Abortion Discussion

Delirium

@Jack any chance you would answer my question regarding performing an abortion before the foetus develops brain waves? Would you allow it, and if not, why?

Nodin

Jack Kyle wrote: »

The issue is women wanting certain more trivial things at the expense of the life of the unborn child.

I wouldn't call health be it physical or mental a "trivial" thing.

Jack Kyle wrote: »

How important is me getting my leg over and "free love" versus the life of an unborn baby??

....you've sex on the brain, yet can't type out the word.....

Jack Kyle wrote: »

How can you think that it's okay to exterminate unborn children? All for what? So women (and men) can rut like chimpanzees purely for self gratification?

...as above.

Jack Kyle

koth wrote: »

@Jack any chance you would answer my question regarding performing an abortion before the foetus develops brain waves? Would you allow it, and if not, why?

No, because the child is "alive".

I am not a doctor, but if you tried to pin me down on when it becomes "abortion"
I'd say that it's sometime around the implantation stage.

It's certainly well before 40 days. Sure a heartbeat's at 20 days.

Bannasidhe

Jack Kyle wrote: »

The issue is women wanting certain more trivial things at the expense of the life of the unborn child.

This isn't just about opinions. There is such a thing as objective morality.

How important is me getting my leg over and "free love" versus the life of an unborn baby?

Have you ever seen a scan where a baby is constantly waving its left hand in the air and then seen that child playing sports left handed after it is born? I have.
Tell me that in those circumstances we're not dealing with a baby or a child when it's in the womb?

How can you think that it's okay to exterminate unborn children? All for what? So women (and men) can rut like chimpanzees purely for self gratification?

WOW Such issues you have with sex - fine if that is the way you are but that does not give you the right to impose that on other people and use your hang-ups to justify denying women self-determination.

Control over one's own body is not a 'trivial' thing - you have it. Why shouldn't women?

Sarky

Jesus. Implantation? I've had surgery to remove thyroid cysts that were more alive than that.

For the love of christ Jack, educate yourself more on basic human biology.

Jack Kyle

Nodin wrote: »

I wouldn't call health be it physical or mental a "trivial" thing.



....you've sex on the brain, yet can't type out the word.....




...as above.

A woman that puts her own health above the life of her child is a callous human being and unfit to be a mother.

Unless the pregnancy wil kill her, a woman should not have an abortion.

Anything else is just our selfish throwaway society gone mad.

Nodin

Jack Kyle wrote: »

A woman that puts her own health above the life of her child is a callous human being and unfit to be a mother.
.

...which is easy for you to say, as it can't happen to you.

Jack Kyle wrote: »

Unless the pregnancy wil kill her, a woman should not have an abortion.

.

'Women as incubators'. That's not really a good prospect.

Delirium

Jack Kyle wrote: »

No, because the child is "alive".

I am not a doctor, but if you tried to pin me down on when it becomes "abortion"
I'd say that it's sometime around the implantation stage.

It's certainly well before 40 days. Sure a heartbeat's at 20 days.

Why implantation? what's so special about that time that makes it your cut-off point? There isn't a hearbeat or any sort of nervous system. The stance is basically, "you got pregnant so deal with it". It has nothing to do with "killing babies" as a baby doesn't exist at implantation.

Jack Kyle

Bannasidhe wrote: »

WOW Such issues you have with sex - fine if that is the way you are but that does not give you the right to impose that on other people and use your hang-ups to justify denying women self-determination.

Control over one's own body is not a 'trivial' thing - you have it. Why shouldn't women?

We've come full circle...because the unborn child inside a pregnant woman has rights too, and its right to life supercedes the pregnant woman's right to self determination.

Nodin

Jack Kyle wrote: »

We've come full circle...because the unborn child inside a pregnant woman has rights too, and its right to life supercedes the pregnant woman's right to self determination.

It's not a child.

Sarky

Bannasidhe wrote: »

Allows us to orgasm with nary a hint of anything to do with reproduction. Men can't do that - you must be eaten with jealousy jack.

