I applaud your analysis Karl.

But to me this is just further proof of the reality of the coming NWO.

If I remember correctly - the whole abortion debate started over .Gov funding for abortion.

Frankly - eliminate welfare, SS, medicare, medicaid, food stamps, etc. etc. etc.

THEN - if someone can pay their own way, do it

There are too many people on earth anyway - the dieoff is getting closer

There is nothing in the fourth amendment that could be construed to enable a woman to choose to have a fetus she conceived and is entrusted with by the laws of nature murdered. Nothing. I guess it was inevitable that as human population increased a culture of death would eventually metastisize. This article really doesn't sound like you, at all, especially the ending.
There is only one culture, Western culture, that has voluntarily embraced infanticide. In the US 40 million abortions has resulted in approximately 60 million less native population with the losses replaced by Immigrants from just about any country on earth, except Europe, from 1965 to recently. Abortion equals extinction, albeit, partial. You rightly rail daily about the morass of corruption that pervades every nook and cranny of this society. If the most innocent vulnerable being can't even be safe in tens of millions of women's wombs, is it any wonder that this country is in the catastrophic state it is in?

Wootendw wrote..

The fundamental fact of all animal life and especially of human life is the quality of consciousness - a human being does not merely exist; he KNOWS he exists. While any 'living' tissue is said to be alive in the biological sense, in the moral sense, only the mind is alive and only the mind has rights. My hand is alive in the biological sense but it has no rights because it does not know it exists. It is part of my body and is therefore my property. To injure my hand would violate MY rights but not my hand's.

That framework has some interesting implications.

I'm not aware of any drastic change in cognitive ability that happens at the moment of birth so a consciousness-based theory of rights would mean that rights start to accumulate at some point during the gestation process and wouldn't fully vest until some time after birth.

If rights are strictly assigned based on cognition there would be a time early in life in which an infant would have less rights than some animals. At a certain stage of development an infant might have less self-awareness than a domesticated adult cow, or some breeds of dogs so we'd need to accept that for a brief period of early infancy children would have a right to life that was less protected than certain livestock or pets.

The fact that such a theory leads to non-intuitive results doesn't prove it wrong but it does mean that it needs more than cursory scrutiny before being seriously advocated.

Agreed. Permanently disallow government funding of abortion. Then, you can tell the people opposing it to mind their own business. But when the coercive power of the state is involved to take money from them to spend on things they find abhorrent, this is what happens.

Of course, if they did that, they also wouldn't have any control when someone gave them the finger and paid for things themselves, so they aren't going to go for it. Doubtless, such decisions would be fewer, and more thought out than those made by spending public money.

I get what Wallace is saying too. The abortion pimps seem awfully hell bent on getting the natives (and have been especially successful with certain groups) to abort their children, while at the same time trying to import immigrants by the busload. If it were the leaders of another country (or just rogue agents within another country) doing this, we'd have a word to call it, I think.

Open ended, rhetorical question: Why do we continuously try to codify and control morals and behaviour? And when will we learn that it doesn't work (prohibition, "war on drugs"), and only forges the links of our shackles?

/facedesk

Wallace wrote..

There is nothing in the fourth amendment that could be construed to enable a woman to choose to have a fetus she conceived and is entrusted with by the laws of nature murdered.

I share your general opposition to abortion, but you are inviting the government in to make "personhood" a status granted by the government instead of something that is naturally conferred by existing. In an era of American citizens being labeled enemy combatants to avoid due process, I am not willing to give any politician this type of leverage. Under this amendment, further laws could be passed to impose conditions on the consideration of someone to be a person.

The GOD that I know and love is omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent. With that understanding and belief it baffles me that humans are so concerned about desperately defining life, the meaning of life, the purpose of life, when life begins, etc.

But what royally*****es me off is a group of humans that attempt to force their beliefs on others (and me), especially when their beliefs infringe on my liberty and my dominion over my body.

