My 2007 anti-abortion e-mail to my M. P. Peter MacKay and my apology for my ignorance

Discussion in 'Abortion' started by DennisTate, Apr 16, 2015.

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Should mothers be given a choice in a democratic nation?

  1. Yes, Canada is a democracy not a theocracy.

    5 vote(s)
    83.3%
  2. No, abortion is making our Creator angry with us.

    1 vote(s)
    16.7%
  3. Yes, mothers face a situation like Masada.

    1 vote(s)
    16.7%
  4. No, we are also a "Christian" nation.

    1 vote(s)
    16.7%
Multiple votes are allowed.
  1. tecoyah

    tecoyah Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    I take it you are a Vegan.
     
  2. dridder

    dridder Member

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    No. I'm not vegan. But I do not eat meat that comes from a small human either.
     
  3. tecoyah

    tecoyah Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Yet....the Cow that was killed to make your burger was FAR more sentient and capable of pain than the Zygote you are complaining about.

    Try using biology and science rather than emotions and God.
     
  4. Fugazi

    Fugazi New Member Past Donor

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    I read the links in the opening post and they are based on purely superficial information, as they say the devil is in the details and these details are left out of the article you linked to eg.

    Free nerve endings, the “alarm buttons,” begin to develop at about seven weeks' gestation [1,2]; projections from the spinal cord, the major “cable” to the brain, can reach the thalamus (the lower alarm) at seven weeks' gestation[3]. An intact spinothalamic projection might be viewed as the minimal necessary anatomical architecture to support pain processing, putting the lower limit for the experience of pain at seven weeks' gestation.

    At this time, however, the nervous system has yet to fully mature. No laminar structure is evident in the thalamus or cortex, a defining feature of maturity[4,5]. The external wall of the brain is about 1 mm thick and consists of an inner and outer layer with no cortical plate. The neuronal cell density of the outer layer is much higher than that of a newborn infant or adult and at seven weeks' gestation has yet to receive any thalamic projections. Without thalamic projections, these neuronal cells cannot process noxious information from the periphery.​
    - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1440624/

    1. Fitzgerald M. The prenatal growth of fine diameter afferents into the rat spinal cord—a transganglionic study. J Comp Neurol 1987;261: 98-104. - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2442203
    2. Fitzgerald M. Cutaneous primary afferent properties in the hindlimb of the neonatal rat. J Physiol 1987;383: 79-92. - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1183058/
    3. Andrews KA, Fitzgerald M. The cutaneous withdrawal reflex in human neonates: sensitization, receptive fields, and the effects of contralateral stimulation. Pain 1994;56: 95-101. - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8159446
    4. Hevner RF. Development of connections in the human visual system during fetal mid-gestation: a DiI-tracing study. J Neuropathol Exp Neurol 2000;59: 385-92. - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10888368
    5. Larroche JC. The marginal layer in the neocortex of a 7 week-old human embryo: a light and electron microscopic study. Anat Embryol 1981;162: 301-12. - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7270905

    Also what must be added to this is pain perception - Pain has both physical and emotional components.
     
  5. dridder

    dridder Member

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    Firstly, I do not believe in God. Secondly, I have used science, and science has told me a fetus is human. A human fetus may not be as developed as an adult human, just as an adolescent, child or infant is not as developed as an adolescent human, but it still has the potential.

    I still stand by what I originally said. I could not kill an animal, except in self defence or for mercy, and I would find it far more difficult to kill anything that looked human. But perhaps I should have worded it better so as not to confuse you.

    I could not be responsible for killing an animal except if I had a good reason (which is why I am against trophy hunting and have an interest in animal rights). I actually restrict my meat intake because I am wary of over farming, and I think the world consumes far more meat than necessary. But now we are getting into different topics; animal welfare, global warming, world resources etc. The point is I would find it difficult to kill an animal, and near on impossible to kill something that looked human.

    I'm not sure of the law where you are, but here an animal must be stunned before it is slaughtered. A fetus, on the other hand, may be euthanized before being removed, in certain cases, but many do not receive any kind of anaesthesia.

    It does disturb me that some animals have more rights than humans.
     
  6. tecoyah

    tecoyah Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    I am also concerned about animal welfare....but we are discussing abortion, which generally deals with a zygote in the vast majority of cases. We must also deal with the little matter of individual rights and freedom of the citizenry.
     
  7. DennisTate

    DennisTate Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    I actually do believe that the connection between killing animals with abortion is a valid one……………… I personally consider it to be somehow relevant that one near death experience in six involves a meeting with a previously deceased pet……. this is especially true when the near death experiencer is a child.

