" I am pro-life" is one of the qualifications for being 'conservative'.Is this not a worthless claim, good for votes in the Republican party but nothing else?

Who in the real world would vote for it? Even if you hadn't 'painted yourselves into a corner' by having the question one of interpreting the Constitution instead of having it settled by vote,that is.

What does it mean to be pro-life? Is it'no abortion in any circumstances' or 'only in some cases' and if the latter what?

How could any legislature alter the law without going against Roe v Wade ? Can it only be altered by judges, so you have to have judges chosen for what would be anathema in Britain viz political reasons, trying to fix the Bench so it agrees with your manifesto ?

I note that President Bush is 'pro-life'. If he'd succeeded in appointing a majority of judges who agreed with him and made appropriate rulings after he had gone, by what justice would he have been able to have bound future Presidents and, perhaps, the will of the people now or then ?

You might be surprised at how many people use the abortion issue as their sole deciding factor, or as the tie-breaker between two otherwise evenly matched candidates. A number of people in my family-in-law voted for Bush purely because they viewed Kerry as a “believer in abortion.”
“Pro-life” can mean any number of things, and it depends on the person who says it. Some people are so staunchly pro-life that they require girls to carry their father’s fetus to term, rape victims to give birth to their assailants child, and do not allow a women to abort even to protect her health or save her life. Others are not quite so stringent. “Pro-choice” can be nearly as tricky. Some people claim to be pro-choice, but really only are if they approve of the circumstances, or perhaps are only pro-choice in the first trimester. And then there are those who are absolutely pro-choice no matter what. It all depends on a persons’ personal (and often religious) views.

The pro-choice/pro-life issue is a very important one for me, personally, and it is a significant determining factor as to where I place my support, along with education, the environment, and gay rights.
In my opinion, if a politician wants to take personal, private medical decisions away from me and my doctor, then perhaps I don’t want that person making decisions that affect the entire country. I don’t worry about my personal abortion rights, but I do worry that if the government decides I’m not smart enough to make these personal decisions, where will it end?

It's maybe not that anyone expects a "pro-life" candidate to actually do anything. Maybe it's like Huckabee's promise to abolish income tax - or pledges to arm schoolchildren with AK-47s, ban the fossil evidence for evolution, promote sexual abstinence among teenagers, nuke Iran into being peaceful, or whatever.

Everyone knows, deep down, that these are impractical, fringe ideas - but they mark the candidate out to be "one of us", and thus maybe likely to make other decisions in sympathy with the wishes of the religious right.

Again, it would be like the lip-service Old Labour paid to nationalisation; everyone knew it would never happen, but the party activists wanted candidates who were in sympathy with it.

Possibly something similar is happening with Obama; people are maybe less worried about the details of his proposals than they are impressed by the fact that he's not a baby-boomer (or older) and thus likely to have a more up-to-date outlook on things in general.

quote:

Originally posted by newnickname:
...they are impressed by the fact that he's not a baby-boomer (or older) and thus likely to have a more up-to-date outlook on things in general.

In America, Obama is considered a baby boomer: "the generation born between 1946 and 1964."

United States Census article

Obama, 46, was born on August 4, 1961 in Honolulu, Hawaii. Hawaii became a US State in 1959.

Nah, he's not a baby boomer..although some studies would define him as such.
There is a bit of an overlap between those born at the end of the Boomer years and the start of Generation X.
Obama is the same age as me, almost exactly, and I'm not a baby boomer.

Why would pro-life be any more or less relevant than pro-choice? Isn't the real question whether or not one considers a baby human life before it is born?

Norma McCorvey thinks being pro-life is relevant. Many of you know her as Jane Roe.

quote:

Originally posted by newnickname:


Again, it would be like the lip-service Old Labour paid to nationalisation; everyone knew it would never happen, but the party activists wanted candidates who were in sympathy with it.

Exactly the comparison that came to my mind. Clause 4 of the Labour Party constitution was included in 1918. It said that the Labour Party was to take ownership and control of the means of production etc into the hands of the people. It was not removed until 1995, when Tony Blair, their new leader, insisted upon its removal.There were many diehards who complained that to do so would be to abandon and go against the principles and core values of the Party. Sounds familiar, does that. Wonder when we heard someone sounding off about core values !

That was exactly the kind of reactionary thinking that kept Labour out of power and unpopular with the electorate.

quote:

Norma McCorvey thinks being pro-life is relevant. Many of you know her as Jane Roe.

She does, and I can't imagine how awful it must be for her to hear about "Roe v. Wade" every year, knowing she is Roe and is now opposed to abortion. But that is her option and her belief. No one should be forced to have an abortion, but no one should be forced to carry an unwanted fetus to term, either.

quote:

Isn't the real question whether or not one considers a baby human life before it is born?

Yes, but the question is also whether the possible humanness and potential rights of a fetus superseded those of the women who has to carry it.

quote:

Isn't the real question whether or not one considers a baby human life before it is born?

That's the simplified form of the question. At some point before birth there isn't a human life, and at some point there is. No one can say for sure when this change takes place - personally I think there is no identifiable point when change takes place. Pro-lifers seem to opt for the two or three days that make up "the moment of conception", but there doesn't seem to be any real scriptural, medical or logical reason for this - it just sounds neat (although actually it opens a can of philosophical worms). Politically, pragmatically, many countries have opted for an unsatisfactory compromise around how many weeks of pregnancy there have been.

However, in any case, the real question for a serious politician would be (assuming that we all agree that abortions are not desirable) how to limit, maybe even abolish, abortion. Simply making abortion illegal is probably not the best answer - it's just the one that certain party activists and religious absolutists favour. Improvement of sex education and promotion of birth control might work better than simply setting down laws - but with those ideas the politician trying to claim 'conservative' credentials runs into a different set of party shibboleths.