Hell, I'M pretty jealous, and I reckon I'm fairly liberal and I'm certainly not lacking in the orgasms department for the last month or so (thinly veiled brag, I know). Can't imagine how jealous someone like Jack would be. Seems to be all twisted up inside.

gaynorvader

Jack Kyle wrote: »

Go to a 12 week scan. Then see if you're still okay with an unborn child being killed.

One side criticises guys for involving themselves in the argument but they have to in order to stand up for those unborn children's rights.

This quest for sex without consequences smacks of wanting one's cake and eating it...zero accountability. Women (and men) want to engage in sluttish behaviour and sod the consequences. Throwaway society. Why not just get spayed/sterilised and then live your life without fear of the consequences.

All of this "these are tired arguments"/we've won the argument smug posts from the pro abortion side miss the point completely...if you support widespread and freely available abortion, you are an amoral disgrace and unfit to be in a position to influence anyone, especially children.

It is beyond doubt that abortion is evil and wrong in all but certain very limited circumstances.

Jack Kyle wrote: »

We may as well be debating the merits or otherwise of kiddy fiddling.

Abortion, murder, child molestation and rape are all there on the spectrum of vile and evil behaviour.

This thread is incredible really.

The majority of posters are saying that it's okay to butcher unborn babies. A few lone voices of sanity are rightly saying that this is b..locks.

Have you seen/heard about how some abortions are performed? Babies stabbed in the head with scissors...legs broken and chopped off...brains hoovered out of their skulls and then dragged from their mothers to be burned in furnaces.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intact_dilation_and_extraction

"But sure this is a women's issue."

"It's my body".

Well no...f..k that...standing idly by while an agenda like this is pushed by dark forces is the kind of behaviour that facilitated and enabled Nazism.

Jack Kyle wrote: »

Why should your opinion take precedent over Hitler's?

I think that it's wrong to murder an unborn baby. Some theoretical woman thinks that it's okay to have that unborn baby butchered. I'm pretty confident that my opinion is right.

Jack Kyle wrote: »

And a woman should have NO right to choose because her right to self determination in respect of her own body does not override her unborn baby's right to life.

This is really about selfish women wanting pleasure without consequences.

When I have sex with someone, I accept that there is a chance, however small, that a pregnancy could arise. I accept that there could be consequences. Killing a baby that was conceived by accident wouldn't even be on the agenda.

If you want sex without consequences, get sterilised...

Jack Kyle wrote: »

lazygal, your post is facetious in the extreme.

Did you know that an unborn child's heart starts beating at 20 days?

Or that brainwaves can be detected from an unborn baby at 40 days?

But let's legalise the widespread killing of unborn children just so hedonistic adults can rut like beasts with zero accountability...

Jack Kyle wrote: »

No because the purpose of child benefit is to meet the expenditure that "born" children bring.

There might be an argument for paying something to pregnant women to get themselves sorted before the baby arrives but that's a different argument.

To be honest, I find it astonishing that you can advocate abortion whilst breastfeeding simultaneously. It's akin to posting about how great euthanasia is whilst sitting at your sick morher's bedside.

Jack Kyle wrote: »

I'll tell you what's not an acceptable solution to an unwanted pregnancy.

Killing the poor child because its parents want to live life hedonistically with zero accountability.

Jack Kyle wrote: »

The issue is women wanting certain more trivial things at the expense of the life of the unborn child.

This isn't just about opinions. There is such a thing as objective morality.

How important is me getting my leg over and "free love" versus the life of an unborn baby?

Have you ever seen a scan where a baby is constantly waving its left hand in the air and then seen that child playing sports left handed after it is born? I have.
Tell me that in those circumstances we're not dealing with a baby or a child when it's in the womb?

How can you think that it's okay to exterminate unborn children? All for what? So women (and men) can rut like chimpanzees purely for self gratification?

It's not an "unborn baby".
It's a collection of human cells. An unborn baby would be fully formed, otherwise, it's not a baby.
Please stop using disingenuous terms to try and create an emotional point in what is supposed to be a rational debate, it undermines your whole argument.

