consider it a separate individual human, who then is endowed with all the rights and protections of the law.

This is, by the way, far far earlier than most societies throughout history.  Infanticide and infant mortality were very common, and children were often not even named until a year or two old, when they had proved they already had a chance to "make it" in a much more difficult world.

And if you try to push this line back much further, you end up with a position that's impossible to reconcile with the science of the matter.  Something like half of all pregnancies end up as miscarriages, many of them even before the woman knows she is pregnant, so even without abortion a huge proportion of fertilized eggs will never develop to viability.  (To say nothing of the fertilized eggs which never even implant, probably even a larger proportion than that.)  And if there's a miscarriage, the fetus will often be reabsorbed by the mother: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanishing_twin

Even more damning for the idea that "life begins at conception" is the existence of chimeras: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_%28genetics%29  Basically, two zygotes fuse into one individual, and yes human chimeras exist.  If I'm a chimera (and you may never find out unless you need a blood transfusion or you're born intersex or something), does that mean I have double the soul power of a normal person?!

I used to be very sympathetic to the "pro-life" view.  Then I learned some facts.

The hoff is back!