Hmmm.

I wonder why I am the only pro-life person here?

Anyway, I firmly stand by my OPINION that abortion is morolly wrong.  It is murder, plain and simple.  It is not the mothers body, it is also the babies body you are talking about, a living human.  It is not part of the mother's body, but is attached to it.

Yes, I agree, birth control should be FREE to all women, because this would reduce abortions.  And yes I agree, an egg is not a person yet, it has to be fertilized for that to happen so I have no problem with birth control as it stops fertilization, so that is not murder.

But instead of abortion, women should do ADOPTION!  

If you can't support the child for whatever reason, give it up for adoption.  Why is no-one saying anything about adoption?  Babies are so beautiful.  They don't deserve to die. If the mother is too poor, or has other problems, then adoption is the answer not abortion.  

I knew someone who adopted three children, and they had to wait in a long line for months for the chance to adopt a baby, some go outside of this country to adopt babies because it is the only way to get one.  

Since my son was born, I now feel abortion is wrong, he opened my eyes to how beautiful children are, they don't deserve to die, they didn't ask to be conceived by a mother who doesn't want them, why should they die?

I don't like children.

LOL Catski, you sound just like  me before my son was born, I hated kids.  My whole life and viewpoint changed when I held him in my arms.  For the first time in my life, I fell in love.

ive never gotten knocked up or had any accidents...or planned bad ideas so i'm undecided.

LOL Catski, you sound just like  me before my son was born, I hated kids.  My whole life and viewpoint changed when I held him in my arms.  For the first time in my life, I fell in love.

ditto catski...

*sigh* if only i were as articulate as you. but im not, so i stick to short, blunt phrases to get my point across.

Okay, but generalising your experience to everybody else is ridiculous. What, we should all go away and get knocked up because motherhood was a life-changing experience for you?

I've outlined all these points before in the thread but sometimes women simply cannot take time off work to give birth. Or there are complications during pregnancy and birth which delay her working. Also, your point about adoption and some families not being able to adopt babies irked me: there are many, many older children in desperate need of homes who are constantly passed over for babies. Rather than give unwanted babies up for adoption to meet some kind of weird supply and demand, how about encouraging couples to adopt older children.

I understand that you struggled with your decision to keep your son and it turned out the best choice for you. But choice is the key to all this. Remember that before you go on a judgemental caps lock rant about how it's MURDER and WRONG and we should all ADOPT. It doesn't matter if it's your OPINION, when you start telling other people which choice to make on an issue as personal as this, you end up sounding like Sarah Palin.

She challenged that as a veg*n I should also be pro-life by default 

It is wrong of people to assume that everyone is a veg*n for touchy feely "compassion to animals" reasons.  People can be veg*n for weight loss and health reasons, to resist government subsidies for the meat industry, for economic / self-reliance reasons (you can grow a lot more nutrition per acre w/o passing it through a cow first), etc.  Veg*nism actually reduces the amount of animals on this planet by making their keep less economically sustainable, so hating animals would be perfectly logical reason for veganism too!

As for abortion - it is an issue of self-ownership, pure and simple.  The right to life is a negative right (there's really no such thing as a "positive right", that is a right to steal from others).  The mother owns the body that the fetus depends on, and thus she should be free to "evict" the fetus at any time.  Since there's (currently) no way to "evict" the fetus without killing it, the current abortion practices are perfectly legitimate.  A fetus doesn't have the right to use its mother's body without her consent any more than I have the right to just yank out your kidney without your consent if I happen to need a transplant to save my own life.

Most people who support a government prohibition on abortion do so due to natalist motivations (religious BS can be reinterpreted to justify anything), which are perfectly valid but there are far more effective ways to raise the fertility rates without violating a pregnant woman's right over her own body.

If cannibalism was legal, I'd eat meat.

Consensual cannibalism should be legal (once again, self-ownership), but it boggles my mind how high the human meat prices would be, and any multi-millionaire stupid enough to be outed as a cannibal would face near-universal ostracism and lose his / her millions pretty darn fast as the result

  regarding fertility rates, if a woman has an abortion at one point in her life, it certainly doesn't mean she'll never have kids. Actually, I think it's even possible to argue quite convincingly that holding off having a baby earlier when she is less emotionally and financially stable might make her more likely to have a larger family when she is in a position to do so.

We are in complete agreement that a woman has a right to decide when to get pregnant and whether to bring any pregnancy to term.  What I (unlike most of my fellow libertarians) am concerned about is whether people have a right to not reproduce at all.  We recognize the absolute necessity of property Rights, because it has been endlessly demonstrated that a society that fails to recognize and defend them to a sufficient degree will never be able to form the complex economy of the modern age, but the same "tragedy of the commons" / "free rider problem" situation can apply to childbirth as well.  A society that averages less than 1 child per woman, which is where all modern secular liberal democracies seem to be headed, is all but doomed to economic collapse!

No, they don't.  Immigration and improved technology can and does compensate for a smaller youth population.  Many developed countries have dealing with declining birth rates while increasing economic output.

I am a big fan of immigration, but it is only a temporary solution as fertility rates continue to decline all over the world.  Economic growth may still continue in a shrinking and aging society, but it is swimming against a very strong current, and that economic growth would have been much greater if population were to experience steady population growth as well.  As the population pyramid continues to invert, you end up with too many old retired people dependent on too few workers: the cost of labor skyrockets, as does the cost of everything that depends on labor, most notably health-care.  This can lead to a negative feedback cycle of economic instability and decline, which could only further discourage young people from spending their valuable time on children, and that nosedive can be very difficult to reverse.

I obviously am not advocating any pro-life / pro-family government policies, in fact I think government interventionism is partially responsible for collapsing fertility rates in the first place.  I am simply encouraging a pro-life / pro-family culture without government force.  This means never making a woman feel that having a large family is less important than joining the workforce and having a successful career.  Mothers of large families should be praised for the contribution they make to society, and I believe that children should do more to provide a return on their investment, so it speak.