Abortion. Pro Life or Pro Choice TS Men and Woman only please.

[LordKAT]

I think anyone who uses abortion as birth control should not have a uterus.

[Kay]

I'm pro-choice...with restrictions.
.
I'm definitely against anything that goes much past the 1st trimester.  There is a point where flesh, blood and cellular tissue develop into something more.  It is at that point that I don't think it should be allowed.  It's a determination that should be made medically...not a judgement that should be determined through superstition, religion, or blind belief.  There is a window there for an ethical abortion, but the window is short, and should not be abused or used as a substitute for birth control.
.
After the first trimester, I would only support abortions for health concerns of the mother, or rape (which amounts to mental/physical health of the mother).
.
Women should be free to do what they want with their bodies, yes. 
But there is a point where both parties (man & woman) need to take responsibility for their actions, and need to respect the fact that the tissue and genetic material they supplied is no longer solely their own anymore.

[Elijah3291]

I am pro life..

mostly because I know that if I ever got pregnant(Im a gay transguy) that I would 100% get an abortion. 

My point being.. that guys shouldn't have to worry about being pregnant, and I do, and I am VERY VERY bitter about it.  and its not like Im not using condoms, or being responsible, its just i'm paranoid.


I also think that the world is too populated to have unwanted babys around, and.. no person should have to carry around another life for 9 months if they do not desire to.

[placeholdername]

I am pro life..

mostly because I know that if I ever got pregnant(Im a gay transguy) that I would 100% get an abortion. 

My point being.. that guys shouldn't have to worry about being pregnant, and I do, and I am VERY VERY bitter about it.  and its not like Im not using condoms, or being responsible, its just i'm paranoid.


I also think that the world is too populated to have unwanted babys around, and.. no person should have to carry around another life for 9 months if they do not desire to.

You said pro life, but what you're describing is pro-choice.

[LordKAT]

You walk into a restaurant and order the chicken salad.
When it gets to your table, it's a cup of seeds and egg yolk.
Now me, I'd complain to the chef.

However, by your logic, it's still chicken and lettuce.

egg not fertilized and growing, seed not growing. I didn't say not to have your ovaries removed.

[Kay]

You order 10 turkeys online for a huge thanksgiving dinner.
The delivery man turns up with 10 fertilised turkey eggs and says "They're turkeys, sure as the sky is blue."
Do you demand a refund?

.
Fast food and biology aren't exactly apples to apples.
You're trying to make it into a straw man argument, but you're ignoring the portions of the facts that you don't want to consider.
.
You ask for a completed product (the turkey), you request a refund if it's something less than what you asked for.  Biology doesn't work that way...it's a process...not a choice of instant gratification or not.  If it were, I could say...'That's a newborn, I wanted a 10 year old so I could take it fishing.  Send it back!'  In that respect, your logic can be exploited even within your own system.
.
That said, the "butterfly" explanation is often overutilized and oversimplified as to ignore the biological complexities involved.
.
With biology, you start with a fertilized egg...and progress through the stages of development until birth.  At some point along the way, that egg becomes its own person.  "When" that point is...where cells become an individual...is the question of eternal debate.  All of it hinging on what criteria do you use to define sentience?

A heartbeat?  3 weeks after conception
Brain waves?  8 weeks after conception
Quickening (independant movement)?  13-16 weeks
etc...etc...etc...

It would be far more productive to debate the particular criteria being considered than to simply debate endless moral platitudes of "freedom vs. life" without any logical context with which to attempt to come to some sort of consensus or decision on the matter.  Alas...our society does like to argue endlessly such.

[PanoramaIsland]

I'm pro-science/logic, pro-civil liberties, proudly feminist, and therefore proudly pro-choice and pro-stem cell research.

I'm also, incidentally, anti-execution, and think that the comments about killing rapists at the beginning of this thread are quite authoritarian and just a tad disgraceful.

[Kay]

Turkeys are fast food now? That's new
== If you're ordering a delivery on-line?  I'd say that's a bit faster than shooting and plucking it yourself.    You didn't specify whether or not they were frozen from a truck or cooked from the grocery store though, so point taken. 

The pro-life argument is this:
A blastocyst or a zygote is a human.
Therefore a fertilised turkey egg is a turkey.
You cannot claim one and not the other. It's dead simple.

The extreme pro-life argument perhaps.  It's a bit naive to think that all pro-life individuals simplify things to such an extreme degree.  Your argument, unfortunately, is the converse of that....and both are like someone who can only see black and white...while ignoring the vast array of grey and color that the world has to offer.  Which was precisely my point...not everything is black or white...it's not quite that dead simple. 

