We live in a country full of double standards. Pro-Choice, yeah right. What suprises me is how many people support the womans right to murder a child while at the same time being completely against enforcing the death penalty on convicted murders. The only light I can see at the end of this tunnel is that every time the supreme court has to see an abortion case before it, abortion gets one step closer to being illegal. And when that happens and it will one day, then those that continue to have abortions can be tryed as the murders they are.

They call it double murder because some, myself included, believe life begins at conception. The Bible says God knew us when we were in our mother's womb. Apparently, this idea also has some traction in legal circles and thus you have double murder charges starting to take (they just started those in the last year or two, I think). Abortion is a personal choice,as is anything else. God still loves us, whatever we do. But if we do something we consider wrong, he calls it sin. We all get in to that and thus, there's disease and death in the world. But some day, all that will be over. I look forward to that day when death and sin is finally defeated. It's like the guy said when I showed him the end of the bible and told him it was an exciting ending. He said, yes, it's a great ending because we win!

Wow, this has such an Adam and Eve feel to it. We made Adam eat the apple, so we get punished for the rest of eternity. I'm glad some of you men take the femine power so literally, yes, you are correct, We women hold all the power in the world, now all you need to do is learn to RESPECT it. All will be placid in the world if you understood the divine power of a woman, let us handle things, and stop all your male posturing life would be great.

While we are at it, why don't we go on witch hunts again, why don't we do like China and cut to the chase and kill all the female babies that we don't deem necessary.

After reading this and the other thread instead of changing my mind about abortion, and my stance on choice, what all of the male anti-choice proponents have done is make me realize that you fear us. You fear women who have control of themselves. They have counceling for this. You should seek it.

For the women who are pro-life, I have yet to see any of them tearing down a woman with an oposing position. This only confirms my previous statement.

Men, I am sorry some woman has emasulated you, but you really should understand that you let that happen, and not take it out on all woman.

Well sir, I see according to your profile that you smoke. Did you know that if you father a child, it runs a much greater risk of spontaneous aborting? Are we to assume that your support of justice for an embryo would extend to the unborn being able to have the government sue you on their behalf for negligence that allowed harm to come it?

And if you did convict a woman of murder for having an abortion, do you favor the death penalty for her? Would you yourself like to throw the switch?

-Kerry O.

Guns and ammunition are about as responsible for the death rate as General Motors is for the people killed by drunken drivers, but that's fodder for another thread. The fact that wal mart wont sell the morning after pill makes it totally unavailable I am sure. My point was that there are precautions that can be taken to prevent pregnancy that are very effective all one has to do is use them.

People don't realize that sex has physical, mental, moral, and financial consequences until it's too late sometimes. If we tell our young people that and educate them about the consequences of any given action, they'll be more likely to go in the right directions, I think. Any Total Transformation Program or Love and Logic books (plus experience) will tell you stuff like that. Additionally, it's best to treat a woman with respect. Leads to a lot less regrets later. Love should always be a win-win situation. If it's win-lose or lose-lose, it's not a good relationship and it oughta be changed or scrapped. There's more than one fish in the sea, you know?

"Is Heaven Populated Chiefly by the Souls of Embryos?


Ronald Bailey | December 22, 2004

What are we to think about the fact that Nature (and for believers, Nature's God) profligately creates and destroys human embryos? John Opitz, a professor of pediatrics, human genetics, and obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Utah, testified before the President's Council on Bioethics that between 60 and 80 percent of all naturally conceived embryos are simply flushed out in women's normal menstrual flows unnoticed. This is not miscarriage we're talking about. The women and their husbands or partners never even know that conception has taken place; the embryos disappear from their wombs in their menstrual flows. In fact, according to Opitz, embryologists estimate that the rate of natural loss for embryos that have developed for seven days or more is 60 percent. The total rate of natural loss of human embryos increases to at least 80 percent if one counts from the moment of conception. About half of the embryos lost are abnormal, but half are not, and had they implanted they would probably have developed into healthy babies.