As for the proposed prohibition of abortion, history shows the practice of herbal abortions going back some 5,000 years. What did our ancestors know about a woman's dominion of her body that we have forgotten? Up until the 10th week, a fetus doesn't even look human...what's wrong with excising a mass of unrecognizable cells that could not survive on their own outside of the womb? Human life should be defined as beginning at the point at which the fetus can breath on their own, any condition short of being capable of sustaining life should not qualify as a person. Maybe we could extend that to the point that a human is not a person until it is capable of being fully self sustaining. Maybe that is why children were historically considered chattel until the age of majority?

Matters of fact: A human female is born with approx 7 million eggs. The human male tosses off up to 150 million sperm per milliliter of ejaculate.

Don't those massive numbers suggest that human life is not so precious or rare?

The biggest hypocrisy with the entire personhood (ownership/preservation of life) pledge bull**** is that we still send our youth to be slaughtered in foreign lands to maintain a steady supply of resources, such as oil. Isn't war kinetic action hazardous to one's health?

The other glaringly ignored precept in this personhood pledge is that we are GOD's property; HE may do with us as pleases HIM and HE endowed us with free will to choose our paths and behaviors. Life is between HIM and us. No one or no group has any right to interfere with the choices we make so long as one's behavior causes no harm to any other LIVING person. A human, minimally, should not be considered a person at any point before they reach full term IMO.

It is my humble opinion that there is nothing wrong with culling a herd, in fact it is an obligation (regardless of species). Now, why the hell would the nanny state want to preserve so many needless skinbags? Are they really in that big of a need of slaves? Are they going to medically induce a coma and use us to produce energy?

With the world population being 7 billion, mankind has reached a critical point in which the sustainability of the population is in serious jeopardy. If you don't think peak oil and peak energy is a real issue now, let's just add another billion humans and see what happens. We're seriously overdue for an extinction level event (whether natural or man-made), why bother with a personhood amendment?

excellent, Imustbenutz!

Better said than I was trying to attempt..

If we really believe in an all powerful God, and the sanctity of the soul, then why, oh why, do we believe we have any say or effect on this plane?
How very hypocritical, it seems to me.....as all souls are in that loving God's hands, so why on earth would our paltry little actions have any effect?

Where's the supposed faith or trust?

I used to be vehemently opposed to suicide.

Then I started paying attention to the people around me.

Karl is correct here. This is about more than abortion but they are using abortion to appeal the the emotions of those that oppose it. "We'll stop abortions! We'll also take over your life in it's entirety but we'll have stopped abortions and that's the important part. Anyone who opposes this is a sick bastard that enjoys killing children."

I support the basic premise of Roe v. Wade that the State doesn't have to recognize the rights of the unborn fetus unless it can sustain life outside the womb. At the point that it can be reasonably expected to survive and thrive outside the womb you must recognize and protect it's right to life.

And back to the suicide topic, while I still mostly disagree with the concept of suicide I believe the choice is up to the person wishing to commit suicide. It's their body and it should be 100% up to them what they do with it as long as they don't harm someone else.

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There is only one culture, Western culture, that has voluntarily embraced infanticide.

Not true. South pacific island culture before the arrival of european culture practiced infantcide to control population in light of limited resources.

One thing that must always be kept in mind:

A government powerful enough to prevent all abortions...is also powerful enough to make them mandatory.

Chew on that, if you will. That alone is sufficient argument against the "Personhood" Amendment.

(Amendments can be, in turn, amended...and Barack Obama has shown us how people in power can ignore the Constitution itself whenever convenient...)

For the record I will state that I am against abortion, but I agree that this pledge as it's written is trash. It oversteps by a huge amount.

I believe life begins after implantation of the fertilized egg in the uterus. A women(couple) shouldn't allow this to happen if she doesn't want to be responsible to care for that life.

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You do know that it's against the law to commit suicide in most jurisdictions, yes? "Gee, let's prosecute this corpse!"

Well doh. Can't have the cattle on the farm offing themselves.

To me it's simple: if you don't believe in abortions don't get one.

If you believe in God, Jesus, etc, then surely you believe that a person, once dead, goes before St Peter and gets judged for their sins. If you believe that abortion is a sin (despite the fact that every culture on earth practiced infanticide in some manner in the past), then you must believe that the women who do it will face divine judgement and go to hell.

