First off, why can't politicians write a bill using plain, easy to understand English? I know many are lawyers but geesh!
This is an attempt to bypass "Roe" by referring to an "unborn child" and I can see someone taking this as permission to murder abortion providers...dangerous and unnecessary legislation.

I think the classification of first weeks abortions as "murder" is beyond absurd, and purely inflammatory.

And yes, our government forcing women to bear babies is beyond controlling - it's illegal under our system of constitutional law.

The potential for a new "life" obviously begins at conception (although I think that is a moot point, as the egg is alive, the sperm is alive, the live sperm fertilizes the live egg which simply begins the process that leads to cell division and differentiation) The single-celled fertilized zygote is never dead and inert (and neither can dead eggs be successfully fertilized) - although differentiation can certainly be readily arrested.

IMO a bunch of cells with the beginnings of primitive neural tube formation is not "a baby", and it's death is certainly not "murder". A fetus doesn't even have all major organs necessary for life until about 2 months of gestation.

The question, for me, is when can that life be sustained independently (with medical support) from the mother's body.

it's your opinion, but not a fact, that abortion is 'murder'. many disagree. some say life begins at conception, others say no. seeing as how roe v wade has existed for as long as it has, i'm not figuring that will change. there've been opportunities over the years for the supreme court to overturn the law; it hasn't happened. i doubt it ever will.
and i'd say many who support the ability to choose do so because they don't want people minding their business, and feel the same towards others.
and yes, prevention is all well and good, but not foolproof. no doubt you saw my story above about a woman on birth control who is now 7 weeks pregnant. they warn you when you have procedures done that it's not 100 % guaranteed. a few years ago a woman i ran into told me that, surprise, she was pregnant five years after a tubal. now, what did she do that was irresponsible? nothing.

Not to split hairs -- if the government decides that abortion is no longer to be legal, that's seems to be different than actively "forcing" someone to have a baby. Abortion is the active termination and disposal of what is (or would be, depending on your point of view) another person. But since abortion, which is relatively new in terms of human history (less than 100 years as an officially defined procedure), is the active measure, the disallowment of it is not an active measure.

The fact that pregnancy starts with fertilization of an egg and then is on "autopilot", for lack of a better term, until the child is ready for delivery is nature's (or God's) design. It is an illusion to think that there are all these "decision points" during that interval. There aren't. There isn't anything close to a daily question, "Good morning, would you like to remain pregnant?" If you don't like God's design, take it up with him. Or lament the short sightedness of our Darwinian evolution. But it is what it is.

I'd be curious to know how many people are pro-abortion and against capital punishment. In other words, the most innocent among us get executed without due process of law, in utero, but some sadistic serial killer shouldn't be executed even if he kills 100 people. I would find that the exact opposite of what should happen.

If the fetus (or collection of cells, however structurally organized) is alive, then active measures to destroy it have to be considered murder. You can't have death through active means of another be anything but murder.

That's why, as we all know, we have degrees in the law. First degree -- you sat down, planned it out, and killed the victim. Second degree - you got so pissed off that you killed someone in anger, when you might not have done it otherwise. Third or manslaughter - accidental, possibly negligent. Then some states have "involuntary manslaughter" - maybe you never got your brakes checked and you slid through an intersection and killed some little old lady with your car. You certainly didn't want that to happen, didn't plan it, weren't angry - but involuntary since you couldn't stop it once the car was moving.

So I can't agree with your "there was a death but no murder" argument.

Your standard for the permissability is what the Supreme Court called "viability" which is probably more legal than biological terminology. Funny thing about it is that as medical technology gets better, we can save children at earlier and earlier stages of pregnancy. Consider the goings on in Italy, where there is debate about "terminating the pregnancy" but saving the baby. Up until now, terminating the pregnancy was synonomous with killing the fetus. In the future, it might not be. It may be possible shortly that the baby can be removed from the mother and hosted artificially or in another willing woman. Now, what happens? For those who saw the abortion as a way to evade the responsibilities of parenthood, it might not work out that way, when, years after, someone knocks on their door looking for their "biological" parents.

