[Anh_Minh]

Originally Posted by Sackett

Mothers should not kill their babies.

Babies are babies, even before they are born.

Not sure why feeling that way makes me an evil moronic nutter, but I feel that way.

It is evil to kill innocent unborn children.

Not sure why the position conservatives have on other issues does anything to change the truth of the above statement. (PS: Lately it's been Obama starting the wars, nor have wars historically been associated with conservatives over liberals- they tend to be equal opportunity offenders. Particularly odd is the way Vietnam cemented the view that conservative = warmonger and liberal = peace despite the fact Vietnam was started by the liberal LBJ, and ended by the semi-conservative Nixon.)

Now... do I recognize that the pro-choice position has some moral arguments in favor? Sure. The argument is simple: Women should have a choice.

A choice to what I ask. We are not allowed to choose everything we want, lots of laws constrain our choices.

Again the answer is obvious: Women have the right to choose if and when they will have children.

I accept that as a god given right of all women. I even view it as an obvious right to be protected under the 10th Amendment, (a much better argument then the idiotic "penumbra of privacy" under the 14th).

But I ask you, is it the only way?

Is abortion the only way that a woman can exercise her right to choose if and when to have children?

Once the woman is pregnant? Yes, pretty much. Now, you can make all the arguments you want about how she shouldn't have let that happen if she wasn't ready and willing to have a kid, and that she got nothing more than she deserved, but I can't help but feel there is something messed up about making pregnancy a punishment.

I do not support making birth control illegal, nor do I know of any legitimately powerful group among conservatives that support that. Oh there are a few nutters, but no more so then there are nutters on the left. The vast majority of conservatives use birth control, they aren't going to ban it.

Focusing on those few nutters is a way of ignoring the true moral challenge that abortion raises. Is abortion the only way a woman can exercise her right to choose if and when to have children?

If the answer is no, then isn't a desire to ban abortion a legitimate position? Isn't it instinctively natural to protect babies? Even if they haven't been born yet? Don't we protect pregnant women with a higher effort then we do non-pregnant women? Isn't that instinct a natural thing inside us to protect the pregnant woman first? Doesn't that say that an unborn child has a intrinsic value?

I understand the position of pro-choice people. They want to prevent men from controlling women through forcing them to have children. That's something that has happened historically in the past (although not in America- or at least not to the extent claimed by feminists). It's an understandable thing to be worried about.

Wrong. My position is much simpler: I don't acknowledge embryos or young fetus as "babies". So I don't care what happens to them. Pregnant women, OTOH, are unarguably human beings, with all the rights and responsibility that go with it.

I just have to ask, is abortion really that necessary for it? Couldn't abstinence, birth control and an exception for abortion in the case of rape be sufficient to protect women's choice?

A ridiculous, if unfortunately common, position. If you truly think fetuses are babies, then they're babies even in the case of rape. Or would you support the killing of those babies even after they're born?

(And that's not even addressing how insufficient abstinence and birth control have proven themselves.)