Legal or Illegal: Abortion?

[Vampyr]

Originally Posted by Professor S

The real question that needs to be decided is "When does life begin?" Once that question is answered, the rest of the questions become irrelevant.

If human life begins at conception, it doesn't matter if the mother was raped, a life is a life despite its origins. Also you can't get an abortion even the day after becoming pregnant.

If human life begins at birth, then you can end the pregnancy at any point before the child exits the womb, making partial birth abortion morally and legally acceptable.

The problem is the real answer lies somewhere in between those examples, and that is where we may never find an answer.

Personally, I find it depressing that as I society when we can't define when a human life begin, we default to "kill it". In my mind, that ideology has bled out into other issues, such as the Terry Schiavo case. We couldn't determine whether or not she was truly living, and even her family disputed the case, but not knowing we defaulted to "kill her".

That is a depressing state of affairs.

Technically, if we aren't sure they're living, we aren't defaulting to "kill it." We're defaulting to...remove it. It's not that we're bloodthirsty (even though we are) it's mostly because we don't want to accidentally cause more pain that something is already experiencing, and we don't want to make something live that might be better off dead, because in death there is absolution. We -know- when something is dead, there is no gray line, and we know they aren't feeling pain.

In terms of abortion, you're absolutely right about it depending on when human life begins, but due to all the factors that I've already mentioned, like rape, I cannot define human life as beginning upon conception. This would mean giving power to those who do not deserve it, it would mean putting an enormous burden onto women, something us men already have a bad track record with, and it would mean that every women who wishes she could have an abortion because she has been given an unwanted baby is a murderer at heart, and I just can't believe that. I can't label every one who has had an abortion as a murderer, because when you compare them to a real murderer...there is nothing similar.