Point one: the "soul" does not exist....... God does not exist
............ to not allow women to have control of their bodies is uncivilized...... It's freedom, and that's American......
The problem I have always had with the abortion issue is that I never regarded it as a "woman's individual rights" issue,nor as a "freedom" issue.....since it really got its' start from a Leftist agenda of population control(which is what it is really all about)....and I don't trust any dogma that eminates from the "Left"....much of it is morally and intellectually bankrupt...
It has taken an enormous amount of bizarre and somewhat irrational justification for us to look at a picture of a 1st trimester child,deny it's human,and contort the constitution in such a manner that it provides a woman an inalienable right to terminate a human life on that ground(especially since the Constitution is utterly silent on the issue;it is mentioned nowhere).
I become even more incredulous when we consider that the "concept" now extends to infanticide,outside the womb,of children who survive a late term abortion attempt......once again, if we leave it up to humans,we have started down the slippery slope of extending these "constitutionally protected rights",of a woman to do with her body what she sees fit, even if it isn't her body she's doing it to any longer...it is pretty clearly,now,...someone else's body;and that body,now ,has precisely the same rights as the mother......so,who's "rights" are superior? Especially considering,in the first place,that the mother in most instances made the choice to conceive in the first place.....in reality it boils down to a question of inconvenience....a lousy excuse for the termination of a human life......
And if you do not recognize the existence of a God...or a deity...or some higher being,...or at least of Natural Law(whatever you choose to call it),then you have no underpinning, or foundation, for the existence of "natural rights" or this "freedom" that Jeff mentions;...because all your "rights" are granted by a higher human authority.....and we all know what happens when we achnowledge the very existence of our rights as emanating from humans(government).....they are subject to "change" at the whim of these same humans(governments) who happen to be in power at the time.....whoever they may be.This is precisely what the likes of Obama,Clinton,Pelosi, Marx, Lenin, et all would love for you to believe.
...so to the extent that we beleive in "true freedom",we must acknowledge,intellectually...that it emanates from a higher source and existence of some higher authority as the source of that freedom....left to human interpretation,your rights are doomed.....the existence of a higher authority from which our rights emanate means they cannot be taken away,and are "inalienable",and is the underpinning of the Constitution,and the reason that most Leftist dogma attacks religion as a means of takeover.... but we all know this...
Hey there Bob! Venturing onto the Campfire forum eh? Beware...grin....
I'll contest that "rights" come from a higher authority. Instead, I see them as being generally blatantly obvious. Any creature on the planet has every "right" we have; we have just codified them in ways beneficial to ourselves. But every creature has the basic right of self-determination, existance, expression, pursuit of happiness, being armed, etc. This is not something that God gave humans. It's just what... is.
So, by that logic, a deer has a right to not be murdered... at least as much as it can be said that a man has that right... but many of us, myself included, have decided that we are willing to violate that right.
As to abortion, it's ugly, and there's no denying it. I can see 100% how it can be such a deeply disturbing thing for people. If a person truly believes that every conception is an act of God, and that a human soul is bestowed upon that fertilized egg by that God at that moment, then it's flat murder and of course I can see how that person would be outraged.
But that's not a logically defensible position. It requires that we first grant the existance of a God and of a soul. I welcome a rigorous proof of these entities; that'd be cool. Failing that, I'll just say again that I do have a problem with accepting those positions as foundational to the debate, in the same way that I'd be leery of granting "God (or Allah, or the Great Pumpkin) thinks that XXXX is true" in any OTHER debate.
Lacking that, what we have before us is a question of simple biological determination. Two people have sex. Fluids mingle. Oops. It is decided that to bring a baby into the world is bad for whatever reasons. Those people choose to undo what they didn't mean to do in the first place. No harm, no foul.
What would be infinitly WORSE is for the above to happen, but for that woman to be compelled by the State to carry that baby to term, regardless of any other mitigating factor. NOW we are in the realm of something evil. Now we have a State in a position it should not be in.
The list of countries that don't allow abortion I posted is illustrative in that we share virtually NOTHING with any of them. Virtually none of them are countries that the average American, especially a conservative one, would see any kinship with other than this issue. Therefore, it's reasonable to conclude that for the State to regulate reproduction in this way is fundamentally un-American.
Remember that the anti's like to paint a picture of clueless 19-year0olds out having sex and getting pregnant and then using abortion like birth control. First... don't we WANT that? Why would we want those clueless 19 year olds to procreate? Second, there's a whole realm of people who confront this daily who are NOT like that. I posted before about a friend who was forced to deal with this in recent years. His wife was 45 years old and got pregnant accidentally. The complication rates, for both baby and mother, are astronomical at that age (just look what happened to Palin). On top of that, they had all the kids they wanted and their kids were teenages. They were done reproducing. She had an abortion. I cannot see the State telling that person they can't do that.
Talk about a nanny state...
