bstempleton (02/11/83)
I figure the above title will get those still reading this debate to print this one. Recently some anti-abortionists have come forward with what they claim are rational arguments against abortion. I would like to point out that I feel this is a religious issue and nothing but. (By religious here, I refer not to organized religion such as christianity, but rather to religion as it refers to things being sacred and things being taken on faith. My "religion", for example, is that I take the consistency of the universe on faith although I have no facts to back this up.) We have agreed (although not all societies do this by a long shot) that the murder of human beings is a no-no. So to face abortion, we have to decide what's a human being. I think everybody, both pro-death and anti-choice (I love those terms!) has to agree that this is debatable, simply because it comes under such heated debate from large groups in society. One can not prove or disprove that a fetus is human because we just don't have a hard and fast definition of human anywhere. It is intangible. As I see it, the question to be decided is not whether abortion is right or wrong but whether one can come up with a hard and fast definition of the premises that 98% or more of the population can agree upon. If you can't do this (and we can't) the only direction open is to do nothing, ie. make no laws for or against abortion. This means of course, that abortion should be legal, or rather, not illegal. In my book, you just don't put the intangibles into law. I have no objection to people who are against abortion, they have every right to not have abortions and even to crusade and try to convince others not to have them. If somebody tries to force their religious opinions by law, however, it is then that they should be shot, drawn and quartered, although not in that order. [ 8-) ] To go further, even though I favour abortion as a very good thing in most cases (My personal opinion, which as nothing to do with the above argument is that there is little value to a fetus) I have to admit it should not be funded by public medicare when so many people are against it. This of course means that we should have private health insurance to pay for that. To get more into personal opinions, may people against abortion argue that life begins at conception. This is something I have not been able to figure out. What difference is there, potential-wise between a zygote and a seperate sperm/egg pair. With modern test-tube baby methods, we can take a typical bunch a sperm and an egg from fertile people and give a very good chance that they will come together to be planted in a womb. There is thus just as much potential in a ml of sperm and a human egg as there is in a fetus. There is no "line" to draw where life begins. Life began with the first human to evolve.