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Should Medical Abortion Be Restricted?


Mudcat

Mudcat's Poll on Abortion.  

47 members have voted

  1. 1. LDS: Should abortion be restricted?

    • No. Abortion should be available to all.
    • Yes. Exclusions being. Life of the Mother, Rape and Incest.
    • Yes it should be restricted in all cases.
    • Other. Please Explain.
    • Not LDS
  2. 2. Non-LDS: Should abortion be restricted?

    • No. Abortion should be available to all.
    • Yes. Exclusions being. Life of the Mother, Rape and Incest
    • Yes it should be restricted in all cases.
    • Other. Please Explain.
    • I am LDS.
  3. 3. When does a human life begin?

    • LDS: At conception
    • LDS: In the first trimester
      0
    • LDS: In the first trimester, when the heartbeat is detectible
    • LDS: In the second trimester
      0
    • LDS: In the third trimester
    • LDS: When the soul enters the body, before birth
    • LDS: When the soul enters the body, after birth
      0
    • LDS : When the soul enters the body, at birth
    • LDS: Other. Please explain.
    • Non-LDS: At conception
    • Non-LDS: In the first trimester
      0
    • Non-LDS: In the first trimester, when the heartbeat is detectible
      0
    • Non-LDS: In the second trimester
    • Non-LDS: In the third trimester
    • Non-LDS: At birth
    • Non-LDS: Some time after birth
      0
    • Non-LDS: Other. Please explain.


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This is a public poll. Other posters will see your positions on this issue. So be prepared to defend and support your personal views on the topic.

In past discussions with LDS, I have noticed in a propensity to promote free agency. In example, though LDS do not seem to agree that alcohol consumption is a good thing if you are LDS. There seems to be a "sort of" consensus that, just because LDS don't believe alcohol consumption is good for LDS, that the availability of alcohol should be restricted to all.

Abortion seems to be a different issue in some respects, because it seems to potentially involve the rights and agency of more than one individual. But I am wondering what everyone thinks about it.

No poll is perfect. I am certain there are oodles of permutations that could be added to this.

Question 3 will be the diciest question, IMO. I have the option to select more than one answer in that one to help clarify.

Thanks for your input.

Respectfully,

Mudcat

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Edit: Sorry- misunderstood the questions

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Abortion as a method of birth control is a violation of agency and should be illegal in all cases. In other cases abortion might be allowable because the agency of one superceeds the child and the man. Life begins at conception, but I believe the spirit gradually "steps into" the baby as pregnancy progresses. I would generally not allow abortions after the first trimester.

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This is a public poll. Other posters will see your positions on this issue. So be prepared to defend and support your personal views on the topic.

In past discussions with LDS, I have noticed in a propensity to promote free agency. In example, though LDS do not seem to agree that alcohol consumption is a good thing if you are LDS. There seems to be a "sort of" consensus that, just because LDS don't believe alcohol consumption is good for LDS, that the availability of alcohol should be restricted to all.

Abortion seems to be a different issue in some respects, because it seems to potentially involve the rights and agency of more than one individual. But I am wondering what everyone thinks about it.

No poll is perfect. I am certain there are oodles of permutations that could be added to this.

Question 3 will be the diciest question, IMO. I have the option to select more than one answer in that one to help clarify.

Thanks for your input.

Respectfully,

Mudcat

I voted life of the Mother, rape and incest. However when I say “life of the Mother”, if the baby could live, I don’t know a Mother who would not die for her child. But keep in mind I only hang out with believers.

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The decision should be left to between the woman, her God, and the doctor.

This is a canard. The doctors that perform abortions are often, or in some cases always, willing to perform an abortion regardless of the circumstances -- including when clearly detrimental to the health of the mother.

This viewpoint is effectively that the decision should be left to the girl/woman, but the abortion should be performed medically.

Note, this is not to say that the viewpoint is wrong. It is that the viewpoint should be recognized for what it actually is.