    If………. both humans as well as animals…….. .have some sort of spirit or soul that survives death and moves on to a higher dimension of space time……. then this does fit in somehow with the ethics of abortion…… On one level…… assuming that there is a Creator who may be composed of fundamental energy then that Creator overlooks all dimensions of space - time which would be at least eleven if not 26 or more. (String Theory). So…… one ethical reason for the Creator to ALLOW humans the freedom to kill each other…… could be that the Creator knows that we don't just simply die…….. but our consciousness continues on.

    http://www.near-death.com/animals.html
    Near-Death Experiences with Deceased Pets and Animals

    Near death experiencer and former atheist Howard Storm asked the Being of Light who he met during his brush with death why this obviously powerful being had allowed the holocaust to occur?

     
  8. DennisTate

    DennisTate Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    I am pro-life….. but I am beginning to swing around to also be at least somewhat pro-choice.

    I am beginning to see greater wisdom in the fact that humanity has been given the privilege as well as the responsibility…. to be free to make mistakes.

    I do believe that when a mother decides to have an abortion she is making an error……. a serious one…….. but…….. I began to look at this differently when I saw the possible connection between a woman having an abortion and the decision by the rebels at Masada to commit suicide rather than become slaves……… or be crucified and degraded in many ways as they knew that the Romans would do.

    Our economy is in many ways more like the economy of Rome than we might wish to imagine.

    We have made it a policy to break unions…….. and create a false illusion that our governments are nearly bankrupt…… when this is not exactly our true economic reality at all.

    http://www.bankingsystemflaws.blogspot.ca
    ….When well trained workers have high quality technology to work with then the total of all wages and benefits paid out to employees is only a fraction of the retail value of the products they produce. As a result of this fact the only way to move products out of warehouses is to extend higher and higher levels of credit. One problem with an abundance of red ink is that compound interest on all this government, business and personal debt over a period of decades will grow to astronomical levels. At this time there is approximately TEN TIMES as much debt in Canada as there is money. A simple explanation for how this happened can be seen here:
    http://www.michaeljournal.org/plenty34.htm

    In my opinion this rather simple mathematical problem is perhaps the number one cause of inflation in the Canadian economy over the past three decades. This is also perhaps the number one reason why our costs of production are so high and Canadian products cannot compete on the world markets as well as they could under better conditions.

    From 1940 to 1970 the Government of Canada put roughly half of the total money supply into the economy through loans issued through the federally owned Bank of Canada. Provincial and municipal governments could borrow the money to build roads, schools, hospitals and sewage treatment facilities at zero or one percent interest. In 1970 we changed our system and since that time a higher and higher percentage of all government debt is financed through loans issued through privately owned banks. At this time it is ninety eight percent. This policy may be great for our banking sector but it was estimated that in the one year of 1995 alone our federal government could have saved roughly SIXTY FIVE BILLION DOLLARS in interest payments if we had gone back to creating half the total money supply through these low interest rate loans issued through the bank that is OWNED BY ALL CANADIANS.

    Considering that our deficit was approximately thirty billion dollars for that year, simply by changing back to an already proven monetary and banking system, we could theoretically have had a FEDERAL BUDGET SURPLUS OF THIRTY FIVE BILLION DOLLARS in 1995.

    The massive cutbacks in the Canadian military, in health care, highway construction, social programs and education were profoundly affected by these accounting practices?

    So what can you and I do about this problem?
     
  9. dridder

    dridder Member

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    Yes. So with abortion its a matter of finding a balance between the right to bodily autonomy and the right to life. Nothing about this can be black and white, not so long as we wish to keep our humanity anyway.
     
  10. dridder

    dridder Member

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    I don't believe in a "creator" but I do believe in an energy that connects humans and i guess as you have mentioned, animals. However i feel there is a scientific explanation for it.
     
  11. FoxHastings

    FoxHastings Well-Known Member

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    That balance has been found. In Canada they found it without misogynistic laws....in the US the compromise is legal abortion until the fetus is viable
     
  12. tecoyah

    tecoyah Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    " So, if only a person can be murdered, when does the fetus attain personhood? When its face becomes distinctly human, near the end of the first trimester? When the fetus becomes responsive to stimuli--again, at the end of the first trimester? When it becomes active enough to be felt as quickening, typically in the middle of the second trimester? When the lungs have reached a stage of development sufficient that the fetus might, just conceivably, be able to breathe on its own in the outside air?

    The trouble with these particular developmental milestones is not just that they're arbitrary. More troubling is the fact that none of them involves uniquely human characteristics--apart from the superficial matter of facial appearance. All animals respond to stimuli and move of their own volition. Large numbers are able to breathe. But that doesn't stop us from slaughtering them by the billions. Reflexes and motion are not what make us human.

