Pro-Choice and Anti-Capital Punishment?

Note I am for neither - I am not pro-choice or pro-death penalty.

First... to all those women who have had an abortion, I can only try to imagine how you feel and support you any way I can with my thoughts and feelings. It's an impossibly hard choice and one that stays will you for some time. I have strong feelings about any of those, especially men, who would want to make that choice anymore difficult for you by imposing their will on you. With that said please skip my article as I wish to have a "no-gloves" commentary to hopefully inspire thought in those who do as their parent or preacher taught them and have not really thought in years. Best wishes ladies. Blue out.

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Now, when a woman gets an abortion, she herself is the killer, even though a doctor does the procedure, it is no different than she herself doing the deed. Plus she's sending a soul to heaven way too soon.

In contrast, when a death-row guy is condemned, it's some bloke who probably isn't going to heaven anyways. I mean, as long as WE don't kill anyone it isn't murder right? Not like those baby killing pro-choicers.

===== ok now in simple English =======

I don't think the State has the right to decide who can die. They get it wrong (court cases) as much as anyone.

I don't think the Sate has the right to tell a pregnant woman she MUST have the baby.


----- and for your pro-lifer's ------
Believe what you want, but stop calling yourself "pro-life". You are anti-abortion, or pro-all-pregancies-being-taken-to-fruition, or pro-everyone-needs-to-have-the-same-values-as-me but "life" has very little to do with what you want, you wish to save a "soul".

Now... how stopping an abortion saves the soul of the child.... I dunno.. seems getting aborted would be a nice straight shot to heaven. No ladies and gentleman, what "pro-lifers" are out to save is the soul of the "mother" before she becomes a murderer.

Lets take the mother of the recently executed "Tookie".

Am I allowed to say, "If his mother had had an abortion, none of this would have ever happened". No of course I can't say that. Every child needs to have the right grow into what ever potential he/she has (you know as long as he/she's not gay or such). Even though the very environment promoted by those most against abortion makes it hard for all children to have their chance.

All this meanwhile.....

WTF are we doing overseas.... it's not people's feeling about it that bothers me. If anyone thinks we have the right to invade a country and do any damn thing we please *spits* well dats just unamericun.

What sickens me is that people have no IDEA what we are doing over there... no concept.. no concept of mission, no concept of how many innocent Iraq's have died.

How many babies have died.. oh well guess it don't matter if they are not american and christian. (but that doesn't stop us from risking our forces lives' to defend the right to practice Islam). BTW I'm not anti-Islam.... I detest all religions equally. I'm for the separation of church and hate.

I even heard one person say "aw we should just nuke them all and be done with it"

That goes very far as to what most people's thoughts are.. we are still just "getting back" at those who did 9/11.

If you ask most of these people the timeline.. they can't remember what the heck happened!

What should we do to get rid of all of those "Impeach Bush" signs.. .well heck I have an idea.

I find it interesting that most people replying can't keep this on non-religious terms. A rant about Iraq, sinners, etc.. has nothing to do with my original question. I am not passing judgement on anyone, I am asking a question - why one is considered murder and the other is not.

Bravo, I admit, you gave a brilliant answer.

The religion card gets pulled because it's by far the most prevalent influence, by proxy.



Really, it's an ingrained carnal response. "This person threatens our society! Burn the witch!" versus "Birth is good because it perpetuates the species."

Religion is kinda just built around (above?) that, so it quickly soaks up debate from this more fundamental issue.

One could try to base the decision on whether or not an entity can be legally terminated based on how conscious it is (when awake say). Of course measuring this is diifficult in some cases, and so writing laws based on this can be difficult.

However, I take it as reasonably clear that some animals are more conscious than others so I am more or less happy to eat such an animal, which had to have been killed for my culinary pleasure. A fetus that is so young that it doesn't have more of a nervous system than an insect say, I have little to no trouble allowing termination. I don't think insects are really conscious at all, and there is certainly a point at which a fetus has no sort of brain. As the fetus gets older I have more trouble killing it off, although if it would be born into a horrible situation, then maybe it's better overall if it doesn't live to see it.

