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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (4152)	1/31/2001 3:58:34 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 82486

I still don't understand on what basis you think a few split cells is a child. Let me put the question into context. I don't like abortion. When I trim back a house plant I always put the trimmings in water to root even if I don't want to reproduce the plant because I feel like a murderer putting them in the trash. I'm certainly not cavalier about a fetus. But I know in my head that a clipping is a potential new house plant and a fetus is a potential child, not a child. Abortions are not performed on a few split cells. Usually they are performed on a fetus not an embryo. They are perormed on a organism that is alive, is human, and has a beating heart. In fact it is legal to perform abortions at any point in a pregnancy. Also I would say that a large part of being human is to have human potential. If you don't count potential a newborn doesn't have more developed intelectual capacity then an adult ape. How do I know I am right? How do you know you are right about anything. You can develop arguements but your rely on other premises. Some things you just feel are true. Can you prove to me that slavery is wrong? Can you prove that abortion is a right (other then in the purely legal sense or the term right) You can set up a logical arguement to prove it but your premises would be philosophical or emotional or religous not facts. When dealing with any question of right and wrong, human rights, or "how things should be", you rely on philosophy, emotion and religion, and opinion not cold hard facts and scientific details. You can use the facts and details to see how you will apply your bigger ideas, but you need those ideas, and they are mostly not subject to proof. I don't feel that God tells me abortion is wrong. I'm not very religious and I can't say that I've ever heard the voice of God or anything like that , so I can't say that God tells me anything about it. "To actually ban it by a court decision you would have to have an activist pro-life court, just as I see Roe vs. Wade as an example of an activist pro-choice decision" I think it would require an amendment to the Constitution. We amended it when we decided that slaves were whole people. I think we'd have to amend it to say a fetus is a person. Unfortunately an activist Supreme Court decision pretty much has the force of a Constitutional amendment. Would a pregnant woman who drank and had a miscarriage be guilty of manslaughter? I don't know. Are you are asking for my opinion of what should be or what I think would happen if abortion was outlawed. For the second it would largely depend on if the law changed to consider a fetus to be a person or just to outlaw abortion without any being given any legal status as a person. Either way I would have to give it more thought. Or the party responsible for an auto accident that killed a fetus? If an unborn child is given legal status as a person then I would say it would be vehicular manslaughter. Could a pregnant woman take out a life insurance policy on her fetus? I would say yes (again assumeing that a fetus is given legal status as a person), but to a large extent it would depend on the opinions and policies of the insurance companies. Would a fetus be eligible to win the lottery? Is a 6 year old eligible to win the lottery? I think you have to be 18. If you don't have to be 18 I don't see how this issue is a problem except that obviously someone would have to buy the ticket for the fetus (or for any all ready born infant if some one wanted them to win). And if it did, what would happen to the money in the event of a miscarriage? The same thing that happens to the money now if the winner dies. If the point is to reduce the deaths, it seems to me that there are more feasible and constructive approaches than criminalizing abortions. There could be a lot of political energy around reducing the deaths, particularly it it also reduced the births through birth control. Why beat one's head against the wall going for criminalization? Surely it's better to reduce the deaths than to get vengeance. I'm not fighting against birth control. But I do think if a fetus was legally recgonized as a person and abortion was outlawed then abortions would be greatly reduced. As for vengeance is their a difference between justice and vengeance? This is not a rhetorical question, I'd like to get some opinions. If some one shoots and kills a 10 year old child is sending them to prison or executing them purely a matter of vengence? Yes it is also a matter of trying to make sure they can't do it again, but if hypothetically you could be 100% sure they would never do it again should not the killer still be punished? Just for the record, I wouldn't exclude an idea from public consideration just because a religion supports it. Religion supports world peace and I think that makes great public policy. The problem is when there's no basis for the idea other than divine revelation. I think ideas that people hold because they think it is devine revelation should not automatically become law or you have a theocracy, but if you do not let religious ideas or ideas that are influenced by people's religous beliefs about devine revelation to even be considered then you are unjustly discriminating against religous people. Should an idea be included for consideration if someone believes it because of some undefined emotional reason, or because some philosopher supported it but exluded if some one supports it because of what they see as devine revelation? Why should religious people not get the same right to push their ideas and interests as anyone else? Not special rights, not the right to ignore the constitution or violate current law, but the right to try and change the law in the same way as any other interest group. Should enivronmental laws be over turned because some one thought it was what "Gaia" wanted? There is a clause in the constitution against the establishment of a religion. I respect and support that clause, but there is a difference between an idea that someone holds because of religious faith and a theological idea. It would be against the constitution to vote in a law saying that people have to worship a devine figure of any sort or to make people recite certain prayers. But there is nothing in the constitution that says no religiously inspired ideas can be considered. IMO religious people have political rights as well. Tim