Envision, Create, Share

Welcome to HBGames, a leading amateur game development forum and Discord server. All are welcome, and amongst our ranks you will find experts in their field from all aspects of video game design and development.

Debate Classics: Abortion

Firstly, it is neither your place, nor the law's place, to decide what constitutes a good lifestyle. You do not get to decide who needs 'to learn a lesson'. That is not the role of the state.

Secondly, I think you are confusing making someone 'grow up' with crushing them. There's a difference between someone maturing, and someone having their spirit broken.

Thirdly, I would like to point out that people are stupid. Getting accidentally knocked up is pretty stupid, I'll give you that. But what you are proposing is a punishment, and a terrible one. One sealed through another person - a child. To bring that child into existance, to make it into a person, and to use it to 'teach the mother a lesson'. I just don't think that's fair on the child that foetus eventually becomes.

Continuing on the theme of punishment, Philip Dick used the analogy of children playing in the street, talking about substance abuse. I think it also fits this situation. Yes, people play in that street; often naievely, foolishly. And some of them get hit by cars, and it is more than they could imagaine such a simple, pleasant game could bring down on them. And you are the ones holding them there, pinning them down after they've seen the headlights. You don't give them the chance to run. You don't give them the chance to learn, before it's too late. Do you know what it's like for mothers in that position? Do you what it's like, having all those people, just like you, seeing them, and knowing that they're thinking just what you're thinking. That they're just another easy girl, just another stupid whore, can't make her own decisions. That she's learning her lesson. Do you know what it's like to be 19 pushing a baby chair? Are you telling me that my own mother's 'decision making skills aren't too hot'? Because I can tell you, I'd take her as a mother over you any day. Maybe you're going that having a child at 16 taught my best friend's mom a lesson. But all you're going to do is make me laugh. Because I've seen, and I know.

Finally, I would like to ask who the aborted child is. Can you tell me their name? Can you tell me what they like? Can you tell me what they want? Their dearest ambition? Can you tell me something about their personality? What was there, that was lost? You might ask how I might have felt about it if I had been aborted. Honestly; I wouldn't have minded. Of course, I couldn't have minded anyway, without a brain to inhabit. But the point is that there was no 'I', at the time. Instead, maybe I would have been born a few years later. Maybe I would have had a slightly easier childhood, who knows? I could not have died, because there was no 'me' to kill; there was only a body. I would like to think that I am more than a product of a few bits of genetic information.

By the way, picking up on a typo of mine does not make my arguments any less reasonable, or yours any more so. I hear you perfectly. It's simply obvious to me that what you're saying isn't right.
 
It doesn't have a personality or name or anything because it's never given a chance. As long as the mother can safely have the child then it's better to at least give them a chance. If the mother can't take care of the baby then she can put it up for adoption so it will have a chance to have a better life. There's no guarantee that it will have a good life but there never is for anybody or anything; nothing is ever certain. And if the mother can't bare to part with the child and put it up for adoption then how would she have been able to abort it? If she can safely have the baby and doesn't want it then at least she could give it a chance with another family instead of killing it. End of story.
 
Roman Candle said:
By the way, picking up on a typo of mine does not make my arguments any less reasonable, or yours any more so. I hear you perfectly. It's simply obvious to me that what you're saying isn't right.


You may not agree with me, but to say I'm not right is a rather bold statement. I'm saying my own beliefs, not facts. You, as a mod, should understand that. Of course we're all capable of typos, I simply had to point out the irony of the particular one.

I simply believe that if we live in a society where we're teaching people "Its okay, you can act recklessly and your mistake will be covered," it can't be a good thing. Sure I see your point about the child growing up with a bad life, and in that sense of the matter I'm really not sure where I stand. I'm simply saying that I'm sick of people wanting the easy way out for their mistakes. Just own up to it.

thats really my problem with it. Not teaching people a life lesson and all that.. I mean yeah thats ideal, but I know life isn't a Disney movie. I just don't agree with the easy-button that is abortion. Easy and destructive.
 
I'd just like to talk about the common conception that every woman who gets pregnant without wanting to got it because she didn't do anything to prevent it and was generally a stupid idiot for letting it happen. What is up with this? Having sex while using protection can fail. Are you to say sexual intercourse should just be avoided entirely? I don't hear you yelling about how the people that had sex and didn't have their protection fail are idiots. It's just the 1 in 100 case that the condom breaks, or that the birth control pills fail because you took some anti-biotics for your strep-throat, and then you become a complete idiot.

And also, abortion is not what I'd call an 'easy-button', it costs money. You don't just walk in, pay 5 dollars, get one, and then go to McDonalds, grab yourself a big-mac and go on with your life. Not only that, but you get the awesome people pushing their morals onto you, screaming that you're going to go to hell for killing the next coming of Jesus.
 
