Ed, In contrast to your baseless insistence that the fetus is a separate person, I have explained in detail why it is not. I have listed the conditions necessary for personhood, and that make the concept of fetus-rights impossible. These conditions could not be better based (in more solid physical matter), and you have not even tried to refute them. Therefore, you have failed to show how or why a fetus is an individual/person; and therefore failed to show a rights violation.
Nonetheless you persist in pointing the finger of guilt at abortion. Well good luck presuming guilt BEFORE you have shown a crime/violation. If you are going to imply guilt, it is YOUR responsibility to prove it. Your "outline" is certainly no such "proof". It reasons that since a newborn is dependent of the mother, and it has rights, then a fetus also has rights (because it is also dependent). Under that backwards reasoning, every cell in our body has rights. Yet you still claim I need to demonstrate a difference. Clearly you are rejecting the most fundamental defense AND failing to show evidence of wrongdoing in the first place. Do you also reject the concept of innocence before guilt? If not, then it is YOU who needs to demonstrate IN FULL that your indictment is supported and legitimate. The rest of your post consists of fence-straddling. What you call being "not that simple" is actually you being "not that consistent". If you believe that abortion is a rights violation, then you can not credibly claim you don't think the government should be involved. Besides, the core issue IS whether abortion really is a rights violation. If you still believe so, the burden of proof is on you, the accuser. -------------------------- Um. You get real. Merely restating your case does not an argument make. I outlined why I thought the child is a separate entity although physically dependent on the mother. If you do not accept that as being separate then you must demonstrate how that state is so much different from being totally dependent outside the body. You must also demonstrate how this separateness confers rights and at what exact point this occurs. As far as asserting rights, an infant can no more assert rights than a child in the womb. If you have ever had children, I'm surprised that you would hold the position that they can. If you haven't, I can see why you do. In fact, infants and young children have either no concept of rights or hold a concept that is more akin to a sociopathic emperor than a libertarian adult. This is not to say they are evil but that they are CHILDREN. You either forget or don't understand my position. To the extent that rights exist outside of a human concept (that's another discussion) I see the abortion issue as a conflict of rights and a moral issue. As far as the government is concerned, I come down on the side of not allowing the state to require a woman to sacrifice herself and not allowing the state to make those kind of moral decisions. As far as convincing anyone, I don't pretend to be able to do that. On the other hand, the anti- and pro-abortion crowds haven't done much convincing of each other either. They just, like you, keep making the same absolutist statements based on their own concepts of morality. I don't make a blanket statement that abortion is always morally wrong. I think in some cases it can be justified. In fact, almost everyone concedes this as even most of the anti-abortion crowd make the exception regarding the "life of the mother." I say that the state has no business deciding what the "life of the mother" means or even setting that limit. I also, however, refuse to let the pro-abortion crowd pretend that a child in the womb is not a human life. As I said over and over, it is not that simple. Ed$