Jack Kyle

koth wrote: »

Why implantation? what's so special about that time that makes it your cut-off point? There isn't a hearbeat or any sort of nervous system. The stance is basically, "you got pregnant so deal with it". It has nothing to do with "killing babies" as a baby doesn't exist at implantation.

I would probably look for the point in time where it is overwhelmingly likely that a baby will be born.

A good starting point might very well be 20 days when a foetal heartbeat can be detected. Apparently 96% of babies survive at this stage:

http://miscarriage.about.com/od/riskfactors/a/miscarriage-statistics.htm

Bannasidhe

Jack Kyle wrote: »

We've come full circle...because the unborn child inside a pregnant woman has rights too, and its right to life supercedes the pregnant woman's right to self determination.

It is not a child and no it doesn't.

Bannasidhe

Jack Kyle wrote: »

I would probably look for the point in time where it is overwhelmingly likely that a baby will be born.

A good starting point might very well be 20 days when a foetal heartbeat can be detected. Apparently 96% of babies survive at this stage:

http://miscarriage.about.com/od/riskfactors/a/miscarriage-statistics.htm

You are claiming this is a child

Delirium

Jack Kyle wrote: »

I would probably look for the point in time where it is overwhelmingly likely that a baby will be born.

A good starting point might very well be 20 days when a foetal heartbeat can be detected. Apparently 96% of babies survive at this stage:

http://miscarriage.about.com/od/riskfactors/a/miscarriage-statistics.htm

Nowhere in the link does it state what you're claiming. It says after 12 weeks the loss of pregnancy rate is 3-4%. You're off by about 50 days.

So taking the 96% rate as your baseline, you'd support the majority of abortions that are carried out since most of them are done before 12 weeks.

iwantmydinner

Jack Kyle wrote: »

The issue is women wanting certain more trivial things at the expense of the life of the unborn child.

This isn't just about opinions. There is such a thing as objective morality.

How important is me getting my leg over and "free love" versus the life of an unborn baby?

Have you ever seen a scan where a baby is constantly waving its left hand in the air and then seen that child playing sports left handed after it is born? I have.
Tell me that in those circumstances we're not dealing with a baby or a child when it's in the womb?

How can you think that it's okay to exterminate unborn children? All for what? So women (and men) can rut like chimpanzees purely for self gratification?

Why can't you just count yourself lucky that the pregnancy didn't terrify you, didn't threaten your health, didn't threaten your ability to provide for your existing family, didn't threaten to put your mental health over the edge, didn't prevent you from receiving cancer treatment, didn't put an end to the career you've worked your ass off for, wasn't the result of rape, or a million other things that can mean pregnancy isn't the magical fairytale it appears to have been in your life.

Why can't you get off your moral high horse and put yourself into another person's shoes for one goddamn second and at least try to imagine yourself in one of the million different scenarios wherein pregnancy is actually a nightmare?

And don't tell me to get spayed (which is one of the most repugnant things I've read on this thread) or to abstain because not wanting kids now doesn't mean I won't want them in later life and having sex (not rutting, not getting my leg over, having sex) is a vital element of normal, adult relationships EVEN in cases where pregnancy would be disastrous.

Jack Kyle

koth wrote: »

Nowhere in the link does it state what you're claiming. It says after 12 weeks the loss of pregnancy rate is 3-4%. You're off by about 50 days.

So taking the 96% rate as your baseline, you'd support the majority of abortions that are carried out since most of them are done before 12 weeks.

Wrong.

It says that once there's a heartbeat present, there's only a 4% chance of the baby dying.

It's already been established elsewhere that a heartbeat arises at circa 20 days.

Sarky

<sigh>

Jack Kyle

iwantmydinner wrote: »

Why can't you just count yourself lucky that the pregnancy didn't terrify you, didn't threaten your health, didn't threaten your ability to provide for your existing family, didn't threaten to put your mental health over the edge, didn't prevent you from receiving cancer treatment, didn't put an end to the career you've worked your ass off for, wasn't the result of rape, or a million other things that can mean pregnancy isn't the magical fairytale it appears to have been in your life.