TREG: You are completely right about not being able to make a law based on those beliefs, and I 100% agree with you. However, the law should be based on the fact that life begins at conception and the would-be baby is being killed and not given a chance.

Andy: It's already been said that they should just acknowledge that it is a possibility and take responsibility if it does happen; not that they're stupid only if it does happen.
 
Mandatory test at the age of 20 to descern if you have the geniology and skill and will to make an effective parent. If you dont, your tubes are tied. You can retake the test every 3 years following a failure to pass. Bad parents or unwitting parents are quite truely a bain on the legal system, they might as well be called criminal/prostitute/drug addict creation stations. No, this wouldnt stop crime, it would lower it though. And it would ease the population in general since we really dont have the resources to support more than 3 billion more people on this planet in its current state without a crisis occuring or a war. THIS is what government funding should go into, "nipping it in the bud" as they say. How many people would choose to get their tubes tied if it were a government writeoff? And it costs less than an abortion and there's no real moral highground for protest, is there? Other than "Im a shitty person, but I deserve the right to choose to have a child". No, that's not a good arguement at all. Wellfare would just end up taking them away later. Plus, there's always adoption. And what's the counterargeument there? "Not my genes"? What a fucking stupid arguement, genes dont shape a who a person is, just what they look like.
 
That people arent willing to adopt because its not their genes.
Hey, the Nazis invented volswagons, I guess Im a nazi for driving one? That's a silyl writeoff used by people with no argeument. There is no pure evil, the Nazis got where they were by getting a few things right but are notorious for what they got wrong. They also breathed, I guess you're anti-breathing? Also they never had a program like this at all, so its moot.
Also, I guess since this is the land of the free a drunk wifebeater should be able to purchase a gun willynilly, right? Who are we to force standards, that's not freedom omg. Seriously, think before you speak.
 
Hailey T, I completely understand what you mean about a single opinion not being able to be right or wrong. But you've made assumptions in your arguments which any experience of the world can show to be false. That having a child is likely to bring someone down to earth, for instance. That abortions are applied for only by stupid girls who got pregnant by screwing around. In these respects, it simply seems to me as if you're basing your beliefs on an ideology, and then using logical argument to justify your conclusions. A debate runs smoothly only when people make observations and then base their opinions off them; this is rarely the case. I certainly wouldn't say it was true for myself. But some of the things you've said, I'm sorry, are wide off the mark.

the fact that life begins at conception
Not a fact.


ryanwh, what you've suggested neither works on a idealist level - that is, in the ideal world we would do this - nor on a practical level.

As a final note on adoption - why on earth would you suggest heaping such a massive amount of work onto an already deficient system. The sad truth is that adoption is great for pretty white babies, and that if you happen to be black, ugly and a teenager then you are basically screwed.
 
The problem you have when approaching this proposal is the standards. This was made clear by the nazi comparison, I mean get real. It wouldnt be high or astronomical or racially based, but shit, is it really unreasonable to impose at least the same standards for owning a gun on owning a child? Does owning a child require less responsability in this topsey turvy world? Or course not. If you dont have a job to support a child or the mind state to handle a child, why in god's name should you maintain the right to make one? That's not freedom, that's irresponsibility and that's why we have so many "ugly teenagers that are basically screwed" in the adoption agency to begin with.
And for god's sake, support the arguement. Just stating it doesnt work is only slightly less insulting then slapping on a condescending label to discredit the whole idea.
 
Life does begin at conception, and it is a fact. The moment that sperm fertilizes the egg you have a unicellular organism with the 46 chromosomes that every cell in your body will later have. It has already determined what you will look like when you're mature. The cells multiply, following the "blueprints" that your chromosomes dictate and after having enough time to mitosisize, you are mature. Given, this takes a good 20 years or so at least, but that's all the process is. After that your cells don't reproduce as quickly as they die and so you shrink and become old and unhealthy, ultimately leading to death. That one cell is still alive and still has the same information as any other cell in your body; it just hasn't been allotted the time necessary to reproduce enough to be capable of advanced functions that you can now perform. Just because it hasn't built organ systems, etc. yet doesn't mean that it isn't living.
 
Life is a human-invented concept and its meaning is subjective, and human life even more so. If you refuse to "kill" a fetus based on the fact that it has a human life, you need to think about why we it's considered immoral to kill a human. Humans feel pain, and they're self-aware. That isn't at all true of very early fetuses - the ones you can abort.
 
No brain, no awareness, no personality, no person. It's like a brain-dead adult. There is no one there to kill.

If 'life' begins at conception, then why aren't you campaigning against the morning-after pill? Or contraceptive coils? In fact, if you truely believe that this is murder, what exactly are you doing to stop it?
 
