many people can come to the conclusion life starts at conception without being religious. Are those people allowed to attempt to criminalize abortion ViLSE? I mean you can't claim they are attempting to impose their religion in that case.

This position of "don't impose your religion on me" taken by anti-life people always confuses me. They act like much of our criminal code is not just a representation of the moral views of the majority of society. Some people get to their moral views via religion, others through other means...

I agree people should not attempt to impose religious beliefs on others. But to me, not imposing one's religion to me means not attempting to impose the RELIGIOUS doctrine of one's faith on others. For example, the laws banning the sale of alcohol on Sundays basically b/c that is supposed to be a holy day would fall under this type of category. Imposing one's MORAL doctrine on others is just how this country works.

Marriage is one big compromise right? SO is living in a country with millions of different people and opinions. The public discourse is how we come to agree on a set of laws that we can all most agree upon...

BobbyATA, you have a valid point in parts but by that same reasoning wanking off should be counted as mass-murder and somehow it isnt. By my moral reasoning it is the womans choice what she does with her own body, it is not my business nor anyone elses to tell her what to do, she can keep her pregnancy or not as she please. This seems far more reasonable to me, then if the woman is religious she can of course keep every conception all the way through to a baby if thats what she belives to be the case. BUT if you dont agree with that then that should be your choice. Its simple really and that seems the more moral standpoint to me.

If you have the idea that women should not be allowed to decide about their own body for some other reason than a strictly religious view then I would equally say that this should not be imposed on those that do not agree. If you have a valid argument though you are perfectly allowed to raise your concern, you are allowed to have your own view but forcing it upon another person that do not agree should not be allowed without a valid reason.

Most the time these strange ideas do come from religion and specifically the abortion and womens rights is just a good example of what I was trying to highlight. As you say there are others such as the Marriage act that is currently debated as well where religious right do not want gay people the right to marry same as everyone else. Again when you ask why this is the case the end argument seem to keep coming back to the bible and other such nonsense.

Morality most certainly does not come from a 2000 year old book. And as you say living in a country with millions of people from all sorts of religious beliefs and cultures just means that we have to be MORE SECULAR so that noone elses culture or belief comes and tramples on you as well. I want to protect your right to be a christian just as much as I want to protect my own right as an atheist or my friend that is a muslim.

BobbyATA - was that an intended troll attempt? There is no such thing as "anti-life".... Except maybe for mass-murderers...

You referring to "wankers" now Atryn? ;-)

It's called payback. Religion has done it for years while Atheists are finally stepping up.

Atryn, my position is now labelled as anti-women by many (perhaps not in this thread). I have chosen to fight fire with fire in this case and label what used to be called pro-choice as anti-life.

IS it childish of me and unproductive? Probably, especially when it gives you a chance to whine about that instead of address any of the substantive points I made. But hey, I did it so deal with it!

"Women should be allowed to decide about their own body." is another crazy thing that gets thrown around in these debates all the time. As if drug laws, underage drinking laws, laws against doctor assisted suicide and so on don't already regulate people's and hence women's bodies.

And all of these are in cases where the activity doesn't KILL another human life. The idea that the government shouldn't regulate what a person does with one's body is a defensible one. But my guess is most people who oppose abortion in part because "a woman has the right to control her own body" support a number of other laws that restrict the women's right to do what she wants with her own body.

BobbyATA - the main reason I didn't address your more substantive points is that we are wandering even further off course and an abortion debate is a much larger one I didn't want to get into right now. I expressed my openness to that being a subject for public debate, not that I wanted to engage in that debae at the moment. ViLSE seems up for it though. ;)

Closer to the original topic --

I had the opportunity to attend TEDxPeachtree live last year. One of the talks there just made it to greater fame on TED's main site!!! It is titled "morality without religion", I believe:

http://www.ted.com/..._animals_have_morals.html

Why is it a "crazy thing" to say that women should be allowed to decide things about their OWN body?

Please explain that to me, I am very interested to hear your reasoning.

Please note that with your reasoning you can say with exactly the same logic that you are not allowed as a man to ejaculate and you have no right to decide where you put your sperm or you potential ruin your sperms chances to live. But perhaps you are ok with some politician to decide when you can use your willy?
Or is it that your argument only goes one way?

Because it is not just HER body we are talking about. If the fetus has active neurons it's two people, not one.

It's crazy for the reasons I already explained. Namely, we already have many rules which restrict what a woman can do with her body (or a male with his body).

I'm personally opposed to a ban on masturbation, and so is probably 99% of the country and that is why it won't happen. Not b/c we haven't established a governmental right to legislate over what one can or can't do with one's body.