    Other animals have advantages over us--in speed, strength, endurance, climbing or burrowing skills, camouflage, sight or smell or hearing, mastery of the air or water. Our one great advantage, the secret of our success, is thought--characteristically human thought. We are able to think things through, imagine events yet to occur, figure things out. That's how we invented agriculture and civilization. Thought is our blessing and our curse, and it makes us who we are.

    Thinking occurs, of course, in the brain--principally in the top layers of the convoluted "gray matter" called the cerebral cortex. The roughly 100 billion neurons in the brain constitute the material basis of thought. The neurons are connected to each other, and their linkups play a major role in what we experience as thinking. But large-scale linking up of neurons doesn't begin until the 24th to 27th week of pregnancy--the sixth month.

    By placing harmless electrodes on a subject's head, scientists can measure the electrical activity produced by the network of neurons inside the skull. Different kinds of mental activity show different kinds of brain waves. But brain waves with regular patterns typical of adult human brains do not appear in the fetus until about the 30th week of pregnancy--near the beginning of the third trimester. Fetuses younger than this--however alive and active they may be--lack the necessary brain architecture. They cannot yet think.

    Acquiescing in the killing of any living creature, especially one that might later become a baby, is troublesome and painful. But we've rejected the extremes of "always" and "never," and this puts us--like it or not--on the slippery slope. If we are forced to choose a developmental criterion, then this is where we draw the line: when the beginning of characteristically human thinking becomes barely possible.

    It is, in fact, a very conservative definition: Regular brain waves are rarely found in fetuses. More research would help… If we wanted to make the criterion still more stringent, to allow for occasional precocious fetal brain development, we might draw the line at six months. This, it so happens, is where the Supreme Court drew it in 1973--although for completely different reasons.

    Its decision in the case of Roe v. Wade changed American law on abortion. It permits abortion at the request of the woman without restriction in the first trimester and, with some restrictions intended to protect her health, in the second trimester. It allows states to forbid abortion in the third trimester, except when there's a serious threat to the life or health of the woman. In the 1989 Webster decision, the Supreme Court declined explicitly to overturn Roe v. Wade but in effect invited the 50 state legislatures to decide for themselves.

    What was the reasoning in Roe v. Wade? There was no legal weight given to what happens to the children once they are born, or to the family. Instead, a woman's right to reproductive freedom is protected, the court ruled, by constitutional guarantees of privacy. But that right is not unqualified. The woman's guarantee of privacy and the fetus's right to life must be weighed--and when the court did the weighing' priority was given to privacy in the first trimester and to life in the third. The transition was decided not from any of the considerations we have been dealing with so far…--not when "ensoulment" occurs, not when the fetus takes on sufficient human characteristics to be protected by laws against murder. Instead, the criterion adopted was whether the fetus could live outside the mother. This is called "viability" and depends in part on the ability to breathe. The lungs are simply not developed, and the fetus cannot breathe--no matter how advanced an artificial lung it might be placed in—until about the 24th week, near the start of the sixth month. This is why Roe v. Wade permits the states to prohibit abortions in the last trimester. It's a very pragmatic criterion.

    If the fetus at a certain stage of gestation would be viable outside the womb, the argument goes, then the right of the fetus to life overrides the right of the woman to privacy. But just what does "viable" mean? Even a full-term newborn is not viable without a great deal of care and love. There was a time before incubators, only a few decades ago, when babies in their seventh month were unlikely to be viable. Would aborting in the seventh month have been permissible then? After the invention of incubators, did aborting pregnancies in the seventh month suddenly become immoral? What happens if, in the future, a new technology develops so that an artificial womb can sustain a fetus even before the sixth month by delivering oxygen and nutrients through the blood--as the mother does through the placenta and into the fetal blood system? We grant that this technology is unlikely to be developed soon or become available to many. But if it were available, does it then become immoral to abort earlier than the sixth month, when previously it was moral? A morality that depends on, and changes with, technology is a fragile morality; for some, it is also an unacceptable morality.

    And why, exactly, should breathing (or kidney function, or the ability to resist disease) justify legal protection? If a fetus can be shown to think and feel but not be able to breathe, would it be all right to kill it? Do we value breathing more than thinking and feeling? Viability arguments cannot, it seems to us, coherently determine when abortions are permissible. Some other criterion is needed. Again, we offer for consideration the earliest onset of human thinking as that criterion.

    Since, on average, fetal thinking occurs even later than fetal lung development, we find Roe v. Wade to be a good and prudent decision addressing a complex and difficult issue. With prohibitions on abortion in the last trimester--except in cases of grave medical necessity--it strikes a fair balance between the conflicting claims of freedom and life. "

    http://www.2think.org/abortion.shtml

    Seems we already did exactly that.
     
