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

Abortion ends the pregnacy process. This kills the chance of having a baby. You can't kill a rock. A rock isn't alive. It can't grow, or change, or anything. So by terminating the pregancy, inwhich the unborn baby is destroyed, you kill. Because a baby, though unborn, can grow, can change, and can eventualy do anything. That's murder. Enough said.

Contraception also kills the chance of having a baby. So does not being sexually promiscous.

'If it's alive, don't kill it'

You use a rock as an inanimate object to justify your statement.

A virus is alive, it grows, it mutates, it can develop a life of its own, it can breed and reproduce, so following your argument we shouldn't kill it? I'm sorry, your rock thesis is far too simplistic for an argument on abortion.

We are talking about quality of life for parent and baby - what right does anyone have to rear a child in what they feel to be an unsatisfactory environment? The choice is down to the mother/parents, it's an individual decision that should be made without prejudice, with full consideration and above all, with all the *facts* taken into account.

I was going to mention cabbage, but viruses work too...

Sure. While we're at it, we should carefully preserve the lives of the world's flies, bread mold, pond scum, bed lice, rabid dogs, and weeds. We should stop treating all the HIV/AIDS sufferers immediately, along with the folks inflicted with the Ebola virus and Mad Cow Disease.

We should certainly be ashamed of ourselves for putting millions of cats, dogs, ferrets, and other pets to death yearly in the name of mere quality of life. Anyone causing the death of intelligent creatures like apes, dolphins, and cockatoos must be put in jail.

And me MUST stop eating plants and vegetables immediately, as they are life forms too. Why, killing one average American before age 20 would save thousands of chickens, cows, pigs, and turkeys. At the very least, all life respecting people should turn to vegetarianism as a moral imperative.

Every person on Earh should have their sperm or eggs surgically removed and cryogenically frozen indefinitely, in the odd chance that these limited "life forms" might be put to better use in some distant future when mankind is spreading itself among the stars. Because indeed, sperm and eggs do live in the same sense that bacteria, single-celled organisms, and mitochondria live.

In fact, I insist we follow this "preservation of life" argument to its ultimate conclusion. I submit we should start aborting all human fetusus in developed nations hereon in, as the reduction of humanity would be the saving factor for numerous species scheduled for extinction. The remaining humans could save up our sperm and eggs for a brighter day when perhaps humans could be entrusted with the responsibility of preserving life unselfishly.

Excuse me for not responding further to this conversation, as I shall be busy fasting, engaging in eco-terrorism, and murderering over-eaters for the good of lifekind as we know it.

Wow Fragilis, that was great!

Well, is it? A foetus is entirely dependant on its mother. It cannot survive without nourishment and oxygen from the mother, and since there is no way to remove a foetus and give it to someone else, should a foetus be seen as a part of the mother, and not as a person.

Some people maintain that life begins at conception. To me, life begins near birth, when the baby is able to live without constant physical attachment to its mother.

JyZude.

Ok, perhaphs my statement was too simple. I was reffreing to human life, which I hold above all others. Yes I agree slaughter all virus, including E. Coli (That gives me the creeps.)
I apoligize for my oversimpilfication.

Yes but by contraception nothing is created, so nothing can be destoyed. Killing chance is fine killing unborn children is not.

Your right, my responce was too simplistic. You asked to look at facts OK.

1) A rock is not alive.

2) (If you find a biblic refrence offensive disregard this) When Mary had learned she was pregnent with Jesus, She told her sister. John the Babtist, still in her mother's womb, jumped for joy. Now if the Bible is true, as nobody's proved otherwise, this shows the baby is alive even though unborn. Abortion kills

Contraception is fine when it works. But half of all unwanted pregnancies in America occur when the woman *is* using contraception. Even the birth control pill fails for 3% of women each year. Over the course of a lifetime, that 3% lottery yields a siginificant chance that a woman using the pill will get pregnant unexpectedly.

If the bible is true is possibly one of the biggest if's I've ever seen... not offensive so much as wildly pointless... but let's run with it... (aside: you may wish to visit http://www.h2g2.com/A213247 to read coments from someone who feels the bible has been disproved) - but I don't want to get sidetracked.

We all know (hopefully) that towards the end of pregnancy, babies do kick, and jump, and so forth. Fact of life. The incident in the bible could happily work with the baby happening to kick or jump at the rough moment that the mother was told. Unlikely to be evidence of intelligent thought in the baby. {especially since wombs and bellies and clothing are good at muffling noise).

