QUOTE(Sodium_Ho @ Jun 3 2005, 07:52 PM)

I feel that even in the case of rapes the child should be allowed to live, if the mother doesn't want the child, the child should be given up for adoption. This would allow the child to live their life, while their biological mother is living her own life and hopefully their rapist father is serving a jail sentence, and the remainder of their life will be a living hell for them.
I realise this is an old thread but I watched Vera Drake yesterday and it got me thinking about abortion again.
Why should a girl that has been raped have to go through nine months of additional trauma? Don't you think being the victim of a rape is enough to go through without having to have the rapist's offspring inside you, be reminded of it every day, and then go through the pain of giving birth to it? You say this is "
allowing the child to live their life" but I wouldn't call a fetus a child. To those who believe life begins at conceptions, a fertilised egg isn't a child. Fertilised eggs are often rejected by the body and expelled in periods (so by that logic many women would be murderers) - the fetus doesn't even have a heartbeat in the first month of pregnancy and can't feel pain until after twenty six weeks, when <1% of abortions are carried out.