abortion and death penalty hypocrisy?

[leftyguitarjoe]

i am against the death penalty, frankly because i find it disgusting. to me it comes down the basic flawed reason that two wrongs make a right. life imprisonment? yes. but to decide kill someone who has committed such a disgusting act themselves, to me sends completely the wrong message. unless i am mistaken the death penalty was eventually banned in the uk after it was revealed that in one particular case where a man had been executed, that he was actually innocent. well there is no going back once you have done it. i think it denigrates a society to have the death penalty, it is barbaric and to me paradoxical that to me the same people who are meant to be the upholders of law telling what is right and wrong are the same people then that sign the papers allowing for another human being to be executed. this to me is a primitive and lazy way of handling crime and something that is shameful for the human race.

I can see where you are coming from, and I sympathize with some of your views on the subject, but I still have to disagree as a whole. I'd rather have a person dead than sapping up my tax dollars. We should not give prisoners any luxuries of any sort, and TIME is indeed a luxury. A family close to mine had their daughter raped and murdered. The killer was found and sentenced to death. People that commit such atrocities do not deserve to live. DO you think the likes of Saddam and Bin Laden should be allowed to twiddle their thumbs in a prison for a few decades, while innocent taxpayers pick up the tab?

[Loffler]

Most of my life I was, like most Americans, more interested in politics than in science. So I thought I was obligated to pick a side on the abortion issue. Then after college I didn't think about abortion for a while.

During this time I made the switch at some point; my mentality made the switch to a scientific mentality (the difference, as I like to put it, is that scientists say "problem, hypothesis, experiment conclusion," whereas everyone else is content to stop at "hypothesis"). When I finally got back to the abortion issue, I realized what the problem was: the embryo in the first week of gestation is definitely not a baby, while the fetus in the last week is. Every week in between is torturously, excruciatingly, nebulously gradual. There simply is no magical day when that tiny amoeba

Humans don't deal well with gray areas like this. Categorizing reality got us very, very far in this world, and so we want to do it with everything, especially human life. We really, really, need to know when sentient life begins.

So early-term abortion is nothing, but late-term abortion really does make me nervous. And the time in the middle? Gray area.