Pretty illustrative of the emotion-driven argument, not to stand on a soap-box because we all do it but 'shudder' isn't a legit rebuttal to a train of thought. I did not take any stance there, I was pointing out an obvious possible flaw of concept, that we have always constrained choice where the person can be reasonably demonstrated not to be of a sound mind, virtually every legal and moral system recognizes that and my choice of wording was not selected for palatability.



It seems a very high probability, yes, as would self-mutilation. Very real issues and concerns, but not automatically pertinent either. Though rape and subsequent pregnancy are obviously pretty good reasons to be traumatized, we do not make moral decisions based strictly off damage someone might inflict on themself or others. Firing an employee or giving a bad grade can result in depression, self-mutilation, suicide, assault and even homicide. Alternately, torturing someone and telling them how worthless they are and leaving them with a knife can result in the same. Beating someone half to death can also transform them into a really good person. None of those results justified or condemned the prior actions in of themselves. It would be very easy for me to see a rape victim going insane and shooting someone who had raped them, or even someone who resembled that person. Few of us would be calling for the death penalty if some rape victim shot a someone who resembled her attacker, we certainly would intervene to stop her if she tried. There's a flip side to this too, if rape was grounds for abortion but other abortion illegal, I'd be willing to bet we'd see a spike in false rape accusations, considering time is a factor, were that the way the law went we'd have to make accusation enough in of itself, even without a named suspect, dark alley and all. HEnce, this can only be a mental exercise as it is otherwise a redundant argument either way, which is one of the many reasons many pro-lifers consider the abortion for rape issue a Red Herring


I said no such thing. I have pointed out what we all know. Whether one classifies abortion as a major decision or not, we do not generally encourage or often even permit those who are not of sound mind to make major decisions for themselves or others. For the very same reason you tell an employee to go home if they show up drunk, high, or are clearly otherwise mentally unstable as opposed to letting them fly a passenger jet. Nor do we recruit Air Traffic Controllers from Mental Asylums. How that pertains to your question would depend on whether or not you feel the decision in question warrants a sound mind and whether or not you believe A) That there is an alternative route (Such as requiring a legitimate third party like a doctor to concur) and B) Whether or not you believe asking for an abortion would qualify as something where the approving authority had justification to require that the patient be established to be of sound mind. We do not generally call in courts and doctors to rule on that, particularly on a time-sensitive decision, without strong justification. Being upset in of itself does not render one legally incompetent to make decisions, and getting someone declared crazy, incompetent, etc is rarely a simple matter for obvious reasons. But should a doctor have the right to turn away a patient, or possibly even the responsibility to turn them away, if they are clearly irrational and the decision is major but not immediately life-threatening? Many other professions have such requirements, tatoos for instance. You are making abortion a separate issue when you rely on emotion driven arguments, because those don't allow us to look for parallel cases that support or contradict a given premise.



Emotional argument and pointless, if my wife were raped I would devote my efforts to restoring her to a sound mind if I were under the impression she were not. If she did something while not of sound mind I would attempt not to 'hold it against her' whatever it happened to be, same as if a relative of mine got drugged and ran around buck-naked screaming about fairies. Anything they do when of sound mind is back on the table for all relevant moral and personal judgments, in that sense I could offer you no guess as to my actions since I deal with most things on a case-by-case basis.



Emotional argument, I would feel bad about anything that harmed someone I cared about, just like anyone else, its not relevant. I would feel bad if my sibling were falsely imprisoned, if they were arrested while traveling in some oppressive third world dictatorship for speaking their mind, or if they were imprisoned for going on a shooting spree, my actions and responses would obviously differ for each case.



Same thing, this is all emotion driven. I could substitute in anywhere here 'abortion' for with adultery, murder, kleptomania or on the other end of the scale 'didn't like her new haircut', 'new friends', 'decision to change careers'.



I generally try to remind myself that little can be expected of people these days, in rhetoric or morals. This again comes down to whether one answers yes or no to 1) Is a fetus a human life? 2) If yes, does its right supersede the mothers for this case?

Consider. You are driving down the highway, a man steps in front of you on the road with a gun and points it at you and begins firing, in that moment you swerve off the road and are injured and in a state of shock, the man flees. You now see that you struck a pedestrian, and they are gravely wounded. Are you morally obliged to help, even though it may aggravate your own wounds and drive you further into shock? What if your trauma were minor? What if your injuries great but your thinking relatively okay? Or vice-versa?

Alternate, a crazed madman assaults you and another, and handcuffs you to another person. He abuses you and attaches a bomb to the other person and puts a gag in their mouth so they can not speak, the bomb is wired to your handcuffs and tells you that if you unlock them before the end of the day they will die, boom, then leaves a key on the table within reach and leaves. Would the duration matter? 5 minutes, 1 hour, 1 day, 1 year, 1 decade, the rest of your lives? Do you unlock yourself? If someone in this case in a moment of hysteria unlocked themself would we try them for murder? Would we, as a third party, have the right to restrain them if they tried to unlock the cuffs? What if the gagged and booby-trapped person was our child?

See, I've no problem with emotionally driven arguments but not when they let one bridge faulty logic. Both those cases involve another person who has done you no wrong, as would an abortion if one answered Yes to the first question, and they are not easy answers, very circumstance dependent. That you shudder to consider these types of thoughts is not surprising, can't say I find them pleasant either, having been in some serious life and death situations where a decision had to be made I have to say I find it better to think about these things before hand, unpleasant or not, so that I won't be working from scratch under difficult and often short duration circumstances. Parallel cases help uncloud the mind, both of mine above feature a human, were it an inanimate object or an animal we'd not need to give much thought to it, though even then, for the latter case I wouldn't object to being chained to an animal for a few days to save its life, clearly years would be out of the question. The fault of the 'except for rape' concept is that it isn't really logically sound. If it's not a full human with rights, then its a redundant issue, if it is, then looking at the cases above I'd wonder what level of risk or time loss most people would consider a moral obligation, and how that would translate to a pregnancy. I have a very short list of things which validate or mitigate the death of another human being, most only mitigate, but it only counts if the victim is a human, my logic is sound, yours appears not to be. I'd normally be more polite in phrasing that but I have difficulty doing so when being told that which way I come down on a moral issue that divided the country for decades makes me an uncaring monster and produces shudders.