Because you must be responsible for yourself

[Legba]

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I can't be the only one to have noticed: the question of when life begins is irrelevant. Life began a bazillion years ago (or about 6,000, if you accept the Genesis account) and has been a continuum since.

People are going to have sex, and not always responsibly. Fact. I'd prefer to see more done to encourage responsible, informed choices before the fact, but it is inevitable that unplanned pregnancies will happen (and, yes, there are unwanted children. Lots of them.), despite the availability of contraceptives (which aren't necessarily cheap any more. Depo-Provera is about $100 a shot now.) I'm just making an observation. I don't presume to lecture others about the morality of it.

It seems to me that society ought to provide some threshold subsistence to people in need, insofar as we do it for predatory felons in prison - why not for people who are otherwise decent citizens (I don't mean as a lifestyle of idleness)? Evil socialism? Perhaps. Letting people starve in the streets waiting for the private sector to clean up the mess is evil capitalism. There has always been private charity in the world. If it were equal to the task of providing for the needy, there wouldn't still be needy people and the welfare state would never have come about. Just a thought.

-ljp

 

[Liko81]

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rmodel65 wrote:

Iknow you cant legislate morality, but to say you have the right to end someones life is preposterous. it really boils down to the idea that i am forced to pay for this with my tax dollars.

I'm going to stay as far away from the abortion debate as I can, suffice it to say that abortion is a very personal decision,that no one law, allowing or prohibiting, can fully encompass with regards to the circumstances surrounding it.

I'd rather talk about the above snippet. You're durn tootin' I have the right to end someone's life. Otherwise, what possible footing could we have to use guns for self-defense with so many other "less lethal" options? Every gun owner knows that gunssave your life byending the BG's first. If you do not realize that key element of the use of firearms for protection, sell your guns and invest in a Brinks or ADP system and a baseball bat; you will be far better protected than if you are hesitant about using your gun when it MAY kill your assailant. You say, "well, that's different". Exactly. Just like there's a difference between a child totally and biologically dependent on the particular woman who is carrying it internally (or on specialized machines, the likes of which you NEVER want to see your baby hooked up to),and a child capable of sustaining its own heartbeat and blood oxygenation and needing only food, shelter, protection and love.

Whether any ending of a life is morally required,allowed or prohibiteddepends solely and totally on the circumstances surrounding it. That is true whether the life was conceived5 days ago, was born5 days ago,5 years ago, or5 decades ago.

 

[rmodel65]

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Tess wrote:

rmodel65 wrote:

to you guys who disagree with Paul wanting to pass the definition of where life begins, you gotta look at it this way. if you kill a pregnant woman you are charged with 2 murders. the child is legally alive and a person, but if you do an abortion it is not a life. most everyone here would say they want to protect liberty? how do you say you protect a 1yr old but not one the womb? a lot of libertarians are pro choice because they say you have a right to hurt yourself, but what about the child in the womb what about the child's right not to be killed because the mother wants it?

i know you cant legislate morality, but to say you have the right to end someones life is preposterous. it really boils down to the idea that i am forced to pay for this with my tax dollars.

im all for pro-choice you have the right to choose lay in the bed with a woman, every guy on earth knows what can happen. you have the choice to wear a condom or use other birth control or choose abstinence.



paul is the only person currently in the race that i will ever give my vote to. even if it ends up as a protest vote. the problem the republican party is gonna have is that 25% of caucus voters still will not vote for mcinsane

if the state conventions keep going like they are mccain will not have as many delegates pledged to him,Paul is the grassroots candidate and Paul delegates like myself are changing party rules and nominating like minded delegates to the national convention. much like lincoln was not frontrunner at his convention it will hopefully be a brokered convention this year.

I'm not going to argue abortion rights with you on this board, but I will not allow someone else to decide what goes with my body.

If a woman has to face some final judgment, it's her choice, not yours.

yeah me either we will keep it simple I personally care, but i know i cant enforce or legislate morality.

 

[deepdiver]

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Wow, this has gone far afield. And as such, I'll throw in my .02 on the issue.

Until or unless SCOTUS overturns Roe v Wade, any discussion about the practice of abortion is nothing more than a philosophical discussion that gets people all worked up for o no purpose. All the :cuss:in the world ain't gonna change a thing unless the discussion is confined to parental notification and partial birth abortion which are at this point open for discussion and possible legislative modification.

Regardless of anyone's opinion on the morality of abortion, I think everyone should be upset about Roe v Wade simply because it is not a federal issue or a constitutional issue. It should have been sent back to the states to decide each as it sees fit. IF that would ever occur, personal opinion on the issue becomes relevent in the halls of your state legislature.