If the anti-abortion do-gooders actually believed what they preach, they would feel secure in the fact that they're not getting abortions and that God/Jesus would handle that judgement of those that elected to get abortions.

If you believe in Heaven, God, Jesus and all that, then why do you feel the need to force me to believe in it? And why don't you believe your own message that God judges all?

Some folks really need to look in the mirror and ask themselves what the REALLY believe.

The gov is not God. Nor does any thinking American want it to be.

I think there is a significant portion of the population that would love this country to be a theocracy that would force their evangelical beliefs on everyone under penalty of law.

I will resist them to the end. They are not supporting Liberty or any of the founding concepts. They are supporting and advocating tyranny and that should be resisted with every available means.

My 2¢

"There is only one culture, Western culture, that has voluntarily embraced infanticide."

The Chinese and the inhabitants of India have been killing off baby girls for thousands of years. Abortion tools are found in ancient archeological digs; 9k years old. Hunter-gatherer tribes do a lot of infant killing. In Victorian England the death rate in foundling homes made it pretty clear that they were meant as killing mechanisms.

Humans can be a rather horrid lot.

Gator, you are truly letting the best be the enemy of the good. Reread Imustbenutz' post (also an extreme position), and then reconsider your commitment to saving just-fertilized-eggs (you said in an earlier post that you considered IUDs to be murder, since they prevent implantation). Sure, fertilized eggs are living. So are sperm; so are unfertilized eggs. Sure, in an ideal world nothing would be killed, including plants. But Karl is right that 95 percent of American women would lynch anyone who would presume to outlaw (e.g.) IUDs (and I'd join in the lynching party). Your degree of extremism just causes your argument to look silly; it makes you appear to simply want to control other people for the sake of controlling them.

Abortion is really just a fancy word for early infanticide. Infanticide is practiced by every culture during every period of history. Sometimes people are open about it and sometimes they hide it, but it's always practiced.

There's really 2 issues going on here: One is morality of infanticide and the other who owns the children.

There have been repeated attempts to suppress Infanticide/abortion unsuccessfully through out western history. Every time a new ban is passed babies start dying of suffocation from sleeping wrong or attacked by wild animals, ect. People view ending the life of their child as their own natural right. Trying to force people to be moral through the law always fails. Go read up on the history of infanticide if you don't believe me. If you want to limit the number of children killed then public shame will save more children than poorly enforced and easily evaded laws.

Secondary if you want to arrest people for infanticide then you are giving ownership of children to the state. Do you really want to do this? The state owning your children means they can prevent you from raising them as you see fit. The state owning your children means they can take them away from you for any reason they feel like. Practice the wrong religion? Bamb, kids are a state foster home. Give the state an inch and they'll take a mile.

I agree. I don't like abortion, but the governments control of anyone ends at their skin, if for nothing else than it is an easily discernable and definable interface.

Karl wrote:

Quote:

"The proposal of a "Personhood Amendment" is Satanic as it assigns the power of life from creation to death not to God or to each individual person with full vesting of authority once sentience has been reached but rather to Government.

Lucifer himself wrote that text and if you fail to see this you need to read it again until you do. There is nothing Christian in the premise and words of that proposal. It is spawn from the forked tongue of Satan himself.

The signatories to that document are in fact sworn, by their own hand and act, minions of the Devil.

I will not vote for or support Lucifer's servants."

The real beauty of many religious metaphysical ideas is the attempt by some poetic souls to verbalize what is basically ineffable.
Lucifer or no Lucifer, rest assured those people who defend and propose any of these "Personhood" claims or ideas are truly dangerous and treacherous.
Be very afraid, America.

Oh so young this America!
There is a reason why the vast majority of Churches and Cathedrals in Europe are EMPTY...rarely used and why the Euros have never forgiven the Christian Church still after 300 years.

Breton

Suicide is illegal due to the same logic used for gun carry prohibition. The absurd notion that you can legislatively change the behavior of someone who is already WAY beyond the point of caring about your stupid law. I still can't believe the AP tried to make a gun control issue out of the Mt. Rainier shootings..

