Evangelical Switch from Pro-choice to Anti-abortion

It's an inconvenience having children. It's also amazing, rewarding, expensive, heart breaking etc etc. But it's also an inconvience because it interferes with your life when you don't want it to. If you chose to abort a pregnancy because, say, you want to go to college or get on with your career you are chosing not to be inconvenienced by by a baby. Try not to be childish.

I really don't recommend testing that idea. Sure there is, if you drink drive you'll lose your licence. If you steal you'll be punished. If you murder you'll go to jail.

The word "inconvenience" generally implies a limited or small interference.
The use of a phrase such as "massive inconvenience" would therefore be an oxymoron.Your insistence on using a term that adds confusion to the scale on which the decision is being made says more about the motives for your argument then it does about any honest search for reality or truth attached to the situation.I've said my piece on this side-issue, your call on how you'd like to proceed.

I said you would quibble about what 'inconvenience' meant. The majority reasons people give for aborting their baby are ones of lifestyle - people simply don't want the baby at that particular time because it interferes with what they had planned. I call that an inconvenience you can call it what you like, the fact is they are choosing their planned life over their baby's life. That's up to you.

Did you deliberately pick a bad example? Drunk driving laws vary widely from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, just like abortion laws. There is no universal agreement.

So what? Any place you go the law there is absolute and real.

Interesting to know. Who has it about right? The US, where each state brews their own abortion laws within the Supreme Court framework? The UK, whose abortion laws I'm unfamiliar but which unless there's some remarkable coincidence are not the same as the US? The EU? Saudi Arabia? Iran?I'm pretty sure it's the same as religions, where since they can't all be right they must all be wrong. So why isn't it the women's choice? Should it become publicly known that a woman is seeking an abortion in a country where it is illegal, should she be locked up until she gives birth? Yes, what about those rights? Do they override the woman's rights? Can the father force the mother to give birth? When does life begin? I am not, as you might have guessed, asserting anything. I asked you a question, the same question I've asked you many times. When does life begin?So are you saying that life begins before birth? When, precisely? I am not, as you might have guessed, asserting anything. Are you saying that life begins at the moment the fetus's heart begins to beat and brain begins to function? Terminate and abort are synonyms, kill is not. Believe what you like, I still think what I do and what I've described here.And you ignored the main gist of what I said, despite quoting all of it: abortion isn't really possible at this point, so continuing to include it in your "scenario" doesn't make sense. Okay, so possibly because you do recognize that abortion at this point makes no sense, you're going with the kill scenario. Is the fetus alive at this point? Despite that you won't answer this question, everything you say points to you believing that the fetus is alive just before birth. If you are correct then that means it *can* be killed (as opposed to things which are not alive and so cannot be killed), and killing it would be murder. If you are correct that the fetus is alive, then since it would be murder the woman cannot purposefully kill the fetus without committing a capital offense. The thought hadn't occurred to me. That such a silly possibility concerns you tells me you're really not listening to me. For me it really really really really does come down to when life begins. Start believing that I believe that, because until you do you're going to continue to just be flat out bewildered and stupefied. I do not, as you might have guessed, know when life begins.In a more general sense you are correct. I do not trust my feelings to inform my knowledge. I rely upon facts for that. Just as I could not be in favor of vaccination laws without facts, I cannot be in favor of abortion laws without facts.You keep insisting you know my thinking, so let me comment a bit about your own. You think that because you haven't been able draw an admission that life begins at conception that you'll go around the back door and attempt to draw an admission that certainly life has already begun by the time birth is imminent. Once you obtain that admission you'll push for earlier and earlier admissions of when life began until you reach conception. And you're somehow going to do this based upon how you feel. We can probably only agree that there is subjectivity in our laws. We probably will never agree that that's a good thing. "Harms another"? As in another living human being who has experienced birth? How is this relevant? And aren't these hypotheticals much too vague? Is the theft of some unnamed thing that could be anything from a stick of gum to a cure for cancer worse than rape? Who could know? Is stealing from a pensioner worse than stealing from a bank? Got me. Was the pensioner tricked out of his entire retirement by an Internet scammer, while the bank just lost a few hundred from a teller's window? Was a gun involved? Etc. Yeah, I was already pretty sure you felt that way. This is the language of pro-lifers, and you also seem to be sliding a bit toward their type of tactics (painting gross images like skewering the fetus with a knitting needle). You're trying to persuade by arousing emotional reactions in people. I think the issue is better discussed if kept dispassionate and focused on facts and what we know. Good to know where you stand. No, of course it isn't. So 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? But how should women feel about the law's right to say what they should do with their bodies? Should there be such a a law? I wasn't involved in any policy, not the current one or any predecessor. It seems to me essential to making laws regarding abortion to know when life begins. If you're doing what you feel is right does that makes it okay?--Percy

And different. Don't lose the plot here. We're talking about when a fetus becomes human and when terminating it constitutes "harm". There is no universal agreement on that. There isn't. There really isn't. Even you should be able to see that right here in this very thread.

Percy.
I'm going to ignore most of your reply because it's all been done several times. And I'm bored with it. I'll pick out a couple of points. I don't think life begins at conception and I've never said that life begins at conception. Moreover, even if I did think that life begins at conception I've said that it would be irrelevant to the debate.Ok? Weird how we can discuss this for so long and you can be as wrong as this. Which you'll now say is all my fault... Of course the foetus is alive the moment before birth - how could it not be. Is it dead? Does it only come alive after birth? What an insane question.My question is not a real scenario, it's a moral thought experiment, like the trolley problems - it's intended to unpick this dilemma. If you allow the woman to skewer the baby the moment before birth because you believe it to be the woman's choice, why do you not allow it a moment after? What has changed? It's a big moment, on one-side is death on the other is life. Why has the moral imperative changed? Not I, we. The collective, majority opinion. We try to do what's right given what we know and feel when forced to make a decision/policy. That's all we can do.