Excuse me but what is INSIDE a womans body is actually HER body.
Same as whats in your body is yours.

Your argument doesnt float mate, come up with a better one?

That may be your opinion but it's a stupid one. Which is why late term abortions are ilegal. Picking a point at which they are considered two different people may be somewhat arbitrary, but picking birth is stupid. They are two wholly different human beings with different DNA, different brains etc... so no that baby is not actually HER body.

it's the united atheist alliance vs the alliance of united atheists!!

Regarding abortion some good reading is Micheal Chriton's book "A case of need". I'm not gonna get sucked into the debate other than to say that you cannot cram "morality" down peoples throats. Prohibition is a perfect example of that. I would argue that "the war on drugs" and abortion are other examples.

what the hell are you guys talking about?

The religious right is not being accused of being anti-women at the moment due to their stance against abortion. It is because of their stance against birth control and having birth control covered under health insurance plans.

that too..

not true H4. The anti-women rhetoric is now used to describe the conservative position on almost all women's issues, not just birth control, by those on the left. And hey, I can't really blame them for this strategy given the recent polling numbers for Obama/Romney among women.

http://newsok.com/...women/article/feed/370172
""Romney's positions are the most radically anti-women of any candidate in a generation," Obama campaign manager Jim Messina wrote last night in a fundraising email

http://thinkprogress.org/...men-surrogates/?mobile=nc

These were literally the first two stories to come up on google news for me. Need I go on or have I proven your ignorance?

If I were Obama's campaign manager Id probably pull the same tactic, about 50% of the population are women after all and if you can get them all voting for the Democrats then theyll likely win the election bigtime (of course I realize thats not very likely to happen but worth a shot). American politics is sure interesting to watch from afar, but it does scare me somewhat how backwards striving the republicans are, putting one of those loonies in charge of the biggest army in the world is not a good idea in my opinion.

Peronally Id say the republicans are very much anti-women but I see this as an outsider and a lot of things the republicans do in America are very much anti-lots-of-things and are generally considered to be total lunatics by most people over here in Europe. :-)
As a European and a Swede on top of that I would most likely be counted as both a communist and a very leftwing liberal if put in the US, in fact even the right wing in Sweden would probably count as leftwing liberals in the US...
All of that of course makes it good fun for arguments here!

Oh and ORKIN:

Nearly all abortions take place in the first trimester (88% of them in fact!), when a fetus cannot exist independent of the mother. As it is attached by the placenta and umbilical cord, its health is dependent on her health, and cannot be regarded as a separate entity as it cannot exist outside her womb.

The concept of personhood is different from the concept of human life. Human life occurs at conception, but fertilized eggs used for in vitro fertilization (IVF) are also human lives and those not implanted are routinely thrown away. Is this murder, and if not, then how is abortion murder?

Again, your arguments doesnt float. Care to come up with some other ones?

+1

martian: Cramming morality down people's throats like abolition of slavery?

i have to go to work, but i look forward to commenting, vilse and atryn :)

(ps, no arguing, only discussion!)

No worries braden, Ill be around checking the posts on occasion when Im feeling bored. :)

If we all didnt have different opinions of things it would be really boring wouldnt it?

Shhhhhhhhh ViLSE... damnit, if everyone around the world keeps telling our Republicans that people in their country think US Republicans are crazy... How the @#%!# will we ever get them to leave??? ;)

OY! Keep your lunatics in your own country please! We definitely dont want them over here! :-)

Hmmm, I wonder if there is anywhere on the planet where they would be welcome? I was thinking about suggesting the North pole or something but theyd probably just start drilling for oil everywhere and build another huge army with the money...

Of course it can be regarded as a seperate entity. It has entirely different DNA/blood/brainwaves. Part of the biology of the umbelical cord is that it allows transfer of nutrient between incompatible blood types with different immune systems etc... Do you regard conjoined twins as one person? Moreover the argument that it is dependent on her to survive is fallacious. It's dependent on her to survive for quite some time after birth as well. They are two different people and as with anything else in society it is certainly my business to stick up for the defenseless aka the baby. You would think moral atheists would agree with me on this considering they don't believe in souls, once a baby has a biologically functional brain it's a new human being and has rights.

Huh????

babies can't feed themselves Atryn. If you take a baby home from the hospital and don't feed it you are charged with murder. It is a good point TheOrkinMan makes...

Orkin, pleave have a look at this picture:
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/medical/IM04046

That is the picture of a baby growing at the very end of the first trimester (remember that 88% of all abortions happen in this time period).

You have the start of a brain and only just barely a heart that is able to pump blood around. This is not even near to being a person of its own yet no matter how you twist and turn your arguments. Measuring something as "alive" just as soon as a brain has started developing is simply ridiculous.

