Dukasaur wrote:ConfederateSS wrote:--------[size=150]Even more hilarious.....The ones who are PRO... ABORTION.... Always seem to be against THE DEATH PENALTY...They let murderers go free , instead of putting them , 6ft down...Where they put their victims...They want to kill the innocent ones, who haven't committed crimes...Who haven't had a chance to experience The World...
Yup, that's me. I'm pro-abortion and anti-death penalty.
So, let me address that.
Anti-death penalty doesn't mean I want murderers to go free. I want murderers to be punished, and if they are genuinely evil I want them killed. Trouble is, don't trust the system to do it. Even in fairly civilized countries, there are a lot of mistakes made. Cops develop tunnel vision -- they see a suspect, they have a feeling he's guilty, they throw everything into finding dirt on him instead of looking for a different possibility. It happens over and over again. About 5% of the people convicted of murder turn out to be innocent when the case is re-examined by objective eyes. If we hanged everyone convicted of murder, that would mean 1 in every 20 would be the hanging of an innocent. And that's a fairly high failure rate. If a plane crashed every twentieth time it flew, there would be NO commercial air travel. Keeping some asshole who deserves to die in a prison cell is the lesser of two evils versus killing an innocent man 5% of the time.
It's best summed up in the famous quote from Lord of the Rings
Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement.
I wish we could kill every evil criminal that deserves it. I won't support trying to do that, because I know that a lot of innocent people would be swept up in the dragnet.
And there's another reason, too, why I oppose the death penalty. The death penalty, whatever its original motives, is always eventually used against political prisoners. It's too powerful a tool to give to our political masters.
Now, back to abortion. I don't support the killing of sentient beings. An embryo is not a sentient being. It's sheer madness to suggest that sentient life begins at conception.
When does a fetus become sentient? It's a bit of a grey area, but I think most rational people would agree with the scientific idea that it's somewhere between 30 and 35 weeks, when the fetal brainwaves become complex enough that they might represent conscious thought. So you can't be killing a sentient being before 30 weeks. Most European countries ban abortion after the second trimester, or about 27 weeks in, which basically is following the 30 week rule with a bit of leeway. Obviously, even in the third trimester, if there's no brainwaves, then the baby has died and removing it should not be called abortion, just a postmortem procedure. But barring that, I could agree with a ban on third trimester abortions.
The trouble is, a lot of people want bans on abortion right back to conception, based on religious dogma with no basis in reality. And of course, to every action there is a reaction, so there are crazy people on the opposite side who want unlimited abortion right up to the moment the baby is out and breathing. The crazies on the right help to motivate the crazies on the left. Yin and yang.
If we could cool the rhetoric, I think the overwhelming majority of people could be persuaded to see the rational middle road, going with 27- or 30- weeks. That would mean tuning out the crazies on the left, who think any rules on abortion is an assault on their freedom, but it also means tuning out the crazies on the right, who think that first-day single celled zygote is a person because god told them so.