Yes, obviously. Here's the link again in case anyone wants to see the full table: Reasons U.S. Women Have Abortions: Quantitative and Qualitative PerspectivesThe text used a form of the word "interfere" 16 times, including in a couple of the items in the table. Forms of the word "dramatic" only appeared 5 times. Draw what conclusions you will. You never stop worrying about your kids. Sure, that's the reality after the fact, but how many women view it that way or think it through in detail beforehand? All surveys have this quality. Not unaware, but not really thinking about that in any detail. I don't think all women contemplating abortion view it as "a very important decision." I think there's a great deal of variety in how women feel about it. I think many parents enter parenthood from a very naive standpoint. I know we did. We felt we wouldn't let parenting affect our lifestyle, and for a while we were right. We were young with plenty of energy, and taking care of a baby was easy. My son, our first child, went to the US Open (tennis, Flushing Meadow in Queens) when he was one month old (mostly slept). He went to the movies when he was five months old (slept). But as he grew older the demands of parenting gradually increased and our naivet slowly melted away. By the time he left home we were totally exhausted.What I'm trying to say is that before you're a parent you don't have a very good understanding of the time and effort required by parenting. It's all unknown and hypothetical.--Percy

I thought you said you were done two or three days ago - I was surprised when you kept going. Sorry I'm boring you. But you did call it things like a "potential human life" and a "potential human being", and you called conception the definitive event, and then you called aborting it a harm when harms only apply to actual human beings. Are you sure you're not hiding your true feelings, maybe even from yourself?Maybe inside you believe abortion is wrong but that it's impractical to ban it. So you rationalize that though it's a harm (a wrong) it's one we feel guilty about, and as long as we feel guilty we can keep doing it. I would only fault you for telling me how wrong I am and then not providing the correct information. If my surmise is wrong then explain where you were going with trying so determinedly to extract an admission that killing a fetus just before imminent birth is a harm? Weren't you just going to extend that harm, in gradually diminishing amounts, back along your continuum to conception?Sorry if I'm wrong, but it seems a natural conclusion. You were arguing forward from conception, and I didn't find that persuasive. Then you suddenly began arguing about birth, and I naturally assumed you had decided to start at the opposite end from conception and argue backward from there. Yes, I know it's a possibility you have difficulty entertaining. There's a familiar feel to this, to be discussing with someone who simply declares things so while calling other people's inquiries insane. Because after birth it is a living human being. Before birth I don't know. There's a significant problem with this. Part of it lies outside the scope of this discussion, so as briefly as possible, the laws of a region don't necessarily reflect "collective, majority opinion." If you're watching the primaries here in the US then you understand that, and if you're not then I'll just say that only a small and usually more extreme subset of voters tend to vote in primaries, and it isn't an unfrequent occurrence for the candidates in the main election to represent the fringe elements of their respective parties. This is the choice Republican voters faced with Trump in 2016 - Trump didn't represent anything resembling the mainstream of the party, but the only alternative was a Democrat, so most voted for Trump.I think you experience the same thing on your side of the pond when coalition governments become necessary and small parties have a disproportionate sway over governance.These issues with representative government mean that our laws are only inconsistently representative of the "collective, majority opinion." Some pretty horrible things have been done by supposedly representative governments that, by the laws they instituted, were perfectly legal.--Percy

Nope, I'm saying what I feel and what is known. Conception is a definitive point and is the start of potential human life. As such there is a harm involved in interfering with its development. That harm increases from the negligible to the most extreme. No again. I believe abortion is a wrong full stop. But it is a justifiable wrong up to a point. It's always a harm but the harm is on a continuum from almost none - the IUD - to murder. - killing a baby just before birth. Close. But not quite correct. It's a wrong but it's a necessary wrong that we have to live with. But we should always know that there's a harm here. And yet you still can't explain why a baby is not alive a moment before birth but alive a moment after. Why not? Exactly what information are you lacking? You know that if the baby is removed from the woman it will be what you call 'alive'. You seem to know what alive is but not what 'dead' is. It's binary you know. Yeh, it's called the human condition. Like I've tried to say, it's not mathematics. Nevertheless, we have to deal with it. Of course, it's an imperfect system. but it's what we've got until we improve it. By and large we get the will of the people and our institutions reflect our feelings. Hence Texas, hence guns. Hence Sweden publishes it's citizen's tax returns but your president doesn't. The American culture is what it is - generally right wing, strangely religious and conservative religious at that, fearing liberalism still dreaming of the frontier and individualism. Not all want that but just at the moment that's where you are and your wackier laws reflect it. Of course, but I've lost your plot.

Maybe you missed it the first time I corrected you, so I'll say it again - an IUD prevents fertilization, it does not prevent a fertilized egg from implanting, it does not cause abortions.I find it somewhat amusing watching several men discuss women's reproductive decisions. Keep on.

The original IUDs prevented implantation. The modern ones now contain progestin which prevents fertisation or copper which has a similar effect. Neither do that perfectly but the IUD also has the original affect of irritating the womb lining and preventing implantation of a ferilised egg.Do you wish to split hairs further or do you have a material point to make? I'm glad to hear you're entertained.Did the woman become pregnant on her own? Has no one else got a stake in the game? No guarantees.

Not splitting hairs, I just think you should be using the correct information regarding IUDs. If you could show me medical literature describing this "irritating the womb lining and preventing implantation of a ferilised (sic) egg" scenario I'd be enlightened.