In your own words :

So why don't you have any respect for animals or plants? Your disrespect for life different from your own is what gives me my disrespect for human lives.

If all it takes is DNA and living cells, then that makes hair follicles 'alive' too.

The real story, from an ultrasound technician :

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10157599109579274&id=507224273

Life is not black and white. The universe is chaotic. Surely it gives you a sense of nobility sitting on your high horse, but that doesn't make you right. You're arguing a subjective point. There's no universally correct answer. Obviously we are all in disagreement about what is right. That's not the right time for government regulation.

The truth is that not all life is special. It's trivial to create it. If you're such a prude that you believe that people shouldn't have sex recreationally then good luck convincing anyone of that. That just makes it sound like you need to get laid. And if you do believe that people should have sex recreationally and that it's expensive these days to raise a child then you should be able to reason that it makes a lot of sense to be able to stop accidental pregnancies before it's too late.

We should not force rape babies to be born. That's a horrible existence to have. If two crack addicts fuck and the female gets pregnant the best thing they can do for that baby is to terminate it. There's a very small chance that it will be enough to overcome the addiction for one of the parents, but basically zero for both parents. It doesn't make sense.

People are not going to use abortion as their birth control mechanism. It's costly, and it's not without risk. It's not birth control. It's a last means to prevent an unwanted pregnancy after the birth control mechanisms have failed. And people have every right to do so.

Sex is a lot of fun. It's healthy, physically and emotionally. It would be different if we could easily afford to support children, but these days it takes 2 full-time parents to pay the bills for a small family of 1 or 2 kids.

The majority of people are going to choose to have the kid anyway. The people that would choose abortion are not necessarily going to provide the best life for these children. Parents need to want to be good parents. There's no law against being a bad parent. It's again subjective what's good and what's bad. There are laws to regulate definite abuses, but there's a large gray area, and you can't force parents to do their best.

It simply doesn't make sense to oppose abortion. Of course the images are difficult. Newsflash: pregnancy is pretty messy too. So are monthly periods for women. That doesn't make them bad. Men are largely oblivious to that because we don't live that. Women live with that on a monthly basis.

And the images that were posted of livestock meat products were finished products. That's not the messy image. The messy image is the actual forcible death and bleeding out and draining the carcass. By the time it gets to the butcher the blood has been drained. There's still a face/head, perhaps, but otherwise it's a very gray image compared to the original act.

Those images of fetuses and babies being exposed doesn't sway me. Nobody would say that those aren't difficult images to see in isolation, but seeing them daily it would be no different than butchering cows daily. People can and do deal with these images daily. It's not a big deal. And the line being drawn makes no sense. You haven't justified why these "lives" are more valuable than other lives. It makes a whole lot more sense to empower BOTH parents, man and woman, over the baby-to-be that isn't yet conscious and has nothing yet to lose.

That baby could become the next Darwin or it could become the next Hitler. There's no way of knowing, and so let live or terminate you cannot say whether it's the right or wrong thing to do. That's life. It's mostly gray. It's very rarely black and white. There's nothing wrong with gray.

Append:

I can attest that condoms are not very reliable. It's really trivial to break them, and it's most likely to happen when the male has the least control in the transaction, and he's the only one that knows the end is near. For anybody using them I encourage adequate lubrication, which sometimes means artificial lubrication. At best it's something like 97.93% effective (which doesn't really sound great on a "good year"). But at worst it's 0%. Still worth using, but it's ridiculous to assert that they're foolproof. They're definitely not.

That pretty much rules out the options that men have to protect themselves.

I really want to know in which way do men feels so superior that they think they can decide what's good for women better than the women themselves.

I really hope that we can ASAP put miscarried/unwanted babies into the belly of pro life men who do not want abortion.

I respect that you're consistent, raynebc, even if I don't agree with your views at all.

> We don't care about the woman's body, we care about the additional life inside the woman's body.

But did you word that slightly wrong?

> Bottom line, don't be selfish and see sex as a mere plaything when its natural purpose has always been procreation.

Just because it's natural doesn't make it right or good. That's a fallacy (appeal to nature fallacy).

I'll clarify that pro-lifers don't care to restrict what a woman does to her own body, but a fetus is biologically a different living body.

I've had arguments with people where they claim pregnancy wasn't the expected outcome of sex. There's a disconnect from what people want and how the universe operates.

I don't know if you're being sarcastic or if you are actually deluded enough to think that's a valid counter-argument. Hair has its owner's DNA, not its own unique DNA. For various reasons it is not classifiable as a distinct life form.

Democrats and Republicans disagree on how to achieve common goals, what a shock. Out of control tax and spend shouldn't always be the answer.

If you've finally decided to stop with the false equivalencies and be honest, I thank you. This is entirely the crux of the argument, whether a mother has any right to kill its offspring for any reason ranging from convenience to preserving her own life. Pro lifers believe the ending of a human life should be well justified, pro choicers much less so even if they mostly value human life after it is born.

Survival of a mother in extreme scarcity could justify a wild animal to abandon or cannibalize its offspring. Survival of a tribal community in extreme scarcity could justify their sex selective infanticide. But then you have places like China, where their one child policy led to men being more socially valuable and baby girls were killed more for social reasons and not for survival. If you believe men and women are equally valuable, as Western civilization generally does, that can't be tolerated. Unwanted pregnancies in Western countries don't cause the mother to starve to death, there are plenty of social safety nets in place. There are plenty of non government entities that will even pay for the mother's medical care so she can carry the baby to term and then give the baby up for adoption. It is far more compassionate and moral to give a baby up for adoption when you know the baby will have all its basic needs provided by at least the government than to abort it.

