And so can lifetime prisoners. There are many who have spent their time in prison working on very positive things, such as attempting to prevent others from getting into the same cycle that has ruined their lives, or helping psychologists understand why someone would do what they did.

You REALLY think that someone who has just spent gods-know how many years imprisoned and who knows that they have no hope of release will, if they escape, do the thing that will attract the most attention to themselves and commit a crime on the level of what put them in prison in the first place? No, they won't. Short-term prisoners are far more dangerous to the world. Kill them.

Ah yes, practicality. It's SO much more practical to slaughter people who may be innocent and who, in all likelihood, could be reformed if they ARE guilty, while putting no effort into understanding why they do what they do so we can prevent it from happening in the future, than it is to actually try and figure out something that doesn't require killing people and might stop similar crimes in the future and ACTUALLY PROTECT INNOCENT PEOPLE, which the death penalty does not in any way.

The argument about "practicality" is complete and utter bullshit, quite frankly, as Hermes touched on. It is an excuse to pretend as though you're taking the moral high-road, when in fact, you're just surrendering to the desire we all have to see those who don't fit in, who do something you've been taught is wrong, be harshly punished for their actions. You want to kill them, you want to kill another human being; the only difference between you and a murderer is that the law allows you an outlet for your urges. Actually, I'd say a lot of them are better, since at least they don't distance themselves from their victims by referring to them as "inhuman" and pretending that their brutality is what's best for society (well, some of them do, and we recognize them as having serious psychological problems, but most of them don't). Speaking of which, the only people who are "demented to their core" are those who cannot control their actions. Are you suggesting we kill them, those whom we do not consider guilty because they had no control over what they did?

All things considered, I'd say you're an incredibly violent person. The lawfulness of your actions doesn't negate their violence.

I am 100% against the death penalty. Let me get that out right away. I am 100% against abortion as that is murder. I am 100% against murder... But I think that's a given. xD

So. Death penalty. This is a popular one. We all believe rape, murder, ect. to be morally wrong, I asume (pardon my assumptions but I have yet to meet a counter example) Alright. Scenario. Your daughter has been raped and beaten and she's in intense psychiatric therapy for the incedent. Your choices: A) Let the bastard responsible die so that he doesn't have to worry about what he did. He's off the hook. Ya, the world is rid of a twisted rapist, however - in my eyes- justice has not been served. B) Let the bastar responsible rot in jail the rest of his life, thoughts of that night haunting him the rest of his life. he may have started out as a sociopath, however you may be surprised to find that a full life in the slammer can bring out the guilt in anyone. The pride, you say? Well it should make sense that life in prison would cost more than a silly needle to kill someone. However did you think of the many, many... many expensive court appeals that the accused would have to go through? (btw I'm going by the USA Court system on that one. >< May be different for other people.) And lastly... It was dark. Your daughter wasn't 100% sure what the guy looked like. Sure enough, four months later new evidence shows that you had the wrong guy all along! Either you've just killed an innocent person, or you'll be able to let the guy go, with many apologies for getting the wrong person.

My death penalty spiel. :)

Abortion: That little cell is alive. Don't doubt it for a second. Abortion is murder. Now as much as it pains me to admit it, I would not wish for anyone to cary the result of rape or some other terribly traumatic experience for nine months. I'd also prefer that we kill the baby and save the mother if keeping the baby would mean that both would die. My only two exceptions. One thing that frustrates me, especially around here, is that abortion has become an excuse for teens to have unprotected sex without a care in the world. That, in my oppinion, is what has made abortion so incredibly aweful in my eyes. If it weren't for that, i may be a little more leniant on it. But I'm not. so.

I saw someone earlier bring up vegitables. It's never easy to lose a family member, or close friend. However pulling the plug on someone like that... it's like putting down a pet, I guess. You can only hold out for so long.

