The anti-choice absolutists believe that a fetus is a human being with an absolute right to life that trumps a person's right to control the interior of his or her body.

If abortion were prohibited, as advised by the Republican Party, then once again the Neanderthals among us, those big ugly stupid men, would have a chance to avoid being extinguished from the gene pool. Rape would become a viable reproductive strategy for those who have no chance of attracting a wife in honest competition. So we all want to preserve endangered subspecies, don't we? If so, then should we pass laws to force women to bear the children of rapists?

I believe that a person's right to live does not imply a right to force his genetic content on the unwilling, and that the right of women to reject unwanted seminal contributions implies the right to privacy of reproductive medicine. Advice to the state: keep your hands off peoples bodies.

Hey Rick, your arguement stears towards blaming the foetus, so real in a little and add some emotional content. This is a complex area and anyone coming down on one side or the other so clearly shows a lack of imagination and/or humanity. It is an impossible problem to solve whilst there are differing opinions on when a foetus (even embryo) becomes a person with rights. And it is likely that this situation will not chnage. So why not let these foetuses be born so they can be adopted by the thousands of loving parents-in-waiting who would value their existence and show that some humans are different to other animalia?

Control of another persons body in this context is a temporary situation (and a very natural one) whereas being a dead foetus is a permanent one. Good thing that Newton or Darwin or Einstein were not conceived in this way with your rules.

Hey Hey

I might not have said so explicitly, but I would blame the rapist. Are you saying that if your wife were raped and impregnated against her will then you would want to keep the embryo and help to propagate the rapist's genes? Adoption is a wonderful alternative and women are and should be free to choose it.

My wife is sterilised and so is the cat. I'm not vasectomised but I have no feeling when I ejeculate due to a surgeon's error. But I digress....

I might not like the thought of the rapist's impregnation of my wife but why should the embryo suffer? And why would the rapist's genes not be of infinite value to the human race? The rapist's genes will be only half of the geneotype of the offspring and who knows what will become of them through phenotype.

We either value human life or we don't. The issue of when the foetus become a human life is an issue to some and is a separate issue.

You might argue that a rapist has an inate (genetic) excuse for what he does. There are all sorts of instances where inate excuses are accepted.

I hate rapists. But I do value human life. And I have the opinion that it starts at fertilisation. I am not antiabortionist. I accept that in dire clinical circumstances the is a separate arguement that a foetus might be sacrified to save a mother. But that could mean that we are ageist. OK society (UK) does tend to deal out shorter sentences for killers of children so we obviously value them less. So the younger the less value. We also tend to value old people less (have personal experiences with aged family members). Who the hell do we value?!

More later.

Best wishes

Hey Hey

Now you're smoking the right end!

there is no right end

Reply to come but must sleep first. Hard day and now 1/2 past midnight. Didn't want you to think I was rudely ignoring you but THIS topic is too important to answer flippantly and needs sober thought.

Be in touch soon Rick.

Hey Hey

During the interlude, you might check out this local (Southern California) newspaper article that quotes me on freedom:

Daily Breeze newspaper article by Nancy Ward

As my dear friend Dr. Hey Hey continues to marshall his resources to the battlefield, let me continue here by anticipating his salient. As the good doctor appears to be defending the absolutist view, let us review the bases of that philosophy.

I'm putting this, at some risk, in personal terms by saying that it comes down to the issue of just who owns my (or anyone's) body. In medieval times the feudal lord had ownership rights on the bodies of his subjects. The cause of freedom is traced back to England in the 13th century when the barons persuaded King John to sign the Magna Carta. That document sets definite limits on the power of the state regarding the personal liberty of free men. The liberterian cause continued to advance with English philospher John Mill, and with the Americans Paine, Adams, Jefferson, et al.

The legitimate purposes of government in the USA are described in the Constitution of the USA. The Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution, explicitly reserves rights, not specifically given to the state, to the people. Therefore, to argue that the state should have a right of ownership of the interior of any free man's body would require that some legitimate purpose of government should be served by that ownership. A detailed review of those defined purposes of legitimate government in no way support any interpretation that the state has just cause to claim ownership of the interior of any free man.

Now I know this is all moot in the United Kingdom, due to details of constitutional law, but I put in those references to England's glorious contributions to liberty to show that the correct philosophy that applies in the USA is universal.

In the absolutist view, a fetus is a human being from the moment of egg-sperm merger and it is always wrong to destroy it regardless of circumstances. The real question here is does the state have a right (demonstrated need) to punish those who commit this "wrong"?

