HalfTangible said:
You NEED to know something beyond 'killing it is wrong'? -.- Seriously?
A fetus is a baby. If left alone, it will be born, it will live, and you have no right to deny it that chance. Killing it is wrong. PERIOD.
First of all: No killing is not wrong just because you say so.
If killing was wrong, how come the US has death penalties? How come President Obama authorized a mission with the objective to kill (not capture) Osama bin Laden? How come it's okay to shut down the medical ventilator of a (partially) brain dead car crash victim? How come more and more countries are implementing assisted suicide?
I'll tell you why: Because killing by itself isn't wrong, that's why.
What's wrong, however, is CRUELTY (which is an entirely different thing), and here is a the gist: a fetus isn't capable of feeling cruelty or associating it with anything (in fact, it isn't capable of associating anything with anything). A baby is. That, right there, is a huge difference.
Your argument that a baby will 'live' is also flawed for the simple reason that it won't. It might be 'born' if the women leaves it alone in her womb until she gives birth, but if she just abandons the child after that, then it won't live for very long, i can guarantee you that. That, btw, is going to be one of the consequences of prohibiting abortion: Women who are going to either leave or directly murder their newborn because they don't feel they can take care of them.
Allow me to finish this paragraph by quoting a part of my first post in this thread:
Bottom line is that prohibiting abortion is going to lead to a mass increase in the following problems:
- Children getting left (or possibly murdered) by their mothers because they can't care for them
- Children dying of hunger, because their mothers can't care for them
- Overpopulation being an even worse problem than it already is. The consequences for this is eventually going to be rather extreme as our resources are depleting.
- Women, who can't handle an extra child, breaking down (and their life along with them), which means they can't contribute properly to society.
I'm sure we can both agree that logically (and ethically), children being left to death by their mothers or dying of hunger, as well as the future welfare of our entire species, is far more serious problems than the ethical problems involved in abortion. Those simply take priority.
But i'll humor you. When DOES it become a baby, then?
When it's born.
That is just semantics however. You see, while i don't consider abortion murder, i do consider abortion after a certain period of pregnancy murder, because at that point the fetus has developed itself close enough to a baby to the point of cruelty being applicable. So in other words, i consider late/very late abortion murder, but i don't consider early abortion murder.
It seems like your stance on abortion is based upon the concept that a conceived child has been 'given a chance', and that it's cruel to take that chance away from it. My counter-argument is that if the child hasn't even gone to the stage where it's capable of understanding that it's alive, then cruelty doesn't apply, because it cannot understand (and therefore not receive) cruelty. Another argument i used was that, even if we assumed that there is a life after death (like going to heaven), if a fetus isn't capable of at least at some level recognizing that it has gone to a different place after an abortion, then why does it matter?
That's of course just the ethical side of things. On the practical side, i refer to my quote from above from my first post. Birth control is a necessity in modern society where overpopulation is a problem and BOTH men and women are working.
You see, in the old days, abortion wasn't as important as it is today for several reasons. In the old times, the women wouldn't usually be working (or at least not as much as the men), and they had to rely on the mans income to survive, which was fine because back then, people were married before they got children, and marriage was more or less permanent. In todays modern world, however, women have to stand up on their own. They have to have their own job/career, busy themself with education. Even if they marry a man (or just find a boyfriend), they cannot rely on his income forever, because relationships aren't hard fast things anymore. They can break up at any time, and if a women is depending on the man in the relationship to feed herself and the kid, that can be catastrophic both for her and the child. Therefore, modern society requires birth control.