"Jeff North" <jnort...@yahoo.com.au> wrote

I could, and my answer will reveal that I am very troubled and ambivalent
about this issue. If I do, do you have your word that you will respond in
like fashion? I have somewhat of an aversion to "casting pearls before
swine" as it were..

Essentially, abortion is never "OK". If the mother's life is threatened then
it is far more than OK, it's necessary. In other circumstances, the choice
to have an abortion is varying degrees of troubling and regrettable. It's a
fact that we are morally obliged to face honestly, that an abortion takes a
human life. Some people in the pro-life movement can never accept that, I
can accept it, provided that we are honest about it. The reason I argue with
the pro-choicers is that for the most part they/you are refusing to be
honest about it. They want to facilitate it, make it normal, routine and OK,
when it should never be that, not to be consistent with the rest of our
moral values, not in the world I want to live in.

[..]

Everything will always occur, like people killing other people, so what?

Didn't you just leap to the conclusion that you have already arrived at?

You said above, "the woman should have the choice", "should" statements
imply moral reasoning. You didn't actually include any arguments per se to
support the conclusion, but you made a moral assertion nonetheless.

We can't have a "meaningful dialogue" if you continue to simply assert your
conclusion.

I use analogies where I feel they will illustrate a point. You used a
utilitarian socio-economic argument to justify abortion. I am saying that we
do not generally use utilitarian reasoning in moral calculations. If you
simply retreat to the position that abortion *requires no justification*,
then to be consistent you should never have attempted to make that argument
in the first place. I would not attempt to argue that abortion is not "a
good thing" from a strictly utilitarian perspective, but using criminals as
research subjects would be a "a good thing" from a strictly utilitarian
perspective also. If you then argue that prisoners are "human beings", then
you are begging the question and have come full circle in a circular
argument.

 [snip]

No child is born into ideal circumstances. Were you? I sure wasn't. My wife
wasn't, neither were my kids.

Any child can end up in such circumstances. If we are going to turn back
time, if a woman decides that she intends in advance that she will treat her
child that way, such a person should never have vaginal intercourse in the
first place, she should be having mutual blowjobs, which she probably
prefers anyway. Turning back time would be nice, but we need to look to the
future, what kind of a human race are we creating?

I don't follow.

I don't follow. Just because I don't buy into all the pro-choice bullshit
going around does not mean I am not in favour of choice.

That is only part of my comment. The lying, spinning and misrepresenting I
refer to is illustrated in a small way by the way you just carefully edited
my comment before copying it back to me. I favour choice BASED ON HONESTY.
It doesn't make it easier that way, but I am not primarily concerned with
easy. Difficult moral choices should be difficult. If we were at war I might
agree that we should dehumanize our enemy to make it easier to kill them,
that's the way soldiers have to think to make them effective. I don't agree
that we are at war with our own offspring.

Oh boy.. Almost without exception, every comment made by the pro-choice
advocates on this newgroup are designed specifically to misrepresent the
real nature of a fetus, to slander and dismiss anyone who appears to
challenge them, argue by definition, argue by utilitarian means. I am going
to compile all the bogus arguments I have seen here so far and put them in
one post. Stay tuned.