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I said outside of childbirth. You were comparing abortion to self-defense. Yes, a child can kill its mother during childbirth, but a) there is no way to determine whether or not the child absolutely WILL kill its mother while being born, and b) even if it was going to definitely kill its mother, how is abortion a solution to that problem? Then you're just killing a baby instead of a woman. And I mean killing the baby is killing someone who is completely innocent in every meaning of the word; while its mother is by no means innocent and obviously already made the mistake of CONCEIVING the child by whatever means that did happen. No matter the situation, it could have been prevented. Killing a baby because of his mother's mistakes is injust no matter what the circumstance.

Once again you're totally missing the point. I'm including all risks of death that an infant can pose to its mother BEFORE birth; this was to retort your attitude that abortion equals self-defense. Self-defense would be if a baby had the means, and intention, to kill its mother deliberately, which has nothing to do with abortion.

Second, if a woman is raped, yes, she made a mistake. Perhaps she should not have been alone. It has nothing to do with blaming the woman, but, let's face it, if it's split straight down the middle, who really deserves a chance at life? The woman who made SOME degree of mistake, and had previously, or the child that has not?

You can easily say that I am implying a baby is more important than a woman, but I guess you forgot that you're arguing a woman is more important than a baby. Bear in mind what you were telling me about arguments based on fact and not opinion... and hey, the importance of children over adults in the legal system is not necessarily the same. Special considerations are made in the case of children in almost any situation. Yes, we are all CREATED equal, exactly. But we decide who we become and whether we REMAIN equal. If we're all created equal then how is it anyone's right to decide which fetuses to abort?

Once again, you have the right to protect yourself, but under no circumstances would it be okay to kill someone because you think there's a POSSIBILITY of them killing you. We can't be just walking down the sidewalk and shooting everyone who looks at us simply because there is some degree of risk they will kill us otherwise, and then using the excuse that it was just insurance, and citing statistics about the likelihood of random killings. It sounds to me like you are not considering unborn children as people, which they are, and which is a denial of THEIR human rights.

Which brings me back to the fundamental issue, which I believe you just concluded yourself. A woman, just like any other human, reserves the right to protect her rights and her life. So then you must agree that infants, however old, also reserve this right. Thus, since it is essentially split down the middle, neither human deserving rights OVER the other, then letting the child live is the only logical solution; as there is never a way to tell with 100% certainty that a child will cause the death of its mother. The chance of the mother's survival is the ONLY deciding factor here, and however small, it does always exist, even in the case of a twelve-year-old girl. There simply is no other logical way to consider the situation. You yourself say that ALL women deserve the basic right to live, presumably including men as well (and if not, then in the case of female children). How then can you possibly dictate whose rights will be violated? You can't. Even a coin-flip with both lives on the line would be more fair a method than abortion. You must allow NATURE to decide, or God if you believe in the concept. It is simply not our place to violate the rights of other humans, which I'm sure you agree judging by what you've said here. I don't see how you can even argue with that.

ROFL!!! That is an even worse argument than your last one.

Now you're saying that abortion is not actually KILLING the baby, it is just isolating the baby and it dies on its own. Wow, where to begin?

First of all, that isn't the case. The baby is KILLED, not just removed from its mother's body where it struggles to survive on its own and then die. This fact alone defeats your argument, but that still leaves your very questionable understanding of parental responsibility and death.

Even if incidentally it was that the baby is simply removed from its mother's womb and failed to live on its own, how is that not the same as directly killing it by any other means (other than that it is even crueller)? That's like saying, I could remove you from wherever you are and seal you into a concrete box with a little hole for air, and I would be committing no crime since I'm not directly killing you. Technically you're killing YOURSELF since it's YOU who is unable to cope inside a concrete box by yourself. O well I guess you don't deserve to live in the first place then, isn't that right?