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The decision should be left to between the woman, her God, and the doctor.

I disagree strongly. Why is it that the man (The father)is always left out of this?

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Would disallowing government funding be considered a restriction?

Do we know when life begins as a doctrine? As science?

Late term abortions are legal in most states, should they be?

Once you restrict one type of abortion, what is the guiding or dividing line for other types?

If a man can go to prison for murder after kicking a woman in the abdoman and killing the child, does that mean that rights exist for the unborn? Is being in the womb the equivalent of not being a life?

Those are very tough questions.

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The third question is not really valid, in my opinion.

I don't think anyone would argue with the fact that, at the instant of conception, an entity comes into existence that is "alive." And (if everything goes just right) that it will one day become a fully developed human. But it's not yet, which is precisely why we have the terms "embryo" and "fetus," to describe these living-but-dependent humans in development.

What's more, the sperm and egg are already "alive" on their own, so "life" is not an issue. What results from their combination is not "life," but simply a new entity, formed by living material.

So when does a new living entity come into existence? At the instant of conception.

When does the entity become a fully formed human? Well, all the parts are present early in the gestation period, but really, not until its late teens.

When does the entity become self aware? There is no way to know.

When does a soul enter the body? No one knows -- or can demonstrate -- if that ever happens, or even if such a thing exists, so it's a nonissue.

Abortion policy should be based on measures such as viability and development, not life or the murky idea of whether the fetus has a soul.

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If a man can go to prison for murder after kicking a woman in the abdoman and killing the child, does that mean that rights exist for the unborn? Is being in the womb the equivalent of not being a life?

I think that is an excellent question.

It certainly draws upon the inconsistency towards the rights of the unborn.

Seems there are fetal homicide laws that exist among 28 States as well as the Fed. Govt.

Most have clauses excluding abortion.

Religious Tolerance has good overview of State and Federal Laws on the topic.

The inconsistency is quite obvious to me.

A woman can elect to have an abortion, which destroys the fetus. This is legally correct.

Someone through violence can cause the fetus to be destroyed. This is a criminal act.. typically considered manslaughter or murder.

Quite a bit of cognitive dissonance involved in a legal sense.

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This is a matter entwined with civil rights, i.e. the woman's right to her own body. That trumps pregnancy and rightly so. No laws should mandate that the "State" can direct or demand a pregnant woman's compliance with dietary laws, bed rest, whathaveyou, or even that she remain pregnant when it is her wish to abort the pregnancy.

However, there arrives a point where the unborn could be brought to term successfully. Many counties place this at 22 weeks. Yet we have cases where the unborn are taken ALIVE from the womb and survive for hours - the latest such case I know of being last year in Italy, where the priest came to pray over the dead baby in the hospital and discovered it still living a day later. Then there is the case in England where the boy is now in his first or second year of school, five or six years after his mother tried THREE TIMES to abort him at c. 22 weeks.

The point of legality should be dropped worldwide to 20 weeks, beyond which it is MURDER to abort the unborn. If it occurs that a case of a 20 week old fetus is taken alive successfully, then the legal limit for abortion should be dropped to 18 weeks; and so on, until we have no survival possible whatsoever previous to that gestation period.

It may (likely) occur that medical technology will make all abortion illegal: that is, any fetus taken from the mother will be artificially brought to term. At such a point of medical capability, ALL abortions would then be classified as murder....

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It should not be restricted, but abortion for personal convenience should be penalized (at minimum taxes or fines, with heavier penalties as the pregnancy progresses including incarceration), and effective alternatives and services such as placement and counseling provided at public expense.

For the purpose of public policy, human life should be considered to begin at conception, with gradients for penalization along the gestational period—not in recognition that a human life is less valuable a the early stages, but in accommodation of compromise and recognition of costs.

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This is a matter entwined with civil rights, i.e. the woman's right to her own body.

