Do you think someone who has an abortion should be charged with murder and punished with death or jail the same as other murders?

Or how about a pregnant single mother who drinks or uses drugs or smokes or eats bad, should she be charged with child endangerment and put in jail? If so should her child be put in the foster system when born in jail?

If we eliminate loaded language, RTG wouldn't exist as a forum. Are you trying to smother the forum in the crib with your spewage about loaded language?!?

My mistake. Apologies all around. I misused the word. Scratch it from the record.I believe sponging is still correct and perhaps best.

no....but that would probably benefit us all if I did

One doesn't cure disease by shuttering hospitals. It is a nice asylum.

No. I'm not really speaking about the legality of abortion. I'm talking about right and wrong. That's why me and Lestat are talking past each other on it.

I believe America has become a police state, in many ways, and we need less laws, and not more. Though I spend most of my time in Jersey, so my perspective has been skewed a bit, because New Jersey is definitely a police state.

Well then perhaps I owe you an apology as well. I thought you were trying to say that terminating a fetus that is surviving solely through remaining attached to your body, is the same thing as killing the same post-natal baby once it is living independently of your body. It is not. And that was my only point.

I'm not sure your argument is really consistent, though. Would you feel comfortable twisting off the neck of an 4, 5 or 6 month old (still in the mother) as you abort it? Would you feel comfortable ripping its arms off of his or her torso- even though it is still a "moocher" and still dependent on the mother alone? Would you feel uncomfortable doing it only because it just might be able to survive outside of the womb?

Uke, do you think Joe is being unreasonable? Do you think this story is not believable?

Is the child better off with Jane alone?

Should a third "father" be introduced?

Do you deny that children sometimes look like their fathers?

Do you deny that people who adopt may have negative views of the adopted kid's biological parents (even when they have never met them personally or know anything about them)?

Will you be willing to state that these negative views of who the kid's parents might be will never, ever show themselves when the child gets in trouble or rebels or fights or says "you are not even my real parents" for the first time?

I don't understand the analogy. I wouldn't feel comfortable doing that (or watching it be done) in any scenario to anything. And I don't know where you're even digging up that comparison from.

Maybe the difference is in the way you and I look at death. It's not something I'm afraid of. I don't look at it as necessarily a bad or evil thing. It's just non-existence. Dying or the act of dying is very different, as is suffering and/or twisting off arms and heads for apparently no reason.

And just because I recognize a woman's right to choose abortion, doesn't mean I'm pro-abortion. I'd much prefer it if another abortion never took place. I'd rather attack the problem through education. Planned parenting and birth control.

That doesnt seem very constant with your posts. If its a baby it should be murder.

I'm not really trying to be consistent. I'm trying to work things out.

I have said in the past that I have known and dated women who have had abortions. I recognized a kind of PTSD in them, and extremely erratic behaviors that I came to felt were directly related to their abortion. All of them expressed regret over what they had done (except 1, who had 5 abortions). This is all anecdotal, of course, but there is a well-known link between abortion and depression and abortion and high suicide rates. If a woman is normal (as in- not a sociopath) an abortion is something that is likely to haunt her for the rest of her life. It is bad- FOR HER.

Is it murder?

I wouldn't take the chance, if it were me. But I believe in God and an immutable moral law. I DO understand a particular atheist view of it: 'There is no God. There is no big-daddy in the sky watching me. Culture and morality. We can create a society where abortion is celebrated, like a birthday, and when people don't have at least one abortion, they are the ones who get suicidal and depressed."

The fact is that if I am an atheist who truly believes as such, I might find all of your legal and moral scrambling above to be nothing more than mere babble- all hot air that means nothing. I'd laugh at your "inalienable right to life" as I strangle the baby infant I just gave birth to and bury it. "Nobody knows I did it. No big-daddy is going to see me. What I did is no more different than stepping on an ant or killing a mouse. I'll just go about my day now, coolly."

If you find that a bit disturbing, 'it is only because your society has trained you to think that way. In the future we will celebrate infanticide.'

But that is surely just a slippery slope argument, no?

Is it?

Do you read the news?

We are seeing that almost every day.

You have told me about 80 adopted serial killers, about 2 people in your lives who are screwed up and adopted, and now a made up story about a potential adoption gone sour. Okay, interesting anecdotes. Now can you PLEASE respond to the same question I have given after each anecdote? Namely, do you accept that similar anecdotes exist - some that I am personally familiar with - that show examples of adoptions that work great, where "care and compassion" actually exist and isn't "faked", where the adopted parents "really wants somebody else's one month old"?

