Response to Pat Hamilton's Note: On Abortion

Pat Hamilton's Notes

Natural Right Over Positive(Legal) Right
1:03am Thursday, Jan 24

**I'm not allowed to post his post here**
Basically, he compared allowing abortion to America's previous practice of allowing slavery, saying both are incompatible with "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness".

Here's my response:

I don't agree with abortion but I think that women should be able to choose. I believe women who have abortions should read your post and argue with you, and I'd support your argument of natural right. I'm not saying it's right that it's a Constitutional amendment, because the values ARE contradictory. I just think that if a woman wants an abortion, the place where she goes to get it is full of people who debate her decision and convince her not to. But I am STRONGLY opposed to coercion as a method to stop abortion. Holding a gun to a woman's head and telling her to have a baby is wrong, in my view. And if we make laws against abortion, then that's essentially what we're doing. The cost of abortion should be guilt, not jail time. The woman and the child have a sacred bond that us men don't understand, and if a woman is ignorant enough to interpret that bond as giving her the right to terminating the birth, than that's society's fault for not teaching her good values.

I'm not saying she shouldn't be held responsible for what she did, in fact, I would want her to make a public declaration of why she feels she needs the abortion prior to having it, so the public responds by talking her out of it. If they can't reach her (she has to listen, though), then let her do it. She'll find out on that judgment day what she did was wrong. But I'm not going to legislate her vagina. I'm not going to pretend that I know when life begins. Personally, I see no reason why anyone should have an unwanted baby, and I think that if the baby has reached the age where it goes past zygote and has become a fetus, it has developed all the faculties needed in order to be called human, even though it is more like a fish still at this stage. And anyone who kills a baby that has already started kicking- I don't understand it. But the baby is still an extension of the mother at this time, so how can I say whether an independent soul has entered the baby at this point?

My three main questions for you are:1) When do you think someone's spirit enters the outer shell known as the body?Personally, I think it's post-zygote stage, but I could be wrong. I think I'll never know, and it's up to those who study DNA and God to figure out when.2) How would you deal with abortion if you had the chance to change the constitution? Would you make it illegal in ALL cases? What kind of punishment would those women who have an abortion under your change serve?3) How would you change the education system (or whatever system you think necessary) to incorporate natural rights into people's lives?Personally, I think if we outlawed abortion, there would be more back-alley abortions, and that would be extremely dangerous. Instead of losing one life, we would lose two, and if a woman is so desperate to have an abortion that badly that she risks her own life, than clearly some women are going to have abortions and there's nothing we can do to stop them.

If one of my friends, for instance, wanted to have an abortion, which, say, was illegal, I would try to talk her out of it so bad. But if I couldn't reach her, I wouldn't want her to die, too. That's all I'm saying on the back-alley abortion issue. I hate abortion, but not to the point where women will risk life and limb to have one in an unsafe way.And they have these pills that this one girl I know swallowed because their function was to terminate her pregnancy. I didn't find out until after the fact. She is young and the baby's life would have sucked and maybe her druggie dad (her mom is not there) would have killed her and her druggie boyfriend. I think she was being a selfish ignorant whacko and maybe ten years from now she'll feel the same way and have to face facts. But it was that easy, it killed the baby before the fetus has grown enough to live outside the womb. These pills would sell like hot cakes on the black market and every promiscious girl would have...

...a bottle at her bedpost just in case.Now I am all for condoms, birth control, and the like. I know that when the sperm and egg connect, it could be the magical synthesis that concieves life right away. But I'm not about to strip away a woman's right to choose. I'm all about spiritual education to people to persuade them toward the right path, but abortions do not make a mother a danger nor do they make her worthy of being repremanded by the law. She's spiritually ignorant and irresponsible, in my opinion, and she could possibly use some spiritual intervention in her life. But in a utopian society, people would love to learn, and once they learned about the sacredness of life, they wouldn't risk having an abortion, the risk being we don't know when life truly begins, at conception or at birth. So we should refrain from banning abortion, period.

But if a woman gets pregnant and has an abortion more than once, Shep? Personally, I believe she is just playing with fire. I'd like it if she got her tubes tied. Obviously, she's wreckless and irresponsible (unless she was raped) and needs to be controlled because she's playing with something that may have far more serious implications than she understands. She obviously doesn't want kids in the first place, so it should be mandatory that after a second abortion, a woman gets her tubes tied for free.But Shep, I thought you didn't want to legislate women's vaginas? Her body is her property and hers alone.Yeah, that is true, but there's a difference between me getting in an automobile accident, because accidents happen. But if I was drinking and driving, I was being irresponsible. And that's what promiscious women are being when they choose to have unsafe sex and risk getting an unwanted pregnancy that will be dealt with by abortion of it is possible- irresponsible.

Some people argue that stupid people should not be allowed to breed, and I like that idea, because of the risk it puts the child in. But children can overcome their environment if they really try, so I'm not going to be the sex gusstapo. But there's a difference here. A woman who has more than two abortions is clearly unaware of the fact they could be committing murder by having an abortion. I'm not saying they are, but the very fact they COULD be outweighs the fact they couldn't be. The first time was an accident, the second time just wreckless. The woman had her chance to shape up and be more careful, right? But what's the difference between one abortion and two? Shouldn't she get her tubes tied after the first one? Were the first two potential lives worse any more or less than each other or a third one?1) there is a difference- the first abortion was a warning sign that the woman should have been taking better care of her preventitive care.

The second abortion was just negligence, but because we just don't know when life begins, it's not for us to say "no abortion for you!". We just can't afford a third chance because she has to learn the hard way that SHE doesn't know as well when life begins, so it's not for her to continue a gamble of life and death. Because a third abortion would prove the woman is too much at risk of being a murder in NATURE's eyes (not ours, because ours are blind in this one), that we would have to make SURE she doesn't have a third abortion in order to make sure we as a society aren't enabling ignorance of genuine human values (the right to life that nature gives us)2) after the first abortion, the woman should be offered the chance to get her tubes tied for free. But by tying them on the spot, we would be invading her livelihood for our own speculations on salvation. Speculations because yes, it is not a speculation we should have a right to life, BUT in the case of pregnancy we ONLY speculate

After the second abortion, the woman makes a choice: either she gets her tubes tied for free OR she agrees never to have a (legal) abortion again. If she chooses the latter, her name goes on an INTERnational file that includes her agreement.3) No, but we should allow people to make mistakes.

On both sides of the abortion spectrum, the extremes have something common- they are speculating! And yet they both act like their guesses are God's Truth.

Let's face it, God didn't throw us a bone with this one.

All we can do is compromise and agree both sides have good intentions (free choice should be protected! human life should be protected!) but both are WRONG about being Absolute!

I'm not going to pretend to know...so the best I can do is give people some breathing room by preserving both Choice and Life.

The Choice is that if a woman has an abortion more than once, she obviously doesn't want kids but is being careless, and those two values contradict each other. If she ever wants to get married and have kids, she better at least have her kid the next time she gets married. But if she doesn't want a kid, the file she signs will go all over the world and she won't be able to get an abortion anywhere...

If she wants a back-alley abortion, she is taking the risk of things going wrong; no one forced her to do it.This also protects Life because it recognizes life is Sacred but we don't know when it begins, the government shouldn't be birth police and people make mistakes- but my idea differentiates between an honest accident and irresponsible promiscuity.

So, Pat, my fourth question is4) What do you think of this plan?

I'd like all you bloggers to let me know what you think!