The end of the first trimester is at 3 months. Not 4-6 weeks which is what that picture depicts. Here's what the baby actually looks like at 12 weeks, the end of the first trimester:

http://3dpregnancy.parentsconnect.com/...ar/12-weeks-pregnant.html

Yes apologies, the picture I took seemed to be "in the first trimester" rather than at the "end of" as I said. So my bad on that. The rest of the argument still stands though just you had a better picture. :-)

Do we really have to have this debate in a thread about religious leaders that come to lose their faith? Must we really track every smelly dead fish dragged across the trail of original intent?
~heavy sigh~

I am 100% in favor of preventing as many abortions as possible. In my idea of a perfect world there would be zero abortions because there wouldn't be any unwanted pregnancies and never would a woman's healthy life be threatened by pregnancy.

But we don't live in that perfect world, and since i was born with male reproductive organs i will never have to face the prospect of an unwanted or dangerous pregnancy taking place within my body.
I am pro-choice not because i celebrate abortion, but because it is a personal choice for the woman that finds herself pregnant.

I do not practice ownership of other people.

Having been called 'pro-abortion' in the past, i can only ask (plead?) that those that would label me with that disingenuous term look at the reality of the world in which we live. Examine your own priorities. Your own preconceived ideas.

Search for the cognitive dissonance within.

Life begins at conception? Aside from the magical notion that a deity injects a 'soul' into the just-fertilized egg, so what?
Identical twins occur when the zygote splits into two about 12 days after conception. Does that mean the soul splits as well?

If you are arguing that the zygote has _potential_ for human life, well so does a living sperm cell, and living ovum. Should a woman make funeral arrangements in each month she does not conceive? Should every nocturnal emission be treated as a crime against humanity?

It is, IMHO, an intellectually dishonest argument. Yeah i know i keep using that term in this thread, but DAMN there's a lot of ignorance wrapped up in these stances.

Where are the anti-abortion people after the unwanted child is born? Are you busy voting to de-fund health care for that child? Are you in favor of de-funding education to save a few $$ on your tax bill?
Are you blaming the mother for not having enough food on the table, and asking the State for help? Are you protesting government-backed programs that provide birth control?

Are you mindlessly chanting 'drill baby drill' because we have to find more oil to support our ever-expanding energy hungry population?

Do you support the death penalty?
Do you cheer when you read that a supposed terrorist is killed by a remote-control missile, and the collateral damage mentioned in the article doesn't register in your mind as innocent men, women, children, and yes unborn children being killed via your tax dollars?

If you are willing to accept all that, yet rail against a woman's right to choose what she does with her body when she finds herself facing an unwanted or dangerous pregnancy, then you are not really pro-life.

You are, to some degree and either through willful ignorance or with purposeful intent, a misogynist. You don't really care about human life. You care about power to make decisions for others.

Maybe that mindset explains why 'Thou Shalt Not Own Another Human Being' never made it into the ten commandments.

I call bullfluff on the previous post. No one is talking about zygotes or embryos. I'm talking about a baby with its own brain. Once it is firing it's own neurons it is NOT just the woman's body anymore. If anything it is the women who are playing the control freaksin this argument by saying they have an inherent right to kill someone else for no other reason then they feel like it. I realize most women who have abortionsdont think that way but to codify it as an absolute right to kill no matter what is insane.

cyref I want you to know I find your post offensive and not worthy of a reply.

I classify myself as Agnostic Christian.

The community we have started loves being able to question everything and understanding our definitions/understandings of God are probably wrong.

Its part of what draws them..

not only do the article you posted not prove my ignorance Bobby, but they prove my point. I think you need to give them a second read, because although they do go into details about some other anti-women stances that the republican party has, they both place disproportionate focus on the insurance coverance issue.

Secondly, it was in fact the insurance coverage issue that launched the whole debate. In conclusion: I'm not wrong!

Maybe my "huh" needed further clarification. A baby, after birth, is NOT dependent on "her" (the mother) to survive.

H4 I know this is the internet, but c'mon man admit you were wrong...

and I'm not denying the anti-women stuff began around the time Sandra Fluke/birth control was blowing up. It just worked so well that Dems decided to run with it and call all repub positions anti-women when possible.

Then you come along and tell me that I'm an idiot for saying that the pro-life stance is called anti-women by some. I link to an article where an Obama staffer calls Romney anti-women, and the first reason listed is his pro-life stance, and then you claim this article proves your point.

I mean HELLO???

well that's just peculiar! At some point, the conversation just stops, huh? okBye



But your criteria does include zygotes and embryos.