Why can't you get off your moral high horse and put yourself into another person's shoes for one goddamn second and at least try to imagine yourself in one of the million different scenarios wherein pregnancy is actually a nightmare?

And don't tell me to get spayed (which is one of the most repugnant things I've read on this thread) or to abstain because not wanting kids now doesn't mean I won't want them in later life and having sex (not rutting, not getting my leg over, having sex) is a vital element of normal, adult relationships EVEN in cases where pregnancy would be disastrous.

Then get sterilised.

I'm sorry, but if someone wants to have sex and pregnancy would be an absolute disaster for them, then they should get spayed.

It's foolish not to.

iwantmydinner

Jack Kyle wrote: »

A woman that puts her own health above the life of her child is a callous human being and unfit to be a mother.

Unless the pregnancy wil kill her, a woman should not have an abortion.

Anything else is just our selfish throwaway society gone mad.

I was shocked by this for a second; I had actually forgotten for a wee while that you'd happily sedate and chain up your own daughter to force her to carry her rapist's foetus to term.

mbiking123

Sarky wrote: »

Jesus. Implantation? I've had surgery to remove thyroid cysts that were more alive than that.

For the love of christ Jack, educate yourself more on basic human biology.

less of the religious stuff

I got an ear full for it

Oh I'm back ! if anybody missed me

Turtwig

Okkkkkkkkkk

I'm rather glad I chose to watch the footy. Um, where to even begin? Oh yeah, how bout we stop telling other posters to perform medical procedures on themselves?

iwantmydinner

Jack Kyle wrote: »

Then get sterilised.

I'm sorry, but if someone wants to have sex and pregnancy would be an absolute disaster for them, then they should get spayed.

It's foolish not to.

But I've explained why sterilisation isn't an option, it's right there in the last sentence of my post, did you miss that part?

Also, care to address the rest of my post?

mbiking123

Killing Newborn Babies No Different To Abortion, Say Medical Ethicists http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/02/29/medical-ethicists-propose-after-birth-abortion-law_n_1309985.html

'A medical journal has called for the acceptance of ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn baby), causing outrage among pro-life campaigners and raising an array of ethical questions.'

Bannasidhe

iwantmydinner wrote: »

I was shocked by this for a second; I had actually forgotten for a wee while that you'd happily sedate and chain up your own daughter to force her to carry her rapist's foetus to term.

Use of the word spayed just shows that Jack sees women as bitches with animals urges.

I am nearly beginning to pity him. But as he would imprison and drug pregnant women I don't.

Delirium

Jack Kyle wrote: »

Wrong.

It says that once there's a heartbeat present, there's only a 4% chance of the baby dying.

It's already been established elsewhere that a heartbeat arises at circa 20 days.

From your link:

Over 80% of miscarriages occur before 12 weeks, so the chances look good for a healthy baby once you've finished the first trimester. Again, many individual factors are in play, but if 15-20% of pregnancies end in miscarriage and 80% of miscarriages occur in the first trimester, a safe estimate would be that in the general population the risk of pregnancy loss after 12 weeks is 3-4%. After 20 weeks, when a loss would be termed a stillbirth rather than a miscarriage, the risk is around 1 in 160.

Also from the same site:

Odds of a Premature Baby's Survival by Length of Pregnancy

Length of Pregnancy Likelihood of Survival
23 weeks 17%
24 weeks 39%
25 weeks 50%
26 weeks 80%
27 weeks 90%
28-31 weeks 90-95%
32-33 weeks 95%
34+ weeks Almost as likely as a full-term baby
Sources: March of Dimes, Quint Boenker Preemie Survival Foundation

So the foetus needs to get to 25 weeks to have a 50-50 chance of survival.

Sarky

I do love when posters with extremely irrational positions cite sources that actively show the opposite of what they claim they show. It's embarrassingly frequent, actually.

