For example:
If a child is born premature, say at six months, and survives, they immediately acquire legal rights, and killing them intentionally is murder.
If that same child was NOT born premature, killing them at any point while they are living in their mother's womb, even after six months, is simply a Tuesday at the clinic.
The only difference between the child that was born and the child that was killed is where they were living at the time of the dead child's murder.
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To be clear, I am not religious. This is not a faith-based issue for me. This is entirely a secular, science-based position.
I am of the opinion that abortion should be allowed before the fifth month when a fetus starts to develop enough to be viable. If the child can conceivably live outside the womb, killing them is murder, IMHO. I could see pushing that back a couple weeks to be safe, but I'm pretty sure that at much earlier than the beginning of the fifth month, the advanced parts of the brain are not functional yet, and, IMHO, if the thinking part of the brain isn't working, there's no personhood there. Earthworms have heartbeats. Planarians react to stimuli. Lots of animals have simple brains. None of that seems a good case to me for restricting abortion, but once that child has developed to a point where it can learn to be human and live outside the body of the mother? That's a different story.
Any unwanted child is a tragedy. Abortion is adding another tragedy upon a tragedy. INMHO when a child is conceived it is a full person. Any abortion is murder except where the actually life of the mother is in the balance. Life or death. Not inconvenience. The next tragedy is how the abortion affects the next circle in society. Friends and relatives of the woman who had the abortion now know that she is a murderer. Some friends and/or relatives have to become prochoice or live with the fact that a murder happened. Hard on every one.
I respect your opinion. I don't share it fully, but you have the right to believe as you wish.
I was 21 when Roe was allowed by the SCOTUS. For many years, that was understood to be no later than 3 months gestation. At the time, PP wasn't a massive DNC political conglomerate that laundered government money to the DNC.
Before Roe, in Florida, you could go to Miami and get an early term abortion. I only know this because the day after my wedding in 1972, while I was gone on my honeymoon, my mother drove my teenage sister, who had only had one boyfriend who was also at the wedding, to Miami to get an abortion for her. (I didn't know this for many years after, it was that shameful.) Anyway, right after that, my sister enlisted in the Air Force. She got her Master's degree in accounting via remote college. She obtained the rank of Chief Master Sgt before she passed away of leukemia while still enlisted. She married a Chief Master Sgt (quite a bit older) and they had one child. She went all over the world with the Air Force. She wouldn't have done any of that as a single mother with a job in an accounting department of a large office supply store back in 1972. This was when divorced mothers were stigmatized, too.
I don't know what the answer is... but abortions after 3 months certainly don't seem right to me. But this is a different time, and the social stigma of single motherhood has certainly changed. Now, single celebrities parade their children through the media, and if you say anything, you are mean.
People need to be more responsible.. a lot is at stake.
Where do you stand on the issue of abstaining from fucking, so that an innocent being doesn't have to be terminated for inconveniencing its "parents"?
Or adoption? So many people are so hungry for a child that they'll go across the planet to obtain one from the most disreputable of places.
Abstaining is great, but not everyone is going to do it. Using abortion as a way to enjoy sex without protection - without later consequences of having a child - is pretty damn disgusting. Put a rubber on it, and take a day after pill if something happens and the rubber fails.
Adoption is awesome. That's what should be happening for all these unwanted children over 5 months gestation who are currently being aborted.
Off topic but I wish I knew the facts about adoption. If a drug free baby is born and is unwanted, how hard or easy is it to find parents to adopt it? At one point (long ago), I was told that it was very hard ... there were more babies than parents. But is that still the case and would it be the case if abortion became almost unheard of?
I really hate that this is true, but white babies don't have an issue being adopted. Newborns of all colors are easier to adopt out than older kids.
There are fewer stable families in some ethnic groups. Adoption agents want their wards to go to stable families. Many (and probably most) people who want to adopt want to adopt children who can fit into their family without clearly being out of place.
It's a painful reality we live in.