Only one clarification - life begins after your first joint.

The "when life begins" argument is important, for me the distinction is when the foetus has it's own conciousness. When is that? I've no idea.

In that scenario the murderer is infringing on the rights of the woman by removing her life and the chance that her fetus will become a life. Those laws were probably also designed by people like you who would love to engineer this sort of logical conflict in the legal system exactly for the specific purpose of arguing "when life begins" and ultimately outlawing abortion.

In the case of a legal abortion, a woman is deciding what to do with the flesh of her own body. These are not valid comparisons.

>> ^MrFisk:

But does a flood start before or after it rains?
Flood starts with the 1st rain drop.

>> ^Januari:

THIS is why nothing works in government... this kind of BS wasting of time.


this is actually government working

what isn't working is that after being elected, less than 30% of their actual time is spent doing what people voted them in for, the rest of the time is spent meeting with corporate/special interest groups and fundraising, basically making sure that in the future, re-election is assured

government is broken because of outside money, nothing else

Of whom do you speak?>> ^Yogi:

What an intelligent and fair individual.

>> ^Sagemind:

What does the bill actually say?
The bill bans the abortion of a fetus that is at or over 20 weeks of gestation, except in cases of medical emergency. It also states that gestational age should be defined as "the age of the unborn child as calculated from the first day of the last menstrual period of the pregnant woman."
That starts the fetal clock an average of two weeks before the fetus actually exists. The purpose of a menstrual period is to get rid of an unfertilised egg, plus all the tissue that has built up in the womb to support it. A new egg typically reaches the uterus two weeks later. In practice, the law therefore bans abortions as early as 18 weeks into the fetus's development.
Does that definition of gestational age make any sense?
More than you might think. Most doctors count how many weeks a pregnancy has progressed starting from the woman's last period.
"It's been the convention for generations to measure the length of pregnancy from the first day of the last period," says medical ethicist Farr Curlin of the University of Chicago, Illinois. He says it is hard for women to pin down what day fertilisation may have occurred, but can easily remember the first day of their last period.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21721
-arizona-decrees-pregnancy-starts-before-conception.html


I can pinpoint about when a woman got pregnant. The gestation period for a fetus is 10 months (I know pretty crazy huh...but it is). So 10 months ago from the point at which they gave birth and the fetus becomes a Human Being, that is when they have gotten pregnant.

It's interesting to me all this talk about weeks and months when "God" gives us a nice perfect line in which to judge these things. Birth. When you are born is when you cease to be a part of your mother and have to crawl out of the womb ready to join the workforce. So lets stop arguing about viability of the fetus...if Conservatives cared about what doctors had to say they would've paid attention in school. Life begins at Birth, fuck off.

damn, if life begins at conception, I murder 2 chickens every morning.

Your video, Jay Leno: Bill Maher On Rick Santorum, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

I think you're right -- the brother's name was Niels, had a thing for the maid.

still, definitely a gay show >> ^GenjiKilpatrick:

@Trancecoach
But didn't he have a thing with the maid or something? ..or was that Frasier?

the brother's gay in that show.. >> ^GenjiKilpatrick:

Hah. Frasier.

I don't think you quite understand the mechanics of conception... Just because there's semen in a woman doesn't mean she's conceived. Emergency contraceptives are no different than birth control. They prevent conception from happening. >> ^Porksandwich:

>> ^CaptainPlanet:
>> ^Porksandwich:
I never took the person's pulse before I stabbed them, so you can't prove they were alive. So it's not murder.
Can't eliminate all grey areas under a law, because you need to make an exemption for when someone you know or a big donator needs to skate on something. IE his daughter or grand-daughter gets pregnant by a black man.

a guess your joking, but i don't get it. if your trying to imply that abortion is murder i have to agree, but its a stretch to say that we live in a society that never condones murder.... actually i think your just being an idiot