The problem is you are delivering these ultimatums about all adoptions. That nobody really wants to adopt, that care and compassion is faked, and so on. But you are bolstering this with specific anecdotes, anecdotes that have direct counters from my personal life and those of millions of others.

Shouldn't you want to be? If murdering a fetus is morally equivalent to murdering a baby, don't you have a problem with zero punishment to the former and massive punishments to the latter? Okay, okay, maybe you think God is giving the "real" punishment. But shouldn't we on earth at least try to have the most basic attempts to be consistent in our crimes?

You wouldn't accept it if murdering white people got a different crime from murdering black people, despite that God treated them the same. So why are you accepting different punishments for murdering babies and fetuses, since you think they are morally the same?

Unsurprisingly, this is not true. There is little evidence (http://informahealthcare.com/doi/abs...73220903149119) for a causal connection between abortion and depression or high suicide rates. The second sentence is also incorrect, as the women who become depressed after having an abortion tend to be women who were already predisposed to depression or who have other risk factors for depression (such as abuse).

The problem with this area is that there is a mountain of confirmation bias in any approach to the issue. You can see this in the first line of the abstract:

This is not a "meta-analysis" attempting to extract better information from a group of studies. It is a review with an agenda; a phenomenon that I find offensive as a scientist.

You can see some of the bias in OP's summary as well.

Not a statement that the authors of the paper chose to make.

Also not quite what the authors stated:

Probably not surprising, but not equivalent to stating that abortions were not a contributing factor. Also, a conclusion that was based on studies that did not initially show problems with abortion and as such (per the authors):

I'm on my phone and so can't respond to your concerns about the linked study , but I did want to point out a misreading here. When I said that doggg's claim was not true, I was not referring to whether there actually is a causal connection between abortion and depression, etc., but rather that it is "well known" that there is such a link. That is why in the following sentence I said that there was "little evidence" of such a link.

I am skeptical that there is such a link, but it is many years since I looked at the evidence and so I'm probably not competent to defend the view that there isn't without doing more research than I have time for right now. But I can defend the lesser claim that there isn't much affirmative evidence for post abortion stress syndrome.

Not really an answer to my question. Just more bigotry and characterization of atheism. Meh didn't expect much more.

You call it a baby and if someone were to kill one after birth you would call that murder, but not before. Guess you did answer. Its not a baby in your eyes. Just using the term to stir the pot.


And your God already made the slippery slope. Sometimes its ok to kill infants and babies.



Also thank God you are a theist and not acting on your natural instinct to harm and do whats in your heart.

That's a fairly weird protest. If you know flaws that plague a study, a series of studies or a type of studies, there is nothing wrong with writing a review to identify and illustrate these errors.

That's one of the purposes of reviews.

This. It may well be that the authors are hopeless partisans out for a unilateral assault against the pro-life movement, with no care in the world for intellectual honesty. But saying their objective is identifying some particular fault in some particular papers doesn't imply that. Even if it did, if the faults are legitimate and the exposition of them well argued, it wouldn't really matter.

From what I remember, there were actually 3 studies that all showed the same thing: abortion causes trauma to the mental well-being of the woman having the abortion.

That uke and tame and pro-death organizations would look to cast some sort of doubt on them does not surprise me at all. There is a really abhorrent element to placing your pride before the lives and well-being of other people, though.

It is possible, of course, for someone to believe that a woman has a right to kill her baby, but that she shouldn't.

But that aside, I'm not really a big believer in legislating morality. You keep piling up laws upon laws and sure- if you strangle people tightly enough, eventually you will get some of the results that you want. But in the end, there is always revolution.

In a way, I'm glad to see christians losing the culture war. When the atheists win court battles that defy the will of the people, or the socialist left- there really is no need to panic. Because the day will come when you will have to own the mess you have created.

Do you not recognize any tension in your rhetoric?

I mean, you aren't saying we should stop punishing murders of babies, right? You are still going to legislate morality against normal murders, right? Yet your rhetoric is that there is no meaningful difference between murdering a baby and murdering a fetus. So why is that you suddenly pull out all this not "legislating morality" stuff when it comes to those types of murders but not other types of murders.

For instance, suppose the law was that murdering white people was life in prison but no crime for murdering black people. When this tension was pointed out, would you respond by saying you were not a believer in legislating morality?

I didn't say a word about abortion and trauma. But if I am going to be accused of doing so, I will give the same kind of answer I gave - that you have ignored now three times in a row - on adoption: while I am sure some women are traumatized by it and you can undoubtably provide anecdotes, I am sure some women are NOT traumatized by it.

Nah we will just take the lead from some Christians who take credit for the good things and pawn of responsibility for the bad on something else.