Which brings up another thing! I love my animals all so dearly. They are family, in my eyes. One of our cats, who is older than I am, is skin and bones. She hardly eats. Her fur is gone on her joints, which has caused soars and such. Her teeth are all slowly rotting out. She just about there. Putting an animal down... it's murder, yes. But it's not cold-blooded. It's done in the best intentions. It's done to stop any further pain once the pain has become inberable. -nod- Alright. That's all i've got to say for now. :)

First of all, I think it's really contradictory that it's okay to put down an animal because "the intentions are good" but not abortion. Murder is the unlawful killing of a person. A clump of cells is not a person, or you'd go to jail for clipping your fingernails or cutting your hair.

Second of all, many of the teen girls who have unprotected sex, followed by abortion, are victims of the "abstinence only" education system that don't show them how to even use birth control, or where to get it, or any of those things. This is usually exacerbated by overly-religious parents who alienate their daughters into sneaking around about sex instead of being up-front enough about it to do it safely. They'll be conned into having unprotected sex simply because they don't know any better, and they're convinced that "their parents will kill them" if they find out she's been doing the nasty with the quarterback. It's not an "excuse" for them to have sex--it's usually a last-ditch resort to keep parents from finding out or to deal with a pregnancy they didn't think would happen for a number of reasons (He pulled out! I wasn't supposed to be ovulating! We used the rhythm method! The condom broke!).

So before you bash abortion, maybe you should attack the root of the problem first, and not the way that girls are trying to cope with a mistake that they weren't equipped to deal with in the first place. I don't see how intentions are not good when you abort a fetus so that you can graduate from high school and actually have a chance to do good with your life, so that children you have in the future will be cared for properly.

Keyori||~ You have really good arguments. However in my oppinion, the cell was fertilized so that it wold have the chance to become a person. Your fingernails and hair are dependant on the body. That cell would be independant, some day. It's like giving it a chance to live by fertalizing it, then taking away that chance by killing it. And no one said that the girls couldn't graduate. There is something called adoption. And while I'm aware that that kind of thing isn't favorable just based on steriotype, it's better than not giving the child a chance to decide for itself wether it should live or not.

Hm... trying to think of how i want to put this in words. The education system... needs to grow up. I find it incredibly aweful that we don't learn what we need to just because some parents are concerned about tainting the mind of their child. Sex happens. ((I have a similar spiel about religion in school but I won't get into that. xD )) So this where fixing the educational system would help to reduce the teen pregnancy rate, which would almost certainly reduce abortion. I'm sure this would make a lot of people happy. Now one of my friends freaked out a couple of months ago because our health class shows a live birth and apparently it's really graphic. now that's a bit too far. But things like how to use condoms and where to get birh controle and stuff like that, that should be taught at least in ninth grade. Although I know plenty of junior high schoolers who've already lost their virginity which blows my mind....

Alright. I'm sorry if I'm offending anyone. xD My thoughts on the educational system are a tad sour, lately, as are my thoughts on pre-marritle sex. Also I have some vintage tendancies and i don't think people should even be /having/ sex while they're in highschool. I mean, isn't that supposed to be an adult decision, especially considering the risky consequences it could come with?

Now back to abortion. I should also point out that it's not just those little bundle-of-cells babies that get aborted. There are nearly fully grown babies that get aborted. Please tell me you guys think that at least that is wrong? And while I'm still against the early stages abortions, I can see where you're coming from and you do have good points.

The thing with adoption is that not all children get adopted out--especially if the child has at least one parent who is a racial minority, and the chances become more slim as the child ages. Unless the mother finds someone to adopt her child before the child is born (which sometimes doesn't happen for a variety of reasons), the chances of the child finding a stable home after birth decrease at a rapid pace. So, unless we fix the adoption system, it's not a viable solution at this point in our society. Otherwise, I would agree with you.

And yes, the education system needs to grow up. I agree with you on that too. Though, we also watched a video of a live birth (in 8th grade I think). I think it deterred a lot of curiosity, especially since the video was from the 80's and the woman was.... ugh. Gross. And hairy. -shudder-

But in any case, I liked how our sex ed classes were. They were age appropriate from 4th grade on, and abstinence was stressed but we were introduced to all sorts of birth control methods. I think that's the ideal way to do it, especially since we got the talk about how (as a girl, at least) your body can get all sorts of messed up when you go through pregnancy and how basically you get to go to the "special" school in our district (which was mostly made up of kids who were teen moms or had drug, violence, or other issues with the law, and had a reputation for being very "white trash").

