Bourgeois pigs kill suicidal 16 year old boy.

[Jester]

Should Pregnant Women be Subject to Criminal Prosecution for Activities that are Harmful to Their Fetuses?

Oh, lovely. That certainly won't go horribly wrong.

The same is true of the elderly nursing homes, the infirm, or human children.

Which then raises the question - what threshold are we willing to accept? I don't, for instance, believe it is a crime to take someone off life support, if they are no longer able to survive without it or make decisions for themselves, so long as the decision is made by those legally entitled to do it.

I don't entirely disagree that being in a womb complicates the situation for both parties. We live in an age informed by science. It is time to set aside common law understanding of "quickening".

First, I wouldn't advocate any such thing - I think birth is the threshold, not "quickening," which in the modern world would pretty much just mean viability anyway. Even if we did replace it, we would replace it with what? You persist in thinking science has answers to these questions. But science cannot, even in theory, answer these questions.

In this age of safe and effective birth control, we should be able to entirely eliminate unwanted pregnancy.

Sometimes I worry that our conversations get too humourless. Then someone cracks a joke like this, and I remember that this is still a funny place.

In my opinion, too much time and effort is spent fighting for and against abortion, whereas the better use of that effort and money would be in getting effective birth control to those that don't want to become pregnant.

Good plan. If only the anti-abortion agenda wasn't being driven by people who don't actually give two figs about the stats, and whose clear and persistent goal is control over women. Sadly, not, and the same people screaming about abortion are also the same people who want abstinence only, who think a woman's place is in the home, and think there's nothing better than "traditional marriage." The agenda isn't tough to piece together, and it's got sweet nothing to do with the objective abortion stats.

But, my main point is that the society has a duty to protect all those we consider to be people.

Precisely. But I don't consider fetuses to be people.

-Jester

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While I appreciate the energy you are putting into this argument, please pardon me if I find droll the continuing efforts at perfection and immortality. At best, it gives us something to do. That by itself isn't a bad thing, but I can't escape the feeling that we are simply spinning our wheels.

I'm no futurist. I think we should be allowed to do these things, partly because I don't think they're going anywhere fast. Ray Kurtzweil-ish dreams of technological singularities strike me as hilariously unlikely.

-Jester