A woman certainly has the right to control her own body. When she becomes pregnant, however, a couple of things happen. First and primarily, she voluntarily (in the vast majority of cases) acted in a way that led directly to the pregnancy; there are, in spite of the news, very few rapes in any place in the world: far less than 1% of all sexual intercourse is non-consensual. Since even a rapist would not know if his victim is fertile at the time of his attack, we can reasonably conclude that no greater a ratio of pregnancies are involuntary than is the intercourse that produced them. This means that in 99+% of all pregnancies, the woman gave her implicit consent to motherhood.

I believe in sexual choice: but the choice should be made before there's a third person involved, and a third person who has no voice in anything, but who will be the one who pays the highest price should his pregnancy be the one terminated.

That trumps pregnancy and rightly so.

I disagree.

Pregnancy is not simply a medical condition, it is not an illness.

No laws should mandate that the "State" can direct or demand a pregnant woman's compliance with dietary laws, bed rest, whathaveyou, or even that she remain pregnant when it is her wish to abort the pregnancy.

We do these very things after the child is born, why is the unborn child bereft of legal protection?

Even in the case of an adult, if he is lost in the wilderness, and unable to sustain his own life, should he happen to come across a cabin stocked with fuel and food, he is legally entitled to take what he needs a(and no more), although he will have to re-imburse the owner later. He can hunt even protected species (or could) to sustain life.

An unborn child has the right to exist, and given that his mother gave her implicit consent for him to establish a temporary residence within her womb when she consented to the act that resulted in her becoming pregnant, he has the moral right (albeit not the legal right for the past 30 years in USmerica) to remain there.

The point of legality should be dropped worldwide to 20 weeks, beyond which it is MURDER to abort the unborn. If it occurs that a case of a 20 week old fetus is taken alive successfully, then the legal limit for abortion should be dropped to 18 weeks; and so on, until we have no survival possible whatsoever previous to that gestation period.

The issue is not "survival", the issue is "personhood". Is the child in her womb a person or not? Only the most calloused individual could deny that a fœtus is not human—he has his own, unique DNA, has the full potential to be an adult like his father or mother.

We often hear self-styled liberals claim that those who lack a voice, the weakest and most defenseless among us should be protected. Yet while there is no class who lack voice more than the unborn, there is no class more defenseless than they, it is these innocents who are forced to pay hte price of their mothers' and fathers' self-centeredness and egotism.

(BTW, the population who most vociferously support legal [and free] abortion is not women, it's men 19~35. They get a free ride when there are no consequences for their acts. it is they who insist on their partners' getting abortions even more than women who seek them for their own selfish reasons.)

There are legitimate reasons abortion should be available. Birth control is not among them. "Maternal" convenience is not among them. Poverty is not, nor are birth defects, child's sex, national policy, or social stigma.

Finally, no one should be forced at the point of the IRS bayonet to pay for an abortion. Those who want abortion to be available to the poor should pony up themselves, rather than robbing their neighbors to support their egotistical notions of fairness.

Lehi

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I'm a pragmatist. People are going to have abortions, legal or illegal. I would support making them illegal after the first trimester. If we really want to reduce the number of abortions and not just make ourselves feel good about taking a hard-line stance, we've got to improve our sex ed/birth control message and availability of contraceptives, including the morning after pill. Suppressing birth control and information about birth control will only lead to unwanted pregnancies, and unwanted pregnancies lead to abortion.

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People are going to have abortions, legal or illegal.

I believe it's only women who have abortions. We must recognize, however, that it it typically the father (or assumed father) who cajoles, or even forces, her to kill their child.

I would support making them illegal after the first trimester.

Why then? Three months is not the magic point at which a child starts being a person. That happens at the point when the blastocyst becomes an embryo, and perhaps earlier.

If we really want to reduce the number of abortions and not just make ourselves feel good about taking a hard-line stance, we've got to improve our sex ed/birth control message and availability of contraceptives, including the morning after pill.

