Well, it’s nice to know that I think “women are just incubating machines or indistinct locations where the all-important child lives.” Nice to know that I’m a woman who is TOTALLY CONVINCED that my body is worthless without a child inside it. Very funny.

Fact is, Steve, 99% of women in these situations DID have a choice with what happened to their bodies. They are the ones who consented to sex and the chance of pregnancy. I don’t have a problem with sex for fun (within the bounds of marriage—go on, call me a purist; I don’t care), but pregnancy is ALWAYS a possible outcome unless permanent measures are taken to prevent fertilization. So for each guy and gal out there, the potential to make a baby happens each time they have sex. That’s just a fact of life that people can’t get around.

Oh, and it’s also nice to know that being in one stage of development is more important than another. I look forward to my 20′s, when my life will take on more value since I will reach my full physical growth and am no longer a pitiful little adolescent. Although, being an adolescent was truly better than being an undeveloped, clingy baby that can’t do anything for itself or an unborn baby whose only sin is that it’s not born yet. Once again, very funny.

Please explain what is sinister about how I present this. I literally do not understand you. I am Planned Parenthood (and any other abortion company)’s target audience: I am a young woman, about to enter her twenties. I care about this issue because of the harm caused to both mother and child, not because I feel like women are made only to carry children. And, just for your scientific benefit, babies grow in mommies. That’s how it goes. I’m going to give up on you at this point: I’ve explained how, for 99% of the time, women made the choice to have sex, making them responsible for potential pregnancies they may get. But you’re obviously going to ignore that, so I’m signing off on that.

And it’s not moralistic hysteria—it’s a logical thought process. If you define life as less worthy before it’s born, that is condemning life because it has had less time to develop. That in turn makes us ask if life is more worthy when it has had longer to exist.

Have a nice day, Steve, and try not to assume my motives. You know nothing about me. Take a day off from work and read a book on prenatal development—you might find it more interesting than criticizing people you’ve never met for motives that aren’t theirs.

Everybody has the power of life and death. Almost anyone could kill some one if they wanted to. This is called free will. That does not mean that if they exercise their free will to kill someone that it is a good thing or that it should be legal.

The woman and the man have already created the child; the child already exists. Of course the woman can choose to kill the child because she has free will, but that does not make her choice a good thing or that it should be legal.

It has nothing to do with control. It’s just wrong to kill a human. And for your information, there are a lot of men that try to pressure a woman into abortion. Also, it isn’t just the “man’s child,” it is the son or daughter of the mother. It is also her child. Mothers should not kill their children.

This is the last comment I’m going to make. At the time an abortion occurs, she is already a mom—there is a baby inside her. The question isn’t whether she wants a child but what she’s going to do with the one she already has. What you are advocating is abdication of responsibility by men and women who unwittingly brought children into this world, not responsible parenting. Killing your baby is not being a good parent.

And I’d really like to know why you think I hate women so much. You have yet to give me any type of coherent reponse to this. Does being pro-woman mean I have to be pro-choice?

Although, being an adolescent was truly better than being an undeveloped, clingy baby that can’t do anything for itself.

No, I’m sure the baby was much cuter. Nothing personal–they just usually are.

It’s not a “form of punishment”. It’s called a consequence.

Out of curiosity, do you know the different methods to abort a baby? Saline injection, dismembering, vaccuum aspiration? If no, I recommend looking it up. But here’s my point:

There is nothing humane about the ways that a baby is aborted. If you wanted, you could call it the most extreme form of child abuse. Now, pretend for a moment that you know that a lot of people are legally abusing their children to the point of death—how on earth could you sit on the sidelines and say nothing? And what about when the women who have done this begin to feel the loss of their child—is it not right to protect them from that grief, too?

Basically, if you take th argument, .Don’t like abortion? Don’t have one,” and you apply equivalent forms of abuse to it, you get statements like this:

“Don’t like rape? Don’t rape anyone.”

“Don’t like domestic violence? Don,t abuse your family.”

“Don’t like murder? Don’t kill anyone.”

The question was to explain how the location of the zygote negates the fact that, biologically, it is a human being. You did not answer the question.

I think Steve raises a very important point – that so many people focus on the fetus and pay no attention to the woman, the person who delivers the child. We need much stricter penalties on sex crimes – those are terrible actions that go incredibly deep, leaving many scars. Pro-lifers should also be concerned about the sanctity of all human life – male, female, teen, girl, boy, fetus, senior citizen etc. In turn, pro-choicers should remember that in 99% of cases where women turn to abortions, they had a choice before the abortion choice – sex. True, sex is now a vessel for pleasure with the availability of birth control, but the point of sex in the first place was to reproduce. If you are willing to take that risk, go ahead. Now, granted, the issues of rape and incest is a very thorny topic, so I won’t try to tackle that on a comment board.

It’s sad that men forced the patterns of procreation “back in the day,” but can we really say that we should now give women the choice to make up for that? Do two wrongs make a right? Does anyone have the right to say who lives and who dies? I find it ironic that everyone gets excited when a bacterium is found on Mars and considers that “life” and then advocates killing a fetus with DNA that cannot be distinguished by a geneticist between that and the DNA of an adult.

Finally, another commenter asked why people are against birth control. While I’m okay with birth control, I’m not okay with the government forcing religious hospitals to do something that goes against what they believe – I am okay if the government developed a plan to have insurance companies cover birth control if you ask for it. But that action is denying a choice as well.

Thanks for keeping this conversation relatively civil; I’ve seen way too many namecalling threads on other sites. Let’s show respect for all life by continuing to respect each other on these debates on the threads. Merry Christmas!

I think, as a pro-lifer myself, that people often judge us of not caring about women. I’ve seen it firsthand in working with several people who brush the woman aside, saying that it’s “all her fault.” Rush Limbaugh calling a woman a “slut” is not the image I want for the pro-life movement to have; we need to turn these negative connotations around and show the world how we stand for life everywhere and the right for babies to live who have no choice whatsoever.

Ok, we are in agreement on one point–one job of a mother is to provide for her baby. In the case of the unborn baby, that means providing an environment for it to live. Nowhere did I or anyone else on this page say that that is the ONLY job of mothers or women in general.

No, we mean they’re being dismembered, burned alive with saline solutions, and having their brains vaccuumed out of their heads while they’re alive. We mean KILLED. My dog was put to sleep in a more humane manner than unborn babies are every day.

Well, you didn’t exactly deny it.

You do realize, with the exception of rape or incest, (approx.2% of abortions) that the woman has already made her choice? Maybe consent to sex isn’t complicit consent to conception, but it is consent to the possibility.
And- how it is a meaningless, hysterical claim. I think you have a pretty lame defense, seeing as you can’t even acknowledge the torture that is undergone in the name of “termination of gestation.”

someone’s been spending time on the planned parenthood action wall….

Well, an unborn child is different from a child that’s living outside mommy’s tummy, isn’t it? The mere fact that the child that hasn’t been born has a fleshy outer covering called a “woman” seems like a relevant distinction. For people who think women matter, that is.

Thank you for that useless attack on my grammar. You are obviously more credible than me because you can correct a teenager’s grammar.

I figured as much—that’s why I stopped following all of this conversation a few days ago. He’s just going to spout the same thing over again and ignore everything we say, so why is he here at all? Anyway, thanks :)

Somebody passed level one of obvious logic.