h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I would like to congratulate all those researchers who were involved in this article. It is comprehensive, professional, factual and impartial.

thanks, brendan! a lot of work had gone into it to make it factual and impartial. it had an abominably long discussion thread while in pr. helped the article a great deal.

An involving read that splendidly covers the issues. I particularly appreciated the information, that I was ignorant of, about how religions apart from Catholicism deal with abortion.

Pimms

+....

Gutsy subject to tackle folks.

I made up my mind years ago on where I stand on this very delicate subject. A major influence was the book, "The Cider House Rules". I was very glad to see a quote from there in this article. I live in a country where some have actually justified murder to stop abortions. The bent circular logic it takes to come to that conclusion...well, . I am NOT pro abortion as pro-choicers are sometimes called here. I am pro choice AND anti abortion. I know that no amount of legislation will end abortions. I know that no amount of zealous rantings will stop young girls from getting in trouble. What *I'd* like to see is both sides working together to promote and improve the adoption process. Young mothers need to be able to go through their pregnancies, protected from hardship, from society, from their communities and families in many instances. The stigmata teenage and unwed pregnancy currently have need to be lessened. There are too many people who want children for us not to promote adoption more. I know that even with this, abortions will continue, but to many young girls today, abortion seems like their ONLY choice now.

Ok... I'll put away my soapbox now just to say again that I commend you on writing a daring, informative article.


Count Zero

Boy did this article change from when I first saw it in Peer Review months ago. I'm glad it made it. Well done!

i'll refrain from making personal comments with regard to this subject, but - thanks, everyone! (thought i would get censored/flamed/nuked... for the longest time i thought it would never make it...)

Congraulations - This is the firts piece on abortion I've seen that is actually neutral.

About a week ago, we had a couple of people in to tak to us about abortion (especially the pro-life movement) for religeon class. A friend of mine let off an 'interesting' rant at one point, which I won't go into here, but part of it was that both sides in the debate were mainly composed of stubborn fanaticists who constantly inflicted their beliefs on others while demonizing the opposition. A bit like the eternal War between Heaven and Hell, then.

thanks hussasan *actually*, that abortion bit was part of my planned-but-never-executed forensics project. (i was going to write a series of articles about forensic medicine - how you determine time and cause of death, forensic clues etc, but i never really got round to it because the project became too immense. the abortion bit was the only part that survived) if you're interested, otto's written an article about the ethical arguments regarding abortion (A1139861). i'm not sure if he's still working on it though...

I'm still working on it, but things have stalled a bit. I'm hoping to write some more this weekend and then probably put it into the writing workshop for comments.

I'd just like to say this article is fantastic, far better than the equivalent wiki article.

Thanks folks for writing this.