Sex-ed has been an important feature of government-run, tax-funded (grtf, aka welfare) schools for the past 40 years and, if anything, abortions and unwanted pregnancies have risen (per capita) compared to earlier times when sex ed was a function of families. Sex-ed as a preventative is a miserable, abominable failure. (Of course, sex-ed, as a means to destroy families, one of the primary goals of grtf-welfare schools, is a stellar success. It depends on what you're measuring.)

Birth control fails. Well there is one method that has a 100% success rate: abstinence. All the others, from physical barriers to hormonal supplementation fail sometime, often as much as 50% of the time.

Suppressing birth control and information about birth control will only lead to unwanted pregnancies, and unwanted pregnancies lead to abortion.

Yet vastly increased availability of birth control (there was no birth control except condoms until the XX) has not reduced unwanted pregnancy, and probably has increased the failure to get pregnant among women who'd like to bear children but who used it in the past.

Lehi

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While a fetus may be a person in the genetic sense, to me, I do not grant it the same rights as the mother. It's not simply enough to have human DNA to become a person. Every cell in my body contains human DNA. Do I shiver at the thought of the holocaust of skin cells being shed from my body every day? Of course not. Arguing from potential is problematic in this way, and several others.

Furthermore, if members of the species Homo Erectus were still around today, I would not want to treat them the same as all other animals, especially if they were capable of the same emotions as I am (especially if they could learn my language). They would not have human DNA, but they would probably share enough characteristics to myself that I would want to grant them a right to life etc.

A developing fetus is not capable of human emotions yet, as it does not yet have the nervous system required. It has no language, and feels no pain. In this sense, I do not think we have to grant full human rights to a fetus based on appealing to personhood. Furthermore, newborn babies, and those with severe mental illness, are also not required to have all the full fledged rights of a person. When the child has autonomy, goals, wishes, desires, language, and the ability to relate to me: at that point it is a person. This doesn't mean murder of a child is okay if you no longer want to take care of them. It means that it is not okay for reasons other than personhood (it feels pain, adoption at that point is easy etc.)

I'm a biologist, and find the question of when life begins a giant red herring to the argument. Life began thousands of millions of years ago, and we are related to it by our DNA, linking us all together. To say your life began at conception doesn't make sense on a biological level (it happened much sooner than that), nor does it make sense on a spiritual level (RIGHT?!!).

To end my thoughts, I want to pose a question for those of religious belief, that think abortion is okay only in cases of rape/ the mothers life (I THINK this is the church's opinion). If the fetus is a person, and we are to respect it as such, then WHY would it be okay to abort it simply because of the manner in which it is being born? I can sort of understand the mothers life (self defence), but unless it is the child (which you are calling a person) that raped you, then how can you justify destroying it for something it did not commit! This seems contradictory.

As a final reminder, I am sure god has a plan for all the aborted fetuses anyways (after all, a large amount of conceptions end in miscarry... that is a lot of "natural abortions").

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Birth control fails. Well there is one method that has a 100% success rate: abstinence. All the others, from physical barriers to hormonal supplementation fail sometime, often as much as 50% of the time.

Tell that to Mary! In all seriousness, abstinence isn't always practical. Especially in countries where rape is common (and even if it isn't). Your chances of getting raped while practicing abstinence are probably higher than the chance of a surgical sterilization failing. In fact, I am going to look the numbers up later, but I bet the odds of getting raped while attending college, is greater than the odds of getting pregnant while under a modern hormonal birth control.

Also, there is something else with 100% success rate: abortion. There are many methods that are so close to 100%, that you need not worry about it.

I also would like to see a CFR from any medical study/ Peer reviewed journal that shows a contraceptive that fails 50% of the time. Even pulling out isn't that low. In fact, your chances of getting pregnant without birth control are probably less that 50%.

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I believe it's only women who have abortions. We must recognize, however, that it it typically the father (or assumed father) who cajoles, or even forces, her to kill their child.

