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The desire not to carry a child is neither a whim or impulse. It is often an agonising decision. Demeaning a pregnant woman by demanding that she make her private life open to the scrutiny of others, by forcing her to justify her choices to complete strangers, by sitting in judgment on her without any real empathy, is insulting and painful.
By your own words, you say that it is often (ie, not always) a difficult decision. There are those situations though when the woman terminates a pregnancy without going through an agonizing decision process and for impulsive reasons. I'm not demeaning any woman. All I'm doing is pointing out that not every abortion is done after serious soul-searching on a woman's part.
1. You seem to think responsible is thinking about it the same way you do, and deciding the way you want them to decide. Even if deciding that way profoundly changes their life, which it will. But if they don't agree with you, they must be irresponsible?
2. Again, maturity is achieved only when they arrive at the point when their values and choices agree with yours? Otherwise, if they decide differently than you, they are immature and irresponsible. And does this include the men that are having sex but don't want a child? Because the path this line of reasoning is following leads to outlawing sex unless it's expressly for procreation.
3. Your reality, which can be dramatically different from other peoples' realities.
You don't get it. It has nothing to do with me. It has to do with being mature and responsible, not sure how much clearer I can say it. Men are just as guilty, I never said they weren't.
Do you agree with the following statement?
If one isn't responsible and mature enough to understand the consequences and live with the possible result of sex, they aren't mature enough and responsible enough to have sex.
The facts of life are young, immature people will have sex and we won't stop it, I am talking about teenagers here.
Another fact, birth control is not 100% and people will not stop having sex because of this fact. It just won't happen.
Lastly, people will not agree on when an independent "life" starts.
Futile to keep arguing about it, IMO.
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The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it. ~Henry David Thoreau
By your own words, you say that it is often (ie, not always) a difficult decision. There are those situations though when the woman terminates a pregnancy without going through an agonizing decision process and for impulsive reasons. I'm not demeaning any woman. All I'm doing is pointing out that not every abortion is done after serious soul-searching on a woman's part.
Okay, so some reasons are good enough, but others aren't. And you want the woman to abandon her privacy by proving that her reasons are the right ones. Who is she supposed to prove it to? People like you who already characterize her as irresponsible, immature, or immoral? And how do you not see this as demeaning and patronizing?
Okay, so some reasons are good enough, but others aren't. And you want the woman to abandon her privacy by proving that her reasons are the right ones. Who is she supposed to prove it to? People like you who already characterize her as irresponsible, immature, or immoral? And how do you not see this as demeaning and patronizing?
I'm not asking anyone to abandon their privacy in order to go before some sort of starchamber and list their reasons for having an abortion. I'm against abortion because I think it is the taking of human life. Even a prior poster on this thread who supports abortion stated that a fetus is a human life. What I said was that even in today's society, where abortion is legal, not every reason that a woman has used for having an abortion meets your standard of serious soul-searching or agonizing decision-making on the woman's part. If by that you say that I've demeaned or patronized a woman, then you've taken the defintion of those words and twisted them for your own purposes.
Well, then I'm not getting a clear idea of your position. Is abortion ever justified? If the pregnancy is the result of rape, or the prospective mother is impaired, or if it's a choice between the mother's life or the child's? If you answer yes, that sometimes an abortion is justified, then if you outlaw all other abortions except the ones for the reasons you allow, then there has to be a procedure in place to allow women to petition for the allowed abortion. And clearly, if you don't trust women's judgments now to determine if their reasons are good enough, you wouldn't trust those judgments after placing more restrictions on her access to an abortion. So, I'm not trying to take your words and twist them, I'm just trying to take what you have said and see how your views would be implemented in the real world.
You don't get it. It has nothing to do with me. It has to do with being mature and responsible, not sure how much clearer I can say it. Men are just as guilty, I never said they weren't.
Do you agree with the following statement?
If one isn't responsible and mature enough to understand the consequences and live with the possible result of sex, they aren't mature enough and responsible enough to have sex.
Okay, who gets to have sex then? Is sex only for procreation? Do couples who don't want to have children have to abstain? Because even if you are using birth control properly you can still get pregnant.
Well, then I'm not getting a clear idea of your position. Is abortion ever justified? If the pregnancy is the result of rape, or the prospective mother is impaired, or if it's a choice between the mother's life or the child's? If you answer yes, that sometimes an abortion is justified, then if you outlaw all other abortions except the ones for the reasons you allow, then there has to be a procedure in place to allow women to petition for the allowed abortion. And clearly, if you don't trust women's judgments now to determine if their reasons are good enough, you wouldn't trust those judgments after placing more restrictions on her access to an abortion. So, I'm not trying to take your words and twist them, I'm just trying to take what you have said and see how your views would be implemented in the real world.
It's not that I "don't trust women's judgments ...". My comments above simply express the fact that not all women's rationales for having an abortion rise to your stated standard of excruciatingly difficult decision (ie, a lot of soul-searching involved). Some are made without much previous pain-staking deliberation. In other words, some women do search their souls before having an abortion while others do not. As for the latter category, while it may be a good decision in the particular woman's mind, the process that lead her to have an abortion did not involve that much internal deliberation. ... In my mind, having an abortion and taking what I believe to be innocent life is wrong. That belief on my part does not mean that I am unable to lack the empathy to understand why a woman who has been raped would choose to undergo an abortion.
It's not that I "don't trust women's judgments ...". My comments above simply express the fact that not all women's rationales for having an abortion rise to your stated standard of excruciatingly difficult decision (ie, a lot of soul-searching involved). Some are made without much previous pain-staking deliberation. In other words, some women do search their souls before having an abortion while others do not. As for the latter category, while it may be a good decision in the particular woman's mind, the process that lead her to have an abortion did not involve that much internal deliberation. ... In my mind, having an abortion and taking what I believe to be innocent life is wrong. That belief on my part does not mean that I am unable to lack the empathy to understand why a woman who has been raped would choose to undergo an abortion.
I'm not the one defining standards here. And I appreciate your moral stance on this issue. But I'm trying to see how you apply your moral stance to the real world. For instance, you state that you are able to empathize why a raped woman would want to abort that child. Does this mean that if abortion laws were strengthened and the option became much less available, that you would want an exception in the case of rape? You also seem to see a dichotomy between women who have searched their souls, and women who have not. But how much soul-searching is required? Is there a time-frame, or any way, actually, that a woman can convince you that she had indeed agonised over this decision and decided to abort?
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