(When did 'conservative' come to mean 'uncompromising idealist with radical ideas'? )

I am Pro-Choice, but with conditions...

-I don't believe a young girl who was a victim of incest should be forced to carry that child

-I don't believe a woman who was raped and got pregnant as a result should be required to carry that child

-If early testing of the child shows that it suffers from an incurable condition or severe life-altering deformity, it should be the parents choice to terminate. And when I say life-altering, I mean that if that child would not have a hope of any kind of quality of life.

I do NOT condone abortion as a form of birth control.

Because most of the Pro-Lifers do not allow for those exceptions, however, I must be Pro-Choice. This subject shouldn't be just black and white in my opinion.

Nobody in their right mind believes that pro-choice means pro-abortion, or that it is the opposite of pro-life. Just don't tell me that I have to follow your religious beliefs, and I'll do the same for you!

Pro-life is not a religious position exclusively.

Pro-abortion does not have a good sound to it. However, someone who is pro-choice believes that abortion is OK in at least some cases. It does not take a great leap to call someone who thinks abortion is OK "pro-abortion."

Being a strong proponent of aborting pregnancies is another matter. There are apparently numerous stories from young ladies who were encouraged not to make a choice but to have an abortion by clinics that profit from the procedure. If that is what you mean by pro abortion, then no, that is not pro choice at all.

I suppose it is a matter of semantics.

'However, someone who is pro-choice believes that abortion is OK in at least some cases. It does not take a great leap to call someone who thinks abortion is OK "pro-abortion." '


Doesn't that say, then, that those who feel abortion is permissible under special circumstances (i.e. rape, incest, life-threatening situation for the pregnant woman, certainty of severe life-altering fetal abnormalities) can also be called pro-abortion? It seems to me that, if one's claim is that a) Taking human life is wrong and b) A fetus qualifies as a human at conception, then the circumstances of the pregnancy are irrelevant, that human life is human life, regardless of how it came to be, and that aborting the deformed fetus resulting from a case of brutal incest on a 11 year-old girl who may not be able to survive giving birth is wrong.

Of course, the example I gave is as extreme as possible, but where is the line that it crossed? Subtract any one of the conditions I gave. Is an abortion now acceptable? If not, subtract another, and ask the same question. Where does one draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable abortions? What changes that fetus from human life, and thus "protected", to un-human, and thus subject to abortion?

My ex father-in-law was Chief of Staff at a fine hospital. His specialty was OB-GYN.

Raised Roman Catholic, he is very pro-life and was able to make a clear distinction between what we normally think of as abortion and what he call (if I remember correctly) a "medical" abortion. The latter was termination of a pregnancy that was inconsistent with life. One such case is when the baby's brain is growing outside of its body (I forget the name of the condition). In no cases will such a child survive after birth.

"Medical abortion" sounds like euthanasia, then; making the decision to end a life earlier than it would end naturally, for humane reasons. I guess there are a lot of "pro-life" people who decry euthanasia at one stage of a human life, but accept it at another.

Or could it be that a fetus does have a special kind of 'human life' status? As I've said before, about 50% of fertilised eggs are naturally aborted. If a fetus is a human life, and that life begins at conception, then the biggest killer of humankind is not war, famine, cancer, AIDS or whatever, but "failure to implant in the womb lining". Why is there no huge medical effort to combat this scourge?

These are complex questions; those labels ('pro-whatever') are surely inadequate when it comes to describing politicians and deciding whether or not to support them.

Assuming that the term is correct (and I have no reason to think otherwise), "medical abortion" seems to be a way of avoiding what it is; an abortion. And aren't all abortions medical procedures? Doesn't the very definition, the technical definition, call it exactly that, a medical procedure? Using the adjective "medical" may sound better to some, but the noun it modifies is "abortion," However official or however "not unpleasant" it sounds, a "medical abortion" is still an abortion.

I don't remember if the term is correct or not. When I look it up online, it seems to refer to abortions induced by medications so it may not be. Where is sid when we need him?

The fact remains that it only applied in cases which were inconsistent with life. Yes, it is still an abortion. I wonder if these were permitted prior to Roe v. Wade?

NNN is right about the high miscarriage rate before a woman even knows she is pregnant.

To take an alternative extreme, in what case would one recommend abortion of a perfectly healthy baby several months along?

I'll make you a deal, Fuse. I'll answer this:

"To take an alternative extreme, in what case would one recommend abortion of a perfectly healthy baby several months along?"

after you answer my questions.

"Of course, the example I gave is as extreme as possible, but where is the line that it crossed? Subtract any one of the conditions I gave. Is an abortion now acceptable? If not, subtract another, and ask the same question. Where does one draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable abortions? What changes that fetus from human life, and thus "protected", to un-human, and thus subject to abortion?"

That sounds fair enough, doesn't it?

quote:

To take an alternative extreme, in what case would one recommend abortion of a perfectly healthy baby several months along?

Here's the thing; there are just so many variables. There is no guarantee that any baby will be born healthy. Your question is loaded, because I don't think anyone here "recommends" abortion.
In my opinion, the final decision to terminate a pregnacy should be made by the the pregnant woman herself, in consultation with medical professionals.

No one recommends abortion, but unfortunately quite a number of people feel justified in recommending that everyone else other than the woman involved and her doctor are entitled to butt in because their own beliefs are somehow morally superior. I think a 'human baby' is one that can live independently, outside of the mother's body.