[Wolf Man]

The "rights" of an unborn human being should never override the rights of an actual human being.

LordKAT: About your butterfly comment. Yes, a catapillar turns into a pupa and then a butterfly. Do note though that a pupa is not a butterfly and it isn't one until it is out and about. So, you just walked yourself back into what I said. Not breathing, not a baby, still a fetus.

[kyril]

I'm pro-choice.

If I had it to do over again, I wouldn't have had my daughter (I had her at 19 and gave her up for adoption). The only reason I did was that I was in denial about being pregnant for six months. I starved myself because I convinced myself I was just gaining weight. I self-induced contractions by dehydrating myself, trying to get it out of me. I got almost no prenatal care even after being forced to acknowledge I was pregnant because I'd induced premature labor, because I couldn't tolerate the exams, and she was born six weeks prematurely because I couldn't stand being pregnant anymore and broke my own water with a knitting needle.

In the end, I was only consciously pregnant for six weeks, and it was still the most horrible, interminable, traumatic experience of my entire life. Abuse and rape have nothing on the experience of a foreign being growing in organs you shouldn't have.

So not only am I pro-choice, I think some people simply shouldn't be allowed to possess uteri, and I am one.

(Happy ending: my daughter's now 7, healthy, profoundly gifted, and a joy to her parents and everyone around her. No thanks to me.)

[LordKAT]

The "rights" of an unborn human being should never override the rights of an actual human being.

LordKAT: About your butterfly comment. Yes, a catapillar turns into a pupa and then a butterfly. Do note though that a pupa is not a butterfly and it isn't one until it is out and about. So, you just walked yourself back into what I said. Not breathing, not a baby, still a fetus.

BS

You are not human then cause you are in a state of change.

[Miniar]

I don't understand why a potential human being's right to being born into a situation where it's not wanted, is considered more valuable than a human being's right to not jeopardize their health and quality of life against their will.

Even if you view a zygote as a human being, it's still one that puts another in harms way.
No matter if there are zero "complications" a pregnancy in and of itself causes severe stress on the human body, some damage, some irrevocable damage, and has a serious consequence on the quality of life outside of the mere flesh.

And to put a human being through the process against their will is equatable to torture in my mind.

So, I'd like to know, exactly how, you justify that torture?
And saying "It's a human being" isn't reason enough. Even in cases where no malicious intent is involved, a human being's right to defend themselves from harm is considered somewhat sacred. You can protect yourself from being harmed by someone who doesn't know any better.

[LordKAT]

Min,

I'm not in total disagreement with you. I am against people who use abortion as birth control. If you don't want to be pregnant, use birth control pills, condoms, tubal ligation, or something along those lines. If you choose not to prevent the pregnancy, then you are killing not to defend yourself but out of not caring about destroying another life.

Should it happen anyway or be a threat to a mother's health or life, then it should be the mothers choice.

[Miniar]

Min,

I'm not in total disagreement with you. I am against people who use abortion as birth control. If you don't want to be pregnant, use birth control pills, condoms, tubal ligation, or something along those lines. If you choose not to prevent the pregnancy, then you are killing not to defend yourself but out of not caring about destroying another life.

Should it happen anyway or be a threat to a mother's health or life, then it should be the mothers choice.

Accidents happen. There is no mode of birth control that is 100%.
I know a person who was on the low-dose-pill And used condoms, and she still got pregnant.

And a pregnancy Always carries some threat to the mother's health.

[LordKAT]

Accidents happen. There is no mode of birth control that is 100%.
I know a person who was on the low-dose-pill And used condoms, and she still got pregnant.

And a pregnancy Always carries some threat to the mother's health.

As I said Should it happen anyway.....

[Sandy]

I've been peeking in on this thread and it is certainly a hot button for everyone.  Myself included!

I am Pro-choice, in every instance, if that makes any difference.

Anyway, the real reason I popped my head back in was to ask what if we flip this argument on it's head?

What if all women were completely unable to get pregnant except when taking a drug which makes them fertile.

This is one of those story ideas that rattle around in my head while I'm on the train.

The drug was very easy to make, but required a prescription for dispensing.

Now the woman *must* choose to get pregnant.

But there would be people who would say that there are already too many people on the planet already so they would want to prevent women from access to this drug.  They say that they are pro-life because they want to *prevent* pregnancies.

Ok, I'm a woman.  Nothing in the world would make me happier than growing a life within me.  But it is my *choice* to get pregnant.  And if I were denied access to this life creating drug, I would be advocating for the ability to have free access.

What is the feeling of the thread readers now?

