Im glad the hard truth is funny to you.
Truth is stranger, and usually funnier, than fiction.
Did we really have to resort to the Hitler analogy?
It's inevitable.
Godwin's law
So asjssl
Are you for or against capital punishment?
Would you support requiring sterilization as a condition for murder (abortion)?
Would you support sterilization of the father as a condition for murder (abortion)?
Are you even capable of acknowledging abortion is murder?
That's the epitome of the religious right, the insatiable need to tell other people what they can and cannot do, what they can and cannot think, and how they can and cannot live their lives, not to mention the redefining of accepted terms. Like it or don't, you have to allow for free will.
On the flip side we have the epitome of the liberal left with this:
I DO NOT have a problem with taxpayer funded abortions..
...where someone can be so fast and loose and free with
Other People's Money. You spend your money how you want, and leave mine alone, thank you very much. Having me pay for someone else's wants and perceived needs (like condoms and birth control pills) is bad enough, but having me pay for someone else's abortion is an absolute stark outrage.
The problem is the redefining of terms. Many people, the religious right in particular, want to just chuck the dictionary of human history and understanding and redefine terms as they see fit, so that they fit their beliefs and agenda. They want to redefine
fetus and
zygote to mean the same thing as
child,
baby,
infant or person. They want to dismiss the very real difference between
conceived and
born, be it a baby or an idea, and make
conceived and
unborn indistinguishable from
born, despite the Bible itself making such a distinction. As the Supreme Courted once noted, at this point in the development of man's knowledge, with those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology being unable to arrive at any consensus on the question of whether personhood begins at conception, birth, or at some point in between, don't for a minute think you have the singular knowledge to know for sure one way or the other, 'cause you don't.
If your morality believes that abortion is murder, then clearly you should not engage in abortion. If your morality insists that those who engage in abortion are guilty of committing murder, then that same morality dictates that
you must either do everything in your power, including physical confrontation, to prevent such murder, or failing that,
you must mete out justice by punishing those who engage in such murder. You cannot have it both ways.
But there is a difference between what is illegal and in what someone's moral interpretation of what it wrong. Society at large determines what is and is not legal, of what is right and wrong, regardless of an individual's morality. Often the two are the same, but often they are not. Abortion itself has been wrong, and illegal, for only a very small percentage of civilized human society. Those who thing it's wrong now and has always been wrong need to take a close look at why more than 2000 years of Christianity said is was perfectly fine, and less than 100 years of it said abortion was wrong. What makes you so special that you are able to recognize something as being morally wrong that 2000 years of Christianity failed to see? That's a tougher question than you think it is.
The fact is, unless or until people are perfect, they need to get off their high horse and quit telling others how to think, live and act beyond the legal and moral standards of society. The only person who should make a decision about having a baby or getting an abortion is the one who is pregnant, with the only exception that being the limited weighted contribution by the one who got her that way. The reality is, it's very difficult to conceive and carry to term a child. The vast majority of pregnancies are aborted pregnancies (miscarriage, if it makes you feel better, but an abortion is nothing more than an induced miscarriage) without the mother even knowing she's pregnant. Knowing how difficult it is to just conceive, one shouldn't be so hasty to get an abortion, I think.
Did you know that in the US during the decade of the 1930s, licensed physicians performed an estimate 800,000 abortions annually. That was when the population was 122 million. We now have 311 million, or thereabouts, and the number of abortions are actually on the decline. In 2008, in a population of 300 million, approximately 1.21 million abortions were performs, down from an estimated 1.29 million in 2002, 1.31 million in 2000 and 1.36 million in 1996. From 1973 through 2008, nearly 50 million legal abortions have occurred in the U.S. For the same period, the number worldwide is 1,260,000,000 (1.26
billion) abortions performed.
In areas of high Islamic faith, like the Middle East and North African, abortion is either outright forbidden or heavily restricted to the point where you can count on one hand how many are performed annually. Even in the case of the health of the mother, these Islamic regions will generally simply let the mother and the unborn child die rather than abort the pregnancy. It's Allah's will. Sounds familiar.
Incidentally, in Nazi Germany, if the mother was of German stock, an abortion under any circumstance was specifically and strictly prohibited. Abortions for the "hereditarily ill" were readily available, however.
Abortions, as disgusting as they may be, are a part of humanity, and likely have been since people first made the connection with a growing belly and popping one out of the oven. It can be traced back in writing to 2700 BC, where it's been widely performed since at least that time.
