deaconson
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If this is the case, we better do something about the infant mortality rate because we will still have lots of dead babies.
Now let's not focus on facts.
If this is the case, we better do something about the infant mortality rate because we will still have lots of dead babies.
Seems someone so passionate about these babies would be willing to sacrifice pretty much anything to save them. Can’t even stop stigmatizing women who have the babies, sends the wrong message to the other women, ya know.
This is where I always go back to -- if a person actually thinks abortion is state-sanctioned murder of millions of humans, I'm not sure how they can continue to live in a country where it occurs. Every fiber of their being should be devoted to changing the law, no matter what, or GTFO-ing. It should be all the GOP talks about all day every day -- how can Warngor live in a country his entire life knowing that the government sanctions murder? What does it tell you about Wrangor, who at least tries to give the impression that he is passionate about the issue. And, more imprtantly, what does it tell you about the rest of the Republicans? It's all talk, just like the rest of their pretend Christianity.
There are lots of countries where abortion is not legal, so move to one of those countries (love or it leave it). If the US said tomorrow that we are actually doing "the Purge" and murder is cool for one night, I would get the fuck out of dodge so quickly Ethan Hawke's head would spin.
There is a subtext in several posts on the last few pages suggesting that it is impermissible for legislators to base their votes (and the population to base their positions on matters of policy) on religious views. I disagree with this suggestion.
Chris, I generally appreciate your posts on this forum, and think that you take unwarranted abuse from the left (which may be a dubious compliment given my own political leanings), but this response does little to nothing to answer my question. The vast majority of your second paragraph constitutes perfectly valid reasons in favor of abortion; I'm not Wrangor, and am not arguing that there aren't legitimate reasons to be pro-choice. I don't agree, but recognize that it's a difficult issue with rational viewpoints on both sides. However, those reasons have no relevance whatsoever in determining whether the unborn child is human or not.
Again, Christopher Hitchens is hardly known for his religious predilections, and he spells out the case clearly.
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But it’s only an evasion if we have some firm grounds for suspecting that the fetus is a human being.
True. But I think that by now we know where babies come from. And dialectics will tell you that you can’t be meaningfully inhuman unless you are actually or potentially human as well. Pointless to describe a rat or a snake, say, as behaving in an inhuman fashion. I put the question like this. You see a woman kicked in the stomach. Your instinct is properly one of revulsion. You learn that the woman is pregnant. Who will reply that this discovery does not multiply their revulsion? And who will say that this is only because it makes it worse for the woman? I don’t think this is just an instinctive or an emotional reaction (not that we should always distrust our instincts and emotions either). We are stuck with a basic reverence for life.
But aren’t all these notions of the sanctity of human life and so on alien to your otherwise Marxist view of the world?
On the contrary. As a materialist I hold that we don’t have bodies, we are bodies. And as an atheist I believe that we do not have the consolation of the afterlife. We have only one life to live, so it had better be good. All the nonsense we hear about mediate and immediate animation, the point where a soul enters the unborn and so on, is at best beside the point. It has in common with the sectarian feminist view a complete contempt for science and the theory of evolution—which establishes beyond reasonable doubt that life is a continuum that begins at conception because it can’t begin anywhere else.
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So even if the belief may have ultimately stemmed from a supernatural belief system, which assertion seems questionable at best, the same conclusion seems inescapable under physicalism.
The only thing you posted that, as far as I can see, even attempt to answer the question of what differentiates humans is "there is no heartbeat that is stopped or switching off a developing brain." As best as I can tell online, fetal heartbeats start at approximately 22 days. Fetal brain development begins around 16 days. Does that make a fetus human at that point?
when have conservatives been on the right side of history?
when have conservatives been on the right side of history?
the Cold War, to name one
the Cold War, to name one