Abortion

This is how I'd approach things.

Azrayne_sl said:

Mandatorycontraceptive implantto all girls between the age of 13-20

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I keep seeing many local parents repeat over and over 'my girl would never get pregnant', and then when she's 17, oops, she's knocked up.

As I said, I'm *personally* pro-life as it's my belief life begins at conception. I also respect others opinion and also realize it's a different discussion for me as I'm a guy.

I think most of us would agree that once the collection of cells becomes a human being, it should not be killed. In the long run I think this is a science issue rather than a moral issue. In the short term, I am pro choice, but I think as much as possible should be done to make women consent to carry their babies to birth and then give them up for adoption. At the very least, women who are willing to give the baby up rather than abort it should not be left financially out of pocket, and should have all of the medical support that is needed.

100% pro-choice. Society is much healthier when abortion is legal, and people should be able to decide for themselves whether it's okay or not. Furthermore, the lives of actual living people are more important to me than those of "potential" people. Also, as Noam Chomsky alluded to in that video linked earlier, if someone actually cares about protecting life, there's about a million better ways of going about it than banning abortion. Lastly, and most importantly, banning abortion wouldn't actually work. People will still do it, and it would largely just serve to make abortion less safe for poor people while limiting safe abortions to people who can afford to travel to another country.

That said, if I got a girl pregnant I would not want her to abort it.

Tuco_sl said:

I know zero people who squat in a crackhouse. How many people do you know who squat in a crackhouse?

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The exact same number! If you don't know any people on the very bottom of the barrel, does it really surprise you you've never met anyone who wouldn't mind if he had been aborted?

hodj_sl said:

This is both illegal in the US, and I have never experienced this what so ever, nor my wife, and we have two kids under the age of 12. Its never affected our ability to gain employment, if anything, its only opened doors, what with earned income tax credits, child care tax credits, assistance with funding for university, etc.

For single moms its a bit harder, for obvious reasons, but still. I've never encountered a situation where I felt having kids kept me from gaining employment.

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HR mangers in corporations usually aren't stupid enough to admit they're not hiring a mother because she is a mother. It's a useless law that make it illegal (we have the same thing here)

Maybe it is better in the US overall, but here your career is fucking over as soon as you have children as a woman.

My sister has a master's degree in IT whatevers, and Microsoft isn't even giving her her own desk as a business customer manager. (UK)

I am talking specifically about women who already have a child.

And again, how do you sue them over "sorry, position has been filled already"?

hodj_sl said:

I dunno man, how did all the minorities who sued and won lawsuits against hiring discrimination do it when HR departments were so brilliant to come up with the "Sorry, the position has already been filled" response to them as well, since apparently just saying that sentence makes you permanently and totally immune from discrimination lawsuits, as per your apparent position?

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I'm going to take my personal experience (and more importantly, my sister's first hand experience) over some anecdotal lawsuit evidence. I've never heard of anyone who successfully sued themselves into a job position.

Just to be clear, are you actually talking about careers with actual salaries or jobs with wages here?

Dashel_sl said:

Hmm. So, every time a woman "has a headache" and turns down sex... potential baby killer.

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Hmm what? Morality = conscious actions. A woman consciously refusing sex will never lead to a baby in the future, therefore a conscious action to abort can't ever be morally considered.

Any other takers? I didn't think I could come up with a logical and scientific reason to believe that life begins at conception, even though I've believed it for a long time.

As I am from Europe I am used to abortion being legal (within certain timeframes) and I fully support the mother's choice in it.

Aside from hardcore cases like rape, medical conditions, failed contraceptives and so on, the reason for my opinion, is the lasting wellbeing of the possible child and the parents.
If someone fucks drunk on a toilet in a bar, they certainly are responsible for the pregnancy, however if you force them to get that child, it might be an awful decision for both them and the child. Maybe they are mentally not ready for that, maybe financial or they are not even a couple and this could have heavy influence on their well own being that and of the child in later years. The quality of a child's life in modern society is not simply determined by being alive and having food enough not to die.

So as long as I feel no moral obligation to the starting life, I see it as best if the parents can make that choice in a way that benefits them and the possible child most.

I understand the argument of "ProLife" people, that is hard to define where life begins, but I strongly disagree with the idea of life beginning at contraception and I feel that it is often simply an argument of not really knowing better and being spiritual or stupid, so some people chose the extreme.
Given that a human life starts with a cell and ends with a baby and a cell is no better to me that any of the 720mio bacteria in my mouth, I kind of agree that in the time between these two states there has to be a point up until which I can relatively safe end that "becoming human" without any moral quarrels.
Not that I claim to know that point, but it should be societies goal to strike balance there between the right to choose and the obligation to protect human life. Chosing one extreme is nearly never the way.

Quineloe_sl said:

The exact same number! If you don't know any people on the very bottom of the barrel, does it really surprise you you've never met anyone who wouldn't mind if he had been aborted?

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Nobody meets anyone like that because if they genuinely would rather have never been born, they've already killed themselves.

We are all animals. Gerbils eat their young alive if they don't want them. Abortions are a-ok in my book

hodj_sl said:

This screams assertion fallacy. One could extend the argument you're making to all female hires, its always potentially possible that any female hire could wind up pregnant and cost the corporation lost time/productivity, what have you. Yet amazingly, lots of women seem to be getting hired all over the place. Women are also graduating at a higher rate than men now, and are rapidly moving into more positions of power within companies.

I'm going to have to just disagree with you on this point, I don't think it seriously affects employment opportunities, if you're a woman and a company won't hire you because you have a kid/might one day have a kid, they need to be sued out of existence, and you don't want to work there anyway.

The trend has been companies becoming MORE accomodating to women's and minorities' concerns, not the opposite.

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Women still have a 19% wage gap in the U.S. and there are multiple studies which show it's almost exclusively due to children relegating women to lower paying jobs. As for the discrimination suits, just put the rational marker through your brain for a moment.

If a company doesn't hire blacks....they have no blacks.

If a company doesn't hire women with children, well theystillhave women and those women willeventuallyhave children. So even if they practice discrimination in their hiring practices, their employment records will not show it unless they have a massive statistical anomaly and none of their women ever choose to have children.

The difficulty in verifying discrimination in these cases is so absurdly different that the apples to orange saying doesn't even cut it.

hodj_sl said:

1. Educate themselves completely on the decision before hand
2. Think very hard about the consequences of both decisions before making the final decision, because either one will have dramatic impact on her life, and her psychology, for years to come.

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Funny that this quote applies well to abortion as well as the gun control debate.

/tangent on..

The Fortune 500 company I work for is hiring tons of women, many with children. Too bad all of them are in India.