General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Being pro-life doesn’t make me any less of a lefty [View all]DHelix
(89 posts)1) I don't believe life begins at conception because life is more than a heartbeat. This is why when people we know are in a vegetative state it's not murder to remove them from life support if we believe they're vegetative. Fetuses are vegetative. It's about quality of life and a 80 day fetus is the size of a bean and doesn't have much quality of life and certainly isn't missing anything because it hasn't experienced anything of significance. If a mother wants to abort it's her decision because she is the one who has to undergo everything afterward and it's the woman that the bean is connected to until it takes its first breaths on its own and becomes a proper member of society.
2) Abortion is legal right now and has been for some time. We live in a society where we've created laws to live and abortion is legal right now.
3) In a freakonomic study there was a strong correlation between countries that were pro-life and crime rate and they discovered this because some countries made the switch. In their study, 18-21 years later after abortions were illegal in countries the crime rates rose. The theory was that more children were being forced into birth to mothers that resented them and absentee fathers. These kids then turned to drugs, violence and crime and became drains on the system in numerous ways. So a case could be made that when you force women to give birth at all times you may be encouraging crime and violence later on from those forced births. These unwanted children could easily join gangs or do harm to others. You might say that these moms should give the kids up for adoption but you can't exactly force that on them too, can you? You never know what kind of dangerous relationship you're creating when you force a woman to birth.
3) If you draw the line at conception why can't others draw the line at the life building elements of sperm and egg? Every single sperm has the potential of creating an entirely different human being. It could be a male or female, tall or short... It's all there in the sperm and yet men routinely masturbate and end the building blocks of life. Men get vasectomies and wear condoms. Seems strange that the same God often driving the pro life argument would be okay with a man surgically altering his life giving penis so that he could no longer create babies if God was so concerned about life being created. Seems like that same God wouldn't be too happy about people engaging in baby making acts at all with deliberate intent to not have a baby if you take the reasoning to its furthest extreme. God has many reasons to be angry at all humans at the moment not the least of which is the fact that we are overbreeding and depleting the earth of its resources. God did a face palm on Earth's humans a long time ago and left to go watch some other beings he created who have more empathy and less greed. We need to quit being a slave to ideas written by men in the name of God 2000 years ago.
4) We shouldn't be forcing religious beliefs on aethists. We live in a society where non-believers have just as many rights as believers of any religion.
Those are enough reasons to make it an easy decision for me and the provisions of rape and health of the mother are only there to make it appear as though the Right Wing is compromising when in reality it's to dodge all of the above issues. There's no debate at all in times of rape, incest or health of the mother... That's a strawman argument to seem like they're open-minded because those were the easiest cards pro choice people kept playing in debates like this over the years.