Abortion

You're combining what I said with Yoshii's quote. I never said it wasn't the government's problem. Unlike abortion, education and food stamps are necessary. People are in jail because they have to, not because they want to.

Abortion should be a state issue and should only be funded by the individual. You want an abortion, you pay for it.

I'm not really a forum person and I apologize for combining something unintentionally.

@BornToLose

Thank you, I honestly don't care how and what happened that resulted in anyone being pregnant. It's a slippery slope; should we look into every detail of her personal life to see whether abortion should be allowed for her or not? Or at least you're making an argument from personal preference; personally, I despise Abortion but I believe there are better ways to deal with the issue rather from a religious standpoint. The subject of Abortion gets treated in the same way as Homosexuality.

There are four general arguments on abortions

Pro-life arguments

First is the religious which we're all familiar with so I won't bother.

Second is that conception is life. Those people tend to be pro-life Atheists who think we have rights and that a zygote is no different than an infant as Embryo, zygote, teenager, adult, etc are all just stages of a Homo Sapien's life cycle. This is pretty much what FPOD's argument was based on.

Pro-choice

"My body, my right" which is the point of view of most feminists who believe that (depending who you ask) have the right to abort all the way up until the infant passes the birth canal. This is Neko-hime and I guess Gizgal.

"Middle of the road" which is pretty much sams point of view. Abortion under specific circumstances involving rape, incest or health.

This

This really hit home with me. I myself was a 'surprise'child, and my Fatther just skipped town after he caught wind that my Mother was pregnant. I am truely greatful to her that she decided to keep me rather than just go with aboution. Hell, I never even met the woman. I just live with my Aunt.

Still, no matter what the reason is, I still firmly against abortion.
As most of you people know, humans are zoon politicon, creatures that can't survive alone. Let's say that someone gets raped, and gets pregnant. It's not like the baby she bears will be thankful is she just aborted that innocent unborn creature. In time like this, the function of humans known as zoon politicon will be needed the most. Why don't the people around her support her, both mentally, physically, and/or financially, instead of feigning ignorance, acting like it's none of their business.
You may say "Why should I help" or "None of business, so fuck off", but think, if this really do happen, abortion won't be needed, and we can save more life, right? However, I don't think that this method can work well in most western countries, as they were just bunch of individualistic people who won't act on things that wouldn't profit them. What a miserable society.

Either way abortions shouldn't be supported by taxes like all other medical expenses.

You forget the whole "maybe said woman who is raped/unable to( or uninterested in) support(ing) a child" doesn't want to go through with carrying a being inside her for just under a year.
And then being responsible for it for at least 18 more years.
At the LEAST.

Because said family sometimes does not have the financial capabilities to support the woman who was raped or is uninterested in having another mouth to feed. Most young women who are pregnant so young barely have their lives together let alone having to raise a child.
I'm not too sure if you realise the cost of raising a child from 0 to [legal] adulthood.

Edit: Taxes shouldn't be used to support abortion but for those who are pro-life you should open your wallets and help those women you denied the ability of have abortions who now have to raise a child at the ripe age of 18.

Pro-life people aren't denying anyone an abortion. It is impossible to stop people from having abortions, and any attempt to deny abortions would result in people resorting to illegal, dangerous abortions.

It's not the responsibility of the pro-life people to deal with the child. People need to be responsible for their own decisions. Rape is not their own decision, so they don't have to be responsible for the child. An unexpected health problem that would cause the birth to fail is not their decision, so they don't have to be responsible. In all other cases (which is the majority of abortions), The couple needs to be responsible for their own decisions, not the pro-life people.

Personal responsibility is something that some people will never a knowledge. I don't know why, even when I was pro-choice I never understood it.

(This is me being on topic, so please reread the actual topic) To exempt one party from the law is wrong. If pro-life don't have to pay taxes on abortion, then no one should and vice versa. To levee unfair fair taxes is unconstitutional based on the fact that we are equal, regardless of our morals. I don't agree with us being in a war right now because the war is fought over money, should I be exempt from paying taxes?

i am adamantly pro choice. A woman has the right to her own body, pregnant or no.

I think something people don't seem to be understanding is that just because you're pro choice, that doesn't mean you're going, "Woo hoo! Abortion! Let's do it!" It means you respect the right a woman has to her body, despite your own personal disagreement with what she's doing with it.

It's not that pro-life people don't understand that. The problem is that pro-life people also believe that the child has the right to his/her own body. It's all about when we perceive life to begin and when should constitutional rights apply. The constitution has no definition as to when life begins, so it is really hard to solve this kind of problem. If you look at it scientifically, life already exists in the sperm and eggs but that life does not get constitutional rights. At what point should the constitution apply if the constitution itself does not say? You could say that the child at birth is when life begins, but why? Because before that, it is not fully formed? That is just another way of saying that it hasn't grown enough. The constitution still applies to people that are in the process of growing, so why is it any different in this circumstance? I've never understood the reasoning behind saying that life begins at birth.