A death row inmate of course is plenty conscious enough to be on the no-kill list.

I'm sorry you're right.. I did not answer the question.

Iraq and religion come up because I personally feel it is at the heart of why one thinks something "is ok" vs. another not.

Now to answer for myself. Yes I think murder should be avoided at all costs when possible, but I'm not against using it.

Police murder criminals.
People kill babies (either in the womb or each other in school)

I see tons of crosses protesting the killing of so many babies... but try to put up a bunch of crosses to protest soldiers dying... well.

Maybe it's just like this in Texas.

The cerebral cortex, responsible for thought and consciousness, can be observed at 5-6 weeks.

Does this change how you view abortion?

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I'm not saying I use the same indicator for basis on my personal opinion, either. I'm just following your train of thought ...

i think you derailed that train

You might as well say a human being is incapable of forming memories until it's somewhere between 1 and 2 years old, surviving solely on instinct, as a sort of animal or finite state automaton.

Does this change how you view infanticide?
Seriously, you're the one who always points to some website or another with a list of phallacies, why do you waste your time with idle sophism.

Ano, your post makes the crucial mistake of assuming that people actually know WTF they are talking about, or make conscious decisions. They go with whatever the TV tells them, or the bible, or their friends or whatever.
Being pro-choice and anti-death penalty is seen as trendy, therefore people want to associate themselves with it.
I'm pro-choice and pro-death though. Kill them all! Heck, legalize murder and give everyone a gun. I'll be in my bunker if you need me

heh.

Here's a scary train of thought:

As medicine advances and we're able to extract fetuses younger and younger and have them survive in a hospital natal ward. Currently it's what? 5 or 6 months that we can have survival?

Eventually someone will come up with an artificial womb. Extreme cases where the mother is bound to miscarry, or the mother is critically wounded, etc, the fetus can be removed and then raised in the hospital's artificial womb.

As mothers seek to reduce the burden on their working lives and reduce the risk to the developing baby, artificial wombs will be used more and more frequently for less and less extreme conditions.

Now: Does a mother retain that right to terminate the fetus in the artificial womb?

I've pondered this train of thought too. I simply don't think consciousness is a good marker for the start of life.


I wouldn't call it that. The easiest way to disprove a theory is to follow it to its logical ends, and see if it causes a contradiction with proven fact.

We aren't talking about the start of life. We're talking about the start of something-it-should-be-illegal-to-kill. Totally different.

The cerebral cortex may be visible at 5 - 6 weeks, but is it conscious? I have no evidence that it is at all, that there's anyone in there, and we believe that other things with brains that small are not conscious (or at least we have no trouble killing them).

Let me give you an example of something that is alive, does things, but I think is pretty clearly not conscious:

There's a kind of insect, and part of it's reproductive cycle is to find and kill some other insect that it will lay its eggs on so they have something to eat when they hatch. It drags the thing it killed to the threshold of a burrow it made earlier, goes in to check everything is ok inside, then comes out, drags the dead thing inside, lays its eggs and leaves. Seems all quite intelligent behaviour. Maybe this insect is conscious.

However, if whilst it is inside checking the burrow, a researcher pulls the dead thing a few inches away from the threshhold of the burrow, then this insect will find the dead thing, pull it to the threshhold of the burrow and go check it's ok inside again. If whilst it is inside again, the researcher again pulls the dead thing a few inches away, the insect will again pull it to the threshhold and go inside to check everything is ok.

It will do this as long as you keep pulling the dead thing away a few inches.

It is clear to me that there is nothing there that you're hurting if you kill this insect.

It's also clear to me that a human fetus which at that stage of development has the same brain power as that insect is not conscious either, and there is nothing that you are hurting if you kill it.

Of course, that stage may be passed quite early in the development of a child, I don't know exactly when. But even then, it may be best to abort later on. I'm coming at this from a utilitarian point of view, if it wasn't clear already. If the child will have a horrible painful life then (depending on the circumstances) perhaps it is better to abort even if the fetus will feel pain for a short time before death. I'm also pro-euthanasia for the same sorts of reasons.

