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When you look at biology, a new individual is created the moment sex cells join. This new life, given the opportunity, will grow to be something as great as you or I. Why take away that potential when you yourself allowed the act to take place, inside you no less?

I refuse to call a child a consequence, and I respect the idea that people should be able to decide who can use their body. However, I'm going to challenge that from another angle. Why allow killing to happen because of this? I do not think that a human being (or potential one) should be killed or left to die because someone did not wish to give up their body. Yes, that does mean I support mandatory donation of blood, marrow, and nonvital organs when the individual in question will die otherwise. And likewise, one should be expected to live through her pregnancy because the fetus would otherwise die.

This should not change if this pregnancy was the result of a rape. Biologically speaking, there is no difference between a fetus concieved through rape and a fetus concieved through consentual sex. Besides, I am not here to punish women for consenting to sex like others have been known to do, but because I dislike the fact that a fetus would be killed out of one's refusal to contribute just as I would dislike the fact that little johnny would die of leukemia because his only known match refused to go through with the transplant.

In the event of an immediate life risk, it would have to depend on how far along the woman is. If this is before viability she should be able to abort to save her own life. It is far better to allow her to abort than to be legally responsible for both her death and the death of the fetus. If this is post-viability, there should be an induced labor or C-section procedure to save both of them. In this instance I oppose the Dilation & Extraction procedure.

In the event of fetal death or severe defect (to the point where the fetus would die soon after birth), She should be allowed to abort. If the fetus has died there is no reason to force her to stay pregnant. In the event of severe defect, there is no reason to force a woman to stay pregnant or a child to be brought into the world where its lifespan was guaranteed to run out before it could really experience the world. (I had the Harlequin fetus in mind as I thought of this)

Great may have been bad wording. What I meant was that given the opportunity the fetus will gorw to be a human being with equal importance and potential as other humans.

It doesn't seem right to criminalize a fertile sexually active woman because she might end up losing a fertilized egg. We can never tell if she does. If that egg never implants, she is never pregnant and it becomes a different issue form abortion. So I'll give on this and move fetal rights from conception to implantation.

I didn't think of that as I was typing, though I will say that pregnancies through rape are a small minority of all pregnancies, and therefore it is more common to see a woman become pregnant through consentual sex.

Those two are different. When a woman has sex she cannot stop the fertilized egg from implanting with her mind powers, while during a date she can (usually) stop him from having sex with her.

I don't consider it to be the same thing. During the times in the US where slaves were common, these slaves were not used to prolong the life of their masters but to save them a bunch of work around the huge plantations they bought. If you apply this analogy and that logic to pregnancy, it can be argued that the fetus is enslaved to the woman because she is killing it for her convenience just as the slave owners were killing slaves because they were unwanted.

Are you just speaking of your pregnancy situation now, or are you talking about all pregnancies? Because I have never heard of rape pregnancies resulting in brain damage for the baby 100% of the time.

You will be angered by my saying this, but I value a human life over another human's psychological well-being.

When the aforementioned brain damage leads to a lifespan too short to have make any contribution to society.

Even the disabled have been known to make great contributions to soceity. All I'm asking for is a chance. 3nodding

I did not know of any treatment for that disease. I will concede.

"Nature adapt to our lives"? What the hell are you talking about? I can't figure out what you're saying here, much less why you've completely and totally failed to address my point.

You said that life begins at implantation, even though I don't understand how an implanted zygote is a person but an unimplanted zygote mysteriously isn't. I pointed out how one can minimize the still-great risk of miscarriage of this person, which would be tantamount to criminalizing the women. Please address this point.



You've cited several reasons to be pro-life that you admitted weren't so great reasons when applied to rape victims, which to me says that you're devaluing them. Since you make no exception to rape victims, your arguements must be good for ALL pregnancies.



In short, one is not allowed to protect his or her body. When faced with imminent rape, assault, or death, it's extremely difficult to find a way to disable your attacker that has zero chance of killing him, especially for people of small stature such as over a billion of the planet's women. Since the risk of death is near-impossible to avoid, one must not use potentially lethal force at all, and simply allow onself to be raped, beaten or killed.

A blow to the head can break the neck and lacerate the forebrain. A blow to the nose can also lacerate the forebrain. In addition to driving bone shards into the brain from the broken nose, there is a bony spur on the inside of the skull between the orbitals that can tear the frontal lobe when the brain is struck from the front or rear. (This is the reason why virtually all boxers get Alzheimer's later in life.) Nonetheless, a blow to the head is the one of most effective ways to disable your opponent, since it usually results in stunning or unconsciousness.