So millions of viable human embryos each year produced via normal conception fail to implant and never develop further. Does this mean America is suffering a veritable holocaust of innocent human life annihilated? Consider the claim made by right-to-life apologists like Robert George, a Princeton University professor of jurisprudence and a member of the President's Council on Bioethics, that every embryo is "already a human being." Does that mean that if we could detect such unimplanted embryos as they leave the womb, we would have a duty to rescue them and try to implant them anyway?

"If the embryo loss that accompanies natural procreation were the moral equivalent of infant death, then pregnancy would have to be regarded as a public health crisis of epidemic proportions: Alleviating natural embryo loss would be a more urgent moral cause than abortion, in vitro fertilization, and stem-cell research combined," declared Michael Sandel, a Harvard University government professor, also a member of the President's Council on Bioethics.

As far as I know, bioconservatives like Robert George do not advocate the rescue of naturally conceived unimplanted embryos. But why not? In right-to-life terms, normal unimplanted embryos are the moral equivalents of a 30-year-old mother of three children.

Of course, culturally we do not mourn the deaths of these millions of embryos as we would the death of a child—and reasonably so, because we do in fact know that these embryos are not people. Try this thought experiment. A fire breaks out in a fertility clinic and you have a choice: You can save a three-year-old child or a Petri dish containing 10 seven-day old embryos. Which do you choose to rescue?

Stepping onto dangerous theological ground, it seems that if human embryos consisting of one hundred cells or less are the moral equivalents of a normal adult, then religious believers must accept that such embryos share all of the attributes of a human being, including the possession of an immortal soul. So even if we generously exclude all of the naturally conceived abnormal embryos—presuming, for the sake of theological argument, that imperfections in their gene expression have somehow blocked the installation of a soul—that would still mean that perhaps 40 percent of all the residents of Heaven were never born, never developed brains, and never had thoughts, emotions, experiences, hopes, dreams, or desires.

Yet millions of intelligent people of good will maintain that seven-day-old embryos have the exact same moral standing as do readers of this column. Acting on this sincere belief, they are trying to block biomedical research on human embryonic stem cells that is desired by millions of their fellow citizens.

But there may be a way out of this politico-theological impasse. The President's Council on Bioethics held an extraordinarily interesting session earlier this month in which two different avenues for obtaining human embryonic stem cells were proposed, in ways that would skirt right-to-life moral objections.

First, Howard Zucker and Donald Landry, two medical professors at Columbia University, proposed "a new definition of death for the human organism, an organism in development, and that is the irreversible arrest of cell division." They pointed out that a good percentage of in-vitro fertilized (IVF) embryos consist of a mixture of cells, some containing the wrong number of chromosomes (aneuploidy), some with the normal number. Embryos with such cell mixtures often cease development by cell division and thus cannot develop into fetuses, much less babies. Zucker and Landry argue that such embryos can be considered dead, and the normal embryonic cells they contain can be harvested just as organs can be ethically harvested from brain-dead adults. (Animal experiments have already shown that cells harvested from defective embryos will produce normal tissues.) Thus, we get stem cells from an entity that could not, under any circumstances, have become a human being.

William Hurlbut, a consulting professor in the Program of Human Biology at Stanford University and another member of the President's Council on Bioethics, proposed another way to produce cloned human embryonic stem cells that right-to-lifers should not find morally objectionable. Hurlbut cited work by researcher Janet Rossant at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto in which she inactivated the cdx2 gene in mice. Once the cdx2 gene is inactivated, the mouse embryo cannot form a trophoblast—the tissues that grow into the placenta. However, embryonic stem cells do develop, although they cannot form an embryo. Hurlbut proposed an attempt to find similar genes that could be inactivated in the nuclei of adult human cells before they are installed in enucleated human eggs to produce cloned embryonic stem cells that are a genetic match for the person who donates the adult nucleus. (Transplanted cells and tissues produced by such therapeutic cloning would not be rejected by the donor's immune system.) Once the stem cells have been derived, the inactivated genes could be reactivated so that the stem cells could be used to produce normal transplantable cells and tissues.