Turtwig

mbiking123 wrote: »

Killing Newborn Babies No Different To Abortion, Say Medical Ethicists http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/02/29/medical-ethicists-propose-after-birth-abortion-law_n_1309985.html

'A medical journal has called for the acceptance of ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn baby), causing outrage among pro-life campaigners and raising an array of ethical questions.'

It's a medical ethics paper examining the argument of a position. Sometimes you can make a valid argument for the most nefarious of things.

me several times now. wrote:

It's a bioethics paper. They argue for something that isn't necessarily their opinion. They're just exploring the ethical frameworks of personhood from a specific angle. If you read more bioethics papers this would be immediately obvious. The media jumped on the paper because it was such an easy bandwagon. But in reality it's like reporting that Schrodinger advocated experimenting with a cat or that the trolley problem was an actual proposed experiment! The point of the paper was to scrutinise logic, nothing more nothing less!

And this too.

“Why not? You should have known!” people keep on repeating everywhere on the web. The answer is very simple: the article was supposed to be read by other fellow bioethicists who were already familiar with this topic and our arguments. Indeed, as Professor Savulescu explains in his editorial, this debate has been going on for 40 years.

We started from the definition of person introduced by Michael Tooley in 1975 and we tried to draw the logical conclusions deriving from this premise. It was meant to be a pure exercise of logic: if X, then Y. We expected that other bioethicists would challenge either the premise or the logical pattern we followed, because this is what happens in academic debates. And we believed we were going to read interesting responses to the argument, as we already read a few on this topic in religious websites.

However, we never meant to suggest that after-birth abortion should become legal. This was not made clear enough in the paper. Laws are not just about rational ethical arguments, because there are many practical, emotional, social aspects that are relevant in policy making (such as respecting the plurality of ethical views, people’s emotional reactions etc). But we are not policy makers, we are philosophers, and we deal with concepts, not with legal policy.

Moreover, we did not suggest that after birth abortion should be permissible for months or years as the media erroneously reported.

If we wanted to suggest something about policy, we would have written, for example, a comment related the Groningen Protocol (in the Netherlands), which is a guideline that permits killing newborns under certain circumstances (e.g. when the newborn is affected by serious diseases). But we do not discuss guidelines in the paper. Rather we acknowledged the fact that such a protocol exists and this is a good reason to discuss the topic (and probably also for publishing papers on this topic).

However, the content of (the abstract of) the paper started to be picked up by newspapers, radio and on the web. What people understood was that we were in favour of killing people. This, of course, is not what we suggested. This is easier to see when our thesis is read in the context of the history of the debate.

We are really sorry that many people, who do not share the background of the intended audience for this article, felt offended, outraged, or even threatened. We apologise to them, but we could not control how the message was promulgated across the internet and then conveyed by the media. In fact, we personally do not agree with much of what the media suggest we think. Because of these misleading messages pumped by certain groups on the internet and picked up for a controversy-hungry media, we started to receive many emails from very angry people (most of whom claimed to be Pro-Life and very religious) who threatened to kill us or which were extremely abusive. Prof Savulescu said these responses were out of place, and he himself was attacked because, after all, “we deserve it.”

We do not think anyone should be abused for writing an academic paper on a controversial topic.

However, we also received many emails from people thanking us for raising this debate which is stimulating in an academic sense. These people understood there was no legal implication in the paper. We did not recommend or suggest anything in the paper about what people should do (or about what policies should allow).

We apologise for offence caused by our paper, and we hope this letter helps people to understand the essential distinction between academic language and the misleading media presentation, and between what could be discussed in an academic paper and what could be legally permissible.
Source.

Bannasidhe

mbiking123 wrote: »

Killing Newborn Babies No Different To Abortion, Say Medical Ethicists http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/02/29/medical-ethicists-propose-after-birth-abortion-law_n_1309985.html

'A medical journal has called for the acceptance of ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn baby), causing outrage among pro-life campaigners and raising an array of ethical questions.'

Who here has advocated 'after-birth' abortions?