Ron Paul states that he believes life begins at conception. And prior to this he says that there is no chemical, medical, legal evidence of a pregnancy when administering the treatment to stop the progression of possible conception.
I liken that to saying that you could justify murder by arguing that you have no reason to believe the guy didn't die of natural causes a split second before he was shot/stabbed/ran over. So while it would have been murder, you can't 100% prove due to lack of chemical, medical and legal evidence that he was expired mere seconds before I would have killed him. So at best I stabbed/shot/ran over a corpse that hadn't hit the ground yet.
And I agree, that does sound idiotic.
In the case of someone having a natural death right before something that would have otherwise killed them, they would argue that you intended to kill the guy and ended all chances of him being saved from the natural causes (heart attack, brain bleed, whatever) by your actions. It's more about the intent. If you are giving someone drugs/treatments to abort or prevent any possible pregnancy after the fact, your intent is clear. If you were pregnant you aborted it, if you were not the treatment was unnecessary....but the intent was still the same.
It's an argument basically boils down to: It's an abortion, only if you can prove they were pregnant. But there is no other reason to perform it besides the chance of pregnancy. So why is it not abortion/attempted abortion when the intent is there? And how can he say life begins at conception, but then do these procedures that are designed to prevent or end conceptions before they are legally, medically, and chemically provable?

It's a half joking, devil's advocate kind of argument. We don't give our ages from the day we were conceived, but we definitely begin life prior to our "birth day". So there needs to be a upper limit instated by law, and a general understanding that the doctors and clinics should make sure all information and choices are presented before doing anything permanent. It should definitely not be a spur of the moment choice, where a patient can walk in to a doctor with no previous discussion and say they want an abortion and have it carried out with no information to other options. Once presented with the options, and as long as it's under the legal time limit window, then I don't think anyone can say it should have been any other way than the people involved in it.
I don't technically have a problem with what Ron Paul is saying here, but he states something contrary to his own beliefs. 7 months is probably too far along, the kid could probably survive outside of the mother's body at that point. But if he believes birth begins at conception, doing things to prevent conception that ALSO ends conception and justifying it as no medical/legal/chemical proof of conception....that's just hypocritical.
That kind of grey area lurking to satiate the need for abortions, but still sticking to your hardline statements is chicken shit justification.

>> ^kymbos:

So that Ron Paul guy tripped up, huh? Good thing the rest of us are completely on top of that simple 'pro-life vs pro-choice' question in every circumstance. Seriously, is there any point of view on this topic that doesn't need caveats or have exceptions?


But that's exactly the problem with what Paul's saying. Abortion is not a simple moral issue, and this whole "life begins at conception" and the move to criminalize abortion is an attempt to force people to view it as a black & white issue.

The answer I'd hope most fathers would give to the hypothetical question Paul was asked is "No, I'll be there for her no matter what she chooses to do." Not, "If she's not lying about the rape, I might let her have a morning after pill, but beyond that, yeah she's gonna carry her rapist's baby to term whether she wants to or not."

I'm not saying that I'm absolutely certain the former is the morally correct position, I'm just saying I'm pretty damn sure the second is morally wrong on several levels.

In my opinion, here's what Ron Paul did wrong in just these 90 seconds:

1. He said life begins at conception.
   
   
2. He said he's okay with emergency contraception after intercourse, because you can't know for certain whether you're a baby-murderer or not.
   
   
3. He said there's no legal or moral problems with killing people, as long as you weren't 100% sure in advance that your actions would kill people.
   
   
4. When asked a hypothetical about one of his daughters being raped, he independently raised the question of whether his daughter might just be lying about the rape to trick him into letting her get an abortion, because, you know, all women do that, even your own flesh and blood, apparently...
   

#3 actually shouldn't surprise me. He feels the same way about product safety. He believes there should be no legal or moral consequences for companies that sell unsafe products. After all, they never bothered to find out whether their products were safe in the first place, so they couldn't have known what they were doing might get someone killed.

The thing I love about Paul is his consistency. You can be sure he will stick to his dogmatic principles, no matter how nonsensical and horrifying they turn out to be in practice.

@Lawdeedaw What you're missing is his initial take, his trying to say that you have this window where there is not yet an implanted egg, and that is an ok window to abort, because he says 'an hour after or a day after you're in limbo'

He splits it into two things, 7 months or immediately after, before egg fertilisation. That's his two extremes that he himself says here.

He doesn't give you a week or two, because after that he see it as abortion because he says life begins at conception.

That's what's in this video. A man who says he is against abortion from the point of conception, and the only way out for rape victims he can give in the example that he's saying here, is to do something in that tiny window between the man coming and the sperm reaching the egg.

Yeah, yeay, that's great Ron