It's being discussed over here right now, the senate and lower chambers seem to have the votes to pass the law to allow it, but the president has already stated that he'll veto it, meaning that the General Assembly will have to reunite to lift the veto afterwards...

So, where do you stand? the popular arguments against it are that you're destroying a life, which is true, but some people argue that to what extent can it truly be considered human life... arguments for it are usually that a woman has the right to choose as its her body, people usually also say that if she chose to do that, then she must take the consequences and carry on with the pregnancy.

I'm pro legalisation of abortion, but let me clear it up; I'm not pro abortion, I'm pro legalisation of the abortion, which may seem similar but are most certainly not. Don't know what the situation is like in your countries, but the problem over here is that, despite being outlawed, people still do it! as everything else that's prohibited, people find the way around it, but the real problem is that the prohibition mostly just affects the poor people (at least, that is the case over here), let me explain why.
A rich/middle class woman has the complete freedom to find a private clinic and/or doctor that will do the procedure for whatever fee he chooses, I have no idea how much it could be. By having money you're free to do many things poor people cannot, this includes access to a decent clinic to have your abortion. When you're poor, you simply cannot choose and as a result a lot of women die as a result of bad practised abortion, poor hygiene as it's done in not the healthiest of the environments (i.e. a clinic of any kind). So the real issue over here is that being outlawed causes poor people not to have one option that people with money already have.

So, again, I'm not pro abortion (actually, only in specific cases, like in rape victims and such special circumstances), but I don't think it's fair for poor women to have to go through this; it can be argued that they should have taken the appropiate measures to prevent it in the first place, but things are like they are, years of economical disasters have taken the level of education to ridiculous levels on the less fortunate portion of the population and I believe they are simply ignorant on some very important health-issues and sex education (thing that is being dealt with now, if I'm not mistaken, sex ed planned to be implemented in schools and such).
So, by outlawing it, we're not preventing it or even discouraging it, we're just leaving people with less options with even less options and running great risks as a cause of it, is it fair?

I'm for the right to abortion in the first three months. No limit about the rape etc.. I simply think that it is very wrong to force a child into a family (if there is one to speak of) that is unwilling or unable to take care of it. An argument that it is possible to give it up for adoption degrades women into incubators.

And besides, there's too many people on Earth already.

I've just given up all hope.

The biggest and most vocal opponents of abortion is and always have been the religious fundamentalists. These are the self-same people who equate abortion with murder, who condemn everyone who supports it as murderers, who wholeheartedly believe that contraceptives actually force people to be promiscuous, who believe abstinence is the cure-all, who taboo the subject of sex to the point of making "Ignorance is bliss" a way of life.

I have had a conversation with a parent who not only believes the use of contraceptives to be exactly the same as the illegal use of drugs ("Should I also tell her about drugs and direct her to a crackhouse?" were his exact words), but has also made very sure his daughter knows allll about the dangers of sex, and only about the dangers of sex.

I have absolutely no doubt in my mind he'll blame me once she starts experimenting thanks to her absolute lack of education.

Yep, when things go bananas people blame it on the school. As if parents weren't a part of the education (or general upbringing) process at all.

I guess you can tell that my GF is a teacher, huh?

It's easier to kill 'em when they're young. Enough said.



Oh, if only it were true.

Well, FullAuto, these people do believe it to be true.

I very recently posted this matter on my online blog.

http://the-bobinater.livejournal.com/58499.html

I cover all the facts I could think of, including a great many that are not even remotely hinted at here. The end result is that I am still ponderous about abortion.

I will say this... When you take a stance on anti-abortion, it always makes so much more sense. Your opinion is clear-cut and leaves no room to fall back into itself. "Life is sacred"

The moment you say "pro-abortion" then your opinion demands a lot of definition. Is it wrong to take a life, at times, and other times it is okay? Where is the exact defining line where it is right to abort a child and where it is wrong? If it's okay to abort an unborn fetus, why is it wrong to kill a child once it is born?

Is it the woman's right to choose? If she did not want to get pregnant in the first place, she doesn't sound like she possesses the responsibility to make that kind of decision. Between that and the severe hormonal imbalances caused by pregnancy... Can she be trusted to make the right choice? Should the choice go to someone else, and if so, to whom? The father? The parents of the woman? The government?

To be pro-abortion demands a lot of answered criteria. The only way to truly define it simply, without thinking too hard, is to simply say it is okay to kill a human being so long as it is in the best interests of at least one other. Otherwise... Well.. You'd best have quite an explanation lined up

Humans have no qualms about ending "life", at least in it's most simplistic sense. The average Joe weeds his garden and swats flies before eating a steak. We each probably account for hundreds of dead things per day with the goods and services we use without a pang of guilt.

On the other hand, we dislike the thought of directly killing things. We're a lot less likely to eat mutton if we have to kill the sheep ourselves. However, once we start doing something we consider immoral, we soon change our mind about the ethics. A slaughter man doesn't much mind what happens to his animals.

The same thing applies when you're talking about killing people. We start of by de-humanising them, then we work our way up to killing regular folk. The most well known account of this was Nazi Germany, but genocide isn't really all that uncommon around the world even today.

Given our "variable" sense of ethics it's easy to understand why the issue of abortion is such a controversial one. It's all a question as to the repercussions of a given action, if there are no visible negative effects we tend to consider anything to be ok. And how does an unborn child fight back?

Of course, none of this has anything to do with whether abortion is right or not. It's just an observation about how people tend to look at matters concerning morality.