Would you be pro-life and want to stop pregnancies?

Or

Would you be pro-choice and want to allow free access to getting pregnant?

(Jenny, if you want to play with this as a story idea, feel free to PM me later).

-Sandy(just stirring the pot...)

[PanoramaIsland]

I agree with most of what you said, however, I think that the death penalty should be utilized more in capital murder cases. I see no point in keeping someone in prison for decades when they are clearly guilty of murder. It's a massive waste of space and money.

It's still the right thing to do, because the justice system is fallible. If we find out that someone we executed under seemingly the clearest of evidence was in fact innocent, we have then murdered that person. This sort of thing happens quite a bit more than anyone would like to admit.

I share your concern about the cost and general undesirability of a large prison system. The best thing to do to reduce prison population, though, isn't to execute prisoners, but rather to (a) institute reforms aimed to reduce recidivism and assist with prisoners' re-integration into society and (b) stop filling the prisons with people brought in on relatively minor drug charges. I'm sorry, but smuggling marijuana - a drug that should be legal anyway - is no reason to make someone a forced ward of the state for years on end.

I say these things especially because here in California we have a ballooning, out-of-control prison system, and it's filled with people whose "crime" was something to do with Mary-Jane or other relatively minor drugs. We're paying a fairly enormous amount of money to keep people in prison who shouldn't be there in the first place.  Sigh.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Since this is an abortion thread, I'll leave this with the comment (not directed at you, obviously) that being anti-choice is being anti-science. There's no real way of getting around that; I don't think that science should rule the world or anything, but reproductive health is a branch of medicine, which is under the auspices of science, not religion. These people who go around screaming about how aborting a fetus is "baby murder" rarely seem to have any problem with killing and eating full-grown animals which are measurably quite a bit more intelligent and substantially more able to feel pain than a fetus. I'd really love to see these "pro-life" folks protesting against cruel and inhumane treatment of animals in factory farms.

Abortion is no picnic, but it's often not the worst of all possible outcomes. Forcing a baby on a woman who simply made a mistake and is not prepared to mother that baby is cruel to both the baby and the parents. Babies should be had on purpose, as part of a planned decision between the parents to start a family. That anti-choice positions so frequently go hand-in-hand with anti-comprehensive sex education and generally prudish, anti-sex and abstinence-oriented views is telling. This creates a system under which one is incredibly ashamed of one's body and tortures oneself by abstaining from so much as masturbating, doesn't know a damned thing about sex or sexuality, and when one finally does break down, one ends up having spontaneous, secret, unprotected sex that leads to pregnancy at a very young age - pregnancy which one is trapped in, since it is just so terrible to get an abortion. One is then jailed to a single sexual partner for the rest of one's life, and told that one is to have sex with said partner only if one desires more babies. To be sure, this is a severe form of the ethos, but it's believed by far too many people, it's promoted by major religious institutions, and it's the standard from which the gentler forms of sexual and reproductive prudishness and ignorance deviate. It's also completely intolerable and cruel.

[Laura91]

It's still the right thing to do, because the justice system is fallible. If we find out that someone we executed under seemingly the clearest of evidence was in fact innocent, we have then murdered that person. This sort of thing happens quite a bit more than anyone would like to admit.

Yes you are right and it does happen far more than people would think

I share your concern about the cost and general undesirability of a large prison system. The best thing to do to reduce prison population, though, isn't to execute prisoners, but rather to (a) institute reforms aimed to reduce recidivism and assist with prisoners' re-integration into society and (b) stop filling the prisons with people brought in on relatively minor drug charges. I'm sorry, but smuggling marijuana - a drug that should be legal anyway - is no reason to make someone a forced ward of the state for years on end.

Yes, reform is a good idea (not for all, though because I believe that some people simply can't be reformed). I also agree with ceasing to filling the prisons up for minor drug offenses. Putting someone in prison for growing pot or what have you is pretty stupid when you consider that it's a relatively harmless drug in comparison to say..meth. Plus, legalizing certain drugs would provide a massive tax boost from the legal sale of it and MIGHT put a dent in the use of much harder and more harmful drugs.

I say these things especially because here in California we have a ballooning, out-of-control prison system, and it's filled with people whose "crime" was something to do with Mary-Jane or other relatively minor drugs. We're paying a fairly enormous amount of money to keep people in prison who shouldn't be there in the first place. 

[annyms]

I think abortion is wrong, unless its for rape or if the pregnancy complicates the life of both (meaning the mother and child's life could be in danger).

[Elijah3291]

You said pro life, but what you're describing is pro-choice.

oops typo.. lol