And, it's possible to have pre-marital sex and still not have sex in high school ;) *points to self*

I've been pregnancy-free for 21 years and counting xD

As for late-term abortions, they're very very rare and very very difficult to obtain. You need to have a really damn good reason beyond "I don't want the baby" to have a late-term abortion, and more often than not, you usually have to go outside of your own state to even have the procedure (only 11 states and D.C. even have late-term clinics, source). I think the restrictions in place currently for obtaining them, and the fact that many people have to travel quite far to have them done (which, alone, deters several people, particularly low-income mothers), are sufficient. I certainly wouldn't support a system that let women have late-term abortions willy-nilly, but in the same token, I don't want a mother to have her options limited when it comes to safe medical procedures approved or recommended by her own doctor.

Hm. See maybe we just need to fix our systems and everything will be fine. xD That way abortion wouldn't be such a big deal.

Haha grats on your pregnancy-free streak. :)

Ya I havn't really looked at statistics and such regarding late-term abortions. Haha. Goodness only 11 states. Well ya I could see then why those aren't common. And I agree that mothers shouldn't have options limited with safe surgeries and procedures and such.

This is making me think a lot about a book we read this year, Unwind. Well we didn't finish it but I've been meaning to grab it and finish it. :/ Anywho. basically if parents don't want their kids, they can have them unwound: kill them and give their parts to people who need them. Apparently the book said that that was all because of a huge issue over abortion. Undwinding was the compramise. I always worry when I argue against abortion and wonder if i'm pushing for that by saying the things that I say.

Emi: May I ask a question of your stance on abortion? Tell me, why is it that I cannot force someone to keep me alive using their body or to carry a child for me or to give me an organ or blood, and doing so would be a human rights violation on my part (according to the UN), yet it's perfectly acceptable for a woman to be forced to keep an unfeeling, unthinking clump of cells alive at the expense of her health, her education, her job, and her relationships? Why do women not get a right to their bodies when everyone else does, at least as adults?

Also, you REALLY need to re-examine your definition of personhood. No truly meaningful definition of "person", that is, one that does not include things we never consider people such as tumors or parasitic twins, can include fetuses until quite a ways into the pregnancy, long after abortions become unavailable unless the woman's life is in danger. And why is their personhood negated by the circumstances of their conception, unless the argument about personhood is merely a cover for the wish to punish women for having sex? After all, a woman who has been forced to carry a parasite she does not want to has had the rights to her body violated just as much as a rape victim, so it can't be her mental or emotional state you're concerned about. The only difference is that one chose to have sex, one did not.

Also, your statement about it being an excuse for teenagers to have sex without protection is, quite frankly, ignorant. Most women who get abortions are either married, have been married, or are in stable relationships with the father, have kids or intend to have kids in the future, and are well out of their teens. A fair few of them did use protection as well, but it failed. And the vast majority only ever have ONE. I can almost guarantee that if they're not using protection, they're going to get pregnant a lot more times than just once.

If you'd like a source, here: http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/US-Abortion-Patients.pdf

And even ignoring that, you seem to have a very odd idea of abortion availability. Several states have passed laws limiting an abortion recipient's right to privacy, especially in the case of teens and their parents, abortions aren't free by any means and are rarely covered by health insurance, and many women are limited in the clinics they can get to. So even if there are teenagers using it as an alternative to contraception (and I really doubt there are), the practice is pretty much limited to rich kids with understanding parents.

Facade, you flatter me. =P I agree though, but kind of for a different reason. The more demented someone is the more reason we have to keep them around because we can learn from them. You know? By gaining knowledge from them, we're increasing society's safety, which seems to be our big important idea here.

And I don't know if this has been said by anyone, but it's definitely been implied. If someone is 'demented to the core' they need psychological help and by that definition are not truly at fault, but needing help themselves. The more 'demented' they are, the more they fit into the capital punishment bracket, but the more psychologically disturbed they are, the more the need help. And those are two contradictory ideas.