Pepper spray is usually nonfatal for people without respiratory difficulties. However, there is no way to tell whether your attacker has asthma, which is on the rise in this era, particularly in cities. Pepper spraying an asthmatic could be lethal. Further, if your assailant falls into a compromised position after being pepper sprayed, especially if you used a large dose, he could suffocate.

A club, knife, or gun stands a high chance of severing or rupturing a major artery or organ. There is no way to use any of these methods with zero chance of death.

In short, for anyone who is not trained in judo and/or wrestling and has the bulk to subdue an opponent by sheer strength, there does not exist any method of self-defense which does not have the potential to be lethal, no matter how small. By your logic, people who are of diminuitive stature do not have the right to defend themselves from any form of assault.



Higher levels of corticotropin-releasing hormone causes more anxiety in normal environments and impaired spatial learning. Knockout mice missing the CRH receptor tend to be less anxious and recover faster, behaviorally and hormonally, from stress. Glucocorticoid activates the hypothalamus and hippocampus to replenish stress-depleted energy reserves and cease the stress response. Rats exposed to prenatal anxiety have lower levels of glucocorticoid receptors in the hippocampus. Behavioral studies of these rats show they are also more likely to self-administer cocaine and alcohol and suffer more severe withdrawal symptoms.



So you support the mandatory drugging of parents, now. One more step towards a fascist state.



What life lessons? And answer my question. Define contribution to society and what the heck that has to do with "life lessons." You don't need to BE trailer trash to know that it's not particularly a productive way to live.



Either you sidestepped my question and didn't answer it, in which case you need to do so, or you've just agreed in taking away the children of any mother who has worked during her pregnancy, driven a car in traffic during her pregnancy, or gotten mad during her pregnancy.

Combined with mandatory drugging, this is sounding more and more like 1984.



Medicine makes new advances every day. There wouldn't have been a chance to save the life of that Harlequin guy if he hadn't been born in the first place.



Nonetheless, you were willing to condemn a man to death because of your lack of knowledge on the topic. Says something, doesn't it?



You can't treat a disability unless you try, and you can't try unless you let these otherwise-doomed babies be born. You're drawing the line where medicine's ability to save critical disabilities stands now, with no flexibility for progress.

(Do try to calm down, Rei. I feel uncomfortable responding to you this way.)

The death of the unborn due to a miscarriage from doing daily routine would not be the mother’s fault. This is what I mean by nature adapting to our lives.

First of all, I never meant to say that life begins at implantation. Nor did I make any direct connection to bersonhood and being alive. Life starts at conception, rights should start at implantation.

Second, why does personhood currently begin at birth? What's the difference between a newborn and a fetus a minute away from labor?

I did.

Way to completely ignore what I originally said. I stated that it is not right to kill to defend your body unless your death was inevitable otherwise.

Sorry, this part confuses me.

This seems perfectly reasonable on my end considering death is avoided. The pro-choice side likes to argue that life can be ended simply because one does not want to host it. That’s worse in my eyes.

Excuse me, miss. My family has not been known to show up in the upper-middle class at times. Hell, I was a welfare baby at one point. But I (plus my mother before me) managed to grow up well-adjusted to the point where we are not considered menaces to society, clinically insane, or anything similar. I learned from her what every child should learn from their parents.

My parents weren’t perfect either, but they managed to take their mistakes and use them to show me to do better. They are doing the same with my brothers.

Now, your post seems to suggest that you assume the people who make major mistakes in their lives have only one “lesson” to teach, and that is to repeat those mistakes. Please reword or retract that claim.

C’mon Rei, this argument is starting to become as valid as an argument I would use to compare you to Hitler.

Yeah, it says that my knowledge of the subject told me that a child with that affliction would be doomed to die either way. Therefore, in my mind aborting a fetus with that affliction would be like aborting a fetus whose brain never developed. Am I a horrible hypocrite for that?

Medicines have been known to take years to completely develop. In a hypothetical situation, is there enough information to believe that this treatment will be ready for a fetus between the time that it is born and the time that it will die from its affliction?

Uh...I have a slight problem with a pro-choice member managing to trump someone who doesn't acyually think this way at all and being declared winner for it...

I only started playing DA because there were no volunteer lifers.

Would you like to start another showdown with Rei or someone else?

If anyone else is up for it, I'd love to play round two.