Who am I to determine that a baby is more deserving of life just because it hasn't done anything yet? Please tell me one reason its mother deserves to live more than the infant, since both are humans and thus have equal rights to life. My argument is not that the woman DESERVES to die; it's that if ANYONE is qualified for termination over the other, it would NOT be an innocent child. I believe in consequence based on the actions of the individual, I don't know about you. And just like when I said when a woman is raped it is because she made some manner of mistake to get impregnated in the first place -- if something happens to someone that they do not desire, it is an ERROR, so getting raped is an error whatever way you look at it. Is the woman completely to blame, no, but it is a mistake. Something that the unborn child has never made. Once again the argument is not that she is DESERVING of death, but that the child has done even LESS to deserve consequence.

Other than these aspects you have just resorted back to your last argument; that the child does not have rights to cause problems or death for its mother if she does not want to accept them. This makes no logical sense, because in the case of abortion it is just the mother causing problems and death for her child that the child does not desire -- except remember, the child did nothing to even BE there, he was PUT there by the mother, and then promptly destroyed against his will. Just like waiting for someone to wake up from a coma after they were hit by a drunk driver and then cracking their skull open with a crowbar so you don't have to take care of them. It is NOT your choice what you do with someone ELSE'S body, and your argument is backwards because the CHILD was PUT there against its will, remember? When the mother got knocked up? He is not choosing to DO anything to his mother's body, but as soon as he is conceived he relies on it to live. Just like you rely on food to live. If you were put into a concrete box you would rely only on food, so would it be within my right to seal you into such a box and leave you without food? Saying that it is your own problem if you can't make it on your own? Gee, if I have a quadruplegic brother who relies on me, and lives with me in my home, is it outside of my responsibility to help him eat food and drink? He does rely on it to live, after all, but yet I am held to my human duty despite problems and inconveniencies that it causes me. So why would you feel different about any of these scenarios? Because they are human adults in question, and you are simply not treating infants as humans in your mind when you consider the issue of abortion. When you don't associate things with humanity it is easy to advocate their annihilation, that's the way my good ol' buddy Hitler did things, but at least he had the humanity to consider infants as the most pure life forms of all creation, something that is a foundation of all civilization.

And don't speak too soon. I can easily argue that abortion is parental neglect. Since the child is still in the mother's womb when the abortion process begins, she has no choice but to accept that she is its mother. She is allowing the doctor to reach into her body and violate, and destroy, her child's life. That is in every way the effective equal of saying, "I no longer accept responsibility as the parent of my child, so I am going to put him in a locked car and gas him to death". Just because you don't WANT the inconvenience of parental responsibility does not mean you can just say the magic word and then do whatever you want regardless of your child's well-being. And you compare that to adoption? I guess you never considered with adoption the child is not being denied its basic RIGHT TO LIVE, and will most likely have access to his original parents later in life. They are in no way morally related.

Abortion IS a denial of rights.

Okay, this is going nowhere because you insist on using circular arguments that I've already discussed.

First let's get one thing straight -- ABORTION MEANS THAT THE BABY IS GOING TO DIE. It is not pulled out of its mother and sat on a table and told, "let's see if you can live on your own little guy". It is TERMINATED. Abortion means the baby is GOING to die. It is a death sentence.

What you maintain as human rights is also a little flawed. You are expressing that a human is allowed his or her rights even if they inflict on others, yet you are only applying them to SOME humans; incidentally, women. A human's rights can only be extended so far that they do not infringe on the rights of OTHERS. Yes, a woman has every right to HER body, but NOT what she does with it. She does NOT have the right to use her body to steal money from someone. She does NOT have the right to use her body to terminate itself (yes, suicide is illegal). And she does NOT have the right to control anyone ELSE's body against their will. If you can not agree to these three basic statements then I'm afraid the discussion can go no further here.

