Grrr....What freaking loony bin did these legislators come from? Don't they have anything better to do than come up with wacked out shit to scare people into conforming to their viewpoints? What's next? wearing nail polish if you're under 18 will make your nails fall off? If you have sex while not married you'll contract AIDS? if you masturbate you'll get hair on your palms? This is just like the kansas school board, people more interested in forcing their screw ball bullshit ideas onto the general populace than they are fixing the problems that need to be fixed. Those dipshits in North Dakota deserve every ounce of ridicule that will come their way from the rest of the world. I would laugh if doctors left that state in droves as a protest.

Well, they get elected because some idiots vote for them... Seen from the other side of the Atlantic, I can tell you indeed that we look at Americans in general with caution. And at Dakotans with a good laugh...

Because in this area at least there are more people with morals than people like you.....

So in this area what should be the penalty for obtaining an abortion? (Morally speaking of course.)

Not my call. I will leave that to the creator.....

Does that mean you do not support legislation to outlaw abortion?

I'm curious ... to those people who want to outlaw abortion, do you think that all of the women getting abortions are 15-year-old unmarried "sluts" who can get an abortion without thinking twice about it? Even if you are against pre-marital sex, or teenage sex, do you want to make abortion illegal for married women who can't afford to have another child? For women who have conceived through rape and/or incest? For a woman whose child is so deformed it will not survive long after birth if it is born alive at all?

This is not a rhetorical question on my part ... I would genuinely like to know if you think all abortions are equally morally wrong.

As for my opinions, I think that abortion should be legal. My thoughts on having an abortion myself have changed over the years, and thankfully, I have not had to face that decision. When I was a teenager, if I had accidentally gotten pregnant, I would have definitely had an abortion (not that I ever had to opportunity to even risk getting pregnant). In college, when I had a steady boyfriend, I still would have considered it. Now that I'm married (and older), there is no way I would get an abortion for an otherwise healthy unplanned pregnancy. I still don't know what I would do if my baby had serious heath problems that would cause it suffering if it was born.

Sterilization would seem to be an appropriate penalty. Morally speaking of course.

Nothing will truly be accomplished through legislation. Only through people coming to know Christ and becoming educated in scripture will there be a change.

And another who would have killed Beethoven before he was ever born.

TruettCollins:

Nothing will truly be accomplished through legislation. Only through people coming to know Christ and becoming educated in scripture will there be a change.

If that is directed at me, I am a Christian (though you probably wouldn't think I was one), and I am quite well versed in Christian scripture.

TruettCollins:

And another who would have killed Beethoven before he was ever born.

Or maybe another who would have killed Hitler before he was born.

Truett,

There are many who know Christ and elect to abort. Perhaps you could direct me to the scriptural passage where HE forbids abortion. However, thank you for answering my post though I am not sure you do not support legislating against abortion.

Hitler's mother did not know what he would be before being born. Beethoven's mother knew she had a VD and was told that he more than likely would have many heath problems.

I hate to be the one to inject facts into debates about abortion, but the Beethoven thing is purely apocryphal, by which I mean totally false. Snopes.com has a section on it, likewise this Beethoven site:

<link>

which says:

Is it true that Beethoven's mother got seven or more children, of which most of them were deaf or blind or otherwise disabled, probably due to syphilis?

No, that's not true. When she married Johann van Beethoven she was already a widow. Both her husband and her young baby had died. Nothing is known about the cause of their deaths. In 1769 she gave birth to Johann's first child, but it died at the age of six days. Then followed our great composer, then his brother Caspar Anton Carl, who died in 1815 of tuberculosis, then his brother Nikolaus Johann, who died in 1848 of old age. Three more children (one boy, two girls) followed, all of them died very soon, respectively at the age of four days, two years and one year. Nothing is known about the causes of their deaths. Beethoven's mother died of tuberculosis (in 1787), Beethoven's father probably of a heart attack (in 1792).