Evangelical Switch from Pro-choice to Anti-abortion

If you were a voter your position would indeed be relevant.

No Phat, I am a voter and still what I think personally is and should be irrelevant to the question of abortion.

I suspect that the answer is that it as representative as are all of your anecdotes.

Because that's what society does - it makes policy to protect it's citizens. We have decided that we need to protect the rights of the unborn as well as the born. And why should it be? A mother can not kill her baby when it is outside her body why should she be able to when it is within her? The question that you and Jar refuse to answer is critical. What is different about the baby immediately before birth that would give the mother the right to kill it? How about we abandon the semantics and think about the principles.If you believe that it's the woman's choice what happens to her baby while it's within her does she have the right to, let's say terminate, her pregnancy right up to the moment of birth? If not, why not? Yes as I've said repeatedly, it's the feelings of people that form our laws. We collectively feel that theft is wrong so we punish it. These are moral issues that have non-objective groundings. We collectively feel that it is wrong to kill a baby just before birth so our laws prohibit it. Your feelings may be different and Jar pretends his are but I doubt they are actually much different. But if they are very different we take the views of the majority as best we can given the way our institutions are structured.

I think this short excerpt from Reasons U.S. Women Have Abortions: Quantitative and Qualitative Perspectives indicates that back in 2004 inconvenience was one of the reasons women cited, though the study doesn't use that specific term:

quote:

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Thirty-eight percent indicated that having a baby would interfere with their education, and the same proportion said it would interfere with their employment.

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If you look at Table 2, the top four items seem to fall into the category of inconvenience: While I'm male so I guess you could argue my feelings are irrelevant, my own reaction was that it would be inconvenient.I think it could also be argued that inconvenient is the wrong term, that it minimizes the impact of an unwanted child. Life-shattering might be more accurate.--Percy

Remember the child.If a child really is unwanted, if a parent really is unable or unwilling to properly raise the child but never does anything so egregious as to warrant removing the child from that situation, does society have any responsibility for creating the situation in the first place?Mother always liked YOU best!

Can the unborn be considered citizens if they have no birth certificate?Which unborn should society protect? Zygotes? Blastocysts? Embryos? Fetuses?Or answering the same question again but based on time instead of state: After 1 week? 5 weeks? 10 weeks? 20 weeks? 30 weeks? 40 weeks?Or answering the same question again but based on developmental characteristics: At conception? When there's a ball of cells? At implantation? When there's a head? When there's a heart? When there's a heartbeat? When there are fingernails? When it begins moving? Isn't the answer obvious? Need anything really be said? When is it alive? You can only kill what is alive. Jar and I *have* answered the question many times (we don't know), you just refuse to accept it. You are the one refusing to provide an answer. Let me prove that you're not answering the question once again: When does life begin? The proof will be you lack of answer in your response. Whether the fetus is alive before birth is not a semantic question. Stop avoiding the question. Phrasing the question a bit differently and a bit more directly, is the fetus alive before birth? I'd like to answer your question, I really would, but in practical terms I don't see how it's possible to terminate a pregnancy just prior to the moment of birth. Let's say the woman is 10 cm dilated and the crown of the head is visible, likely just a very few more pushes are necessary, but suddenly the woman announces, "I'd like to terminate." How would that work exactly? That's a rhetorical question. I'm just trying to clear about why I don't see how terminating a pregnancy just before birth is possible. I won't argue about the degree to which feelings govern our current laws, but will just say that we should strive for objectivity as opposed to subjectivity in our laws. Uh, I think a strong argument can be made that theft is objectively wrong. But there are plenty of laws that are subjective and therefore are themselves wrong. No fishing for solo women in Montana. No drinking in Lynchburg, Tennessee. Yes, I just provided a couple examples. You keep switching back and forth from one message to the next between killing versus aborting the baby. Those are not the same thing, so which one are you arguing? If the law of the land were that men must be circumcised by age 12, how would men feel about the law's right to say what they should do with their bodies? Should there be such a a law?In the same way, if the law of the land said that women have no say about terminating their pregnancy after some point that society chooses, how should women feel about the law's right to say what they should do with their bodies? Should there be such a law? Maybe there should, but then society has to answer the question: When does life begin?--Percy