What we have now is that premature delivery of wanted children results in medical measures used to save their lives - pretty successfully. But unwanted children at the same level of maturity can be left to die or aborted through "partial birth abortion". Which one of these two identically aged children is alive? Wouldn't the answer have to be the same for both? The mother doesn't get to decide like Solomon who lives or dies.

You could be right about Roe v. Wade. Maybe abortion will slowly wither away like Big Tobacco has. Less of the population smoke now than ever, and tobacco has remained legal. The education of the people about the negatives of tobacco smoking has done a lot to reduce that. In my generation, very few of teenagers I knew smoked. Some still do, it might never go to zero, but it is a hell of a lot less than it used to be.

If the view of "life begins at conception" pollenates as I hope it does, people will simply not opt for it as often.

There will always be exceptions, nothing is foolproof, but it would be a great start if the 95% or so of abortions that are stemming from absolute non-preparedness are eliminated.

If it was my decision, I'd have the guts to end it. My action would be unpopular with close to half the current population, but in 30 years or so several million individuals under 30 might appreciate it.

Joey your arguments are very passionate however they read like a pro-life flyer including the inflammatory language. You have trained well.

I guess the passion tends to colorize my language. And unfortunately, e-mail and postings cannot convey the inflection and intonations with which one makes his points. As I pointed out above, my most frequently used "inflammatory" word, murder, is not inaccurate for life beginning at conception and active means being taken thereafter to destroy the cell(s). I'm not necessarily angry or passionate every time I say "murder". It's just accurate given those philosphical points of departure.

The pro-choicers tend to be inflammatory as well, though maybe not to the same degree since the Court has ruled in their favor. If, Roe is eventually overturned, you'll see a reversal in those roles.

Nobody "trained" me. I've never attended any pro-life functions, rallies, demonstrations. The views on either side stem from where you think life begins. The rest just follows from there. If life does not begin at conception, as some would contend, then that indivdual would not have as much of a moral problem with abortion. And their views, if expressed passionately, would read as a pro-choice flyer.

This is incorrect, joey; abortion has been around for almost as long as pregnancy has been around. What the term "abortion" encompasses has evolved, but what you think of as abortion (a woman's conscious action to end a pregnancy) is older than recorded history.

Technically, the WHO defines pregnancy as beginning when a fertilized egg implants into the uterine lining. So no, pregnancy starting with fertilization of an egg is not a fact; that's false. The debate about when life begins can continue, as that's a matter of opinion, but pregnancy is a medically defined term and it starts on implantation.

Those who oppose capital punishment, as I understand it, oppose it on the grounds that it is not applied fairly and that there is always the risk of an innocent person being executed (there was a pretty devastating New York article on that very thing happening a few years back). So your question is a straw man.

This has been a very interested thread to read. I want to post two links, for those interested. The first is an excerpt from a very excellent book, When Abortion Was a Crime which explores the roughly 100 years in the US when abortion was more or less illegal (1867-1970). It's out of print now, but you can still find used copies on Amazon.

http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs...ay/abortex.htm

Chock full of interesting facts, like that even the Catholic Church tacitly allowed abortion until the 1860s and it wasn't until the 1890s that they removed the "life of the mother" exception.

The other is a piece entitled "The Only Moral Abortion is My Abortion: When the Anti-Choice Choose" and it's a collection of anecdotes from abortion providers who have had anti-choice people come to them for abortion:

http://mypage.direct.ca/w/writer/anti-tales.html

Joey, I wouldn't endeavor to argue with you about when life begins, as none of us know. Even the Bible is wishy-washy on it, with some references to God knitting people together in the womb and others to God breathing life in only as the baby leaves the mother's body. But understand, that no law will stop a desperate woman from attempting to rid herself of an unwanted pregnancy. And the majority of abortions are performed on women who have already had a baby. So outlawing abortion will lead to the deaths of desperate women who are already mothers. If you are truly, truly against abortion, then you need to work towards a nation that financially supports childrearing, through state-supported daycare, accommodating work schedules for parents (or subsidies so parents can take time off to care for babies, as they do in Europe). And to push for comprehensive sex education and birth control to be free to anyone who needs it. If we want more potential lives brought into the nation we need to be willing to man and woman up with our own tax dollars and support them. Because having a kid is f*cking expensive, but that's not going to stop people from having sex.