 

[grishnav]

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rmodel65 wrote:

to you guys who disagree with Paul wanting to pass the definition of where life begins, you gotta look at it this way. if you kill a pregnant woman you are charged with 2 murders. the child is legally alive and a person, but if you do an abortion it is not a life. most everyone here would say they want to protect liberty? how do you say you protect a 1yr old but not one the womb? a lot of libertarians are pro choice because they say you have a right to hurt yourself, but what about the child in the womb what about the child's right not to be killed because the mother wants it?

i know you cant legislate morality, but to say you have the right to end someones life is preposterous. it really boils down to the idea that i am forced to pay for this with my tax dollars.

im all for pro-choice you have the right to choose lay in the bed with a woman, every guy on earth knows what can happen. you have the choice to wear a condom or use other birth control or choose abstincence.

In my humble opinion, whether or not it's considered a person is irrelevant.

If it's not a person, than it's just a tumor, and removing it is nothing more than a medical procedure.

If it is a person, than you have a simple case of another person commandeering your body to prolong or ensure their own survival. It would be no different than the government forcing you to hand over your kidney to someone whose kidneys have failed. If you want to donate a kidney to someone in need, by all means, do it. The government should not force you to.

By the way, I pissed away my liver binge drinking in my twenties. I'm going to have to borrow yours now. You're pro-life, right?

 

[Sheepdawg]

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I can't believe how one post turned this into an argument over abortion vs. pro-life. But I am by no means a smart man with any type of higher education, maybe I'm just reading this wrong. I just thought this was a forum about the open carry of firearms.

 

[asforme]

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It is a forum about open carry, and I hate the fact that threads get hijacked to other topics so often. But this is just about the most active freedom-loving online community I've ever seen and I enjoy discussing other issues here. I think an off topic section would be a welcome addition to the forums here.

 

[grishnav]

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edit: oops

 

[grishnav]

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asforme wrote:

I think an off topic section would be a welcome addition to the forums here.

That would be quite welcome indeed.

 

[Sheepdawg]

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grishnav wrote:

asforme wrote:

I think an off topic section would be a welcome addition to the forums here.

That would be quite welcome indeed.

I second that!

 

[t3rmin]

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I gotta say it again.

God bless Ron Paul.

 

[grishnav]

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Flintlock wrote:

grishnav wrote:

In my humble opinion, whether or not it's considered a person is irrelevant.

If it's not a person, than it's just a tumor, and removing it is nothing more than a medical procedure.

If it is a person, than you have a simple case of another person commandeering your body to prolong or ensure their own survival. It would be no different than the government forcing you to hand over your kidney to someone whose kidneys have failed. If you want to donate a kidney to someone in need, by all means, do it. The government should not force you to.

By the way, I pissed away my liver binge drinking in my twenties. I'm going to have to borrow yours now. You're pro-life, right?

Lucky for you that you weren't thought of as a tumor before you were born...
You contradicted yourself. If it is a person, it wouldn't be your body that would be violated , it would be the babies.. A separate,living, breathing human life has as much right to continue tolive and breath and you do.

I'll try to be brief... since this whole discussion is WAY off-topic at this point.

To "point" 1 -- which is more of an emotional appeal and less of a rational response -- I will say that you are correct. I am extremely lucky to have been given the precious gift of life, will defend it, and will make the most I possibly can out of it! I'm also incredibly lucky to have intelligent, stable parents that gave me a good shot at making something out of myself.

To point 2 -- I have not contradicted myself yet, and because you think so, I believe that you may be misunderstanding my position. I a merely stating that no human being -- be it an unborn baby, born baby, or fully grown man -- has the right to access your body and tap your internal organs in furtherance of it's own life. Doing so is a slippery slope that leads to allowing the government the ability to hack out your organs and sell them to the highest bidder (ok that's a bit extreme, but it's a logical conclusion if you follow the thinking way out).

That said, I will go ahead and contradict myself by saying that I do believe it's Ok for the government to give extremely special protection to children and force you to take financial responsibility for your child, and that if there were some way to externally incubate an unborn baby, I'm all for making you pay for that procedure after terminating the pregnancy.

Yes, that's a contradiction, because unless you've won the lottery, or something equally lucky, than your money is one of the fruits of your precious gift of life, and allowing access to it is allowing access to your precious gift of life in a similar vein as allowing access to your body. I am also contradictory in that I would not give other people nearly as much access to your money as they are taking now (taxes ftw!), but would give your child substantial access to your money.

