Australia gets progressive...
I read a story like this and I think to myself about how and why they chose 14 days as the limit. Think about it. It's completely arbitrary. Why not 15 days? Or 16? Or 20? Or 30? Or 100? Or how about 270 days? Wait, that's nine months. That would be barbaric!
Really, the only thing that changes is the look of the human after conception. Wouldn't want to allow embryos to be farmed at 15 days! Oh, no! That would be bad! Maybe even... murder! Wait, when does it become murder? After it's born? Or wait, maybe right before it's born... hmm... but nothing changes in the 10 minutes it takes to exit the womb... so it's gotta be before that. Well, 6 months it looks too baby-like, like an actual person, and it cries and squirms as it gets ripped apart during abortions... so maybe like 3 months, or 9 weeks... yeah, something like that. Let's go with 14 days, because it's really small then and doesn't have arms or a head yet. Sounds good. We can all be comfortable with that.
Oh, and bonus points for the DUMBEST GODDAMNED POST EVER by some retard that goes by the alias "BirdDoggy" on the Slashdot forums, commenting on this article, saying:
Really, the only thing that changes is the look of the human after conception. Wouldn't want to allow embryos to be farmed at 15 days! Oh, no! That would be bad! Maybe even... murder! Wait, when does it become murder? After it's born? Or wait, maybe right before it's born... hmm... but nothing changes in the 10 minutes it takes to exit the womb... so it's gotta be before that. Well, 6 months it looks too baby-like, like an actual person, and it cries and squirms as it gets ripped apart during abortions... so maybe like 3 months, or 9 weeks... yeah, something like that. Let's go with 14 days, because it's really small then and doesn't have arms or a head yet. Sounds good. We can all be comfortable with that.
Oh, and bonus points for the DUMBEST GODDAMNED POST EVER by some retard that goes by the alias "BirdDoggy" on the Slashdot forums, commenting on this article, saying:
Using the term embryo conveys a level of development not present at up to 14 days of development. At 14 days, we're talking about a blastocyst. Technically, it needs to be 3 weeks old before it can be considered an embryo.I swear, sometimes the level of pigheaded idiocy that people throw around makes me want to forget all about these issues. And if it weren't for the fact that the stakes are so high, believe me, I wouldn't even try to get involved in them.
Comments
No pressure.
But the really bad thing is that this can be abused: it is very common in cases where the mother is "at risk" for injury because of such a pregnancy, for the pregnancy to be ended before any such danger or harm to the mother actually materializes. This doesn't give the pregnancy a chance. With medical technology today, as far as I know, it's very easy to monitor pregnancies to the point where, supposing the embryo attached to the fallopian tube or in ectopic pregnancies, the mother's health can be adequately monitored to insure that she's not blindly walking into a deadly time-bomb situation where a problem could suddenly become obvious.
As far as rape and incest is concerned, I personally don't consider those to be valid reasons to end the life of the unborn kid.
First of all, if the person you're talking to agrees that, for example, a woman saying "eh, I just don't want a child, I'm going to abort it" is wrong, but they think that it's okay for cases of rape or incest, you should ask them why they think that it's wrong to casually get an abortion. Is it just because it's a yucky thing? Or is it because they think that it's unfair to the unborn kid?
I think that abortion can either come down on one side or another of murder: either it is murder, an unfair ending of a human life, or it's not murder, and it's just killing a little ball of cells. So when you're discussing about the point of rape and incest, you have to keep that in the discussion - that abortion is either the death of a full human being, or it's just the death of a ball of cells.
If they don't think that abortion constitutes the ending of a fully human life, then they really don't have a problem with any abortion at all in any deep and moral sense. At most, their feelings for why abortion shouldn't be used in most cases (for example, the example above of the woman that just doesn't feel like having a kid) are just due to abortion's general and obvious "yuck" factor, or maybe because abortions are expensive, or maybe because women that have abortions have a statistically higher rate of depression.
But, if they do think that abortion equals the destruction of a full human being, they have to accept that the destruction of that life happens in all cases of abortion, equally so in cases where the woman just doesn't feel like having a child AND cases where a woman is raped and impregnated with a child. In the case of injury to the mother, this killing is justified in self-defense. But in cases of rape and incest, the fact that the abortion still means the destruction of that fully-human person brings up the issue of: is it that child's fault that it was created by the rape or incest? We don't let the mother kill her rapist, why should she have the right to kill the baby that results, who is totally innocent of any crimes that its father committed.
Arguments like "the child will only cause the woman distress and unhappiness because they'll remind her of the rape" are really weak for two reasons: 1.) go ask a woman who has a child from a rape and ask her if she doesn't love her child or wishes that the child didn't exist... and 2.) for the sake of argument, even if you allow the argument that the woman will be sad and depressed by having a child that's the result of a rape or incest, that IS NOT sufficient grounds for killing someone. You can't kill someone because they make you feel bad in our society. Remember that the real issue is whether or not abortion equals the killing of a fully human person. If it is, then the mom's (alleged) sadness at having to carry the rape-child isn't sufficient reason to kill that child, her son or daughter. If abortion isn't the killing of a full human being, then yeah, there's no reason not to abort the child if it's from a rape or incest... but then that means you can abort children for whatever reason you feel like, including just "not feeling like having a kid."
Another argument that I've heard is that the child of rape or incest should be killed because it carries it's father's genes, and it's father was a rapist, so it's better not to let rapists and other hard criminals reproduce. This is pretty much an appeal to eugenics, and completely ignores the capacity of humans to learn and to be civilized. If you truly think that the kid carries genes that make it a menace, you're ultimately arguing that there are "violence genes" being carried in the human population, and that people carrying the wrong genes should either be themselves killed or forcefully sterilized so they can't pass along their inferior genes... this quickly gets really ugly.
There's also the fact that women are often destroyed psychologically after being raped. It's pretty much the most vulnerable and disgusting feeling if you listen to their stories and experiences. At the very least, this means that on top of reeling from one of the worst experiences of their life, they are being confronted suddenly and without warning with another truly monumental life event: pregnancy. These women need a lot of support and help and a new faith in humanity in the weeks after being raped... what they don't need is an abortion... (unless abortion isn't the killing of an innocent and fully human person, in which case abortion is just fine, after rape, or "just because." -- see, it always comes back to the question of "what abortion is" - either it's the unfair killing of a human being or it's not.)
So, most people who think that abortion is wrong in most cases, but permissable for rape and incest usually don't really understand the issue and the logic.