Don't fall back into the trap of equating philosophical arguments about humanity with literal, objective definitions of humanity. You can argue an adult has more value than a baby or a fetus, but that doesn't mean the latter two have no value.

Even if a child isn't adopted, they have a good shot at a good life in the USA even if they don't live a life of luxury. Certainly better than never being given a chance. I am proud of this stance, it is what is righteous. It's unreasonable to demand that everybody acknowledge that having sex for fun and then killing offspring out of convenience is a just or moral set of choices. Killing your own kind to have fun without consequences is wrong, and that is a black and white assessment I will stand by.

I'm sure you've gone to visit a few orphanages to verify this fact. Surely you aren't just pulling it out of your ass. Maybe you grew up in the foster care system and know what it's like? Surely you've spent time living in extremely impoverished communities, and have experienced first hand how bad life can be in America. Because if you have no idea what you're talking about then it would certainly NOT be very righteous to dictate what should happen to these life forms, as if you were some kind of omnipotent being.

That's like saying that 5 is greater than null. It's nonsense. There can be no comparison. Countless sperm die every day that were never given a chance. It makes no difference. A consciousness that never existed cannot feel any which way about having never existed.

Careful of being proud of ideas. That tends to close the mind to different ideas.

It took me several passes over this sentence to make any sense of it. I don't know what to make of that, but found it noteworthy anyway.

I think you said that it's unreasonable to expect people to allow other people the freedom to terminate a pregnancy that has nothing to do with them. Which is unreasonable. If my wife gets pregnant you have absolutely zero control over what we do with that fetus. It's completely none of your business if we decide to abort it.

It's not the "pro-choice" group that is forcing anything on anyone. Nobody is saying that if you knock up your old lady (or whoever) that you have to abort it. By all means, if she agrees with you, and if you're fucking her hopefully you've done what you could to established a minimum level of compatibility, then carry the baby to term and either keep it or give it up for adoption. You have that right, and nobody is taking that away from you.

Odds are pretty good at this point that we'd also keep it since we're mature, my wife's clock is ticking, and she's excited about babies. I certainly still worry myself silly about how I'll continue to provide enough for us, let alone children...

It's the "pro-life" group that is trying to dictate what other people do with their lives. You have absolutely no entitlement to do this. Abortion is proven safe and effective (in fact, mothers that abort often feel immediate relief, whereas mothers that give their baby up for adoption often suffer long term emotional pain). There's no reason to believe that the terminated fetus feels anything at all. Nobody asked you how their abortion made you feel because it doesn't matter how you feel about it. It's none of your business.

And again where we differ is with the definition "your own kind". I imagine if we were to discover a fetus outside the womb we'd probably think it was some kind of alien being. It vaguely resembles a human, depending on how far along it is, but it's far from being fully human. It takes approximately 9 months to make a human. At 5 months (4 months premature) the baby only has about a 50% chance of survival with doctors doing everything possible for them. They are still not developed enough to even have good odds of being artificially supported through the rest of their development. That's not a human. There are actual humans with much more minor developmental inadequacies that we might consider less than human (e.g., sociopaths and psychopaths), but are still more human than a fetus at even 6 months of development.

If given the necessary time and energy a fetus might become human, like a caterpillar will eventually become a butterfly if given the chance, but the universe won't even feel the ripple if it doesn't. That caterpillar is not a butterfly yet. The DNA will not change. The caterpillar is already a unique set of DNA, which the butterfly will share, but just like the fetus is not a human, in its caterpillar form it is not a butterfly.

You don't need to tell everybody else what I think because I've already done that. Also, there's a really good chance you'll get some of it wrong, like suggesting that I believe sperm, which I slaughter by the millions every day, are actual distinct human lives. That's more close to what you believe, not me. But again, my ideas are already well expressed in this thread so there's no need for you to try to smear me by misrepresenting my ideas.

Just for the record, what do you suppose is done when a fetus is found in a toilet? Do you expect that the police are called? A murder investigation is launched? An autopsy is performed? The fetus is placed in a wooden casket and buried in a cemetery? Or perhaps they send it to a funeral home to be cremated?

Or you think it gets bagged up in a plastic bag and thrown away like garbage? That is, of course, assuming it's too big to just be flushed down the toilet.

How about Euthanasia?

I believe those with a terminal illness who are suffering should be allowed to choose to end their life.

While I disagree with suicide, if somebody has an illness that multiple doctors agree can't be cured, the patient could decide their life isn't worth living anymore and pursue ending it. A doctor shouldn't be required to participate in an assisted suicide. I'm not sure I'd consider it a good idea to allow people who are merely mentally ill to commit suicide, as they can often be helped.

What happened to all life being precious? Whereas a fetus' life has barely begun, has no consciousness, and has no strong human bonds; a person that has been living for years, like decades, has very strong bonds. Seems like you arbitrarily go one way or the next with no real morality at your core.

You believe anyone should be able to euthanize a loved one on a whim? How the Hell are we supposed to determine if it was murder, suicide, or assisted suicide?

There's a huge distinction between assisted suicide and suicide. While the latter is generally understood to be a desperate cry for help, and often the person can be helped, the former is merely a way out of an impossible life where there are no other options.

It is quite surprising though to see celebrities that you would think have all of the best resources in the world still committing suicide. It's a touchy subject. I suppose in some instances those with deep psychological wounds may also be living an impossible life. But they're generally still capable of killing themselves so no need for assistance.

Of course, there's no point criminalizing suicide because if they're successful there's nobody to punish, and if they're unsuccessful what they need is therapy and treatment, not punishment, to deter/prevent another attempt. And punishing them is likely to only add onto the weight of the world that lead to their decision in the first place.

It seems compassion is the best response in every case.