He was merely stating that it was what he would expect from a juvenile(child) posting on a pokemon forum, I don't that that is that unreasonable although fairness is always a matter of perspective.
Anyway getting back on topic, I was chatting with Aeolus, Obi, and Arti about this on IRC and it got me thinking a bit and solidified my thoughts on this(and abortions in general) a bit more. I think most of the regulars here are aware that is highly unlikely I would end up in a situation where this would be relevant to me, but it's good to have it sorted out, I guess.
Obviously, with abortion, like most of the controversial ethics debates, religion(or lack thereof) tends to be a big factor in determining what most people think. It's lack thereof in my case, but I think even so, regardless of whether or not there's any potential afterlife for the kid, it makes life that much more important, you know. Like, if most of the various religions are correct the kid would probably end up in some sort of afterlife since s/he did no wrong, which is potentially better than it's going to do in life depending on how bad the mental retardation ends up being. On the same token though, if there isn't an afterlife of any sort I think that makes life that much more important. It's hard to quantify the value of a life even with the whole heaven/hell thing factored in, but it's even greater if life on Earth is all we have... I don't think I could justify taking the kid's life to myself.
It's still up for debate when the kid starts feeling pain and becoming aware and that sort of thing(which is where that research comes in I guess!) for the most part the first trimester is expected to be a period where the above doesn't happen currently, but then in chatting with the aforementioned people we eventually got around to... what is and isn't a child? Where do you draw the line? Is masturbating the same thing as an abortion? How about people who never have sex but have the potential to, is that equally wasteful? I think for me the line is as soon as the fetus starts forming so I don't really consider abortion a viable option, I'm definitely not a man of strong morals but I just don't think I could justify it to myself.
That said, I don't think I would keep it even if it was perfectly fine, let alone if it had (potentially severe) mental retardation. I would probably go the adoption route, I'm biased that way, being adopted myself, but there's a massive amount of people waiting to adopt children so it doesn't make much sense to be an unwilling parent when there's so many potential parents out there who can't have children of their own who would love a child.
Of course I'm not factoring the mother into the above logic, but without her input that's how I feel I think!