No one said that it would cost the woman her job, her education or her health. Relationships would be affected, yes. So I can see where that would be an issue. However having a child does not disable one from finding the other three available. It'd be harder, yes. I'm not sure how other high schools are, but the one I attend has a day care. I wouldn't want to encourage teen pregnancy, however I am all about finding ways to help teen mothers. There are a lot of programs, too that help out with these kinds of things. Now if health is a concern, this is where the doctor with options come into play. If you saw my first post on here, I did mention that asking a mother to sacrifice herself and the baby is unreasonable. I could also see the mother sacrificing herself for the baby as unreasonable, should either of these things be involuntary. There are soooo many complications that could happen durring pregnancy. But there are solutions to a lot of these; abortion being the final, desperate resort.

Alright I get the argument of being forced to cary a parasite. I get that. What I don't get is why the baby's rights should be any less important than the mother's. As to the personhood matter... I'm not saying that the clump of cells is a person. i'm saying it will be. Big picture.

An excuse for teenagers to have sex without protection. No. What I mean is that it's a way for teenagers to clean up after themselves if they make a stupid mistake. And I'm not saying that that is abortion's prime purpose. You're trying to make it seem like I think that teens are the only ones who take to abortion. That would be ignorant. However I am not ignorant to the fact that many abortions are grown women with relationships and that that you just said. So please do not acuse me of lacking that knowlage when the truth is that I'm quite aware of this fact.

Now I admit that I'm not up to date on the abortion laws of every single state in the US, but I do know that the state I'm in does not require a teenager to even tell her own parents about an abortion. And I can name several teens here that say if they accidently got pregnant in highschool, they would have an abortion. One of my close friends battled herself for a week after she was 100% sure she was pregnant regarding the abortion issue. She didn't want to, but her parents, other family, friends... Her bf didn't want anything to do with it at first. But after that she accepted that she was having a baby. Unfortunatly the child miscarried. :(

Teen pregnancy is a serious issue, or at least it is here. The highschool I attend is considered the "good crowd" of the highschools here and we have several mothers to be and several girls who already are mothers. So don't think that it's just adults who look into abortion.

Then your area is fortunate. The high school I nearly went to has a no-tolerance policy on teen pregnancy -- if you get pregnant, you're not allowed in school. The one I -did- go to, you were pressured to either drop out or get a home tutor, and you could not attend the graduation ceremony. And that's not taking into account the amount of time they'll have to take off school; they'll at least have to be absent for the actual labour, and if something goes awry in the pregnancy, they can be out a lot longer. A friend of mine who got pregnant in the 11th grade had to drop out because complications with the pregnancy made her miss over half the school year.

Otherwise normal, run-of-the-mill pregnancies can and do result in death or permanent injury. And that's ignoring the things we consider "normal" -- hernias, hemorrhoids, vitamin deficiencies, toxemia, and postpartum depression, to name a few. So yes, forbidding a woman from having an abortion is putting her health at risk.

They're not. First of all, fetuses don't have rights. Babies do, babies are people, babies are aware. Fetuses are not aware, they are not people. You do not base someone's rights on potential, otherwise everyone would have the right to vote and drive and drink and smoke from birth, since they'll likely eventually be at an age where they have those rights. Also, as I mentioned, you, as a feeling, thinking person, do not have a right to violate someone's bodily integrity. That is, you do not have a right to force someone to do something with their body that they do not want to, even if it it necessary in order to save your life. You do not have that right, and neither does a fetus.

It has little more chance of becoming a person than sperm does. Miscarriages happen a great deal of the time. Also, what I mentioned about the argument from potential in the previous paragraph.

And why is this a problem? If you have a wreck, no matter how at fault you were, no matter how stupid whatever it was you were doing, everyone makes every effort to fix things for you, take care of you, prevent you from dying, prevent you from having lasting injuries or problems, and as long as what you did was not criminal, you are not punished for it. I see no reason why this should not be afforded to women.