It's comes down to a question of where you draw the line. I draw the line somewhere between having access to my money and having direct access to my body. Where, exactly, do I draw the line? Frankly, I'm not even sure of that yet. But I know it's definitely on the other side of allowing another human to access my body to further their own life -- baby, brother, stranger, mother,friend, or otherwise.

In my mind, abortion isn't about killing babies -- it's about terminating an unwanted pregnancy that, due to the limitations of current medical technology, results in the tragic loss of a life.

Do I think it's despicable for a mother-to-be, knowing full well that the results of the abortion are going to be tragedy that results in a dead child, and the results of not having the abortion are going to be a lifestyle change, makes that choice?

Yes, absolutely.

Do I think it's despicable for a brother, knowing full well that the results of failing to provide his "extra" kidney to his brother in renal failure (for the sake of the debate, we'll just say that the renal failure is no fault of his own) are going to be a tragedy that results in a dead child, and the results of giving the kidney
are just going to be a lifestyle change, makes that choice?

Yes, absolutely.

Would I legislatively force the "correct" choice upon either one of them?

Not a chance.

I simply won't allow the government to give me access to your body under any circumstances, even if it helped me live a longer and fuller life. This concept is obvious to most people, but they seem to be blinded by emotion when you start to talk about babies. Understandable, given our evolution as a species and the hard-coded importance of passing along our genes. I'm simply asking you to recognize the fact that babies are humans just like the rest of us and are entitled to no more or no less privileges and responsibilities.

Or, failing that, at least acknowledge that by legislatively forcing a mother to carry to term, that you are giving them special privileges above and beyond that which any other one of us would enjoy -- because there is no way around it, that's exactly what is being done -- and then we can start to talk about whether or not the babies should have those special privileges. (My answer, obviously would be no, since as aforementioned I draw the line somewhere closer to "money"...)

So to point three -- the baby has just as much right to it's life as anyone else (that I wouldn't be depriving it of), which is to say that the baby has no rights to someone else's life, but full rights to it's own. I am slightly contradictory in that I would give babies and young children some special rights to other people's life, namely, the continued financial support of their birth parents (even if put up for adoption), at lest until it was self-sustaining. But this is a special privilege conferred to babies and young children by the law due to agreement between all of us rational humans that, overall, this improves society more than it hurts it, and helps keep responsibility in the correct hands, strengthens families, tickles our sense of righteousness, or whatever other rationale you'd use to justify it. It is not a god-given right.

Apparently I fail at being brief. Sorry.

Oh, and by the way, I'm using the generic form of "you" to mean "pro-lifer's" in general. I don't specifically have a problem with you, whichever post I happen to be replying to now. I respect your opinion, but disagree.

 

[asforme]

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grishnav wrote:

You believe that you (or the government) has the power to draw the line of how much dependence justifies killing. Financial dependence does not justify it while biological dependence does. You claim that the unborn child has the right to life, but not if it means biological dependence on the mother.

The problem is in your analogies. The child did not appear out of thin air, it is not a random event like cancer eating someones kidney. Nor is my brother who may need my kidney the result of any decision I made. A child is the direct result of a risk that a couple takes in having sex. Risks can come with consequences.

Your analogy would better be reversed. I take a risk of binge drinking and ruin my liver, then expect you who had no knowledge of my decisions and never consented to them, to give up your liver to save me from the consequences of my risky behavior. This is how I see your expectation that an unborn child give up his right to life in order to save the mother from the consequences of her risky behavior.

 

[grishnav]

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asforme wrote:

grishnav wrote:

You believe that you (or the government) has the power to draw the line of how much dependence justifies killing. Financial dependence does not justify it while biological dependence does. You claim that the unborn child has the right to life, but not if it means biological dependence on the mother.

The problem is in your analogies. The child did not appear out of thin air, it is not a random event like cancer eating someones kidney. Nor is my brother who may need my kidney the result of any decision I made. A child is the direct result of a risk that a couple takes in having sex. Risks can come with consequences.

Your analogy would better be reversed. I take a risk of binge drinking and ruin my liver, then expect you who had no knowledge of my decisions and never consented to them, to give up your liver to save me from the consequences of my risky behavior. This is how I see your expectation that an unborn child give up his right to life in order to save the mother from the consequences of her risky behavior.

"You claim that the unborn child has the right to life, but not if it means biological dependence on the mother."

That is an excellent summation.

" You believe that you (or the government) has the power to draw the line of how much dependence justifies killing. "

In general, I believe it's a personal choice. Personally, I currently believe that line is biological dependence, as you stated earlier.

