Yes toad, perhaps this would have improved D4J’s lot. However I think the rest of us would have been so much poorer if we didn’t have his distinctive ‘thwarted’ perspective to read, no?

Only thing I have to say is that perhaps you should have considered condoms or oral sex so you didn’t find yourself in this predicament.

But when there are children in a family, they do not deserve the bash or psychological abuse – WHATEVER they may do in their childhood innocence! Nor do either of their parents, for that matter.

Phil – as usual you are talking shit. For a start, almost every woman was married as a teenager in the days you recall, so of course they were having sex.

Second point, the sexual drive of the vast majority of people over puberty is such that very few will be celibate. Those who attempt to, against their biochemically induced desires, often lose the plot. The Christian church taboo against masturbation and oral sex don’t help in that regard either – that also encourages young people to seek sexual partners for intercourse ahead of satisfying their sexual desires either alone or through mutually satisfying activities with partners that will not result in pregnancy.

Sorry, Phil, but celibacy is an unnatural state for human adults, and if you try to enforce it, as you seem to do with teenagers and the Catholic church does with priests, you get some very unfortunate outcomes.

Bottom line, mate, is that man or woman, straight or gay, we’re all programmed biologically to want to have sex, and religious constraints that purport to suppress our biology will always fail.

PS: Or Thomas Pynchon on wartime Europe, if you want to REALLY get your rocks off

This kind of equivocation seems standard for the anti-abortion movement. You don’t distinguish between ‘life’ and ‘a life’. Bacteria, tumours, and more significantly, teratomas, are alive. To say that life starts at conception is just a biochemical tautology. What you mean to say is that ‘a life’ starts at conception. The usual terminology to avoid this confusion is ‘personhood’, i.e. that ‘personhood’ starts at conception. This claim is known to be false.

… there is a strong scientific consensus that life begins at conception.

Sperm and eggs are already alive in the biochemical sense so it is no surprise that, after conception, the subsequently formed zygote is also alive. Again, what you mean to say is that ‘personhood’ begins at conception. This claim is false. The scientific evidence is categorical. There is no scientifically meaningful sense in which you can make a one-to-one mapping between zygotes and people. Unfortunatey evryone in the anti-abortion movement is poorly informed about the relevant details of human reproduction.

People on the liberal left are unable to grasp the idea that teenagers in earlier eras actually DIDN’T HAVE SEX, as a rule, and those that did were the exception, not the rule, and society still attached ideas of shame to certain activities as society’s first line of defence against the socially destructive effects of those activities. But they will never admit this.

Some old curmudgeon wrote a good letter to the DomPost the other day, in which he made the point that politicians who are into permissiveness on matters sexual have got a bloody CHEEK to tell people how they should learn to control their urges to eat tasty foods, or to smoke……..

Richard Worth has just ‘Friended’ me on Facebook. (I am not his friend, so I presume this is because I subscribed to his weekly e mail newsletter back when I lived in his electorate.)
Does this sort of endeavour require approval under the EFA, or count towards the spending limit??

Oh dear…

Anyway, There’s an article on my blog from last year with an interview from Right To Life, they are clearly very committed and I’m sure will be over the moon with this announcement.

What struck me when interviewing them is how willing to compromise they are, a contrast from the very black and white stances reflected in this thread. Always nice to see some realism in debates like this.

I don’t think we should have a debate about abortion – rather, we should have a serious debate about the status of the unborn. If we can determine (scientifically, not ideologically) that the unborn are either human or not, then abortion no longer become the issue. If the unborn are human, then abortion cannot exist as it is an attack on a human person; while if you think the unborn are not human, then there can be no problem in abortion because it is just a proceedure.

I think NZ needs to grow a moral backbone and a nice pair of balls and stand up for what it believes in.

Also, sonic: my dear and deluded friend from Scotland. I have no idea where you and your friends get the whole “If abortion is illegal, then it will be done anyway in the backstreet”. Firstly, that is not true; secondly, so what? P is illegal and it is done in the backstreets so should we legalise that? How about suicide? Its done in secret, so why not make Govt-funded suicide centres so people can die efficiently. See, your arguments are hollow and weak. They defy logic and they run purely on emotions but they don’t make sense and they don’t survive under universal scrutiny.

There is no evidence to show that Poland, Ireland or Malta (all who have criminalised abortion) have backstreet abortions, rather the opposite – they just don’t have abortions.

http://politicsandprose.blog.com/3203873/

I don’t think we should have a debate about abortion – rather, we should have a serious debate about the status of the unborn. If we can determine (scientifically, not ideologically) that the unborn are either human or not, then abortion no longer become the issue. If the unborn are human, then abortion cannot exist as it is an attack on a human person; while if you think the unborn are not human, then there can be no problem in abortion because it is just a proceedure.

I think NZ needs to grow a moral backbone and a nice pair of balls and stand up for what it believes in.

Also, sonic: my dear and deluded friend from Scotland. I have no idea where you and your friends get the whole “If abortion is illegal, then it will be done anyway in the backstreet”. Firstly, that is not true; secondly, so what? P is illegal and it is done in the backstreets so should we legalise that? How about suicide? Its done in secret, so why not make Govt-funded suicide centres so people can die efficiently. See, your arguments are hollow and weak. They defy logic and they run purely on emotions but they don’t make sense and they don’t survive under universal scrutiny.

There is no evidence to show that Poland, Ireland or Malta (all who have criminalised abortion) have backstreet abortions, rather the opposite – they just don’t have abortions.

I’ve already made my position clear getstaffed, I believe in a women’s right to choose.

Yes, you did make this clear. But you didn’t answer the [quite reasonable?] question so i’ll repeat it: care to hazard a guess as to the proportion of the ~18,000 abortions performed last year that would have been in response to such horrible [rape pregnancy, serious health threat to mother] situations? i’d be interested. especially since there’s now some evidence suggest that abortion can have a detrimental impact on the mental health of the mother?