7 years I lived there I never saw or got caught up in anything gang related. Only once or twice in all that time did I feel I needed to place a higher sense of my surroundings for safety. I surpassed that number in less than a year being by Baltimore.

If the elections are free and clear, then let the people decide who they want as elected representatives. We as democratic nations need to respect that outcome.

However, we as nations that provide funding for foreign nations can then reassess how we wish our money to be granted out - that is our prerogative and one we should exercise.

I hope the blogosphere takes this opportunity to remind itself of the virtue of skepticism. I doubt it.

When an infant dies because of neglect, that is a criminal offense. Whether it’s the mother, or the father, or someone else who is responsible for the conditions of neglect that led to the death depends on the circumstances, but it’s still a crime, and *someone* is going to be charged with negligent homicide and be tried in court.

And in other ways, too, our current laws aren’t consistent- when a fetus is wanted by the parents, then there are certain legal protections that the parents can sue for- suing doctors for malpractice, seeking murder charges (in some states, I believe) if an unborn child is killed in an attack on the mother, etc.

Well, I certainly know more than the average person about suing doctors for malpractice, because my then-husband and I tried to file a wrongful birth suit against the medical laboratory that told us he was not a carrier for Tay-Sachs, when in fact he was. We were not successful, because in New York State, where we then lived, there is no legal provision for wrongful birth lawsuits. But if we *had* been able to sue, the claim would not have been murder. Obviously, this doctor did not murder our daughter. He was negligent in analyzing a genetic test, which resulted in my having a child with a fatal disease.

That does not indicate that my daughter, at 11 months old which was her age when she was diagnosed, was not a human person. It had nothing to do with her humanness. It had to do with the doctor’s intent.

Malpractice is not the same as murder. It’s malpractice — literally a bad practicing of medicine such that someone under the doctor’s care is harmed or killed. There’s no intent to kill — unless there is, of course. Then it’s not malpractice; it’s murder.

So where is the connection to abortion, where the woman most certainly does intend to kill the fetus? The intent is there. What’s not there is the personhood of the fetus. You say a fetus is a person at every stage of development from conception onward, so a woman who has an abortion should be charged with murder.

Since current law contains a number of inconsistencies, I fail to see that the inability to reconcile the exact same punishment for all types of murder (born and unborn) would be a deal breaker.

Because whatever inconsistencies there are (and so far I haven’t seen you give an example of a real inconsistency in treating *the same offense*), there is still a legal process of crime committed, person charged with said crime and arrested, person given a trial, and if convicted, sentenced to an appropriate legal consequence. I can’t see any reason for skipping or truncating or changing that basic process in the case of abortion, other than that a fetus is not a human person as someone who has been born, is.

Plus, I’ll acknowledge that there are differences in the bonding capacity of the mother which should lead to a greater culpability after birth than before.

Bonding capacity has, or should have, nothing to do with culpability in a legal sense. If you think about it, anytime a mother intentionally kills her children, there’s something dysfunctional about the bonding, there.

But I reject the idea that the law couldn’t possibly handle the gradations as an excuse for not dealing with right to life before birth at all.

Nobody here (and very few people anywhere) would argue with that. That’s why abortions late in a pregnancy are only done for serious medical reasons. No woman has an abortion in the eighth month because she suddenly decides she doesn’t want to be a mother. By contrast, a woman who finds out she’s pregnant at six or eight weeks gestation and doesn’t want to have a baby or to go through pregnancy and childbirth may choose abortion. And there’s nothing wrong with that. If a woman decided a couple of weeks before her due date that she wanted an abortion, however, I would say something was very wrong with that. And no reputable doctor would perform an abortion that late in pregnancy for that reason.

I’m just pointing out that some inconsistency already exists and yet our foundational rights aren’t threatened by that (to give one more example, we consider minor children to be a different category which enjoys fewer rights- and yet they’re still fully human and their right to life is obviously guaranteed.)

And once again, Christine, if a minor child is killed, there is a legal process from evidence-gathering to trial, verdict, and punishment. If a fetus is to have the same right to life as a minor child, then logically there must be the same legal process. I simply can’t see any rational argument for treating an abortion differently in law from the murder of a minor child, if there is no moral difference between killing a minor child and killing a fetus.

… the differentiation could allow for laws which handle abortion in a manner somewhat differently from murder of postpartum human beings, while still allowing for criminalization of the abortion process in some manner that balances the need to prohibit killing with the need for compassion for the pregnant woman.

Why? As a consolation prize for taking away her body rights? And would you favor laws that handle the case of a mother who kills a minor child while in the midst of postpartum depression? What about a mother who kills her baby a month or two after she gives birth, because she didn’t want the child but was not allowed an abortion? Should the law treat her the same way as it would treat a woman who has an illegal abortion, in the interest of balancing the need to prohibit killing with the need to show compassion toward the woman?

These questions are not meant sarcastically. They are questions that come up as a consequence of the inconsistency in how abortion opponents propose to treat women who have abortions if abortion becomes illegal. I think they are reasonable questions, and I think they need to be answered (in general).

I have sympathy for the point of view that society should not have to wait for all possible problems and inconsistencies to be foreseen and dealt with before correcting a great injustice. But I do think that, at the very least, attempts should be made to anticipate and try to address such problems and inconsistencies, as well as to decide whether those possible problems and inconsistencies are likely to create injustices as bad as the one that you’re trying to eliminate.

Yes it’s horrible, but I assure you that once you’ve been scared a few times it becomes entirely “crying wolf” if for no other reason than that you don’t want to encourage the behavior by playing along. Occasionally someone follows through on one of those threats and I’m sure those who were given warning feel horrible for having ignored the upenteenth threat as it turned out to be real. But you can’t force yourself to believe something like this every time. Been to high school? If yours was like mine you received bomb threats. Did you ever see anyone rush out of the school? One of those threats could have been the real thing and kids could have died, but they can’t force themselves to be frightened of a threat they hear often that never turns out to be real.