"This process does not involve the creation of an embryo that is then altered to transform it into a non-embryonic entity," explained Hurlbut. "Rather the proposed genetic alteration is accomplished ab initio, the entity is brought into existence with a genetic structure insufficient to generate a human embryo."

Will this research reduce the number of embryos populating heaven? Who knows? But these options offer a possible way around the moral blockades that impede promising biomedical research on human embryonic stem cells. Should we halt current human embryonic stem-cell research while these possible new avenues of research are being explored? Absolutely not. That would be surrendering to the moral bullying of a minority that wants to halt promising medical research that could cure millions on theological grounds that many of their fellow citizens do not share."

First, let me say to you that while my ex was pregnant I didn't smoke, for the same reasons that you decide to outline. It does cause health risks to an unborn child. I, unlike these Pro-Choice or Abortion addvicates, took responsibility for MY actions and the possible risk to OUR son.

Second, If the laws on abortion are changed and it IS made illegal, than I WOULD be more than happy to throw the switch.
Woman as well as men have to take the responsibility for their actions. I've read comments about women not having control of a mans penis, this true. They do however have the same right as a man to say no, to keep their clothes on and their legs shut, or be willing to accept the responsibilities of their actions. To me it is no different than a man walking into a drug store and killing the clerk. We would expect that man to take responsiblity and punishment for his actions, would we not?

so you want to murder the murderer. Sounds great, I'm sure you are qualified to kill women.

I thnik you are missing the point, men should take responsibility, and alot of them do, and for that I commend them, but how sad is a statement that we commend men for taking responsibility for a pregnancy, but we rarely hear of people who commend a woman for doing the same thing, it is simply expected.

Instead we say things like "Oh she got pregnant, I hope she learns her lesson" What do we say about the man responsible? NOTHING. When the double standards stop, then we will be equal, so for now, unless you tatoo your name on the pregnant womans head and it says "I take full responsibility for my part in this" Don't concern yourself with how certain women choose to survive.

So instead of taking resonsibilities for my part in a pregnancy, I should instead, since it's none of my business, tell the woman that it's her problem deal with it?

I didn't tell you what you should or shouldn't do, that is YOUR choice, just as it is hers.

No, but the law does hold men accountable, not very well, this is true. But the woman shouldn't be ?

The woman is responsible, every single step of the way, if she chooses to abort, or if she chooses to keep it, and because a man can just quit his job and get a new one til they find him again for support some women raise children with no help whatso ever from the father. hence why it is her decision and not his.

I'm not saying that women don't abandon their children, but it is far easier for a man to do it, and much more common.

The women are held ultimately responsible that is why the option of abortion is available to them and it is legal.

The choice to abort is not a responsibility, it is an option out. With the current laws in most states if not all, it is a criminal offence for a man to run off and not pay child support.
In my state alone it is a manditory six month sentence to get behind on child support, and when the man is released he only has a certain amount of time to catch back up. I think they should get longer sentences, but then the mother would still be S.O.L. while he's doing time.

you don't think there are reprocusions to an abortion? There are alot, both mental and physical, worse than what any court in the land could impose.

In most circumstances the mother can decide if she wants the man prosecuted for non payment, so if he acted right and did what he was supposed to the entire time, she can decide to or not to send him to jail in most cases. If he had a child with a psycho crazy women that would put him in jail just becuase he lost his job or whatever, well it serves him right for having sex with someone who is unstable.

so you would throw the switch for a woman who got an abortion but you are pro life. talk about your double standards..this is why women go to sperm banks.

I find it interesting
that the same people
who would try a woman
for murder if she has
an abortion have no
problem sending a
19-year-old kid over
to Iraq to die.

Mental and physical reprocusions to an abortion. My ex aborted our first pregnancy at the request of her mother. To this day she has had no medical problems as a result, nor has she shown any remorse for the abortion. And yes we do talk all the time, in case your wondering. As far as child support goes it is the womans choice to bring it up in court, this is true. It is not her choice to prosecute him, that responsibility is taken by the state.