Also, the "stupid mistake" they make is often not a mistake. Teenage girls are often pressured into having sex without protection by their partners based on threats and social pressures. A more aware society would deem this rape, but unfortunately, we're still at the point where if it didn't involve physical force, it was consensual. At any rate, the ones who have to deal with this are the women, not the men, so essentially you're punishing them (extremely severely, I might add; I'd rather just die than have to go through pregnancy, labour, and my entire life being turned upside down) and calling them stupid for doing what they've been pressured to do, while the men get off scott free. Oh, wait, they might have to pay a bit of money once a month, provided the woman actually pursues it. Excuse me while I weep for them.

My state does require such things, and even in places where it doesn't by law, how many teens do you know of who can come up with a few hundred bucks all on their own without anyone, especially their parents, noticing in the relatively brief timeframe they have until they can no longer receive an abortion? And, if they don't have a car, they have to get someone to take them to the clinic, who will more than likely either be a parent or someone who might tell a parent.

...You say that you don't think it's only one group even though you mentioned teens getting abortions as the main reason you dislike it so much, and then do the exact same thing to me. I did not say it was only adults, I said it was mostly adults.

As a pacifist, I would LIKE to say that killing is never right under any circumstances. However, I find that from an ethical standpoint I cannot say that.

For one thing, as a believer in abortion I could be seen to be contradicting myself. That said, TO ME the unborn foetus is not a LIFE, but a POTENTIAL life. As long as an abortion is carried out quickly, as most abortions are, there is no ethical problem in my mind. However, this debate isn't about abortion - it's about killing. Is abortion killing? To me, no, so that's all I'll say on it for now.

On capital punishment, I have to go back to sitting on the fence. Capital punishment has been out in my country for decades, but I hear calls for it to be brought back - mainly from the older generation - frequently. Once again, I personally want to say that any act of killing is an aberration and should never be done, but I cannot say that. As this is nowhere near an ideal world, we will always be confronted with the issue of murder and therefore I can't hole myself away in an ivory tower.

Therefore, it may be suggested that the "punishment fit the crime." The taking of one life as vengeance for the taking of another. However, "eye for an eye" philosophies like this are arguably just as barbaric as the original crime itself. Do we "turn the other cheek?" Certainly, people who forgive and forget could be judged to have strong moral character... or weak, depending on your viewpoint.

PERHAPS it should be a matter which is totally made relative to the situation. The way the judicial system works now, the ultimate decision of a person's fate is made by people who are detached and sitting high up on a bench. Many see this as the definition of impartial justice, but what if this justice is too impartial? People every single day feel wronged and let down by the courts. Maybe the punishment for a MURDERER (specifically for a murderer, as this debate is about killing) should have greater input from the wronged party ONCE IT HAS BEEN DECIDED by an impartial jury that the murderer is indeed guilty. Does this compromise standards of justice? Maybe... but in a system where something has already gone wrong (speaking for my own country), shouldn't we be open to change?

I'm so bad at giving a definitive answer, huh? So for now, let me end this and just put a few questions to you guys:

My ethics teacher often posed to me the dilemma of "Sophie's Choice." In Nazi Germany, a woman was given the choice of which of her children to save from immediate death. For condemning one of her children to be killed in order to save the other, did this woman commit a moral crime? Should she have allowed both to be killed instead?

Recently in my country, a court refused to deport two terrorists who had been involved in a bomb plot, for if they were deported their lives would have been at stake in their own countries. Is this court doing right by potentially endangering the lives of many in order to save the lives of two proven criminals?

the death penelty is debateble it does cost money to keep a person in jail but if we kill them we are no better than them.

I do believe killing is wrong (I have no opinion currently for the death plenty - because I know plenty of times people get put on the death plenty for being innocent or for some really minor reason - getting stoned alive, ring a bell? Death plenty seems like a way for people just to get entertainment and watch someone die right in front of them) ; anyways, I don't believe in war, I just don't believe in the idea of killing, no matter what you say, killing someone for anything does not prove whom is right, just who is left standing.