joey... You often post about Obama and the soaring deficit but have no problem with the Tens of Billions of taxpayer dollars spent debating this issue that was resolved nearly 40 years ago. How do you reconcile that? Is it ok to spend unabated on things that you care about yet wrong to spend money trying to keep the unemployed afloat while Big Business sells the country down the river?

The tens of billions would not be necessary if people managed their own affairs responsibly, including the decisions on if and when to have children, and preparing and preventing when one does not want to get pregnant.

The issue clearly was not resolved since it has hovered around a 50/50 split in polling for the entire 38 years.

Besides, it takes many many chunks of 10 billion to make 1.6 trillion, doesn't it?

Which is why they should exercise better judgment. They, not the taxpayers, should bear the responsibility for events stemming from their own actions. Why is this so hard for people to understand? There is no right to responsibility-free sex. The "Free Love" thing from the sixties and seventies was the result of the collective drug-induced stupors of the hippies and disco freaks. It never existed.

A typical self centered response... Every Billion spent on things you agree with is inconsequential in the big picture yet every Million spent on things you don't agree with is a huge deal.

I didn't say that.

We don't know what the true cost of the abortion debate is. I took as a given your figure of around $10 billion.

If one is opposed to deficit spending, as I am, one would be proportionately 1,000 times more outraged at a trillion dollar waste than a billion dollar waste. I didn't mention millions, which would follow are one millionth as important as a trillion.

while I agree with the above... think of how much tax money would be saved in this country if every individual managed their own affairs responsibly, like Joey pointed out.

And if my aunt had a penis she'd be my uncle. Yes, people should exercise better judgment about sex. They should also eat more fruits and veggies, not smoke, exercise at least 30 minutes five times a week and always wear their seatbelts. But they don't. However, all of those situations that don't involve sex mostly affect the individual. Sex affect the possible birth of a baby, that, as you have pointed out, is an individual. If you're going to insist that women not have a choice about whether to bear a child, then you need to be willing to support the brand-new life that has come into the world. Babies have NO control over the circumstances of their conception or the economic status of their parents. None. By saying "well, the parents should have exercised better judgment" you're electing to punish babies because you disagree with the parents' sexual habits.

And that's the part about the anti-abortion side's view of the pro-choice side that makes me so sad. The pro-choice side is very aware that we are talking about real babies and real lives coming into the world and is trying to create a place where every one of those babies is desired, as pro-choicers are also fierce advocates of sex-ed and pre-natal care for women who choose to have kids. The anti-abortion side doesn't seem, to this pro-choicer, to be offering any solutions other than, "Well, the woman should have kept her legs crossed." I really feel if these alleged pro-lifers actually cared about babies that if they and the pro-choicers united on a move to reduce the number of abortions actually performed, as opposed to fights over the legality of them, that huge strides could be made to creating a support system for both babies and parents.

But I don't think it's about babies for anti-abortionists.

Many of the 40 million aborted would have been taxpayers too. That helps.

I do have to correct my post here. It was postulated that the cost of the debate is 10 billion dollars. I compared it to 1.6 trillion in my answer as a reference was made to President Obama and my opposition to his deficit spending. But that's comparing a cumulative cost for a 38 year debate to a one year deficit figure. The actual proportion is much worse when comparing both cumulative figures - it becomes 10 billion versus 14 trillion, and proportionately that much less expensive to the debt, rather than the deficit.

Which individuals do you think are eating up most of our tax dollars, Antitrust? I'm not trying to pick a fight; I'm genuinely curious where you think the government spends the majority of its money. Judging from your posts, you get most of your news from right-wing sources, so I'm curious what they're telling you.