I'm glad you think that killing chance is ok - this is progress at least. Perhaps you would like to tell us at what point killing chance becomes killing a human. Contraception? Conception? Implantation? Formation of placenta? Nervous system? Birth?

In this context, surely 'killing chance' equates to the same thing, as contraception (or even abstinence from sex, if you wish to go to extremes) results in the 'death' of the egg and sperm - the two components which fuse together to create an embryo.

From a religious sense, I understand what has been said, and how it can appear black-and-white, but from a scientific, logical and emotional sense (ie human), the whole question of abortion is far more complex, and how it, along with pregnancy, childbirth and child-rearing, affect individuals is different in every single case.

In another forum, someone equated pregnancy with 'a parasite invading a host'. Whilst this is not a particularly pleasant way of looking at things (and not a viewpoint to which I subscribe), it does highlight the fact that a foetus is not an independent lifeform until it reaches a stage where life can normally be supported outside the womb, generally considered to be around 8 months gestation.

~A~

'course you all know that catholics (and other religions as well i assume) ARE against contraception in any form.

i would like tempest to define "alive" for me, please. i don't want a documentary, just a simple definition of the word "alive", about as simple as the rock reference.

thanks

You mean *sings* 'every sperm is sacred'?

That is basically a Catholic standpoint, and contraception is certainly admissable in other Christian faiths. Although, from my experience, the 'no contraception' rule is not always adhered to by 'Catholics' anyway.

~A~

There is a form of birth control that the church does not frown on The Rythum Method ie. counting the days you menstrate etc. This is a type of contraception (a bad one, but one just the same). My mother and all her sister were concieved while using the rythum method.

Now back to the subject at hand Tempest I also would like to hear your definition of alive.

In your opinion what makes human life anymore important then any other life. Are you a vegitairian (sp?) or do you eat meat? What type of shoes do you wear are they leather, do you own a fur jacket?

Everything I have just mentioned are all living, period. They eat breath excrect waste, and think (I"m not sure if plants think but )

In nature animals if they have a sick child, they will either abandone it or kill it them selves. They turn away from a runt because it is small. If the have a dead baby a lot of times they will eat it. Does this mean that you think we should kill any animal that does this?

sorry I strated ranting again

I sincerely and desperately hope that you do not think that it would be all right to kill the sick and weak among us and eat our dead, since this is the way of the animal world!?!

The fact that animals engage in a behavior cannot give humans license to engage in it. If the group will bear with another Bible quote, St. Paul said, "All things are lawful, but not all things are expedient." Telling women that it is all right to kill their offspring, born or unborn because animals do it, relieves us of the opportunity and obligation of rational thought. If people are really to be free to "choose", then they must be free to use the faculties they have to clearly think out that Choice. This is especially important when speaking of abortion. However helpless and dependent that foetus is, it is still human, and the offspring of the woman and her partner. Even if one believes it is not alive yet, one must consider that it would eventually be a child, a human child, and can develop into nothing else (frog, monkey, virus, tumor). If I have an abortion, that which would have been my son or daughter is gone forever. Anything that person might have contributed to the universe (even if weak or handicapped) will not come to pass. I must weigh this against what the pregnancy and the responsibility of raising a child will do to my life. (You can probably guess that I have already chosen to raise the child.) Each woman who is pregnant must make this choice. Do it as a human.

I don't think that Courtney ever said that she did think it was right to kill the sick and weak. Ahh - the subtleties of the written word.

If we're quoting our favourite books, I'd like to mention Ether, who wrote "And now there began to be a great curse upon the land because of the iniquity of the people, in which, if a man should lay his tool or his sword upon the shelf, or upon the place whither he would keep it, behold, upon the morrow, he could not find it, so great was the curse upon the land."

We need a concrete definition of life. For the purposes of this post, I will define life as "an aspect that opposes death." By this definition, all microbes etc. are alive. Now, I need to define value. In order to avoid religion, I will define value as "the degree to which a creature benefits society." Therefore, viruses, etc. have no value. Trees and worms have little value, and people have the most value. The logic behind this conclusion is that people ARE society. I believe that being human gives you a right to life. This right cannot be taken away. I further believe that you are a human the moment that you are conceived. Sperm and eggs are alive. I will not disagree. However, they are not human life. And human life is what I respect. What factor does potentiality play? Does being handicapped make you less human? No. Scientifically speaking, a human is defined by their genetic code which is set at conception. This means that human life begins at fertilization and ends at death. Because society is defined by a group of humans, all humans in our universal society have equal value. This value cannot be changed by race, sex or age.