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Originally Posted by irateplatypus
gilda,
if you'll read the post i cited, you'll see that wasn't the argument i was countering. the entire point was centered around "drinking a pregancy to death" while you were speaking of a different set of circumstances (it surviving the ordeal).
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I responded directly to this statement: "someone explain to me how you can condemn drinking a pregnancy to death while defending abortion in this case."
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even so, i am deeply troubled by the rationale you employed in that scenario as well.
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How so? I see two moral options for the pregnant girl. First, she can get an abortion in the first trimester, which is legal, safe, and very effective. If for some reason she doesn't believe in abortion, and has a moral or religious objection to it, I fully respect that stand, and she should act according to that conviction and carry the child to term. Once the choice has been made to carry the child to term, she has the obligation to care for this child and keep it safe and healthy. After it has been born, she then has the choice of keeping and raising it or giving it up for adoption.
Two good options, which allow for her to act according to her own moral code regarding abortion. Attempting to drink it to death is neither. It is an attempt not to take responsibility for her actions by neither aborting the fetus nor taking good pre-natal care. There is a very good possibility that the pregnancy will come to term, and if it does, that the child will have been harmed directly as a result of her choice to drink heavily during pregnancy. This isn't a judgement about the worthiness of the child involved, but about the morality of a parent intentionally inflicting harm on a child.
We all have defects. I'm very near-sighted. While I won't love my children any less if they are near-sighted, it isn't something I would intentionally inflict on them if I had a choice. Fetal alcohol syndrome is a much more serious condition, and just as I wouldn't love a child with this condition any less, I also wouldn't intentionally inflict it upon an otherwise healthy child. Choosing actions that result in direct harm to a child is reprehensible.
This is a judgement regarding the woman in this case, not the child.