Originally Posted by
NightTrain
I rarely jump into abortion discussions.
For those of you debating "when life starts", the answer is : At conception.
I realize that there is a time lag in discovering when the female is pregnant and there are a host of other concerns; but no one can dispute that the moment of conception is the beginning of life when the sperm fertilizes the egg - to say anything otherwise is stupid, and you all know it.
Sure, you can debate all you want about quickening, knowledge of the pregnancy, whether it's legal, safe, financially prudent, or if the mother feels like being pregant - the fact remains that life starts at the moment of conception and anyone claiming otherwise is a fool.
I posted the following in 2003 on USMB back in the day. Today, my son is a 14 year old boy that looks exactly like I did at his age, he has his learner's permit, girls that are fawning all over him, and makes mistakes like we all did at that awkward age. I wouldn't trade him for the world, and there were medical professionals almost demanding that we kill him prior to his birth due to inadequate medical training.
Here is what I posted in 2003 :
My personal opinion formed when Misty became pregnant with Ricky back in '96.
We went in for an ultrasound, and the tech was cheerful and bubbly. Then suddenly she got real quiet & I could see she was disturbed... she kept focusing the screen on Ricky's head, but wouldn't answer me when I asked her what was wrong. Then she got up, told us to stay there, and left.
After a few minutes, a doctor came in, and they looked & took pictures of the ultrasound. They flat out wouldn't tell me what was up.
About a week later, they called us back in. The doc sat us down and explained that the baby had some sort of hideous genetic disorder and would be severely retarded, have massive defects, would be in constant agony, etc.. they could tell this by looking at the cysts in the brain. I forget the term for this, but it's flat out scary shit. Neither of us have any relatives that have problems that we know of, and he was puzzled about that. Anyway, the doc said that the best thing to do was abort the pregnancy. I immediately shook my head, and that fucker put his hand up to me and told me I had nothing to say about it! Misty said no, too. He described how it was going to be for him, and it was truly frightening.
Anyway, we agreed we'd come back in for another ultrasound in 3 weeks.
We came back again, and there was another woman doing the ultrasound. She was bubbly & excited to see him moving around, and finally I asked her about the cysts in his brain. She gave me a puzzled look and focused in on the brain - there wasn't anything there! I was dumbfounded. I asked her what happened to the terrible genetic deformation, and she had no idea what I was talking about, so I explained what happened on our last trip in.
She got kinda pissed, and explained that technology is moving so fast these days, they're seeing things that they've never seen before, so they don't know how to interpret what they're seeing! She assured us he was perfectly normal.
Now when I look at Ricky, who is a perfect little boy & my pride and joy, I shudder at what almost happened to him before he ever had a chance to experience life.
That's what I wrote in 2003.
I had about 12 posts quoted in this thread alone that I wanted to respond to, but just decided to post this instead.
MM, I think you have some great notions, but you are dead wrong on this. I think this is due to your atheist beliefs.
We all have souls; we all have a purpose. Whether that is reproducing someone down the line that has an important role in events or a direct role with our actions / reactions is impossible to say.
Consider this : Where would we be if Michelangelo or Einstein or Khan or Ford or Wright or Tesla or a multitude of other influential people had been aborted?
Surely you can agree that the world would be a very different place had they all been aborted.
It is not our right to kill our babies; I really can't believe that any civilized human would dispute this.