Absolutists answer "yes, by punishing the destroyers of fetuses we are protecting the innocent (human beings) by deterring future abortions." And certainly the state has an interest in protecting innocent people from harm.

Now consider the real context of the absolutist view: we have a (unborn) human being within a human being. If a clinical pathological condition should arise in which the containing human is at risk of serious injury or death due to the continued pregnancy, then a decision needs to be made. Depending on the exact (and often difficult to understand) medical situation, there are several possible outcomes: both the fetus and mother might live, both the fetus and mother might die, the fetus alone might live, or the mother alone might live. If the state presumes to have ownership rights on the interior of the woman, then the state has duty to make the decision as to the probable outcome of the pathological medical condition. This puts the state in the position of making medical decisions as a third party to the physician-patient relationship. For the state to come in and say in one case "the fetus must live and the mother must die" or in another case to say "the mother must live and the fetus must die" is an absurd misappropriation of governmental competence. QED.

Rick/Hey Hey...or perhaps someone else around here...
A question about abortion in USA and in the UK:

I'm not really sure if this is relevant to the board...However, does anybody know if legal guardians or parents have the right to make their child(MINOR) get an abortion if she is pregnant? Is that legal? How does it work in your countries?

Strange question,I know....

It's very interesting that Silke has anticipated the next step in my argument, should all of the above fail to persuade. We take it up (down?) a notch in the reduction to absurdity by observing that if the state has the power to control the interior of a woman by preventing her from aborting her pregnancy, then the state also has the power to force her to abort a pregnancy, as is the actual legal circumstance in the so-called people's republic of China.

I'm not an expert on the details of law in California, but I think that if a minor child objected to her parents' intention to have her fetus aborted, and appealed to a court for protection, that the court would provide that protection. Perhaps a lawyer or legal scholar might weigh in here.

Tell that to the elected neardanthals of South Dakota, where they just passed a bill making practically all abortions ilegal in their state: http://www.radioiowa.com/gestalt/go.cfm?ob...lator=local.cfm. Funny how the more culturally advance we think that we are in this nation, the more we begin to resemble one of those middle eastern countries where religion preceeds reason when it comes to the law. Shame, shame!

hmm in my humble opinion lol, when a egg and a sperm meet it is life.. So is it wrong to have abortions? well then it would also be wrong to go to Iraq and light up hell over their but they arnt stopping that now are they? Think about it this way though, if you were that embryo what would you want? I dont think it is right to try and control what women do with their bodies since their is far to much of that already. But I also dont think it is fair to give something life and then snuff it out, but I suppose that happens alot even without abortions. The way I see it is even if having an abortion is killing their is already sooo much killing I dont see what the major diffrence is. Also think about China, 1 billion people they barely have room to sit! haha also just take a look at Japan, places like Tokyo that are wayy to overcrowded, now if people didnt have abortions that would add to the troubles. With everyone person added to this earth that much more harm is done to the environment and further increases the exhaustion of reqources. I mean what are we to do down the road? unless nasa moves their asses and gets people in space the world is slowely becoming crowded.. Think of it like this is it better to let a dog go on in pain for the rest of its life or put it down? The same can be applied to abortions, since the mothers already dont want the babies one of three things will happen, (a.) The mother decides to love them (b.) The baby is put up for adoption (c.) the baby has a unloving mother. So you are already cutting down that babies chances of life, also consider the psychological impacts. People who are forbidden against doing something makes them want to have it that much more, alls a women needs to do is figure out a meathod of having an abortion without the use of a doctor and vowala! you psychologically increase the desire to have one and reduce the costs of having one..

NO. WE'RE THE GOVERNMENT, WE SAY YOU CANT DO WHAT YOU WANT WITH YOUR BODY, WE OWN YOUR BODY. IF YOU DONT LIKE IT, YOU SHOULNT HAVE BEEN BORN HERE, OR BORN AT ALL!

Abortion should be used only as a last resort in the case of rape or probable harm to the mother, never as a means of birth control.

I suppose you are being facetious, but, who knows, maybe not. In the USA, the government rules with the consent of the governed. "... so that government of the people, for the people, and by the people shall not perish from this earth." --Abraham Lincoln's address at Gettysburg, 1864.

Yes i am because the whole issue of abortion is such an absurd infringement on civil liberty that i cant even see it being an issue. it should be a non-issue. its so insane that i tend to think of this first before ethics, even though i also think abortion is actually ethical!

I agree abortion should not be used as a form of birth control Rick I am just making the point that as people live longer, get bigger and have more babies, eventually something has got to change

If it involved my wife, I would kill both the rapist and the fetus. It would be the only way to make things right.