In my opinion, life begins at conception. That is when the process of growth begins. After meiosis when the sperm/egg is created, there is no more growth for those cells. Only when the egg is fertilized by the sperm is there a continuation of growth. It is that initiation of growth that I believe defines the beginning of a humans life.

I believe life starts at the third trimester. That's when babies begin to feel pain and the like, it's when they become sentient, it's when they show all the different signs of life that we recognize .Heartbeat included. There really is no justification that life begins at conception. The fertilized cell is completely unfeeling, nonsentient, and is far less than a bacterial cell in DNA information.

I already gave the logical justification as to when life begins. Life already exists within the sperm and egg. Those cells are scientifically proven to be alive. They do not grown anymore until the egg is fertilized and that is when growth begins again. Feeling pain is not a factor at all when determining if something is alive or not, and neither is a heartbeat or sentience. There really is no justification that those are factors in determining if life exists.

Now I believe that a person exists once the growth process begins again. You seem to believe that a person exists once sentience exists. I see that as a flawed view since sentience is merely a product of the growth process. That and there are people with mental issues so severe as to where they could almost be considered to be without sentience and yet, they still have constitutional rights.

Your justification is just as arbitrary BigLundi's.

The quality you use to define a person - life - is not unique to the zygote. The cells of skin you normally shed during the day are also alive. It also shares your DNA. Bacteria and animals are also alive yet the former are usually only thought of as pests, while animals are routinely slaughtered. For the heck of it, I could point out that some researchers consider even virii a form of life.

All the rights you quote are a property of a person. Therefore the whole question of "when does life begin" is inappropriate. The question should be, when does a fetus become a person?

The answer would be very much an arbitrary one, but at least it's clear it's such an arbitrary decision, whereas questions over life are waxing biological fact with personal belief or faith if you will in metaphysics.

This is an ethical question.

Biology can't be used as a scalpel to cut the Gordian not. It won't have answer for you. If will tell you when a cellular organism comes to exist, when its various functions develop and finally when it will have the capacity for thought and feelings.

When you ascribe natural rights to that organism is a tricky thing, but if you ascribe it at the moment of conception, you also ascribe such rights to all the myriads of zygotes that never manage to embed in the womb. You also ascribe it to all the zygotes routinely destroyed in artificial insemination.

Even if you ascribe these rights only to zygotes embedded in the womb, if you put in clauses for rape, the safety of the mother, then you still - even if unconsciously though - accept that it does not yet have the full range of rights a person does.

Imagine if we were talking about a breathing, living new born and were debating whether to kill it, because it was born as a result of rape? Even pro-choice people would find the idea repugnant, yet the fact that you'd allow for that to happen to a zygote in case of rape shows that even you don't believe that a zygote is a person yet.

I know someone who was 10 years old at that time and she was raped (and pregnant) by his own grandfather, but she was still willing to bear the children, saying "The baby has done nothing wrong".
Nuff said

...and I know a guy who was willing to have a nail driven into his penis. Another one was willing to drink battery acid. An individuals choice to do something carries no weight toward mandating the behavior for everyone else.

I think you seem to be misinterpreting his definition of life or whatever he was talking about. He specifically did say that the cells in sperm and egg are living "scientifically." However the point he made was that the growth element is what separates everything. Quite frankly the skin on your army isn't going to turn into a person without some massively cool science going on.
His determining factor is as far as I interpreted, the inevitability that the cells will become a human being. A sperm will not grow to be a person without an egg, an egg without a sperm will not grow to be a person, but combined they will inevitably grow to be a person (without complications or abortings or whatnot).
Well anyways that's what I think was his main point? Hopefully I didn't misrepresent him.

Regardless I agree with the science is rather irrelevant thinking here. Honestly I don't necessarily get why people debate over where life begins because they're really just trying to attach an arbitrary definition of life onto a situation when "life" is, in a way, a concept we made up ourselves, I guess is the way I want to put it. In a way people realize that, I think, and I'm making a weird point on semantics I suppose, but the point is that I don't get why people are so concerned about natural rights and whether something is granted them and when.

The bottom line to me seems to be more, things aren't perfect either way, but is snuffing out the potential of one life set in motion (yet not developed) justified to minimize the damage on another.
Also it seems like the topic is actually quite often fluctuating between a general abortion debate and the initial idea of the thread, about whether tax money should be used for abortions, which to me actually seems to be more just a question of to what extent should the government support people in health issues, which brings a wider girth of factors and questions of responsibilities of separate entities.

To quickly address this specific section of the argument, people constantly are commenting about how someone who got pregnant took risks and shouldn't have done that if they didn't want to accept the repercussions. But that could also be applied to other areas like maybe poor people or other things that the government covers, and it seems unfair for one very common small chance mistake to ruin a person's life. Then again that is often how the world works and it isn't really fair, so basically should the government help in this aspect?

That's all off the top of my head, in any case.