Is abortion murder?

[Wes]

Abortion is murder. I understad why some support abortion, but I find it unacceptable. When you have sex, you understand that you could be responsible for a child that results. Precautions can be take--condoms, the pill, spermicide, etc. Still, they are not 100% effective, and as such, anyone engaging in sex should understand the potential that they could have a child. At some point, people must take responsibility for their actions.

And before I am slammed with "But what if she was raped?!", I would like to point out that there are very, very few abortions where the reason is that the child is a result of rape. And rape is no reason to have an abortion and kill the child. It isn't his fault that his biological father is a rapist.

[azhariq_8]

I don't believe abortion is murder and the law agrees with me. If I'm wrong, if the law is wrong, then about a quarter of Australian women are murderers and millions of men and women are knowing accomplices. This is the reality of the debate that Abbot, Boswell and others want us to have. Abortion is murder, or it is not.

[boontito]

I respect most everyone's opinion regarding abortion, the one problem I have is with people that think abortion should be against the law except in cases of rape.

If abortion is wrong because it is murder as some believe, then why is it okay to commit murder against an innocent baby when they are conceived as a result of rape? It isn't the baby's fault that a rape occurred, but yet they are the ones that have to pay for it with their life.

Abortion should be either legal, or illegal, but these special cases should be done away with.

[IdioEspalon]

You could think of it in different ways.

On one hand, the baby isn't technically a person yet. It hasn't developed properly into a human and you could probably argue that it's not murder because of that. Plus, you've got to take into hand that some of these pregnancies were not planned and the potential parents may not have the financial security nor conditions in which to raise a baby.

On the other hand though, I understand that the foetus could potentially be a human being and that a potential life is being taken away despite the fact that it's not been born yet.

The truth is though, there will never be a conclusion about whether it's murder or not, and this debate will last for a long time before a solid definition of abortion is made.

[JonUK]

(09-07-2008 06:14 AM)IdioEspalon Wrote:  On one hand, the baby isn't technically a person yet.

(09-06-2008 07:26 PM)boontito Wrote:  ...It isn't the baby's fault ...

(08-27-2008 09:39 AM)Wes Wrote:  and kill the child.

(06-18-2008 09:28 AM)PoliticsGuru Wrote:  But to kill an innocent child?

(06-06-2008 11:02 AM)PoliticsGuru Wrote:  ...an innocent child ... the baby has developed organs or not, its still a baby.

(06-01-2008 07:20 AM)tsmaster Wrote:  ...the babies organs have developed...

(05-28-2008 09:22 AM)PoliticsGuru Wrote:  murder a innocent child ... kill a baby ....

PLEASE PEOPLE! The term is 'fetus/foetus' or 'embryo' - embryo, not baby, not child, not 'future adult' not 'post-sperm' not 'potential McDonalds employee', not 'organ bag' and not even 'stem cell bank' - EMBRYO!

No one is a 'child' or a 'baby' until they have vacated the womb area. They are a parasitic bag of cells until they are able to breathe on their own. Full stop.

As Bill Hicks once said "You're not human until you're in my phone book"

I am fed up with zealous nutbags using the terms like murder or killing to describe abortion - would you describe your doctor as a murderer for lancing your boil, or scraping a mole? It is a medical procedure, no different from having your appendix removed or a tumour excised.

Objections to abortions are almost entirely based on religious belief and there is no good reason for basing a civilised society on religion, the US (despite all appearances) was founded on the separation of church and state for this very reason - religion is not the way to run a country.

If you are going to have this endless, ridiculous argument/discussion once more, at least remove such emotionally charged words such as 'murder' and 'innocent' and discuss it like rational human beings in control of your own lives.

Oh and as for the guff about 'the innocent child' - Catholicism (being one of the major religions with objections vis a vis abortions) believes in the concept of original sin - so no child is innocent.

[pallas_m]

America needs to do a simple body count. Ill conceived wars like Iraq and Vietnam kill fetus, infants, and children. The ravages of war kill fetus', infants, and children for decades afterward due to malnutrition and social upheaval.

So who kills more the abortionist or the war-monger?

Who is more Christian, the abortionist or the war-monger?

Sarah Palin believes that if a girl is raped she is forced to carry the child for 9 months. That's not small government. That's big Christian brother government dictating a female's biological state for 9 months.

[Taopoet]

(09-10-2008 08:19 AM)JonUK Wrote:  PLEASE PEOPLE! The term is 'fetus/foetus' or 'embryo' - embryo, not baby, not child, not 'future adult' not 'post-sperm' not 'potential McDonalds employee', not 'organ bag' and not even 'stem cell bank' - EMBRYO!

No one is a 'child' or a 'baby' until they have vacated the womb area. They are a parasitic bag of cells until they are able to breathe on their own. Full stop.

O JonUK, we can always count on you to cut to the chase! So awesome!

I don't believe that abortion of an embryo is any more a case of "murder" than the oft-ill-fated practice of "pulling out" to keep the sperm from meeting up with the egg and creating an embryo in the first place. To say that the killing of an embryo (potential human) is murder is the same as saying that birth control of any kind, which effectively "kills" a potential human before it takes its next step, is murder.

Whenever the abortion debate gets all heated up, I'm (unfortunately) reminded of the famous Monty Python song, "Every Sperm Is Sacred": "... if a sperm is wasted, God gets quite irate...."

I believe in the sanctity of all human life. As a Unitarian, I believe in the first principle of my own faith: We affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of all people.

That said, I cannot agree that abortion is murder, because an embryo is, as JonUK so eloquently points out, not a person... yet. And neither are the thousands of eggs I still have that are getting ready to die forever as I approach menopause.

That said, I've been pregnant twice, both times were surprises, and I made the choice to stay pregnant. I now have two wonderful teenagers who live a strange and interesting life of travel between their parents' homes on both coasts.

Regardless of how it all turned out, I made the choice to stay pregnant, and was either pregnant or nursing a baby for almost four years. That whole time, I had a bumper sticker on my car that said, "I'm pro-choice and I vote!" You should've seen some of the looks I got in the grocery store parking lot when I dragged my pregnant belly out of the car and then reached back in to pull my little baby out and drape her over my pregnant belly. It was as if people who saw my bumper sticker and fully baby-laden belly couldn't reconcile the political statement with the choice I'd made.

Abortion is not murder. War is murder. Execution is murder. Leaving a homeless veteran in the street to die is murder. Killing Iraqi civilians is murder.

The difference? An embryo is not a sentient human being. It is a potential. All the sentient human beings (of all ages and statuses) who are killed through war, neglect, and genocide are murdered.