Have I ever told you how much I appreciate your wit?

Keep the smiles coming...

Why thank ya, right back atcha.

Heh heh heh, a pun, god I love ruining a tender moment.

This is true... A Human fetus is human and it enjoys life... therefore by the principle set forth by Jefferson's Declaration, the instrument which sets forth the principles on which the Constitution rests, the pre-born human is endowed by its creator with certain inalienable rights. Those rights being the right to its life and the pursuit of the fulfillment of that life.

Roe establishes the myth that the female is rightfully able to strip the life conceived through her overt actions when that life is felt to be an inconvenience. This is a preposterous notion in that the mother is tasked by nature and natures God to protect and nurture that life.

There is no exception in natural law which provides that with rights come sacred responsibilities and with the right to one's life comes the responsibility to defend one's life and those in their immediate presence from unjustified threats of death or bodily injury. There is no right to strip another of their life because that life represents a burden.

So given the sound nature and incontestable logical construct of the above reasoning, there can be no doubt that the pre-born enjoy the rights, thus should also enjoy the full protections of those rights as it matures through it various stages of development, advanced by and enumerated in the US Constitution.

As long as it is a fetus.After it is just a child whose rights can be taken away just like anyone else.

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I respect your right to have your own opinion,but I do not necessarily respect your opinion.

Still waiting... The constitution only states provisions for a person. Is a fetus a person under the law? Not a human, not alive, but a legal person?

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No More Fate And No More Mystery Even As Time Falls Away I Live My Days Every Moment And Its Memory Not Only To Survive, To Die Alive.

Sorry I didn't get to this last nite. It was pleasant so I went for a motorcycle ride and didn't get back until late. Your argument here is interesting in light of the fact that you accused me of making things up when this argument shows beyond any doubt that it is you who is making things up as you go. You make assumtions when you could be operating from a position of fact with just a little bit of research. Of course, if you did the research your argument would fall apart around you.

The same is true of every other pro choicer's argument. Every aspect of my defense of my position has been thoroughly researched and corroborated which is why all pro choicers who debate me are eventually left with nothing but ad hominem attacks on me rather than any actual debate on the issue. I don't make things up, I don't make assumptions, and I don't lie.

Have you ever picked up a legal dictionary? Clearly you haven't, but it is polite that I should ask anyway. I have picked up, and read a lot of them in my research of the legal question of abortion. I am sure that you wish that Roe v Wade represented due process with regard to unborns and it is clear that you have assumed that Roe v Wade represents due process with regard to unborns, but it is self evident that you haven't actually taken the time to find out if Roe v Wade represents due process with regard to unborns. In short, you made it up.

From the law.com legal dictionary:

due process of law - n. - a fundamental principle of fairness in all legal matters, both civil and criminal, especially in the courts. All legal procedures set by statute and court practice, including notice of rights, must be followed for each individual so that no prejudicial or unequal treatment will result. While somewhat indefinite, the term can be gauged by its aim to safeguard both private and public rights against unfairness. The universal guarantee of due process is in the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which provides "No person shall…be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law," and is applied to all states by the 14th Amendment. From this basic principle flows many legal decisions determining both procedural and substantive rights.

Roe v Wade only represents due process for Roe. It doesn't represent due process for all any more than a single murder trial in 1972 would represent due process for you if you should find yourself charged for murder. Due process is a right that each individual has and no trial can represent everyone in any manner. You, as an individual even get your due process in matters as trivial as a parking ticket.

If you had picked up a legal dictionary to research your position rather than simply making it up as you go, you could have thumbed from "due process of law" over to "person" and seen what the definition of person is as far as the law is concerned.

From the law.com legal dictionary:

person - n. - 1) a human being. 2) a corporation treated as having the rights and obligations of a person. Counties and cities can be treated as a person in the same manner as a corporation. However, corporations, counties and cities cannot have the emotions of humans such as malice, and therefore are not liable for punitive damages unless there is a statute authorizing the award of punitive damages.

I suppose that your next objection will be in the vein of philosophy with regard to personhood even though your argument has been based on the legal so if I may, I will preemt the philosophical question of personhood as well even though it is irrelavent in the courts.

If you look critically at some of the definitions of person that are advanced by the pro choice side of the argument, it is obvious that most can be set aside right away without discussion because they simply do not mesh with our own experience of what being a person is or they are simply not applicable to the question of what it is to be a person.

First, we don't "get to be" persons because we become autonomous, or independent, or even viable. These characteristics can be dismissed out of hand as not being essential characteristics of personhood because we all know someone or of someone who lacks some or all of these characteristics to some degree or another. In fact, we all lack them to some degree or another. You may have to be viable to stay alive, for example but viability doesn't tell us anything at all about what it is that is staying alive and if you are going to argue philosopically, it is imperative that any prerequisite you care to demand must speak to the subject of the discussion.

Nearly all of the most popular definitions of personhood suggested by the pro choice side of the argument break down in principle, it must be clear to any critical thinker that it follows that they will also break down in practice. Failure to admit this disqualifies one as a critical thinker and identifies one as an emotionalist. If we try to draw a line and say "beyond this point we are persons" we find rather quickly that there is no bright line in which we can say after this line we have characteristics X, Y, and Z but before this line we didn't. Unless of course, you want to limit yourself to some very arbitrary and superfical physical characteristics at which time, you enter the realm of the biological sciences and pro choicers tend to favor the philosophical arguments rather than the biological or legal arguments which naturally give pro lifer's the upper hand.

In attempting to set a time in which we "aquire" personhood, the pro choice side immediately enters the realm of logical fallacy. You must "beg the question". You must first assume that this aquisition of personhood happens at a time far enough along in the pregnancy so that abortion becomes a rational action and then try to construct an argument that proves whichever time you have arbitrarily set. This is a terribly flawed form of reasoning in either the scientific or philosophical realms. The failure of the application of this rational tells us that we must first try and find the definition of personhood and then determine whether it is a thing that we aquire or not.

