Only informed consent should result in a pregnancy!
Rape, incest, battered wive victims, should be able to gain medically supervised, morning after pill, which just prevents ovulation, for the term any sperm remains viable.
Failing that, they should be able to access a free service, medically supervised, very discrete, early term abortion!
Perhaps in another town and across the border?
Young women still at school can have their whole of life prospects terminated, by an entirely unwanted pregnancy.
If only bible bashing moralizing men, (pious hypocrites) could become pregnant, and then breast feed a baby, this discussion would never ever arise!
Rhrosty

Sadly Rachael, I think that many people who support abortion being available would be prepared to say to you that your life is not worthwhile. If they are going to maintain their support for abortion they have to do this. To acknowledge you as someone of equal worth to everyone else would be to cut the ground out from under their own feet.

Unless every human life – regardless of how that life was conceived or how handicapped or different their life may be - is recognised as being of equal value to every other human life, then ultimately no human life really matters at all.

(And if we have unintentionally happened to evolve from the slime, for no particular purpose, then yes, none of us actually has any intrinsic value.)

Rachel,

You can also use this argument to ban contraception, as it would result in lots more "precious" people.

However, this is all irrelevant, as the cornerstone of this debate is the right of every person to have control over one's own body, and what you and I think has nothing to do with what anyone else decides.

Rachael, you have entered into difficult territory by posting to this topic and making it about the value of your life. For you what you have done may make great sense but it places those who disagree with what appear to be your conclusions at an unfair disadvantage in what is already a difficult topic.

Few of us would think that your life as a functional and self aware human being does not matter. I can say that your life matters while still accepting that there are a lot of things that matter that don't always come up trumps and that there does not seem to be any viable way of ensuring that they do.

I've pointed this out before but it seems relevant to make the point again, as a member of a relatively wealthy society we have great ecconomic power compared to many in the world. Every bought coffee, every cinema ticket, every little thing which is not strictly necessary to our own survival could potentially be redirected to saving the lives of others in parts of the world where they lack our economic power. I've not checked the figures recently but it used to be that something like $5 could buy a life saving vacination, $30 can buy a water filter for a family which lasts around 5 years.

There are people in our own society who's lives could be saved which are now lost if we poured every available resource into funding for treatment. We don't do that, rather we try and find a workable balance accepting that it's not viable long term to focus all of our energies into righting every wrong.

We choose to buy that coffee even though a coffee is worth far less than the life of a child in Africa because few are capable of living with the whole hearted selflessness that is required to always put the big things first.

R0bert

'However, when you are next speaking to God, Rachael/Sonia... would you convey my disgust that He achieves his plans through the violence of rape and its consequences upon your mother. '

Actually WmTrevor its amazing that God can and does fulfil His plan despite man's wickedness. You and me being alive is evident of that.

Great story Rachael although 99% plus baby murders are more for convenience and as a result of brainwashing by people using junk science than the young girl being raped as was the case with your mother.

The two sides on this issue will never accept each other's premises. In most areas of life, the necessary condition for personhood is sentience. That is, we can (uncontroversially) turn off the life support system of a brain-dead patient. Similarly, we would regard the murder of an identical twin just as seriously as any other murder, regardless of whether the victim's DNA lives on in the twin. We would give human rights to E.T. or Commander Data if they actually existed, and very few people would object to keeping third trimester abortions illegal (except to save the mother's life), even if they support abortion on demand in the first trimester.

runner's "baby killers" are simply extending this definition to embryos. As Carl Sagan once put it, if there is brain death, then there must also be brain birth. They would regard the idea that something with "the intellect of plankton", as Sancho put it on another thread, is a human person as ridiculous. They would also regard the idea of forcing a woman to bear a rapist's child as abhorrent, as would be forcing her to have an abortion.

It is worth pointing out that not even all the early Christians accepted that ensoulment (personhood) begins at the moment of conception. Jewish law didn't regard the foetus as fully human, although it didn't condone abortion on demand. For example, the execution of a pregnant criminal was not delayed unless she was actually in the process of giving birth. Some early Christians accepted the moment of conception view, but others believed that ensoulment could not take place until the foetus was developed enough to have human faculties. Of course, St. Augustine or St. Jerome would have said that early abortion was still wrong, but for reasons to do with Christian theology and because abortion was so dangerous for the woman at that time. Even the other camp was not as extreme as the Roman Catholics of today, who are prepared to let a pregnant woman die rather than perform an abortion, even if there is zero chance of saving the foetus.