Lexi,

What a clear analysis of the complexities of the problem!

I wonder if the “right of a woman to control her own body” is not somehow like the obsolete “right of the breadwinner to control the financial situation - and other matters - of his family”. This other “right” was not only superseded by the fact that today both man and woman can become “breadwinners”, but it was also wrong for more principal reasons, even though seen only retrospectively.

Of course, there is a difference: the “right of the breadwinner” to determine what happens to his wife and family, was dictated by the social system and economy, whereas the “right of the woman” to determine what happens to her body is dictated by biology.

In the first case, the circumstances have been superseded. I wonder whether we are not approaching a situation - well, probabIy in the far future, I am not a biologist - where a man and a woman (or perhaps two women) will bring their genetic material to an institute housing laboratories as well as artificial wombs, and then in nine months (or less) return to pick up their baby. That would mean the final divorce of sex and its reproductive function.

Of course, this is just a speculation that probably goes against some fundamental laws of biology.

@david

One thing at a time.

Yes, you can choose not to believe in God.

I would rather see you believing in God though, but I can respect your decision.

If you do not believe in God, you can still have morals, not amoral.

What I am saying is from a humanistic point of view, morals to a person who does not believe in God can at best be relative… there is no absolute.

Take Roe vs Wade for eg.

Take the American laws on gay marriage for eg.

It changes.

Politicians and lawmakers move along with time and demands of the people.

What is considered immoral will in time be ok.

Just look at some members here.
They are dead against ending the life of a convicted murderer but when asked if it is ok to kill an innocent unborn, they hesitate.
Have I proven myself that with reference to God, morals means different things to different people at different times.

There is a comment here that says killing an unborn child is not murder because the law says so.

I am accused of being hypocritical but sometimes I wonder who is being hypocritical about the whole matter?

Can I suggest you listen to Ravi Zacharias on this matter?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyKR6IQBDGg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDfJsYgGZMU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rf1SPPHDlfc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIx_TUKNgF8

The last one is applicable to many of your questions…go to 7:00 and listen

It was expected that abortion would be safe, legal and uncommon. The expectation of society was also that abortion would rarely be late term.

However there appear to be far more abortions than predicted. It is not known how many are late term, or for what reasons.

Unlike almost every other medical procedure, where science and the need for accountability dictate that statistics be kept and analysed, there does not seem to be the same concern to gather data and report where terminations of pregnancy are concerned. In fact the opposite appears to be the case and the lobbying is coming from outside of the medical profession, but why?

While society is led to believe that many terminations are for vulnerable young women -who presumably don't know enough to take due care- the evidence points to an early reduction in such unplanned pregnancies years ago and the number has stayed low.

It seems that the bulk of terminations are for women who are in their best childbearing and child raising years - their twenties to early thirties. Why this is apparently so and why the overall number is so high (and growing?), require study.

It is also known from government reports that regrettably young couples are putting off having children for financial reasons and secondly, that they do not then go on to have the number of children they wanted.

In turn this could indicate more fundamental problems affecting society, for example that the casualisation of employment that has paralleled the increased participation of women in the workplace and the rising unemployment that accompanies it, is acting against women being able to have the children they want and when.

What if overzealous immigration is ramping up house prices and that, together with the loss of permanent work mean that young couples cannot plan for the families they want? It is hard to commit where employment is risky.

There have to be very compelling reasons why young women at the height of their physical and mental powers in their twenties and early thirties are having so many terminations.

Dear platypus1900,

There is no absolute morality. The God of the Bible changes from time to time. The Jewish Bible requires certain dietary habits which the Christians do not follow. The God of the Koran you really should make the trip to Mecca. The God of Jews and Christians doesn't require you to make that trip.

You have just chosen to call absolute the morality prescribed by a particular religion. It is no more absolute than any other morality.

It is just a morality of a particular group of human beings who follow a particular religion generally because they were born into it.

Humanist morality is a morality determined by questioning and examining. It think it much better than following the morality of another people living two thousand years ago in different circumstances from that of our world.

The Bible does not condemn slavery. It accepts it as a fact of life. I don't think it condemns abortion either. If I am wrong in that possibly you can cite the passage where the Bible condemns abortion.

however, I think it better not to follow a book collecting the writings of superstitious people a long time ago.

There are other sacred books besides the Bible. There are the Upanishads of the Hindus, the Tripitaka of the Buddhists and the Koran of the Muslims. Religious people in those areas follow those books.

They may claim that the morality derived from those books is absolute. It is no more absolute than the morality you call absolute.

Circumstances change. In the Bible people are told to "be fruitful and multiply." We live in a world today where we are in trouble because our population is increasing beyond the capacity of the world to sustain. No species, human or not, can increase indefinitely. A human population grown beyond reasonable bounds will be reduced by famine, pestilence and war unless we control our population by more reasonable means. "Be fruitful and multiply" is bad advice in the current world. In the current world we should not follow the Bible where it is no longer applicable.

platypus,

Regarding your comment:

"What I am saying is from a humanistic point of view, morals to a person who does not believe in God can at best be relative… there is no absolute."

Where is your God-influenced "absolute" when you pronounce:

"this bloke should have been shot or hanged"

So it seems that even though you profess to believe in God, your own ideas on the sanctity of life are "relative".

While I have serious reservations about the need for many abortions, because of availability of contraception, I agree that women have the right over their bodies.

How ever it seems the government needs to rule about late term abortions and put a time on that procedure. If medicine can now save a premature baby's life at say, 24 weeks, that should be an absolute limit for induced abortion. Say 20 weeks max, after which it is an illegal procedure.

Want others views on this.