I really don't believe that the government should have any say in where the line is drawn, but it's difficult for me to swallow a completely lack of a line for the exact same reasons that it's difficult for the pro-lifer's to swallow the current position of the line. You get to a point where it just feels like you're killing babies through inaction.

There is an excellent exploration of this very topic here, for those interested in a bit more reading: http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard144.html

" The child did not appear out of thin air, it is not a random event like cancer eating someones kidney."

Well, in the case of rape, it could be.

"Nor is my brother who may need my kidney the result of any decision I made. A child is the direct result of a risk that a couple takes in having sex. Risks can come with consequences."

If you switch brother/brother for father/son, than you could make the case that, well, when you decided to have and raise a child, you most certainly knew there was a risk that some day cancer would eat his kidney's and you'd have to give one up, so you should therefore be compelled to do so if and when the time comes. I'm not comfortable with that position either.

(This analogy only valid in cases where the unwanted pregnancy came to a couple who were correctly using highly effective (99.9%+) birth control methods. Void where prohibited. See store for details.)

From here on out, we get into a discussion on personal responsibility (and it's limits), and this is a particular topic where I'm still having a raging internal debate with myself about what my beliefs on the subject are.

For example, if you blare your stereo and annoy someone, are you culpable for their annoyance? There is most definitely a physical element (the sound waves hitting their ears), and that physical element causes physical changes to their physical brain, which may cause them to physical react by punching you in the face. Are you, therefore, personally responsible for getting punched in the face because of your loud music? Is getting punched in the face a direct result of the risk you took when you played your music loud? At what point does the responsibility, simply, become somebody elses? Why aren't they culpable for punching you in the face? Is holding the other person responsible merely blaming? Is it lacking personal responsibility to do so?

How about intent. Does it matter? After all, I'm not trying to annoy them, I just like to listen to loud music!

Does reasonableness come into play? Is it reasonable to expect that they ask you to turn it down once before they punch you in the face, and then, because you didn't, you are at fault for being unreasonable? Are they therefore at fault if they fail in their duty to ask you once?

What about in the case of openly carrying a firearm? Are you responsible for the fear you cause other people, or are they overreacting?

Unfortunately, I don't have answers to these questions yet. The only thing that I can offer is that I don't currently see this topic as an issue of personal responsibility (you did the nasty, therefore you MUST PAY! MUHUAHAHAHA!), at least in the cases where effective protection was used. I would personally assign responsibility to people irresponsibly having sex, but that still doesn't make me comfortable with the idea of the government giving others compelling control of your biology.

So I guess, for me, this is where the debate ends, because I'm still unclear as to my own thoughts on the subject of personal responsibility (and it's limits). I'll just continue on thinking and using the best judgment that I can.

Man, I'm really bad at being brief!

 

[Evil Ernie]

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ENOUGH OF THE ABORTION ISSUE!!!

This thread is about Ron Paul and the RKBA!!!!!!!!! Take your abortion discussion offline or PM!!!!! Mods!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[asforme]

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Evil Ernie wrote:

ENOUGH OF THE ABORTION ISSUE!!!

This thread is about Ron Paul and the RKBA!!!!!!!!! Take your abortion discussion offline or PM!!!!! Mods!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Do you do this in real conversations if the topic of discussion changes?

The fact is there are several people here who would be willing to support Ron Paul (who is the best thing that could ever happen to gun owners) if it wasn't for this single issue. The belief that many have is that Ron Paul's opposition to abortion is "legislating morality". I am trying to argue that it is not "legislating morality" but in fact providing equal protection under the law for the unborn as provided by the 14th Amendment. If the freedom-loving people on this board can at least understand the reasoning behind Dr. Paul's position (even if they don't agree) then we have even more support for the best candidate that a gun owner could ask for.

Now because discussion board etiquette can vary between different websites I will ask the Mods: Is the way this discussion has been flowing appropriate? I have seen very few threads locked due to being hijacked on this site, if I had that impression I would perhaps be more willing to self-censor for the purposes of keeping a conversation focused.

Secondly, if some of us here would like to continue this discussion would an off-topic thread be welcome in the "General Discussion" section? If not, Admins would you consider adding an off-topic section?

 

[Evil Ernie]

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Don't get me wrong Asforme, I have no qualms about discussing abortion issues, but when the OP is about RP and his stand on RKBA, lets stick to the issue/topic. If you want to discuss RP's stances on abortion or foreign policy, or the environment, etc., then start another post with that topic.

As far as an Off Topic section, I'm all for it, good idea!