Evangelical Switch from Pro-choice to Anti-abortion

The point is that you're not thinking of it as a human life. That's just rhetoric. You're actually think of it as second class.It's like saying something is "valuable" but not being willing to pay for it.I'll remind you again that I am not in favour of abortion. But you have to understand the implications of your own position before you can go declaring to everybody else what is "moral".

Ever hear of equality? Should we go back to treating women as second class? Black people? People who follow the "wrong" religion? Maybe we should measure humanity on a scale of 1 to 10.We've been trying to improve our idea of equality (except for the Trump supporters who are already perfect). Now you want to go backward? Moral issues are muddy. You're best off keeping your own morality in your own pants.

The unborn child doesn't have legal status as a human being because it isn't considered a human being. Human being is an either/or proposition. Either it's human or it isn't. There's no "human enough to not be terminated" but "not human enough to punish the person who terminates it". But you're not arguing that it's a human life. You're arguing that it's kinda sorta like a human life.

And yet we do. The Bible did. Our law does. Evangelical Christians did until recently. Even you don't actually want to treat it as a human being.That's the topic. You can argue otherwise until the cows come home but unless you change your ideas about how to protect it, how to deal with the "crime" of terminating it, you're not really saying anything.

Humanity is something that develops. Hopefully, we are all becoming more human. It is not certain when the process begins.Our legal system decides arbitrarily when certain aspects of humanity kick in. The right to life generally begins at birth. It can be revoked if you commit a crime or happen to be born in an enemy nation.

The evidence you've given is that even you don't believe the fetus is fully human.Rhetoric can say that "all men are created equal" but as long as some are held as slaves, it is clear that that is not the real belief. And rhetoric can say that the fetus is fully human but that is not the real belief unless you advocate treating it like a fully human being - and you don't.

I'm not putting words in your mouth. I' m pointing out what the words mean. You're just parroting rhetoric without any understanding of the implications.The fact is that nobody considers the fetus fully human. That's the point of the topic.I'm saying that you don't consider the fetus fully human - despite your unthinking rhetoric - because you don't propose to give the fetus the same protection that we give to humans. You apparently want abortion to be illegal but you don't want to deal with the perpetrators - i.e. the women. You are at least humane enough to agree that they should not be punished - but what you refuse to think about is the implication that that diminishes the humanity of the fetus. Try pulling your head out of the right-wing phrasebook for once and think about what you're saying.

Then stop doing it. Instead of just blathering the same old rhetoric that we've been hearing from your crowd for decades, blow the dust off your brain and think through your own position for a change.

But it's a continuum with a finite beginning, isn't it? The real question is when does it begin to be harm? At birth? In the second trimester? At conception? When the grandmother met the grandfather?

Exactly. So "harm" is a term that doesn't have much meaning. One woman might think it's "harm" and another woman in the same situation might not think it's harm.

I meant, of course, that the way you are using the word in this thread, it has no meaning. But on the subject of abortion there is no consensus about harm. The only consensus is that the decision should be an individual one. And if a psychopath sees harm in abortion, that doesn't mean there is harm either.

You're using it as if there was a clear difference between "harm" and "no harm" when there clearly isn't. But there's no consensus in our laws. They vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. The date being semi-arbitrary is the whole point. It's what makes the whole issue fuzzy.

The timeline you are trying to construct is both phoney and absurd. There is no exact "moment of birth", so talking about tenths of a second is just stupid.

This is not rocket science. Before conception, there is no fetus to terminate. After conception, there are different legalities in different jurisdictions. Just about all jurisdictions set the latest allowable time for termination at birth. In a given jurisdiction, the individuals involved make their decision within the legal restrictions or not.There are no absolutes, no absolute time when it is "harm" or not, no absolute time when it is permissible or not.

You don't seem to understand the "harm" angle. That's what I'm saying to you: Neither you nor anybody else can just declare that there's no difference. Neither you nor anybody else can claim that there's a particular time when it becomes "wrong".