You lot expend heaps of hot air making generalisations about Catholics that only a 'brainless' Darwinian might believe. It's curious that Jesus Christ isn't believable to you, but Darwin says we look like evolving apes and Yabby starts scratching...hmmmm, that's rational.
RE: forcing anyone to follow Catholic laws...that's amazing, I was taught by Catholic Nuns too and they said I had free will...of course Yabby, there are consequences for choosing wrong over right or refusing to seek fact from fiction or doing what will harm another. As abortion kills another human, it is HARMING another - therefore wrong. Join the local footie club - surprise-there are rules there too.

RE: society's cop out-if the best any of you can offer a woman in this situation is to kill her baby then perhaps it is you who should check your motives or lack of compassion. How many of you have put your money where your mouths are? I have, long before I had children and I continue to do so, because I believe it to be right, responsible and compassionate.

RE: 'rosary on ovaries' shirt only highlights our pitiful standard of parliamentary representation. The argument isn't about ovaries-at least get the facts right - ovaries produce eggs BEFORE they are fertilised, OK?
Luckily for all of you, Catholics are kinder on sin and other sinners than some Islamics and you are unlikely to be bombed or terrorised for your infantile insults and blasphemy - enjoy it while your 'spirit' diminishes into bitter little puddles of self-centredness. Personally, I enjoy the company of people from other religions also, you should get out and meet some of them/us sometime.

Lastly, an unborn baby has a brain and nervous system Yabby, from very early in the FIRST trimester, if you are convinced yours wasn't there until you were born, I won't disagree.

While Catholics won't go out and accost you to 'join up', there's always room for more, just accept your responsibility for the free will God gave you.

God bless you all and I hope you had a wonderful CHRISTmas!

Meg1 “RE: society's cop out-if the best any of you can offer a woman in this situation is to kill her baby then perhaps it is you who should check your motives or lack of compassion. How many of you have put your money where your mouths are?”

I did put money where my mouth was.

About 35 years ago, I helped someone else, who sought an abortion, to fund it.
I acted without interest of benefit to myself (ie I was not the father) and only from a sense of love and compassion for the pregnant woman.

“Luckily for all of you, Catholics are kinder on sin and other sinners than some Islamics and you are unlikely to be bombed or terrorised for your infantile insults and blasphemy - enjoy it while your 'spirit' diminishes into bitter little puddles of self-centredness.”

I guess you are excluding the practices of Father Tomas de Torquemada from that claim to Roman Catholic tolerance?

Oh nice one with “spirit diminishing” but the bitterness (or is that frustration) on this debating board seems to be emanating from your posts, not from mine.

Finally, who is the more “self centred”?

1 the person who, for reasons they know, seeks an abortion

or

2 someone else, without knowledge to circumstances, desires, expectations or capabilities of the pregnant person and equipped only with their own emotionally subjective desires, demands that the another person is denied the right to abort?

I suggest 2 rates as the most “self centred”, intolerant and lacking in respect for other peoples rights.

Well said Credo!

No offer of money to help her KEEP the child, Col?

Sadly, one risk of abortion is that subsequent pregnancies are at higher risk of miscarriage as demonstrated.

Suggestions that an 8 1/2 month old baby should have no 'rights' begger belief. The baby is viable well before then, requiring inhumane killing methods not used on violent criminals...why should babies suffer such brutality? Birthing an 8 1/2 month old poses no further risk to the mother than aborting it-quite the reverse. Your spurious reasoning is unbelievable...you better hope your children don't want your estate enough to use the same rational when 'debating' your worth in your dotage.

I have regular contact with adoptees, adoptive and adopting parents - quoted case posted is difficult to believe. Mothers aren't tattooed on their foreheads. Perhaps you should have suggested it was her choice...or doesn't that argument apply if she chooses life?

Australia's interminable waiting list for adoptions destroys the assertion there are unwanted babies. There are lots of couples/families who would dearly love to adopt here but very few are placed for adoption.

Getting one up on Tony Abbott, George Pell and those 'Catholics' seems the only agenda here...not any rational argument or any genuine concern for women/babies.

I'm still waiting for Col Rouge to post something he doesn't contradict in the next paragraph...you don't need anyone to debate with, you lose the argument all by yourself!

Perhaps some are trying to justify past actions - male and female, but the arguments about incubators are pretty lame. If pro-lifers see women as incubators does that mean anti-lifers see women as communal sex playthings and babies as disposable. Explains the unwillingness to accept the time for decisions is long before choosing to kill or not to kill is the only so-called choice left.