The catholic church does campaign against those things. So there are levels of extremism that cover morning after pills. And short of becoming either a politician or a terrorist there's little a single person can do about the choices millions of people choose to make. I mean, you can talk, but then you get shoved into a partisan corner and half the nation has already toned you out.
 
I meant the people in this thread specifically. If it's murder, taking place casually every day, shouldn't you at least be burning down an abortion clinic or something? I mean, if the doctor next door to me was routinely killing people, and the police weren't going to do anything, I would sure as hell try something. I wouldn't sit around going on about how it's an easy way out for dumb girls. If life begins, and from a religious point of view the soul enters the body, at conception, than thousands of killings are taking place, right under your nose, and you seem not to care enough to act on it. So what if you're branded a partisan? So what if you're sent to jail? Wouldn't it be worth it to save those few lives lives? Unless, of course, it's not actually murder...
 
Roman Candle said:
I meant the people in this thread specifically. If it's murder, taking place casually every day, shouldn't you at least be burning down an abortion clinic or something? I mean, if the doctor next door to me was routinely killing people, and the police weren't going to do anything, I would sure as hell try something. I wouldn't sit around going on about how it's an easy way out for dumb girls. If life begins, and from a religious point of view the soul enters the body, at conception, than thousands of killings are taking place, right under your nose, and you seem not to care enough to act on it. So what if you're branded a partisan? So what if you're sent to jail? Wouldn't it be worth it to save those few lives lives? Unless, of course, it's not actually murder...

Well Huitzil, you've gotta be thinking about looking out for number 1. Despite what anyone says, you're the most important person in the world to yourself. You're not going to sacrifice the rest of your life or a good chunk of it to save some babies. And also, the fact that a good portion of people disagree with you, and make you doubt the fact you hold so dear also plays a part in it. "What if I'm wrong?" enters you head (like it should to any rational person in any situation ever), and the jail time could be completely pointless, especially considering that you're just getting rid of one abortion clinic and all the people that would go there would probably just go to another one across town.

Remember Huitzil, I'm the most important person in the world to me. And unless I get a divine message (which I'm sure a lot of the abortion clinic terrorists probably think they did) to burn down an abortion clinic, it's just not worth it.
 
Agreed. I'm not going to do something off the wall like that, and lose the rest of my life. I'm a great student in school and plan on getting a degree or two once I graduate high school. Going to jail for something that would be little more than the equivalent of a stubbed toe to the situation and losing any chance of a good future I had isn't worth it.
 
I have a hard time buying the words without the resolve. I think if people really, truely believed abortion was equal to murder plenty of people would be more than willing to take on some kind of vigilante justice. So there must be some level of doubt in their minds in addition to the whole self preservation thing (which should, in theory, be outweighed by faith if one has complete beleif in their religion). So either there's doubt in the validity of considering a fetus equal to a human, or there's doubt in the afterlife as people here arent willing to go to the extreme measures one would think they would believing what they do. I think that can be attributed to the priviledges one gets in a relitively free and powerful society. If you have a good life, you're not willing to throw it away and if you live in a good part of the world, a single death means more then the same thing happening in a place where death is constant. So I guess that dynamic created people willing to protest and believe abortion is equal to murder but not willing to take it any further than that.
 
ryanwh said:
So either there's doubt in the validity of considering a fetus equal to a human, or there's doubt in the afterlife as people here arent willing to go to the extreme measures one would think they would believing what they do.
You don't need to believe in the afterlife to be anti-abortion. It is a good argument though. Personally, I don't think I would go around burning down abortion clinics even if I thought abortion was murder. There'll always be another one out there, and it's hard to have as much compassion for a fetus as a grown human regardless of your belief.
 
There'll always be another UN bus, too. Always another embassy. That doesnt stop suicide bombers. Faith isnt terribly logical, but if I for one was absolutely certain that there was an afterlife and that by wiping the world of abortion clinics(which I were absolutely sure were commiting murder) Id absolutely have a chair in the cloudy happy section of the afterlife, I wouldnt hesitate. So there has to be some level of doubt in these people since knowing this is happening and letting it happen would certainly be considered a sin I would think. Sort of an accesory to murder, or mega-apathy.
 
Dude, you really can't compare it to something like that. Reasons for not doing it have already been explained and are damn good reasons. Not to mention whoever said they believed in the afterlife and that it was "God's bidding" or what have you anyways?
 

Thank you for viewing

HBGames is a leading amateur video game development forum and Discord server open to all ability levels. Feel free to have a nosey around!

Discord

Join our growing and active Discord server to discuss all aspects of game making in a relaxed environment. Join Us

Content

  • Our Games
  • Games in Development
  • Emoji by Twemoji.
    Top