Guest:Sins: "Which child, Nick? The pregnant 13 year old or her fetus?"

I'm not sure what you're on about here. I'm not sure what you're referring to.

Grab: "Yep - because it's not a child at that point, it's a collection of cells which *might* become a child. You may disagree, but it isn't your choice, it's the choice of the woman whose body this collection of cells is in"

I disagree first of all with what you are trying to claim (directly and indirectly) with your semantics. 'Fetus' (in this context) is a term for a stage in the development of a human being, just as 'child' is a term to describe another stage in that development. A child, by the way, is also a collection of cells - which might (if no-one interferes by destroying it) become an adult at some stage. A child is not an adult, a fetus is not a child, but they are all the same human, whether you like it or not.

But anyway we have been over this at length in another thread, and if you are still trying to say black is white, we can only agree to disagree.

As for it not being my choice - no, of course it's not. Thankfully I cannot be held responsible if someone destroys the life within them (for whatever reason). But I could be held responsible if I say or do nothing to try and prevent it. And by that I mean arguing my view, voting according to my conscience, trying to persuade others of the rightness of my argument, giving whatever support I can to those who wish to keep their child - either directly when the case is known to me personally, or through my taxes used to support people who find themselves in this situation, etc., etc.,

And I'm sure, being modern, democratic and pluralistic and so on, you wouldn't want to deny me that right!

BTW, pro-choice/ abortion lobby, I think you might have misunderstood the motivation of pro-lifers / anti-abortionists, when you criticise their motivation for trying to persuade kids not to abort. It's not about making that kid's life hard, or to 'punish' them (which wouldn't be very christian), or 'set an example', but to try and preserve the new human life, out of respect for the sanctity of life. Of course, and I shouldn't even need to have to state this, if the pregnancy were threatening the life of the child (i.e if having the baby would result in the death of the child either immeditaely or soon after) abortion is an acceptable course of action. But even young teenagers have sucessfully carried to full term (Grab has pointed out how kids got married and had children at very young ages in the past, even quoting the example of Shakespeare and his 13-year old Juliet, and again, according to Grab, they're maturing at an ever younger age), so abortion shouldn't be a necessary option in most cases.

Anyway, as I said, we've been over this at length in another thread and we're not likely to convince each other by the looks of it. We'll all have to answer for our own actions in the end.