For me personally, it comes down to the fact that I simply don't believe in abortion. I have 2 daughters and I pray that if they are ever in this situation THEY will make the right decision. Karl is 100% right. I do not want any laws that give the government the right to chose or not chose - let alone run other aspects of MY life. It is hard when you have such a stand against something to APPEAR to take the other side, but you must look past this as I believe Karl has done. And I don't mean he's looked past the issue of abortion, like he said this is not about abortion.

Abortion is just one way to handle an unwanted pregnancy. When you start arguing about abortion, it's too late, you've already failed. Instead of fighting each other over abortion, why don't you fight together to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies?

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I pray that if they are ever in this situation THEY will make the right decision

You mean YOUR decision. In all matter that are legal, the right decision is always dictated by the decider and the circumstances they are in at the time.

The first post Karl wrote made me shudder - this one had chilled my spine the core.

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why don't you fight together to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies?

Right. Remove the sex drive of ever post-pubescent male and female. Personally, I would tend to agree with you. If we ever find a way to sterilize people pre-puberty and make them take comprehensive tests to get parenting licenses, I'm all for it. Well, that's the half of me that sees poor parents ruining kids lives. The part of me that still believes in the Constitution and the right to self-determination despises that concept.

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Right. Remove the sex drive of ever post-pubescent male and female

How about we get both parties to accept the possibility of a pregnancy and what goes with it before they succumb to their hormones.

Once upon a time is was shameful to get pregnant outside of marriage, now so many want an easy out when they can't control their passion.

It is also distressing to hear so many expound about personal rights while ignoring that thing growing and living inside.

The amendment is horribly flawed and needs to be thrown out.

Every signer should reexamine what they have signed but they are pandering nothing more.

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I do agree with you there. I think abortion should be handled specifically. Not in the roundabout way with other issues attached.

I can second that.

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But what royally*****es me off is a group of humans that attempt to force their beliefs on others (and me), especially when their beliefs infringe on my liberty and my dominion over my body.

This I can also second. I currently am forced, through taxes, to fund abortions, however I believe there are much easier ways to fix that than this amendment.

I am not refusing to see how this amendment as written enshrines in the Constitution an obligation of government that could be used to further tyranny, however, in practice, I believe that obligation to protect is already being abused in every other aspect of our society to an equal extent as might be possible under this amendment including breach of due process. That being said, I respect your call for highlighting the true consequences of such an amendment before signing some pledge.

If we are to have a government, I want one that respects the unalienable right to self-determined life. I do not believe that entails the right to actively kill another complete human being, born or not. Enshrining the right to kill in law based on an arbitrary date (2nd trimester, 3rd trimester, birth canal), albeit a date determined by the state, already created significant moral hazard for the government itself. Had we never allowed our government to grow to the extent it has where such an amendment is seen as necessary to prevent tyranny, we would not be having arguments over the meaning of the word "is". We have come to a point where tyranny is being used to fight tyranny, or maybe they're both being used to further tyranny. Either way, a society that supports and actively encourages, through subsidy, infanticide does not have the understanding of the human condition to determine the role of government. What ever happened to Mayberry?

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The fundamental fact of all animal life and especially of human life is the quality of consciousness - a human being does not merely exist; he KNOWS he exists.

If that is the criterion for personhood, then infanticide should be legal. How many infants do you know are aware they exist?

Quote:

But what royally*****es me off is a group of humans that attempt to force their beliefs on others (and me), especially when their beliefs infringe on my liberty and my dominion over my body.

Are you in favor of laws restricting very late-term abortion (e.g. aborting a 38-week fetus)? If you are, then aren't you "forcing your beliefs" on late-term mothers? If you are in favor of late-term abortion but believe that a 38-week fetus is indeed a person, then you're advocating the mother's "liberty" to murder her child. If you are in favor of late-term abortion but do NOT believe that a 38-week fetus is a person, then your logic holds. So which is it?

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To me it's simple: if you don't believe in abortions don't get one.

BS logic. If you don't believe in murdering, then don't murder. Don't interfere with someone who wants to kill another just because you personally don't believe in it.