Tell me your thoughts on Abortion.

Gaah. Looks like I'm going to have to give up on the parental consent question, won't I? And back in history, women were essentially property. They didn't do anything for themselves. Now, women get educations and careers and the like and it's a lot harder to scrape out a living now than to pass from the ownership and care of one's father to being owned by someone else, so having kids younger wasn't a problem. Not to mention the fact that people didn't live nearly as long, and that at the time, it made more sense to have kids quickly, and to have a lot of them because of the chances of their being killed off by disease. And being physically ready to have kids has little bearing on the argument. And you suggested using a contraceptive. But as I stated, contraceptives sometimes fail. And where does that leave people? You can't encourage sex under certain circumstances and then strand people when something goes wrong. "You talk about how a person that drops out to raise a child is worse off. Of course that is true, but you know that it is their responsibly and worrying about their well being before their child's is selfish." That's just the point. If you have kids, you can't be selfish. Usually, the kid comes first. And of course, if you're putting someone else's needs before your own, it's a lot harder for you to have your needs met. If you're focused on taking care of the kid for the day, it's obviously going to be a lot harder to keep up with your coursework, and consequently you'll flunk out of school. And, again, in this day and age, it's near-impossible to get a job without an education and so you end up spending whatever money you had and then living in abject poverty. And as for adoption. There are most certainly not thousands of families looking to adopt. Do you really want to create even more children that no one wants? I couldn't find a nationwide statistic, but in Iowa, for example, 3% of adoptable children are actually adopted. The rest rot in foster homes for their entire lives, and end up emotionally disturbed. People like to paint a rosy little picture about adoption, but you never hear about the kids that never found families. And I know that statistic sounds like I pulled it out of thin air. I wish I did. http://www.ipt-forensics.com... "I mean we are actually killing our own young. We are preventing a natural cycle of life because of technological advances and "convenience" of the parent." And preventing this ‘natural cycle' isn't necessarily a bad thing. You're making it sound like the way humans live is natural. You're typing this into your computer, probably from the basement of your house, in a nice little neighborhood with all sorts of trains and planes and paved roads. The way we live is not natural by any stretch of the imagination and neither is our reproduction because medicine is keeping our kids alive when they should have been culled out by disease or predators. And it's not like we're dying out. We've got plenty of families raising the next generation, and because the average family has more than two kids, the earth's population is going to get even bigger. And abortion is hardly a matter of convenience. In this day and age, again, if you're at a certain age and you're pregnant and you don't have an abortion, you're going to make it near-impossible to keep yourself somewhere in the middle class. Our systems to provide welfare aren't nearly enough. The $1,300 a month you mentioned? That's $15,600 a year. Factor in $200 a month for food, $500 a month for rent and you're already down to $7,200 for living expenses, bills, gas, taxes, healthcare and the like. It's very little money, really. And to make things even worse, now people are being ‘proactive' and forcing single mothers to take jobs in order to get that $1,300 a month. So you end up with people who have to take a bus out to the city to work 8 hour days for minimum wage in addition to being the only parent in the household. What kind of life is that for a kid? And here's the most obvious argument. We donate these millions of dollars to the people that need them now. Can you imagine how many more people would need financial aid if we made abortions illegal? Either the money would be split more ways making everyone suffer, or taxes would go through the roof. "The problem is that these people keep making babies and don't feel the major affects of paying for a child because of the hand outs they can fully exploit…You talked about parents using drugs and such well our system right now pays/contributes to these addictions. " Well, this is the system that you want to use even more by forcing people to carry to term. If abortions are legal, you don't get nearly as many people exploiting the system and buying drugs. Better for everyone, right? Besides, I think I already mentioned that these people certainly are feeling the effects of raising the kid. Again, the welfare isn't nearly enough. I know I should sum up my argument neatly or whatever, but this is my second abortion debate in two days and in all honesty I'm getting rather sick of the subject so I'm not going to bother. Just pretend I said something witty.