The males haven't given any indication of too much respect for their women participants or friends...a lot of talk of masturbation though, so perhaps it's all theoretical argument for them anyway

Thanks for making the whole issue so much clearer, Francis.

>>You're making a fool of yourself. It's very easy to quote parts of anything and omit the rest! For starters, in the Catechism try #1258, #1259, #1260 and #1261 (the latter will pay the lie to your ignorant assertions).<<

Unfortunately, my copy didn't have a pocket guide that told me which part to believe and which to discard.

One of the charges often levelled against non-christians is that we "pick and choose" that which we believe. In fact it is the most common knee-jerk reaction of the faithful.

How, pray, does this differ from the process of selection that you have made, or the selection that I made, in arriving at a guide for catholic conduct?

It seems to me that your set of beliefs depends entirely upon i) which century you live in, ii) what views have been expressed at the most recent convocation, or in the latest papal bull, and most importantly iii) which argument is in play at the precise moment you are looking for catechismal support.

So please explain again. What did I misquote, and what exactly is its disqualification? For it would appear to me that if you are correct, and there is no such concept as original sin, and there is no necessity for baptism in order to reach heaven, there might just be some variation, or flex, if you will, on the concept of heaven and hell themselves.

Given this highly convenient flexibility, surely there is - buried somewhere in the texts - also some give-and-take on the concepts of contraception and abortion?

There there Meg, now that you got those two long rants off your chest, no doubt you feel better :) Sadly just not much substance.

Your Catholic Church accepts evolution theory Meg. So it pays not to ignore what Darwin wrote. He provided lots of substantiated evidence for his claims.

In contrast, religion is at the end of the day, no more then an idea. No substantiated evidence, just human claims. Go into a court of law and tell the judge that you know the answer, as you had a divine revelation and see how far that gets you :)

Rosaries on ovaries was a joke Meg, you clearly missed it.

Thank you so much that Catholics don't want to kill people like Muslims do, how comforting for me.

A foetus is not a baby and no, at the end of the first tremester, it does not have a human brain. Go and inform yourself.

What this debate comes down to is why a health minister who believes in the supernatural, despite a lack of substantiated evidence for its claims, can affect the lives of so many millions of women, denying them the freedom to make their own choices. Its their body, their life, their decision. They should choose which of the 400 or so organsims that they can create, they want to carry to term and raise as babies and children. People with claims of supernatural phenomena should keep out of it, unless they can provide some substantiated evidence. Any court would need more evidence, then religion can provide for its claims.

Meg its time that you learnt respect for other people and their rights to decide their lives for themselves, free of religious dogma.

You would object if the Muslims tried to force their theology onto you, so why should we not object when the Catholics try to do the same to us?

Francis, you talk about 'picking and choosing', and I will assume for the sake of argument you haven't read my last post in full (I'll assume nobody else has either – quoting doctors of the church, papal encyclicals and canon law tends to make people's eyes glaze over, but is necessary if you want to attack the Catholic stance on abortion on its own terms). If you denigrate others for picking and choosing, why don't you mention the readily-obtainable evidence that the Catholic hierarchy is undecided about foetal personhood? What, pray, do you make of the evidence that the Catholic church, when not dumbing it down into an ethics-bite the punters can understand, isn't sure foetuses are persons. Go on, read it. You know it makes sense.

As an aside, let me ask you to think about a not-entirely-hypothetical case. Imagine a contraceptive failure: the prospective parents a mother with a strong family history of major depression, and a father who has bipolar A (a strongly heritable, truly horrid mental illness). The odds of the offspring of these two inheriting bipolar are better than evens. Assume, correctly, that such an offspring wouldn't have been unwanted – we (like you couldn't have guessed), wanted, had things been different, to have a child, and deeply regret it wasn't an option. But having seen (me) and experienced (him) what our joint heritage would probably visit on any child we had, it was clear to us that it was wrong to produce a child who was literally more likely than not to suffer this horrible illness. Adoption can't fix genetics. And it's not, at least in some cases, that the kid would be an inconvenience – you wouldn't do it to anyone, let alone your own flesh and blood.

She was a girl. We would have called her Leah Kate. We agonised about it long enough to have had all the tests.

So tell me, please, why stopping her existence, before she knew about it, before she could suffer, was so wrong?

Col Rouge – you reveal hidden wonders. All praise.