(continued)

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"It's not alive, It's not alive, It's not alive. Because I said it isnt', there's your proof jerk." ...lexi

"As far as your logical fallicy shit - shove it. I am a woman."...naturemomma

(continuation)

We often hear argument for brain or thinking. OK, lets go there. The potenital for reason and rational thought is a matter of kind. We either have it or we don't. Realization of reason and rational thought is always a matter of degree and we all realize it to different degrees and none of us reach the absolute limit of our potential. Agreed?

Working within that framework then, the work of being a "person" is not an issue of degree but of kind. Do you understand the difference between degree and kind? The sort of person you are is a matter of degree while what you are is a matter of kind. It is quite possible for you to be a better or worse person than someone else. You can be more or less ethical, or honest, but you simply can not be more of a person than someone else. To suggest so is nonsense.

The demand for some sort of actualization that the pro choice side argues for is based on the acknowledgemen that the potenital for reason and rational thought is already there in each individual regardless of age. The pro choice side attempts to treat this as irrelavent, but if one is attempting to make a rational argument, then it simply must be acknowledged that we are all the same kind of entity as the unborn and that the adult is no more and no less than a grown up unborn. The pro choice side may argue that they are only asking that we all agree on some "reasonable" minimum qualification for personhood, but once again, in principle this demand breaks down.

The first sign of breakdown in principle is obvious on its face. The problem of having to name the degree of potential that must be achieved in order to be a person. Look about you among the various pro choicers. There simply is no agreement even among those on your side. The passion with which you hold your conviction is not a substitute for a rational explanation of why you may choose one point and another pro choicer may choose another. It also fails as reasonable substitute for a rational argument that higher and higher standards for personhood be met, even among post natals.

Then there are those who attempt to avoid the inevetable arguments by engaging the question of realizing potential as a sort of ticket to personhood. That is to say that they argue that we must reach a certain level in order to be considered a person, but once we are there, injury or illness that might bring us below that level will not "un-person" us. In this manner, they attempt to restrict the debate to those who are yet to be born. Again, to a critical thinker, this line of reasoning fails in that it attempts to change degree into kind but doesn't allow kind to be changed back to degree.

This line of thinking ignores what is required to be a person and focuses instead on what is required to "get to be" a person. This is a dead end because even if you conceed that more is required to get to be a person than is required to remain a person then we are necessarily brought back to what is to be required to remain a person after one has achieved personhood. Such arguments would fail to oppose infantacide in a great many cases and would fail to oppose killing of older individuals in just as many cases.

The logic in introducing degree into the definition of person rather than kind is simply flawed. Our rights are founded on the kind of being that we are, not the degree to which we achieve our potential. The extent to which we are different from each other in degree is not the source of our rights. It is nothing more than evidence of differences in our ability to exercise our rights and we all know that there is no requirement to exercise a right in order to have it none the less.

If the philosophical concept of what is a person refers to anything at all, it refers to something that doesn't need to be proven over and over. The essence of the person is something that is inbred. It is not something that we aquire somewhere along the line. Things that are aquired can be lost and may or may not be regained again. The fact that you are a person and can not lose that personhood no matter what may befall you is evidence that it is not an aquisition that you can lose. It is simply what you are.

It simply isn't rational to argue that non persons change into persons. To make such an argument is to argue that we undergo a radical and essential change in our natures during the span of our lives.

The problem with that thinking is that if the change is inevetable from the time we are concieved if given time then the change is not a change in our essential nature. If we initiate the change from within ourselves then it must be in our nature from the beginning and any changes in characteristics like independence, or where we live, or the amount of physical development we have achieved or how much mental capacity we have later in our lives is nothing more than a manifestation of what we were at the beginning of our life and have been ever since. A person.

My apologies for the lenght of this post, but the philosophical argument necessarily requires a lot of words.

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"It's not alive, It's not alive, It's not alive. Because I said it isnt', there's your proof jerk." ...lexi

"As far as your logical fallicy shit - shove it. I am a woman."...naturemomma

Breath is the mundane (uneducated) word for respiration. Respiration is the sum total of the physical and chemical processes in an organism by which oxygen is conveyed to tissues and cells, and the oxidation products, carbon dioxide and water, are given off. Unborns have been respiring since the time fertilization was complete.

Don't you find it odd that law, which generally speaking, is composed of high speech would need to revert to the mundane in order to deny the right to live from a living human being?

By the way, pick up a legal dictionary some time and look up person. Most will define person as "a human being" and then, once again, you are left trying without success to prove that the offspring of two human beings is EVER anything other than a human being.

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"It's not alive, It's not alive, It's not alive. Because I said it isnt', there's your proof jerk." ...lexi

"As far as your logical fallicy shit - shove it. I am a woman."...naturemomma

The argument put foreward here:

http://www.arguewitheveryone.com/463456-post237.html

Is word for word the argument that okhamsrazor put foreward here:

http://www.arguewitheveryone.com/11811-post46.html

So are you okham come back trying already failed arguments in a different name or are you perjuring okham after having had the nerve to call me a fraud?

And we have clearly seen that you need to do more research if you hope to develop an argument that actually has a chance of winning. Thus far, you have lost on something so basic as the definition of words that you could easily have looked up and modified your argument accordingly. If you are failing at building the foundation of your argument, how do you expect the walls of your defense to stand?

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"It's not alive, It's not alive, It's not alive. Because I said it isnt', there's your proof jerk." ...lexi

"As far as your logical fallicy shit - shove it. I am a woman."...naturemomma