There are very few instances in which a regular person CAN legally use their body to hurt or kill another person's body; either in the case that someone has the intention of hurting them against their will, in the case that it was in an accident, or in the case that they are under military authorization and officially engaged in combat as sanctioned by their ranking superiors. The reason these three normal cases are protected by either the Constitution or Charter of Rights and Freedoms is because they are for the common good of the people and do not infringe on the rights of others. None of these instances overlaps the human right to life and all provide perfect equality. Please tell me which of these instances is related to abortion. Is the baby planning to murder its mother? Is the baby going to be aborted by accident? Or is the baby an armed warrior declaring war on its mother or another party?

In some rare cases it may be the latter, but if none of these exceptions to the human right to life apply, then hurting or killing another person is simply a violation of the Constitution (or Charter of Rights and Freedoms) and a crime against humanity. Abortion is NOT protected under the rights of an individual as long as another human is having THEIR rights violated, which they are. You have the right to YOUR body but you do NOT have the right to ANOTHER's body in any way. Any exception to this rule exists because it is just in the case that another human deliberately acts with an intention to infringe on your rights. An unborn child does NOT intend to infringe on your rights and so preserves his own.

Anyway, of course it's not my LEGAL duty to take care of a family member whose ability to live independantly is obstructed in part or in full. Using legal issues to argue ABOUT legal issues is hardly sound protocol and is similar to me arguing the existence of spiritual beings with spiritual evidence. It is not my legal duty to take care of a disabled family member, it is my HUMAN duty. It is for the sake of equality and the good of man, and that's really what the issue of abortion is about.

Please provide evidence that babies are not generally more pure than adult humans, considering chronic intoxication, inhalation of intoxicants, exposure to chemical properties, natural degradation of internal organs, etc.

You have restated that abortion is not an incident of parental neglect but you have not even considered my argument against it. If a parent can, at any time, choose to give up the rights to their children then why can a parent not choose to give up the responsibility over their children every time they go to the mall, leaving their child in the car in freezing temperature, and then reclaim those rights when they return to the car six hours later? Are they then not liable for what happened to their... non-child... during those hours? If the child had died, would it not be an issue of parental neglect? If you ask me, I think the parent renouncing their title as parent in the first place would be parental neglect at its WORST, and certainly a horrendous omission of responsibility. The reason a parent's rights over her child are sacrificed in the case of adoption is because the child is under guardianship of whomever he is being transferred to. A child is ALWAYS entitled to a guardian, do you not agree? It is a basic human right. Yet who is the child's legal guardian after the parent gives up the title? Is the child considered the doctor's? Wow, that would open up a whole new WORLD of legal loopholes.

A mistake is to "understand, interpret, or evaluate wrongly". If a woman is raped, it is due in some SMALL part to her mistake. Perhaps the mistake was what created the opportunity for the rapist to act; perhaps it was to such small degree as travelling to the place where the rape would occur. In any case, the woman DOES make a misevaluation. She knew that there always exists the possibility of being raped; she knew that she could take the precautions to protect herself against rape; but she MADE a mistake in some direct or indirect way. It was not the baby's fault that the rape occurred; in fact he did not even exist yet. I will agree that rape is often not the woman's fault, but that is because making mistakes is natural and everyone inevitably does err.

But a 40-year-old often DOES have more rights than a 70-year-old. Naturally organs depreciate over a human's life-cycle and this can directly or indirectly cause malfunctions and inaccuracy of non-vital systems (and eventually the failure of vital systems, which is called "death"). Due to these natural depreciations people eventually may lose their right to command certain vehicles, live independently, fill labour-oriented job positions, be a part of some institutions such as those of a military nature, and some means of transportation or living situations. Once again this is obviously for well-being and the general good of man.

Abortion is not simply the excercising of a woman's rights. This excercising of rights conflicts with the rights of another human. It is comparable to an act of necrophilia. Technically we all as adults have the right to sexual satisfaction as long as the parties involved do not disagree; so if we feel we can only find this satisfaction by keeping a corpse in our bed for that purpose, it is an extension of our right. I mean it's not like the corpse cares. But it ISN'T an extension of our right, it is the desecration of a human body and a perverse excercise. For now, it is illegal, but much like abortion it will become legalized as soon as enough human dignity is lost to even consider such inhumane matters.

