Since this debate is winding down owing to a distinct lack of credible, evidence-based responses from the "abortion is murder" camp, I'd like to point my finger of laughter and derision away from Mark "I can't believe a brother would think like that" Richardson (although I could probably point with two fingers using my feminine, multi-tasking brain) and towards Gadget The Researcher Extraordinaire.

AHA!

AHAHAHAHA!

I thought you would be regretting the “witchcrafted foeticide” comment. I thought that you would have wanted to maintain a little bit of credibility in this debate.
But no. I was wrong!
You weren’t satisfied with people just SUSPECTING that you are an alarmist wowser with a browser and a bible.
You wanted to remove all doubt.
And done that you have with your response to Audrey’s photo of a woman dead from a botched abortion.
Audrey – you big silly! Don’t you know that dead foetus trumps dead woman any day of the week?!? Looks to be around second trimester to me too – that lady must just have been too darn busy to book herself into the Chinese abortion clinic because of all the lifestyle she was enjoying.

Well, enough jeering for now. Hard evidence, anyone?

http://www.snopes.com/horrors/cannibal/fetus.htm

Gadget, buddy, still waiting on that ‘hard evidence’, my crusading friend.

Bugs
Supporting my child is as I said “absolute and immutable” Look that up. And the reality is that the most common “failure” of contraception is the failure to actually use any in the first place
Yeah so you would support your daughter having an abortion but would your sacrifice your lifestyle to support he and her child if she chose to keep it? If you would not you are not giving her a real choice are you? That is a bigger commitment though ..

Franzy

Three letters mate; DNA just as you are defined as a human being by the most fundamental building blocks of life so too is every child from the moment of conception .every other part of your rant is just semantics
There is a name for the women who hang out with homosexual men “fag hags “ and you are a very sad example of the male equivalent, more rabid than the feminists you wish to cultivate and sadly much more silly. It seems to me that you could not think for yourself if your life depended on it.
Opinionated 2
Sounds like a reflection of your own life you are giving us here and sad for you.

Gadget
Will you please drop the shock jock stuff? It does not save any children and just alienates those who might otherwise be convinced

Actually Iain... the most obvious shock jock stuff I've seen has come from you... fag hag? What the?

You're simply saying that because Franzy is a man, and he has a feminist viewpoint that disagrees with yours, he musn't have an opinion of his own.
I can't help but feel you'd feel differently if he simply adopted yours without question.

In your comment, you basically say that the issue is simple, and merely semantics. Well, if it were so simple, perhaps it would have been solved by now.

Perhaps you see it as a simple matter. Others do not.

I happen to think opinionated2's comment was the best I've yet seen on the thread. It wasn't haranguing people to agree with someone's viewpoint, and I can't fault it for accuracy. In simple logical terms, where is the flaw in Opinionated2's comment?

I'm somewhat disappointed by your reasoning here Iain. You fail to find a problem with opinionated2's comment, so you resort to commenting on what may or may not be someone's circumstances.

You have based this on what exactly?

For someone who claims that this is an issue of 'semantics' you do a miserable job of employing logic, instead resorting to personal attacks.

Issues to consider:

- A foetus cannot survive without it's host parent. Granted, babies need constant care - though they can function with care from say, a devoted father. This isn't the case for a foetus.

- I'm informed that the neo-cortex, what is frequently regarded as a key part of the brain that distinguished people from lower order intelligences, is fully formed at approximately 25 weeks. Can a thing be regarded as a person before it is capable of independent thought, or even breathing?

Whilst I'm in the pro-choice camp, I would be genuinely interested to hear honest responses to these questions from the other side of the fence.

And guys... can we keep this civil and to the point? personal attacks degrade more than the target.

Hi Iain!

Thought we’d lost you for a while there.

I’ve got to agree with TurnRightThenLeft here … or no, wait a minute … I almost fell for that one! That would be not thinking for myself!

Jokes and insults aside, I do like what you’re saying with the DNA argument, but you’re still avoiding the special and unique circumstances of a developing foetus – that is physical dependency on the mother. The scab I just picked has DNA, and like a foetus, under the right conditions (womb, test-tube) it could truly grow into a wonderful human being. Should I protect the scab’s ‘life’?

You and your mates (sorry Iain, you can refer to me as such, but I’m not one of them) keep searching for that one piece of undeniable evidence, the golden rule that would state the when of humanity and decide right from wrong (with you on the right side, of course). So far we’ve had DNA, heartbeat, zygotes, sex, blind shooting, squashing platypus eggs, baby-eating abortionists, ‘It is because I say it is’, primary mathematics, crazy women chickening out of motherhood and cries of “WITCH! WITCH!”

At the end of the day, anti-abortionists will never EVER concede a women’s right to choose over their decision that foetus = person. I bet everyone arguing for Foetus Rights in this discussion will swear that, while I and the rest of the pro-choice camp have been brain-washed by feminism, academia and liberal humanists into this stance, they themselves have worked out their ideas about abortion all by themselves using the day-as-day evidence at hand and learning from the school of hard knocks, university of life and workplace of the real world.
I will also bet that no one in the anti-abortion camp has had any contact with a woman undergoing the complete process of utterly unwanted pregnancy -> abortion -> aftermath. None of you has had to hold the woman’s hand and hear her reasons or share her story.
That’s what Audrey’s post was for. So you could see the other side of the coin for a change.

TRTL
The point you raise is not the humanity of the fetus but its sentience, when does it become self-aware? Most of the "pro-choice" crowd has been trying very hard to argue that before some undefined point of time a fetus is NOT HUMAN, a parasite, a tapeworm. I take it that you are arguing that it is fine to kill the fetus before sentience is demonstrated. The trouble with this argument is that taken to its logical extreme it then becomes permissible to kill people with only marginal brain function. That is a rather more worrying prospect don’t you think?

Opiniated2’s hypothetical makes assumptions about those of us who consider that abortion is not a social virtue and the sort of family dynamic that we may have, these were shallow and given the word and posting limits here not worthy of detailed response so I made an of handed comment.

Me a Shock Jock? Oh come on I have repeatedly said that I support the legal status quo but that if a woman has to have an abortion do it but don’t pretend it is just like having your legs waxed. Or some minor cosmetic surgery. We sugar coat with euphemisms so many things in our lives and I just think that the ethical issues have to be faced; what is so shocking in that?

Franzy
Have you noticed my view the legality and availability of abortion? I’m not trying to prevent any woman making her own choice.
I think you are making the same argument as TRTL and confusing sentience with humanity. You are trying to make it easier to choose an abortion as the answer to an inconvenient pregnancy when it should be the very last option if all others are impractical. The battle to make abortion safe and affordable has been won. However as I see it there is no contradiction between supporting that and trying to convince women to not have an abortion. This is why I make the point ,calling a spade a spade that abortion is the killing of a human being

Oh that was hurtful Iain with the extra i.... OUCH! Wasn't my hypothetical, as you so eloquently put it, up until Tony Abbott awarded the contract the status quo and didn't you prove my point without you even realising it?

Aren't people like Tony Abbott sneakily attempting to skew the status quo against the woman having choice, independent advice, guidance and councelling? So which status quo are you now talking about?

If you are so intellectual why would you need more than 350 words just to say "I agree The Pro Choice reasonable people are right"?...Ha!