Suppose, getting to more common real life instances of abortion, we have a college student who gets pregnant. There are a lot of factors to weigh, but I can see that if the baby were born, it could be bad for both baby and parent(s). Perhaps the sum total happiness there would be in the world in which the baby was born is less than that of the world in which the baby was aborted. In which case they should abort.

And yes, I have thought deeply about this.

In the UK we don't really have the pro- or con- capital punishment debate any more, because everybody, apart from a few loonies, realises what a horrible and barbaric act it is.

So far as abortion goes, it is inevitably an unpleasant and morally touchy issue. There is no doubt that preventing abortion causes a great deal of harm - the number of women who died from backstreet abortions was very high in the years when it was impossible to obtain one legitimately, and probably we will never know the extent of the suffering.

The moral issue comes about because the foetal human goes in nine months from a single fertilized cell to a complete human being, and it is impossible to put a precise time on the moment when it changes from insentience to sentience or from undifferentiation to humanity.

I do think those anti-abortionists who describe the blastosphere as a 'baby' are demonstrating the poverty of their argument by their manipulation of the language.

My own feeling on the issue is that abortion should be available on demand to everybody up to 12 weeeks. Between then and 16 weeks it would be necessary to have to get a medical dispensation. Over 16 weeks it would be illegal unless the health of the mother was under threat. That leaves about a six week safety margin before the time at which some babies are able to survive outside the womb.

Here's why I'm pro-choice (even though were it my choice I'm not sure I could go through with an abortion)... We live on a planet with finite resources. The world population has gone from 2.5 billion to 6.5 billion in just the past 50 years. It will continue to grow exponentially until we are no longer able to sustain that many people with available resources. Is it crueler to be aborted or to starve to death? We have to start thinking about that future now. Anyone who doesn't believe that every nation in the world will eventually have to adopt strict regulations on reproduction is naive. We will all end up doing what China is doing now. Forcing every pregnancy to result in birth only speeds us ever faster towards that future when we'll be far less worried about regulating abortion than regulating births.

The exact same thing could be said for those describing it in the most scientific and clinical of terms to make it devoid of any trace of humanity. You don't like the term baby for what is in the womb of a woman? How about human being? Arguing that what is there is a human being is hardly poverty of argument - it is the entire argument.

This is why we love you. Do you get the show Boston Legal in Portugal? You would be perfect as a cast member. Another brilliant answer.

No, my point is that a blastosphere is *not* a human being. Nothing resembling a human being. A foetus is not a human being.

The baby, the human being, appears gradually during the pregnancy. The whole moral issue comes down to when it stops being a foetus and starts being a baby.

i think there is a major flaw in most people's discussion of the term pro-choice. pro-choice involves much more than the choice to have an abortion. it involves the choice to use contraceptives (or any other pregnancy-prevention method), the right to have those methods easily available to the public (including the "morning after" pill), and the right to have education about pregnancy prevention easily available to the public. a large number of people that are anti-choice also oppose the education of the general public about the use of contraceptives (and other pregnancy prevention measures), as well as making contraceptives easily available to the public. the irony is that the more educated a woman is about her choices, the less likely she is to have an abortion. being pro-choice does not necessarily mean an individual is pro-abortion. imo, the terms are not interchangeable.

as for the question at hand, i'm in agreement with ulrika's response. i couldn't possibly state it as well as she did, so i'll leave it at that.

now someone explain to me the reasoning behind anti-choice people who believe in capital punishment. they don't believe in abortion because it's the murder of babies, yet they will approve of someone being murdered by the state. i've never understood that one.

Well put - regardless of what I think [morally] about when life begins or when and if it should end (assisted suicide) etc. This is where I stand, period.

I completely agree, the state should stay out of decisions about the life and death that individuals make for themselves and their unborn.

Handing over the power of life and death of it's individual citizens to the state can be very dangerous, should the state ever choose to misuse the power.

Then again, I probably don't have to do much to convince the 13 innocent men that were on death row in illinois that were cleared by DNA evidence of that.