Yes, in the case that the child DOES kill the mother, it is an infringement of her right, and no, the mother does not have the right to kill the baby or anyone else just because they are infringing on her rights. Do you feel that it is just to remove someone's human rights, including the right to live, because your right is being infringed upon? How does that make you any less deserving of the same fate? You are, in turn, removing the rights of another individual. If the punishment for this type of infringement is death, then let that apply to all who remove the basic right to life.

In one particular case, it IS just to remove someone's right to life. That is when they deliberately remove someone else's. The reason behind this -- known as Capital Punishment -- is to punish (obviously) a murderer and show others that what the murderer has done is the most severe form of crime agaisnt humanity. His crime is so severe that he no longer deserves even the most basic right, that of life. That is the reasoning behind Capital Punishment.

So why is Capital Punishment also being implemented in the case of abortion? Why is the child being punished, and what is the benefit of the child's punishment to society? The child has no knowledge of its infringement, nor will killing the child teach him or any OTHER children to do right. Someone who accidentally kills another using a firearm is not guilty of murder and thus does not receive the death penalty; yet he HAS removed someone's right to live. To require punishment a degree of understanding and deliberation is requisite. No-one can be blamed for things such as accidental deaths. A car's brakeline snaps and to avoid hitting someone the driver steers his car into a storefront. It kills two people, the driver has removed these peoples' right to live. Is he guilty of a crime? Would it have been justified for someone to shoot the driver, if possible, to prevent further deaths? I'm sure you'll agree it would not.

Death is not the answer to infringement of rights.

Well you're wrong for two simple reasons.

First, your skewed perspective on what "self-defense" encompasses. Killing someone to save your life is not the bottom line of self defense and there are MANY other variables tied to the law. In Canada this law is even MORE strict and it is ruled that under NO circumstances may a civilian end another human life, not even in the protection of your own. Yet abortion has been legalized. Some judges in the US would also agree, and would certainly charge someone who has killed another REGARDLESS of whether or not it was in defense. Additionally, a self-defense case must be ruled in a Court of Law before a sentence is determined, so if you're arguing self-defense then according to the child's CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS he or the mother must be allowed to bring the case into a Court of Law to be decided by an appointed Judge.

Second, even IN the case of self-defense, it would technically be the CHILD being attacked by the mother and doctor! Who poses a greater threat to the other? The abortion doctor certainly does. In almost ALL cases, self-defense can only apply if you do not pose a greater risk to your attacker than vice-versa (you then become the attacker). A thief who breaks into a house with a rock in hand and is met with a loaded shotgun, begins as an attacker but as soon as that shotgun is fired he is BEING attacked. He could then, according to his rights, bludgeon the owner of the house and call it self-defense. This and many scenarios like it can, and have, happened.

Since in ALL cases of abortion, the child has yet to pose even a SLIGHT threat to the mother or doctor, and is completely UNABLE to harm either at that point, who is infringing on rights first? Certainly NOT the child, who is being destroyed at the hands of an adult who could and SHOULD be considered armed with a deadly weapon.

And finally, returning to the point I had already mentioned. An ATTACKER is only ATTACKING if he is aware of his actions and performs them with deliberation. Otherwise it is completely unfair and unreasonable to administrate consequences; a more appropriate solution is to discover and treat the problem which was truly responsible for the occurrance.

It makes the argument invalid, yet you do nothing to actually evidence your point?

Please tell me how a child is harming its mother at the time it is aborted -- keeping in mind the stage at which the child IS aborted.

Even an 8-month unborn child needs no less than 300 calories per day to survive, and nothing else. Are you arguing that a child is threatening his mother's life by consuming under 300 calories per day (a handful of potato chips)?

The child does not pose the first lethal threat. The doctor poses a lethal threat to the child before the child CAN even threaten his mother's life; additionally, never in the child's unborn life does he pose a risk, however minor, to the doctor who initializes the abortion. The child can thus not be considered the attacker.