by nearly all) and thus use that to suggest Pro-Choice advocates totally devalue life.

Peter Singer, the late Australian ethicist and animal rights activist, believed something similar. That's right, he thought livestock should have more rights than newborns!

They have, fortunately, been kept well under wraps by the social stigma associated with anything that smacks of eugenics, but they're still out there.

Im sure Stephen Hawking and his family would disagree as well as millions in the scientific community and many consumers.
There are many examples. On the other side of the coin I can say if the parent/s dont know how to love such a child the child is better off not being born to them.

Are babies being consumed?

She wasn't expected to live past two. She's 22 now, and still needs constant care. I'm proud to push her around in her "buggy" wheel chair and I don't give a shit what people whisper or say loud enough that I can here it. The most popular line is "she must be that way from all the drugs he did". I look like Tommy Chong. She's not my daughter, but I love her as one.

We never had any testing done with our kids. We didn't even know what sex they would be. They were all born in the same bed at home and all turned out fine. You roll the dice with pregnancy, but whatever comes out is what you love. As for abortion, I fully support the right. I don't consider a zygote to be a person (Hearing Monty Python's "Every Sperm Is Sacred" song in my head - I hate when that happens).

not for infants though.

It's called the death penalty.

the argument goes that you're not a "person" until you're a moral agent, capable of making moral decisions and actions yourself. so until you're at least a toddler, you don't have the full rights, such as life and liberty, that full "persons" do.

not many people buy into this, but the key point i recall was that this ignores the very real difference in status between fetus and infant. the fetus is inside and attached to a woman, who is a "person" and who has rights, whereas an infant is dependant on others but not physically inside and attached to anyone in particular.

consquently, a woman may have a right to "evict" the fetus, which might necessarily result in the fetus's death because there is no other way to "evict" the fetus. by contrast, not only is there no need for "eviction" in the case of an infant, its dependency is transferrable -- if you can't take care of it, you can put it up for adoption. there's no scenario where death can't be avoided.

Personally, I am pro-choice because it's the woman's body. If fetuses grew in eggs outside the body I wouldn't be fighting for the right to abort them. Pregnancy is an invasive process occuring in a woman's body and no one else can care for the fetus instead. However, a newborn obviously can be cared for by any willing person.

The common law definition of personhood has generally been anyone born alive is a person. Personally, I think a person is a living human being whose brain has developed enough to be capable of consciousness, which occurs before birth but not until sometime in the last trimester, when abortions are extremely rare and generally only done for catastrophic fetal abnormalities or extreme danger to the woman's health or life.

then we should say it doesn't begin until you do too.

One of my students who was a nurse said, ''but babies don't have normal brain activity until they're two!''

And that ended my foray into medical ethics.

There is no basis for supposing that having a right to life depends on having language, or being autonomous, or being able to think circles around a dog, or anything like that.

America has gotten bizarrely fanatical in our selective application of idealistic principles to an extremely un-idealistic reality.

Quite frankly, I don't have a problem with their logic, or their conclusions. I think they are well reasoned, quite legitimate, and though I may (or may not) disagree I can see the possibility of sensible debate with them, which I don't see with the anti-abortion terrorists.

THEY are uninterested in logic, facts, debate, rights, the opinions of others, or, as far as I can tell, USING abortion as an EXCUSE to create policies to harm people for their own pleasures.

Quite frankly I encounter ADULTS who don't seem to have enough functioning upstairs to be considered "human", or be able to interact in a human manner with others. They seem to have no grasp that language means anything, for example, but use it as noises you make to get people to do things. They have no grasp that their entire universe of opinion is trivial when set against that of an entire culture, especially one different than theirs. They have no sense of cause and effect, of the idea that the physical world obeys reasonable and somewhat predictable laws, or that actions have consequences independent of the wishes and desires of the actor, that the actor is responsible for. And they think the entire world is obliged to serve them in their ignorance, because they in turn are willing to serve some authority or other.

I would be quite willing, for academic purposes, to make an argument that humanity shouldn't waste resources on them, because they are not merely useless, but actively harmful to all humanity.

So I suspect a reasonable position is somewhere in the middle, and not way over on the anti-abortion fanatical extreme.