Wall Of Text explains:

Brain development begins with the formation and closure of the neural tube, the earliest nervous tissue that looks like a fat earthworm stretched out along the entire back of the embryo. The neural tube forms from the neural plate, which begins forming about sixteen days after conception. This plate lengthens and starts folding up, forming a groove at around eighteen days, which then begins fusing shut into a tube around twenty-two days post-conception. By 27 days, the tube is fully closed and has begun its transformation into the brain and spinal cord of the embryo.

Generally speaking, the central nervous system (which is composed of the brain and the spinal cord) matures in a sequence from "tail" to head. In the fifth week after conception, the first synapses begin forming in a fetus's spinal cord. By the sixth week, these early neural connections permit the first fetal movements--spontaneous arches and curls of the whole body--that researchers can detect through ultrasound imaging.
These abilities are controlled by the brainstem, which sits above the spinal cord but below the higher, more recently-evolved cerebral cortex. The brainstem is responsible for many of our body's most vital functions--heart rate, breathing, and blood pressure. It is largely mature by the end of the second trimester, which is when babies first become able to survive outside the womb.

Last of all to mature is the cerebral cortex, which is responsible for most of what we think of as mental life--conscious experience, voluntary actions, thinking, remembering, and feeling. It has only begun to function around the time gestation comes to an end. Premature babies show very basic electrical activity in the primary sensory regions of the cerebral cortex--those areas that perceive touch, vision, and hearing--as well as in primary motor regions of the cerebral cortex. In the last trimester, fetuses are capable of simple forms of learning, like habituating (decreasing their startle response) to a repeated auditory stimulus, such as a loud clap just outside the mother's abdomen. Late-term fetuses also seem to learn about the sensory qualities of the womb, since several studies have shown that newborn babies respond to familiar odors (such as their own amniotic fluid) and sounds (such as a maternal heartbeat or their own mother's voice).

In spite of these rather sophisticated abilities, babies enter the world with a still-primitive cerebral cortex, and it is the gradual maturation of this complex part of the brain that explains much of their emotional and cognitive maturation in the first few years of life.

Now the question is, if your criteria is "firing it's own neurons" do you mean the neural capacity equivalent to jerking a frog's leg in a science lab? Certainly you are not including the first ~month of pregnancy, prior to the closure of the neural tube?

And in re: to the contraception issue Melinda Gates recently gave a thoughtful presentation on TEDtalks
http://youtu.be/2BOTS9GAjc4

"Now the question is, if your criteria is "firing it's own neurons" do you mean the neural capacity equivalent to jerking a frog's leg in a science lab? Certainly you are not including the first ~month of pregnancy, prior to the closure of the neural tube?"

That's exactly what I'm saying. If you dont have an abortion by 6 weeks then as far as I'm concerned unless keeping the baby would kill you or permenantly maim you then it should be tough fluff. You should have had it aborted before it became a human being. (By the way I am NOT talking about zygotes/embryos. By 6 weeks it has been a fetus for a while and is not an embryo or zygote.

cyref: Thanks for the link to Melinda's talk. I had heard it mentioned elsewhere but today I had the time to watch it all the way through. It is certainly eye-opening to hear some of the statistics about hundreds of thousands of women who die in childbirth or whose children die in the first month of life when all of that death could have been avoided.

I also note that her conversation was explicitly NOT about abortion, so let's not confuse her message with the rest of the debate on this thread. That was one thing she noted had caused confusion already. The birth control / contraception conversation should not be confused or intermingled with the abortion conversation.

This thread, along with religion, is chock full of stupid.

That was an intelligent comment...

Thanks! I figured I might as well bring something intelligent to the conversation because you sure as fluff wont find anything intelligent in a religious discussion :)

One side of the argument tends to try and use intelligence and reason, the other side prefers magic. :)

Those are harsh comments guys:)

I do understand people are reacting against fundamnetalists/evangelicals who have gotten the majority of the press the last 30-50 yrs....

BUt tehre are pro eveolution/agnostic/very open minded, intelligent oriented Christians out there....and there are people looking for that.

Its a minority right now, but there's a new type of Christianity emerging that fits within these confines...and people who tend to be anti christian, are finding these new wave of christians acceptable:)

Just because people think differently than you doesn't mean you should trash talk what their beliefs are. I don't have issues with people who are different than me but I do have HUGE issues with ignorant people such as yourselves!

I don't have to agree with your guys' beliefs or lack thereof on faith, but I HAVE fought like hell for your right to believe whatever you want!

Good, it's okay you don't agree with my opinion.

Also, thank you for fighting for my right to believe that religion has done more harm than good for mankind and that it's a bunch a fairytale bullfluff that, in my opinion, only the weak and feeble minded need :)

Calm down, Flanders :)