Both our societies have decided that the unborn child has rights. I agree with that. I think we have it about right now. No. Obviously not. How about the rights of the father? How about the rights of the unborn child? Are you saying that a baby moments before birth is not alive? The opposite of alive is dead, are you saying that the baby that has a beating heart a functioning brain and in 1 minutes time will be deserving of a birth certificate is dead then miraculously becomes alive? I do not believe that you think that it would be ok for a mother to terminate/abort/kill her unborn baby just before birth. If a woman stuck a knitting needle through her cervix and skewered her baby moments before it was born you could not be philosophically neutral about it - could you? Could you say that it's a woman's choice to do that? Please don't reply that in this circumstance the woman is likely to be mentally ill. I'm trying to establish that you do know, it's just that you can't trust your feelings about it. The law is a combination of subjective and objective. We feel bad about both rape and murder but rank murder worse. Punishment is arranged in ladders of increasing harm. It's a rational system based on feelings. Feelings are real too and can, if necessary be measured objectively. And how would we know? The test is whether it harms another. How much is the harm? Is it worse than rape? Is stealing from a pensioner worse than stealing from a bank? I think killing an unborn baby moments before it is born one of the worse crimes a person could commit, you can't decide whether it's a crime at all. Yes I know. The reason is that abortion is a euphemism for killing. Let's quit messing about, the termination of a foetus kills it. Cells are alive, cells can be killed. Whether we call that 'life' as in an independent, living organism or not, what we're doing is killing the developing foetus. Is a foreskin the equivalent of a human foetus? That was the case for many years. In the end society decided that it was less harmful to allow regulated abortion. That seems a reasonable outcome. It wasn't necessary to answer that question when introducing the current policy was it? Or rather, we decided to fluff the question and say that termination could be allowed at 12 weeks which was the point that medics decided they could keep a baby alive outside the woman. We don't need an answer to your question to do what we feel is right.

Thanks for proving my point. The reasons for having any abortion are complicated. No, they are not. You are simply choosing to see them that way.
That choice shows your agenda against the reality that woman in such a position is facing.You are mistaking the ease of fact-display for an ease of real-life-situation.Can you imagine the size of the article if it went and asked each woman and described their situations individually?Again - do you deny that having a child is a life-changing event that goes on for 20+ years?
How can you honestly imply that choosing against a 20+ year life-changing event is equivalent to avoiding "an inconvenience?"If you're going to label the reasons any woman has for getting an abortion as not wanting to deal with an inconvenience - you are heavily implying that you think having a baby is barely life-altering at all.If you don't want to search for the truth of this matter - feel free to keep a vice-grip on your opinions against the facts.
You can't have it both ways.

How does any of this show that this person considered the children an inconvenience?It seems to me she's dealing with reality.
She seems to understand that having a child is a 20+ year, life-changing commitment.She can have more time to spend with her husband, her friends, her social life, her hobbies.
Or she can have much less time and money for those things and spend most of her time taking care of a child or the next 20+ years.Yeah, you can say the baby is "inconvenient" in the sense that being jailed for a crime you didn't commit is also "inconvenient."

How so?
Notice how the numbers don't add up to 100%.Obviously this is a tally where each woman entered multiple answers.Over three-quarters agree that their lives would be "dramatically changed" (well, duh...) and you think they consider it "an inconvenience?"Again, it's a simply question:Do you agree that taking care of a child is a 20+ year, life-changing commitment?If yes - then obviously the child is more than an "inconvenience."Is it wrong that a 20+year, life-changing commitment will "interfere with education" or a job or other children you're already committed to?
The people who took the survey did not choose to write the survey.
They did not choose the words to report in the final tally, either.But the only way an abortion can be decided on because the baby is an "inconvenience" is if the woman is unaware that a child is a 20+ year, life-changing commitment.
Otherwise, it's a very important decision and some people simply value their time and resources more in what they have planned rather than an un-planned 20+ year, life-changing commitment.
That's really not very difficult to understand.Find one woman who thinks raising a child "takes up no time at all" or "hardly any additional effort required" or "barely noticeable" and I'll agree with you.
Without that - you're merely taking a tally which has been condensed in order to provide the factual information, and mistaking that "simple form" for women thinking children are "simple things." That jump is very unrealistic.

They're not normally complicated, but I'm sure they can be very difficult. Yes they are You are simply choosing not to see them that way. Actually it goes on for life. It's a massive inconvenience. I can do that very easily when I read the reasons given for it. 'Interferes with study, career, husband etc. Nope You've been shown the facts. Feel free to avoid the conclusion that many if not most women chose abortion because it would interfere with the way they want their life to be at the moment.

"Massive" inconvenience now? That's what I'm saying.
I thought you were saying it was a "simple" inconvenience.Thank-you for agreeing with the point I was trying to make.

The issue is who decides. The medical staff need to decide what can be done and the woman needs to decide what should be done without interference from every Tom, Dick and Harry who has an opinion.

There is no such thing as "the" law. It varies. There is nothing absolute about it.