What do I mean by "fanatical extreme?" The idea that YOUR ill-informed (or well-informed, for that matter) opinions about abortion have ANY PLACE WHATSOEVER between a woman and her FREELY CHOSEN health care provider. None. Nope. None at all.

And if you want to argue that, start with the idea that our definition of murder is largely arbitrary, made for the convenience of the legal system in approaching the sort of complexity desired by humans. And argue why you want to include abortion in this arbitrary definition when most of the civilized world does not.

Eugenicist monster! the death threats are well deserved.

anti-abortion crowd? This seems too extreme to be real. If a child is born alive, why the fuck would someone MURDER that child? That isn't a action of Abortion that's out and out MURDER. BIG DIFFERENCE, Fellas! Death threats are the least you deserve. This is ugly as homemade sin. I don't know what to say...

It doesn't deal with societal mores, nor does it rely on the opinion of the people who might find themselves in a situation that required a decision in such a matter.

From a strictly scientific viewpoint, it would seem that they are correct--but it is never that clear-cut, nor is it ever that simple.

The term "after-birth abortion" is, as others have pointed out, nothing more than an attempt to push a hot button.

But, putting aside the term, I don't really see anything wrong here.

Why is it, exactly, that an infant, who cannot survive on its own, should be considered an individual?

post-natal abortion.
sounds softer.

other societies have done this as well.

The origin of this is actually in GREECE from the POV of the ethics at play.

Oh and yes, before somebody screams about Judeo Christian, this is believed to have been a common practice across the levant, that includes ancient Israel

At some point in the womb, it has been determined by the legal system in the U.S. that the fetus has become a person when it is able to survive outside the womb. Once that point has been reached, the fetus is a person, and as such, his/her life cannot be ended or it is murder.

The partial birth abortions are an exception that is allowed past the point only in cases where: the fetus would die soon after birth AND the mother's health or life is in jeopardy because of the pregnancy and a doctor has determined that an abortion would relieve that risk.

Once a baby has been born, it is a person, and the mother's health or life is not in jeopardy. So it would be murder, pure and simple, to kill a baby.

This smacks of what Hitler's regime did. The disabled, retarded, etc., were not worthy to live. (Is "retarded" the correct term these days? Or is there another term being used? I don't mean to offend, but I can't recall that point.)

To keep flailing on some is more cruel than letting them die peacefully.

At least I feel there is a difference between deciding against painful, invasive treatment when the odds of survival with any quality of life at all, or even the odds of surviving at all in any condition, are poor, and actually actively killing someone. It's perfectly legal to decide against treatment when the odds are very poor. It's not legal to then shoot the person in the head after deciding that.

Some parents may want to max out their insurance and go into debt to try and save their child and it may live just a month or maybe to them holding that child for just a few more days would be worth it. Or maybe those heroic measures will result in some semblance of a rich full life.

Or maybe they just want to take their child in their arms and take her to the park. So that she will feel sunshine and hear laughter and die in arms that are soft rather than a short life where gloved human hands bring needles and prodding and pain.

on edit.

The OP premise is quoting a thing that does not occur though. Late term abortions...if a women in this country could find one to save her life...are very rare. They are only done in very dire circumstances.

I'm almost certain that in such cases 99.99999% percent of these very rare cases the mother would weep with joy if the child were born alive.

Republicans, however, hate women so much and think that we will go through with seven to eight months of pregnancy and then have an abortion on a whim.

And getting it.

I doubt that they actually believe all this for a moment, but it's a way of stimulating discussion and provoking thought, as they would put it, and getting lots of publicity and citations, as a cynic might put it.

These days, it's not just 'publish or perish'; it's often 'get your work cited widely or perish', and these individuals are certainly going to achieve their goal.

Unfortunately, they are playing into the hands of those who would like to portray all pro-choice people as 'baby killers'. The Daily Telegraph, which was always the Torygraph, has in the last few years been taken over by people more akin to the American Christian Right, and have an anti-abortion obsession; so I am not surprised that they are jumping on to this.

some crazy social statement. There is no way anybody can believe this.

nothing new to the abortion debate.