[quote=mdk] This is the part of the 'debate' that I despise. The word games. Look, if the only way you can make sense of things is to call it a 'parasite,' or to call it 'subjugation,' you're not really giving yourself a fair shake. [/quote] Calling an embryo or fetus a parasite is a crude and simple way of outlining the truth of matters: before the ~20 week marker (the earliest premature birth that has survived so far was at about 21 weeks), a fetus is not an independent organism, it is a parasitic organism that depends upon its host to survive. It's not the only way to make sense of things, it's the quickest way of getting to the point, albeit an unpleasant one that puts pro-life people's backs up, thus one better avoided if you're intending to have a civil discussion on the matter. This is especially true on the internet, where it would take at most an extra minute to type out a less inflammatory post. It is rather easy to make the pro-choice argument without these word games, and I find most of them just as distasteful as you. I prefer to make the case on logic rather than trying to dehumanize and demean the opposition, but alas, not everyone holds to such standards. --- [quote=Magic Magnum]As for the "Against a mothers freedom to choose" argument I've seen above. Technically yes, it is. But we have other laws also against some freedoms. It's illegal to kill, rape, steal etc. We do not give people the free will do these acts cause we as a society deemed it immoral and harmful to society. I am not defending people who commit these crimes at all. But in a case of murder, theft, rape no matter how you handle it, 100% of the time someone is losing their freewill. Just that it can be either the victim, or the person committing it. We as society have chosen to take the freewill away from who wants to commit the crime. When it comes to pro-life or pro-choice there isn't an exception either. There will clearly be the removal of free-will from one side or the other, that will never change until we find the means to grow a newly developed fetus at the moment of conception outside of the womb. Until we reach the scientific point, we either must remove the freewill from the mother or the child, but one of the two will lose their freewill in this area in the end. [/quote] Except the pro-choice argument is that the woman is the only one that actually possesses free will and rights in the matter, since a fetus (much less an embryo) isn't actually a living human until it gets to the point of actually being viable life outside of the womb, at which point most pro-choice people agree that it's too late for abortion unless there's a great risk to the mother's life. A fetus in the formative stages before becoming viable human life deserves rights no more or less than a sperm or an egg, as neither of those are actual human life yet either. It's not just about a woman's right to choose (among other rights which I shall outline in a bit), it's also an argument about an inherent lack of rights of the other party. But let us say that life starts at conception, or after the first couple months when a fetus starts to be recognizable as a thing on its way to becoming a full grown human, just for the sake of argument. Then we would have to look to other cases to see what rights (btw, free will is a related but separate philosophical concept, rights are what you're talking about and what actually matter in this conversation) are like when it comes to one person's right to life versus another person's rights. When it comes to full grown adults, if person 1 is in desperate need of something, let's say a kidney transplant, and person 2 is a perfect match and there's no time to try to find another, person 2 has the right to say no and legally trump person 1's right to life with their own rights. Let's say it's something less drastic, just a blood transfusion, but person 1 will still die without it and there's no time to find another match; even then, person 2's right to bodily autonomy trumps person 1's right to life if they don't want to give that blood. Let's go even further out, nothing to do with bodily autonomy. Say this time person 1 is going to die if they don't get money for some medicine they need and cannot afford, then they go to person 2 who is rather well off and has money to spare and they beg for person 2 to give them money to keep them alive; once again, person 2 can say no and it's all well and good, their right to do with their property as they will has trumped person 1's right to life. Change it to food, say person 1 is starving to death and they see person 2 walking down the street with a bag full of groceries, person 2 can refuse to give starving person 1 any food, again trumping the right to life with property rights. Say person 1 is drowning and person 2 can swim, person 2 has no obligation to go and save person 1 if they do not want to, and this time it's person 2's rights to safety and freedom to choose their own actions that have trumped person 1's right to life. I could have stopped just with those bodily autonomy rights trumping another person's right to life, but look how much farther you can take it. A person's right to live only goes so far as it does not infringe upon the rights of others. It is in fact one of the lesser rights, as fucked up as that may be, since so many of the other ones stomp all over it. Seriously, property is more important than ensuring another person continues to live so far as rights are concerned. The only time a person's right to life is upheld is in cases of murder, which in this context can be seen as ending someone's life when they are not infringing upon your own rights. Self defense as a valid legal defense is saying that once your own rights to safety and life are endangered by another person, you are now legally allowed to supersede that other person's right to life by killing them to defend your own rights. Your right to life ends where other people's rights begin, as can be demonstrated and confirmed in any number of ways. Apply all of this to pregnancy. Pregnancies that threaten the life of the woman are threatening her right to life and safety, thus termination is completely justified. All pregnancies of any kind infringe upon a woman's right to bodily autonomy, to doing as she will with her property (related to bodily autonomy, your body is your property), to safety (pregnancy and giving birth are risky even with modern medicine), and they infringe upon a woman's right to freedom of choosing her own actions. You can look at it either as the woman having no obligation to continue another person's life because it infringes upon her rights, or you can see it as her defending her rights by killing the person infringing upon them. Either way, so far as rights are concerned, no matter how you look at it, the woman's rights trump the unborn child's right to life even if you say life begins at conception. This is simply how rights work. Oh, by the way, those crimes you listed can help to outline the whole rights thing even further. Murder is illegal because it infringes upon another person's right to life (without just cause such as your own rights being threatened or infringed upon). Theft is illegal because it infringes upon another person's right to property. Rape is illegal because it infringes upon another person's rights to bodily autonomy and freedom of choice. In general, crime is just people infringing upon the rights of others. It's all about rights, the whole legal system and large segments of how society works is built on rights and how they work, and it wouldn't be incorrect to say that a general summary of how rights work is that your rights end where they begin to tread on the rights of others, to expand on the similar statement I used a couple times earlier. The one who wins a legal case is almost always the one whose rights were infringed upon first, with some wiggle room for severity of the infringement from either party. In the case of pregnancy the woman's rights are infringed upon by the very fact that their womb is occupied, which means their rights are assaulted first, and given the wide array of rights that trump right to life that are being infringed upon by a pregnancy... Abortion is a no contest issue in favor of women being allowed to do as they wish if you look at it in the context of rights. I had a bit of a rant here about why I dislike those trying to push their pro-life opinions as law, but I reread my response to mdk's post and decided to take my own advice about not being inflammatory. To put it simply and in less strongly opinionated terms, allowing others to choose to do as they will with their life in this matter does no harm to any of the people arguing pro-life. I would like to see this issue, and some other controversial ones, be solved very simply: make your own choices for your life, let others make their own choices for their life, so long as they aren't actually harming you or infringing upon your rights you shouldn't care what other people do. Life would be so much simpler if people could keep their noses out of other people's business and stop trying to force their personal choices on others through law.