Well, at least you didn't advocate saving every sperm and egg.

If you were a raped woman, would you wish to carry "his" violently conceived child ?

Walk in other people's shoes.

Ignoring the 'academic' bashing, baby killing/nazi references etc. I'll summarize what you are attempting to ask in one sentence:

Is it wrong to kill people and if so, what is a person?

Specifically to the abortion debate:

Is a human cell a person? Is a fertilized egg a person? An embryo? A fetus? A newborn?

There is no single point at which we acquire "person-hood". This is a myth derived from the religious invention of a soul.

If you can define what a "person" is, then we can continue this debate. Otherwise were are all arguing about different things.

Thank you Bill for bringing this article to my attention.

I feel like vomiting.

To me, it essentially says 'if your baby is a disappointment or inconvinience to you, it is ok to 'do away' with it'.

I can understand abortion in some situations (rape is one), but to do away with your own child because they are going to be a burden on you - I can not fathom that those words are even uttered.

Letting nature take its path (i.e. turning off life support) is different to actually making a decision to kill your baby. The two are chalk and cheese.

EVERY life is precious.

The average mother in the developed word gives live birth to less than three children in her lifetime.
With the depletion of our resources that is more than enough.
There will not be a second green revolution and our present population is probably well above a long term sustainable level.
In effect about 300 eggs in the menstrual cycles of each woman's potential childbearing years are destroyed along with millions of her partner’s sperm.
It is strange that many of those who oppose abortion are the philosophical descendants of the people who murdered so called witches (many of whom were only affected by rye flour poisoning) because their ancient god told them to, or so they claimed.
The same fools condemned Galileo for supporting the thesis that the earth went around the sun.
The sensible limit to abortion is that no one has the right to inflict pain or disadvantage on a conscious personality. The foetus in the first few months is not a conscious personality. Even any newborn with no or little prospect of a competently lived and enjoyable life is not a conscious personality.
The human race needs to get its priorities right or our civilization will eventually go over cliff.
All pro-lifers should ask themselves what is their personal priority between an unborn foetus and any one of the 20,000 children who die each day because we do not feed or house them adequately or did not provide adequate birth control measures to their parents.

I too felt ill, Pete, when I read an article about this issue earlier today.

In that article Lord Alton, co-chairman of Britain's All Party Parliamentary Pro-Life Group, said that infanticide was the "chilling and unassailable" logical step for a society that permits killing a baby one day before birth. He said, "That the Journal of Medical Ethics should give space to such a proposition illustrates not a slippery slope, but the quagmire into which medical ethics and our wider society have been sucked.

"Personal choice has eclipsed the sacredness, or otherness, of life itself. It is profoundly disturbing, indeed shocking, to see the way in which opinion-formers within the medical profession have ditched the traditional belief of the healer to uphold the sanctity of human life for this impoverished and inhumane defence of child destruction."

You summed it up very well, Stezza, in saying, 'There is no single point at which we acquire "person-hood."' That is why human life in all its forms is sacred from the time of conception.

No Australian has the right to argue this case. It's easy to take the moral high ground and dictate that the most profoundly disabled child must live while condemning unfortunate families to a lifetime of unsupported caring and social exclusion. Until this society has worked out that we have a collective responsibility for such children, you should keep your fine arguments to yourself. A member of a society that requires parents in their seventies and eighties to continue caring for a disabled son or daughter they gave birth to five or six decades ago should not be telling us what's right and wrong.