Think about this: Justice Gerald Kogan, a former Florida State Supreme Court Justice, has worked on more than 1,200 death penalty cases, as a judge, a prosecutor, and a defense attorney. During his years on the Supreme Court, 28 executions were carried out. He says he has "grave doubts" about 3 of those cases. After 40 years of experience, he believes innocent people are convicted every day.

If your so opposed to an individual making a decision to have an abortion instead of supporting the state's intervention in life and death decisions, how about campagning for adoption of all babies - even disabled, crack and AIDS babies? Run commercials and Ad campaigns? Line up people willing to adopt.

The problem is, I never see any of those things. It's just pop out the baby and then drop it into the welfare system so that it can grow up in foster homes and wind up in prison later down the road. Disturbing.

I believe nobody should have a say over a woman and her body, especially not the government. If she wants a family, it should be her choice.

The justice system is flawed, I'm sure everybody can agree on that. So how can you dispose of a human life based on a flawed system? Not to mention it'd be nice to get out of the dark ages.

That's the gist of it. I rarely agree with Ulrika, but she said it better

Leilany

This is an excellent question Cris. About 10 years ago I was having a conversation with a colleague discussing politics and this came up. I was asked whether I was pro-choice or pro-life. I stated I was pro-life. He then asked me if I was pro-Death penalty or not which I answered I was pro-death penalty. He then challenged me and said he had no respect for the two positions because in one instance killing a life was ok and in the other it was not.

I went home that night and gave some thought to his words as well as my position on the issues and concluded that he was absolutely right. No disrespect to anyone but I believe that his assertion that it is hypocritical to be pro-life and pro-death penalty or the other way around is right on. Right then I changed my opinion on the death penalty and have been pro-live, anti-death penalty ever since.

I do see where Ulrika is coming from and she has an interesting take but to the core I believe that one needs to examine and be consistent on both issues whether taking a life is acceptable.

To me this isn't really a religious issue the way you posed the question because it plays equally on both sides of the fence. Most conservatives are Pro-Life and Pro-Death Penalty and most liberals are Pro-Abortion and Anti-Death penalty so in my opinion both sides have a conflicted stance.

I will challenge each of you as I was challenged. If you are pro-life, you cannot be pro-death penalty just because the person is a criminal and if you are anti-death penalty you cannot be pro-abortion just because the person isn’t born yet. The two stances are diametrically opposed to each other. It is interesting however that the political lines on these two issues have been drawn the way they are.

Thanks Ano! I've never heard of that show, but who knows. I never watch TV anyway

pro-choice does not mean pro-abortion. it means that each individual has the CHOICE to do what she/he believes is best for her/him. that could mean using contraceptives, practicing abstinence, etc. it does not only apply to the choice to have an abortion or not. an individual can be pro-choice knowing that they would never make the personal choice to have an abortion. the terms pro-abortion and pro-choice are not interchangeable. therefore, i don't believe that being pro-choice and anti-capital punishment are diametrically opposed to each other.

additionally, each person has their own view on when a "baby" is formed. i don't want other people's views to be forced on me, nor do i want my views to be forced on them. no one's opinion on this should be considered more valid than another. they are merely different opinions/beliefs. being pro-choice allows everyone to make decisions based on their own personal beliefs.

At conception the baby is created from the egg and sperm. One can use any word one chooses to describe the baby, but it's still a baby.

The main point is we are talking about a human being at the very earliest stages. This new human has it's own dna, completely different than the mother's dna. So to say it's part of the mother is wrong. If its not killed it will grow to reproduce, which is a major issue in this debate.


When the mother decides to kill her child, she is choosing to end an entire family tree. When I look at my grand mother and think she might have been aborted, I can't help but think of all my family members who wouldn't be here. Abortion doesn't kill a single human life, but a whole family tree.

I'm against governmental intrusion. But the reason we have a government is to protect the weak from the strong. We have laws concerning morality. The law against murder is a moral law. I should define murder as the killing of innocent human life. The unborn child is the weakest link in the human development, and the unborn should be protected with extra laws as we do with the elderly.

The taking of a human life at any stage should be illegal. The mother has ways to avoid pregnancy if she doesn't want a baby. But killing a child after it is alive should be as illegal as killing the baby after birth imho.