Abortion

This is my last argument on this topic, I shall thank you for making me think and research. Whether I lose or win, I feel as this has been a learning experience for me. :)I should like to answer your question, "My brain-dead cousin has been situated in my room, but to keep him alive I'm risking my financial future. Should I stop keeping his body alive or should I dedicate my life to him? The brain-dead person is no longer alive, they have no brain. The person in charge of them must make the right decision. The baby's brain starts developing almost at the moment of conception, according to the Long Island Spectrum Center website. By the end of 3 weeks, the developing embryo has formed a neural groove, which is the foundation for the brain structure. By the time the baby is born, it's brain will have over 100 billion neurons. Abortions enable us to remove unborn children that have defects. Myself, knowing several handicapped children and adults, and loving them, I am horrified at this comment. Our society is hypocritical in its attitude toward handicapped children. On the one hand, we provide special parking and elevators for the handicapped. We talk tenderly about those poster children with MS, spina bifida, and leukemia. We sponsor the Special Olympics and cheer on the Down syndrome competitiors, speaking of the joy and inspiration they bring us. But when we hear that a woman is carrying one of these very children, we say, "Kill it before it is born." Handicapped children are often happy, always precious, and usually delighted to be alive. To be sure, it is hard to raise a handicapped child. He requires extra attention and effort. What makes this a hard case, however, is not whether the child deserves to live or die. What is hard is the difficult responsibilities that letting him live will require of his parents. Many families have drawn together and found joy and strength in having a child with mental or physical handicaps. You argue that it's unfair to bring a handicapped child into the world, because he will be unhappy. Yet studies show that suicide rates are no higher for the handicapped. Experience confirms that many people with severe handicaps are happy and well adjusted, often more so than "normal" people. Some argue: "It's cruel to let a handicapped child be born to a miserable and meaningless life." We may define a meaningful life one way, but we should ask ourseles what is meaningful to the handicapped themselves. A number of spina bifida patients were asked whether their handicaps made life meaningless and if they should have been allowed to die after birth. "Their unamous respons we forceful. Of course they wanted to live! In fact, they thought the question was ridiculous."There are economic reasons to why abortion is good.You stated that children are financial burdens and that large families are bad. I honestly take a little bit of offense at this. I am the 3rd of 8 children in my family. My father is the respected, loved Pastor of an extremely small church, he has a couple other jobs to make money. I have never heard my Father complain and we all help in whichever way we can, we have never been in need. The rich, not the poor and minorities, are most committed to unrestricted abortion. The truth is, they feel trapped into abortion because it is the only alternative they know. As Frederica Matthews-Green puts it, "No one wants an abortion as she wants an ice-cream cone or a Porsche. She wants an abortion as an animal, caught in a trap, wants to gnaw off its own leg. Abortion is a tragic attempt to escape a desperate situation by an act of violence and self-loss. Studies show that "abortion finds its heaviest support not among lower or lower-middle class women, but among white upper-middle class women for whom child-bearing may conflict with career goals. Because rich people can afford something and other can't makes it neither right nor advantageous. Rich people have greater access to cocaine and can more easily hire a hit man or commit any crime. Is the solution to subsidize a harmful activity so all can have equal opportunity to do it? Shall we make burgulary legal so it would be a more viable alternative for the poor and minorities? The poor and minorities do not want abortion for themselves nearly as much as the rich what abortions for them. Prochoice advocates want the poor and minorities to have abortions, but oppose requirements that abortion risks and alternatives be explained to them. Since minorities have many more abortions, they suffer most from misinformation. Prochoice groups do not favor the poor and minorities making informed choices; they favor the poor and minorities having abortions. Family planning is extremely important and any unwanted pregnancy and children can or most likely will damage someone's life objectives, dreams or things they've enjoyed. The obvious answer, so the woman won't have to sacrifice is to simply give the child up for adoption. Every child is wanted by someone; there is no such thing as an unwanted child. One and a half million American families want to adopt, some so badly that the scarcity of adoptable babies is a source of major depression. There is such a demand for babies that a black market has developed where babies have been sold for as much as $35,000. Not just "normal" babies are wanted-many people request babies with Down syndrome, and there have been lists of over a hundred couples waiting to adopt babies with spina bifida. "Unwanted" describes not a condition of the child, but an attitude of adults. The unwanted child is a real person regardless of anyone elses's feelings toward her. For years women were degraded when their value was judged by whether or not a man recognizes it, so a baby's value is real whether or not a mother or father recognizes it. "Every woman or child a wanted woman or child" is a good goal, but if a woman or child is not wanted, it does not justify killing her. Planned Parenthood argues that unwanted children "get lower grades, particulary in language skills." It says unwanted adolescents "perform increasingly poorly in school" and are "less likely to excel under increased school pressure". And "they are less than half as likely as wanted children to pursue higher education." I don't question the accuracy of these findings. They tell us what we should already know-the importance of wanting our children. Instead, prochoice advocates use such research to justify aborting the unwanted. They say the solution to having unwanted children who don't perform well in school is to eliminate them. But isn't this a backwards approach? Aren't there better ways to cure the disease than killing the patient? Most abused children were wanted by their parents. A landmark study of 674 abused children was conducted by University of Southern California professor Edward Lenoski. He discovered that 91 percent were from planned pregnancies; they were wanted by their parents. Child abuse has not decreased since abortion was legalized, but has dramatically increased. Statistics reveal a sharp rise in child abuse in countries that legalize abortion. The United States has one of the worst records among industrialized nations - losing on average between 4 and 7 children every day to child abuse and neglect. According to Wikipedia, abortions, when allowed by law, in developed countries are one of the safest procedures in medicine. For decades prior to its legalization, 90 percent of abortions were done by physicians in their offices, not in back alleys. 15 years before abortion was legal in America, around 85 percent of illegal abortions were done by "reputable physicians in good standing in their local medical associations." In 1960, Planned Parenthood stated that "90% of all illegal abortions are presently done by physicians." The majority of physicians performing abortions after legalization were the same ones doing it before legalization. It is not true that tens of thousands of women were dying from illegeal abortions before abortion was legalized. Former abortion-rights activist Bernard Nathanson admits that he and his cofounders of NARAL fabricated the figure that a million women were getting illegal abortions in America each year. The average, he says, was actually 98,000 per year. Nonetheless, the abortion advocates fed their concoted figures to the media, who eagerly disseminated the false information. Nathanson says that he and his associates also invented the "nice, round shocking figure" for the number of deaths from illegal abortions. He states, "It was always "5,000 to 10,000 deaths a year." I confess that I knew the figures were totally false, and I suppose the others did too if they stopped to think of it. But in the "morality" of our revolution, it was a useful figure, widely accepted, so why go out of our way to correct it with honest statistics? The overriding conern was to get the laws [against abortion] eliminated, and anything within reason that had to be done was permissible. Women still die from legal abortions in America. Abortion is normally not life threatening to the mother. However, the fatality rate is much higher than many prochoice advocates admit. For instance, a widely disseminated prochoice video produced in the late 1980s states, "By 1979 the Federal government could not identify a single mother anywhere in this country who died of abortion." Since public health officials stopped looking for abortion-caused deaths after abortion became legal, the opportunity to overlook or cover up abortion-caused deaths is now much greater. When the Chicago Sun-Times investigated Chicago-area abortion clinics in 1978, it uncovered the cases of 12 women who died of legal abortion but whose deaths had not been reported as abortion-related. Finishing off my side of the debate, I again ask you, how can abortion in any way be right? Don't believe everything you hear or read without knowing for yourself. Research both sides of the story.