  13. dridder

    dridder Member

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    In my personal opinion, to protect our humanity and morality, and to avoid problems of changing viability, we need to base it on when a fetus becomes distinctly human in a physical sense, or at 8-10 weeks from conception. No moral human being should be okay with killing a small human for no good reason. And 8 weeks should be ample time to decide if you want to stay pregnant or not (given most women discover their pregnancies at 2 weeks from conception). From here, allowances should be made in extreme circumstances for social, legal, medical and economic reasons, because it is also immoral to bring a child into a world that can't sustain it. This should be limited to 20 weeks, when the fetus's anatomy is complete and when most medical diagnosis can be made.

    From 20 weeks onward it should be legal in cases of extreme fetal abnormality or a high risk of threatening the mothers life (more than the usual 1:10,000). Because it is immoral to force someone to die for someone else, and immoral to force someone to live a life of pain and suffering.

    As i said, this is just my personal opinion based on effective abortion laws in other nations.

    In European nations, where social welfare is a high priority, you will find they enforce abortion restrictions similar to this.
     
  14. tecoyah

    tecoyah Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    It is fortunate that our laws are not based on individual opinion.

    However....it is also fortunate that YOU are not required or effected in any way by this series of laws as they do not require you to wait for the abortion you will likely never need.
     
  15. dridder

    dridder Member

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    No but they are generally based on mass opinion. And mass opinion about law is generally based on morality.
     
  16. tecoyah

    tecoyah Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Granted.....however the "Mass Opinion" obviously did not match your own, as testified by the law.
     
  17. FoxHastings

    FoxHastings Well-Known Member

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    "morals" are individual opinions. They vary from person to person and no one has the right to impose their "morals" on others.

    Laws shouldn't be based on morals but on what prevents chaos in society.

    Abortion doesn't cause chaos......but trying to pass laws against it does.
     
  18. dridder

    dridder Member

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    Not compared to the rest of the world. I believe it's only Canada, china and north korea who have less stringent abortion laws than the USA. USA is the land of the free, i wouldn't say it is the land of the moral.
     
  19. dridder

    dridder Member

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    When no one cares for the weak any more, you better hope you are among the strong.
     
  20. FoxHastings

    FoxHastings Well-Known Member

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    Once again , you quote me and don't address the post......why don't you just give a speech....oh, you did....:)
     
  21. DennisTate

    DennisTate Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Which……. is why I keep looking at this question and over the past decade I am closer to the pro-choice camp than I ever thought that I could be!

    Yes……… if Canada's Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper had put together some sort of pro-life legislation that really made women angry………. he might not have been able to accomplish so much to assist the nation of Israel or give the RCMP legislation that they can use to decrease the number of victims of the sex trade industry as it still exists even in Canada.
     
  22. DennisTate

    DennisTate Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    This discussion could become quite relevant again if........ P. M. Stephen Harper is not given a majority again tomorrow in the October 19, 2015 Canadian federal election.

    He will probably hang in there for a while if he remains P. M. with a minority but even then it is likely he would retire previous to the next election.

    This would set up Mr. Peter MacKay to perhaps become the national leader of Canada's Conservative Party?!
     
  23. Zeffy

    Zeffy Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    The polls predict a Trudeau minority govt. Trudeau is pro-choice, though Harper is, too (he's personally against abortion but doesn't want to make it illegal). Of course, it ain't over till the fat lady sings ie. the polls close and votes are counted so it's possible Harper will get re-elected, but it doesn't look good for him.

    OT: I just hope Trudeau follows through on his promise to legalise pot......
     
  24. DennisTate

    DennisTate Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    I made a statement back on July 21 that I am hoping will now become true.......

    https://www.facebook.com/Dannion-Brinkley-for-V-P-in-2016-and-President-in-2024-362589677098305/

     
  25. DennisTate

    DennisTate Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    (I submitted the following message on the Contact the Prime Minister link under the category of....Justice, October 16, 2015)

    ..................

    Dear Mr. Prime Minister:




    I made a suggestion to our local Conservative Party candidate Mr. Fred DeLorey that in my opinion could perhaps win you two to ten seats across Canada even though this is the last minute.



    I suggested that he promise, if elected, to table a bill:
    "Ban Intra-cardiac Potassium Chloride Injections on Singletons."



    Central - Nova is such a strong Catholic riding that I believe that if Mr. Fred DeLorey were to do this there could well be an all time record turn out of voters on October 19.



    Although I am a member of Canada's Liberal Party I am of course a Christian first and a Canadian first and that bill, if it was supported by pro-life M. P.'s in the other parties, could well save the lives of several dozen Canadians each year from now on.





    Thank you for considering this.



    Prime Minister Harper, what you did at the G-8 back in 2011 was one of the wisest and most courageous acts that I have ever seen taken by any political leader over these past forty years that I have been watching world events.



    Kind regards and a big thank you for serving us so well.



    Dennis Tate
     

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