I never said ANYTHING about the child being a problem drinker or alcoholic. I'm saying that there is factual support that he will be 21 one day so it should be legal. Fine, I'll use another argument - Babies should be allowed to vote since they will be 18 one day.
Ohhhhhh. OK. The difference in those is in the status of the human. A fetus is either a living thing or not. From my perspective, it's not about the degree of its life that matters, its simply a matter of whether or not it s alive, and to me, it is. What you're arguing
is development. A three year old does not have the mental capacity to handle the responsibility to vote. It will be able to eventually, but right now, it can't.
A human is either alive, or it isn't. Like a checklist, you either say yes or no.
The right to drink is given over time, like a 1-10 scale. At a seven on this imaginary scale, the human is getting closer to being able to vote, but it's not at ten on the scale yet.
Well, instead of trying to ban abortion, why not strive for a machine that can emulate the uterus and let those fetuses grow? You said it yourself, some people simply don't want the kids. I simply believe the woman's right to her body is more important than the fetus. It is technically not part of her body, but if she doesn't want it, why would she have to keep it?
Because the machines that can emulate the fetus, and the processes that do it are far too controversial and not near widespread enough to give to every aborted fetus.
Also, I hear pro-abortionists say all the time" Why let a baby be born into a hard life, or in a terrible orphanage?"
What would being born from a womb-machine or being a "test-tube baby" do to the kid? No mom, born out of machines, it'd be just as hard.
I feel that if she doesn't want it, then she should have to deal with the fact that, in all likelihood, she was responsible in part for it. Now, discounting the approximate 5% or rape-induced pregnancies, she shouldn't be allowed to get an abortion because she did something incredibly irresponsible with "her body."
It's her body, she had a choice, she chose to get pregnant.
Now, that's not to say that rape-induced pregnancies fall under the same guidelines, since its not her choice at that point. So again, here's a grey area. I don't know what I believe about abortion when it comes to rape, mostly because I don't know how it usually turns out. Do they keep the child, only to discover that they can't love it? Do they abort the child with no/regrets? I can't say. So as far as her body her choice goes, you know. Aside from rape, she had a choice, and she chose to be irresponsible with a life-changing aspect of her being.
I'll try to explain my general view on this, by comparing it to a news article I once read -
Click
A homeless woman once lived for a years in some man's closet, somehow undetected. She was discovered when the man noticed he was losing food from his fridge, etc. He called the cops to investigate and they found her, and kicked her out of the house.
Now equate this - That homeless woman = fetus, the house owner = the woman, and the house = the woman's body. The man has the right to decide what goes in his house, and had the right to kick out the woman, even though she had nowhere else to go. I simply think that the woman should have equal treatment of her own body as this man has of his house.
And the police are the doctors! This is actually a pretty spot-on analogy. Now we can equate the situations in metaphors, sure. But in reality, the two situations are completely different. [As a side note, congratulations to this woman for being so awesome. I'm impressed.]
The thing is, that woman has the capacity to fend for herself. I'm not speaking sociologically, I'm speaking in terms of nature. She has legs that can walk or run, she has a mouth that can chew. If she were put in a room with a deer and a shotgun (provided she isn't insane), she'll be able to shoot the deer and eat it. A fetus, on the other hand, can't fend for itself, so it is actually dependent on its mother. The homeless woman doesn't need the man, she could go into another house and repeat the process, or she can beg for food, or go to a homeless shelter.
Like I said, if you can find an alternate solution for the fetus, go ahead and try to employ it, I simply believe that the woman shouldn't be forced to birth and care for something she doesn't want.
I'm not saying I can find a new solution, I'm not that bright. I'm just saying that abortion is wrong. I'm saying something needs to change, and if there were a better system, I'd love it.
There are so many things wrong with the world that I accept because they can't be fixed so easily. Some of those being: dependency on oil, the homeless problem, illegal immigration, the theft of Native American land. They're all problems that I want fixed, but for right now, we can't, so I accept them. I disagree with abortion, and I'll fight to prove the immorality of it, but I have to accept that there's no better way yet. All I can do is try to bring attention to it, I guess.
Even if it has a decent chance of being born, why do its rights outweigh the rights of the woman to her own body? Last I checked, there's no actual law against intoxicating yourself while pregnant, wouldn't you rather an addict get an abortion than suffer a potentially addicted and sick baby if it survived the pregnancy?
Why should the rights of the mother outweigh the fetus? They're both human.
There probably should be a law against drinking while pregnant. Just because there's no law against something doesn't necessarily make it okay. And in fact, since the fetus is alive and human, then we could consider alcohol consumption poisoning another human being. Which I would hope is illegal. It'd be illegal to dump a shot of potassium cyanide into someone's drink at Starbuck's, so I guess it should be illegal to poison a fetus.
You could consider it like the army: by enlisting, you had the right to give up some of your rights. You had freedom of choice, and you chose to give up some freedoms. Weird loophole, right?
And if you pour acid on a rock, it responds by melting. I have a different view of a response - An actual reaction to something, instead of just being destroyed by the addition of things that can destroy it. Last I checked, that affects non-living things too.
But the rock doesn't cease to function. The rock isn't doing anything, its not functioning at all. It's existing. The rock particles aren't dividing to form new rock particles, the rock isn't getting positional information from its surroundings and growing accordingly.
The cells of a fetus will stop performing regular cell activities if sulfuric acid is poured on them. There's nothing you can chemically do to make those cells react after that. They'll never perform regular cell activity after the acid.
The fetus doesn't CARE about living, or react whatsoever. Contrast this to the reaction you get from a bug - If you get near it, it reacts by running away or curling up into a ball, or anything. A hungry baby cries when it wants food, for example. The fetus just slowly grows over time unless something happens to it, similarly how moss grows unless you light it on fire.
I don't care if the fetus isn't crying or laughing; it's alive. Just because it doesn't have a brain or a nervous system doesn't make it non-living. Trees don't have nervous systems or brains, they're living. The moss is alive too!! What are you saying here, that it's not? You may have just proven my point; that a living organism doesn't need to run away or cry when it is stimulated.
But it's hard to tell a forced miscarriage from an accidental one from a natural one. The fetus may have miscarried within its first few hours because of a genetic defect. Or, it could have not implanted itself in the uterine lining. Or, the mother didn't know that she was pregnant and got drunk. Or, the mother DID know that she was pregnant, and did something to try to get rid of it.
Unless you impose a law stating you can't drink before or after sexual intercourse, you can't really prosecute women on having possibly forced miscarriages, which is technically the same as having an abortion.
I'm not going to argue that there's injustice in the world. I'm not going to argue that illegalizing abortion would prevent all abortions. Going over the speed limit is illegal and yet, here we are. The best any law can do is to prevent people from doing harm to themselves or others. What I can safely assume, however, is that if abortions were illegalized, the numbers of abortions should decrease. As with any law, we can't expect the law to eliminate that behavior altogether. What it can do is deter it.
Again, there are many types of abortions, it's not that all of them would be illegal under some crazy law. And I'm not sure I'm endorsing the illegalization of abortion, because as of now, there's nothing to replace it, and illegalizing would increase the risk for mothers and children, with back alley abortions and home remedies of alcohol poisoning. So As I said earlier, I’m against the concept, and I’ll fight against the idea, but in practice, there’s nothing else. That can feasibly replace it. It’d be a mess.
