I'd like to point out flaws in your argument. I'll get to my beliefs in a minute, so don't prejudge me.
But I do not think it would make sense to ban abortion, as, while making it a crime, would not prevent it from happening.
I don't think banning abortion will do anything but criminalize people who would otherwise not be criminals...
Yes to a degee but there will be a significant number of deaths, sicknessess, etc. due to back-alley abortions if abortions are banned. Also there will be new types of "morning after" drugs on the black market that are not FDA approved and can cause harm to individuals and possibly cause contagious diseases as side effects.
Banning something doesn't make it go away, it just makes the lowest level of opportunists thrive.
All of you are basically saying that "If we ban abortion, it will not prevent it from happening." If we choose to apply that logic elsewhere, we could say that outlawing assault and battery has not prevented it from happening. In fact, we could say this for every crime. Does that make it right?
And it is best for society that women's control of their bodies be taken away, that they are made slaves?
Suicide is illegal (and people still do it, by the way). Using your logic, making suicide illegal is taking away control of one's life, it's making us all slaves.
We now have the abilities and the technical knowhow to find a crippling or degenerative illness in a child pre-birth. Don't you think it would be immoral to condemn a child to live a life of hardship and misery just because of stupid Judeo-Christian beleiefs?
...the embryo is not a person.
I find the "a fetus is not human" point very very disturbing. Why? Because that is the mentality that Hitler used to start the Holocaust. First it started with killing the comatose, mentally disabled, etc. with the reasoning that "well, they aren't human." The people agreed, after all, they were just a burden to society. Hitler moved it up a step, saying that the senile, insane, mentally retarded people weren't really human. He kept going up step by step, up to the Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, weren't human. It's okay to kill them. We in America have accepted abortion, because fetuses aren't human. Michael Schiavo's lawyer's used the term "vegetable" to justify the removal of Terri Schiavo's feeding tube. What will we justify next?
Well...is it possible to make it that speedy of a trial to get it all done before the baby is born? Maybe they could just speed them up and put a special importance on such cases.
Not that easy. You have to hire lawyers, gather evidence, do tests, schedule court dates, keeping in mind how many other people are doing that at the same time.
The best alternative to jail is probably fines. Making abortion illegal would be difficult. Which comes to my main point: My problem with abortion is that it is disrupting the moral fabric of society. My beliefs are not guided and do not stem directly from religion. I believe that abortion is taking away the sense of responsibility on the part of people. When you say abortion is okay, subconsciously you are saying, "Yes, it's okay to have promiscuous and uncommitted sex!" If two people choose to have sex without using contraception, they should face the consequences. After all, isn't that the reason sex was created? To reproduce?
If we ban it, and women have no choice to do as they see fit,and let every child be born, they won't all be in perfect health. There are many factors invovled in this like drinking habits, smoking habits, drug habits, etc. It is indeed a crime against humanity to let children be born who will suffer all their lives when we know how to ensure that only healthy children be born.
Have you ever seen the movie GATACA? I reccommend it. It's a good portrayal of what will happen if we start tampering with the human genome. I would rather live with imperfection than cease to exist.
They will be forced to endure a life of hardship and turmoil, constant poking and prodding.
So you advocate taking away the soon to be human's right to choose whether to live or die? It is not the mother's decision to choose whether her kid should live or die if it is handicapped. It is ultimately the child's.
Completely irrelevant, as sex is not consent to pregnancy any more than smokign is "consent" to lung cancer, or driving is "consent" to accidents.
It's not so much consent as risk. If you choose to smoke, you accept the risk of cancer. If you drive, you accept the risk of crashing. If you have sex, you accept the risk of pregnancy. Filters, airbags, and condoms (respectively) lessen the risk, but do not eliminate it.
And your position is that for 9 months, you can enslave the woman, you can own the right to control her bodily resources without her having a say about it.
When you take control over another person's life and body, then you are enslaving them.
If a fetus is not capable of conscious thought, then how is it controlling her life? How are "you" taking control of her body if "you" aren't human, as per your argument?
Unfortunately, "fervent" religious prolife types seek to restrict access to these.
One of the reason's I'm not Catholic.
Which is more important, saving the life of an innocent or making people go through with a brief surgery to donate a kidney, but still be alive and have the opportunity to be successful and happy afterwords?
You volunteer to donate.
Which is more important, saving the life of an innocent or making people go through with a 15 minuet process of giving blood but still be alive and have the opportunity to be successful and happy afterwords.
You volunteer to donate.
When is it OK to force people to give up their bodily resources? merely to save a life? So you support forced blood donation and kidney donation? Or do you only support such when YOU are not at risk of having such a duty imposed on you? It is OK to force women, but not you?
Abortion and transplants really don't connect. "saving the life of an innocent... donating but still being alive..." It's the same damn thing! If you donate, you save lives... If you go through an abortion, it is accomplishing nothing but making your life much easier. It is not contributing to, say, stem cell research, it is not saving anyone elses life (excepting rare conditions where the mother is in danger, more below). It is making the mother's life easier. A donation of blood is saving lives of people who need blood. There is no correlation.
I said it had no perception of being alive.
How do you know? Did you ask it or something?
And what shall we do with all natural abortions?
That's biology. This is taking a vacuum/metal rod and beating a fetus' brains out.
But it will be in the future. That is the point: it will become human. So you are still killing someone because you are preventing them from coming into the world. Spirit, consciousness, organized bioelectrical activity in the brain, you are still stopping a life from entering the world. Unless you have some spiritual theory, killing the fetus is preventing the human that is developing in that fetus from entering the world.