Actually the typical abortion patient is an uwed mother whose boyfriend is long gone, in favor of keeping the child, or in favor aborting it (in about equal measure).

Why then? Three months is not the magic point at which a child starts being a person. That happens at the point when the blastocyst becomes an embryo, and perhaps earlier.

Ironic that you seem to have confidently identified the magic point where a blob of cells becomes a person.

Sex-ed has been an important feature of government-run, tax-funded (grtf, aka welfare) schools for the past 40 years and, if anything, abortions and unwanted pregnancies have risen (per capita) compared to earlier times when sex ed was a function of families. Sex-ed as a preventative is a miserable, abominable failure.

Now you are just spouting stupidity borne of your own wishful ignorance on the subject.

http://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/yrbs/trends.htm

http://www.womenshealthchannel.com/teen-pregnancy/sexeducation.shtml

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=4514004&page=1

Incidentally, abstinence-only education is an abysmal failure.

http://sexuality.about.com/od/saferse1/a/abstinenceonly.htm

(Of course, sex-ed, as a means to destroy families, one of the primary goals of grtf-welfare schools, is a stellar success. It depends on what you're measuring.)

So sex-ed destroys the future families of teens somehow?

Or does it cause the destruction of those teens current families in some indirect way?

I'm confused here.

Birth control fails. Well there is one method that has a 100% success rate: abstinence. All the others, from physical barriers to hormonal supplementation fail sometime, often as much as 50% of the time.

The ignorant assertions continue.

Most modern birth control methods have success rates in the high nineties - with less than a 1% chance of pregnancy with correct use.

Yet vastly increased availability of birth control (there was no birth control except condoms until the XX) has not reduced unwanted pregnancy

Absolutely and laughably false.

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Actually the greater the education about sex the less unintended pregnancies there are.

I'm sure you can back that up with statistics. (And let's not forget that "statistics" comes from the same root as "state".)

But I know, having lived as long as you, that there are far more unwanted pregnancies today than there were 50 years ago, before Sex-Ed was a required feature in every kindergarten class. Before birth control was freely available over-the-counter. And, there were far fewer abortions, per capita, than there were last year, when the federal government subsidized them, the Hyde amendment notwithstanding.

(We desperately need a decent table function here.)

Alan Guttmacher Institute Statistics (AGI)

Center for Disease Control Statistics (CDC)

YEAR AGI CDC

1973 744,600 615,831

1974 898,600 763,476

1975 1,034,200 854,853

1976 1,179,300 988,267

1977 1,316,700 1,079,430

1978 1,409,600 1,157,776

1979 1,497,700 1,251,921

1980 1,553,900 1,297,606

1981 1,577,300 1,300,760

1982 1,573,900 1,303,980

1983 1,575,000 1,268,987

1984 1,577,200 1,333,521

1985 1,588,600 1,328,570

1986 1,574,000 1,328,112

1987 1,559,100 1,353,671

1988 1,590,800 1,371,285

1989 1,566,900 1,396,658

1990 1,608,600 1,429,247

1991 1,556,500 1,388,937

1992 1,528,900 1,359,146

1993 1,495,000 1,330,414

1994 1,423,000 1,267,415

1995 1,359,400 1,210,883

1996 1,360,160 1,225,937

1997 1,335,000 1,186,039

1998 1,319,000 884,273*

1999 1,314,800 861,789*

2000 1,312,990 857,475 **

2001 1,291,000 853,485 **

2002 1,269,000 854,122 **

2003 1,250,000 848,163***

2004 1,222,100 839,226***

2005 1,206,200

2006-07 1,206,200 §

§ NRLC Base Figure

* excludes NH, CA AK, OK

** excludes NH, CA AK

*** excludes CA, NH, WV

Please note that these numbers are abortions only, and do not include ba$tard births. Today, the social stigma of being an unwed mother is essentially nil, so there is less reason to hide her immorality. If we add those children into the total, there is a whole lot more fornicatin' goin' on that was not when we were younger.

Lehi

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