No worries, its a pretty new technique. Even the Panda guys only noticed it last week and I’m not sure there are any spam filters that would catch this right now because there are no unusual links in the body (in fact, its using body text it knows will bypass the spam filter, since its content already posted.)

The only easy way to avoid it, as I can see, would be to alter your posting settings such that only people who previously posted can post and a moderate must OK first time posters. Perhaps through in a CAPCHA as well to ensure only real people can enter comments and not web bots. WordPress allows all of this

Hope this helps.

I guess I need to start looking into better spam filters.

DO NOT CLICK on the author’s name link, to see their blog.

This is a new technique by spammers for spreading malware and if you follow a link, there is a possibility you will be infected by a “drive by” download

http://pandalabs.pandasecurity.com/spammers-blogs-new-techniques/comment-page-1/#comment-4972

Infosec is what I do for a living and I only noticed the pattern in my gmail this morning.

I hope no one has been infected.

Pity our relatively civil and intelligent debate has been interrupted by this

As a male, it is very easy to say with confidence that I will never have an abortion. Unless a female is an unwilling participant, she should be able to do the same. I look at it kinda like Russian roulette, if you don’t want to see your or someone else’s brains spattered all over the place, don’t play the game.

In the game of creating life, women bear the brunt of the burden and in far too many cases the responsibility as well. For this reason, they should be more careful. I know that if I were the one who had to gestate, birth and feed our children, we might not have had more than one.

My statement was somewhat tongue in cheek, but still valid.

“Persons have natural rights. Among these is the right to their life.”

This is absolutely true and I think that should include the right to their own genetic material, but we have seen that this is not the case if you are suspected or arrested for a crime.

As far as abortions go, I have decided that I will never have one, nor will I force anyone else to. This is not because I believe it to be wrong, but more out of a sense of responsibility for my actions.

The only form of birth control my wife and I use is the rhythm method, all three of our children are very much loved and wanted. The fourth is due to be conceived in June of this year.

Person is a word often used in law to describe a human with rights (setting aside corporate persons for the moment). And rights are what are at issue here. As Brad wrote, killing cattle is not generally considered murder. This is because cattle are not recognized as having rights in most human cultures.

Anything with traits like metabolism, growth, reproduction, and response to stimuli or adaptation to the environment originating from within the organism can be called “life”. Tapeworms are alive, yet happily and legally dispatched by humans.

Also, arguably, much of the physical aspects of being “human” can be expressed in DNA. A life with human DNA can be said to be human.

But when does a life – a human – become a legal “person” with rights? And when does a person with rights become just a life? A blastocyst is undeniably life and a genetically unique human. If it is also a person, would a miscarriage then be Involuntary Manslaughter? A severely injured person in a permanently vegetative state of brain death can be kept alive by machinery. The body is undeniably human. When the brain is dead, is the person rendered simply a living human?

Persons have natural rights. Among these is the right to their life.

I am not advocating an answer with these questions, simply wondering if language can help focus thought.

I posed the question, because I want to know if you accepted 1 how could you except the medical concept of death? I don’t think society really deals with these kinds of issues until they are ask to pull the plug or in a untenable position while pregnant.

I am pro-choice, but I would prefer that society do more toward unwanted pregnancy prevention to reduce the numbers of abortion. I don’t want in a secular society, the position that abortion is murder, that the reason for sex is procreation and all birth control is abortion, to become embedded in health policy or laws regulating abortion.

Funny, I had the same experience and came to the exact opposite conclusion.

I think those who would tell a woman what she can do with here body and when are no less advocates of human slavery than if they were trying to buy and sell them in a market.

If you thinks its wrong, don’t do it.

There’s the rub…we all will never agree, especially as to the exact moment.

This is why this needs to be a deeply personal decision, which creates an emergent bottom up “rule”, rather than an imposed, arbitrary rule from the top down.

Everyone agrees that a 7 or 8 month old fetus is a “baby”. Indeed, this is borne out by the fact that these fetus are never aborted unless they are not going to survive birth (women at that point want to have the baby).

Everyone agrees that a cluster of 100 or so cells with no nervous system and no other morphology is “human” in any but the genetic sense. And this is when well over 90% of abortions occur.

The problem isn’t really abortion, its trusting people to make choices. We are discussing this because somebody wants a rule they can use to impose their will on another person, because they are afraid that person will make a choice that they do not agree with.

We can dress it up as anything we want but its authoritarianism at its core. Part of being free is allowing others to make choices that you would not make, choices that you believe are wrong and that you do not agree with.

It is up to each woman individually to be prepared to make that choice and to live by it and for all of us to understand that others cannot be made to live by choices we want.

That is why, whether you think a one minute old zygote is a human being or it doesn’t happen until some magical moment in week 22 or until the child is born alive (as you and I have both experienced, it could not survive up to the moment it is born), it is up to you to live your own life by that standard and let others live their lives by theirs.

We need to trust women to make those choices. Most of time we will agree and when we don’t, then it will be thw women making the choices who will live with the consequences and not us.

Trust women to make choices about their family and their bodies and you will not be disappointed.

Somehow, I doubt it. The “leaders” of the states of the world seem perfectly happy to send their young men and women off to kill and die, by the thousands, in foreign wars. And to kidnap and cage their own citizens for inhaling the smoke of a burning weed. It’s hard to imagine people who can engage in that kind of insanity responding in a moral and rational manner to much of anything.

I’m not that different. Prior to my wife and I having children successfully, we suffered two 1st-trimester miscarriages. These were very sad events.

They were sad for many reasons. First, of course, there was the loss of the child that we hoped to have. Second was the worry that perhaps we had some sort of medical issue that might prevent us from having kids (doubly after the second miscarriage).

But at least for me, I didn’t really mourn for the fetus, because it was so early in the term that even with a heartbeat, it still seemed to be the loss of a *potential* child, not the loss of an *actual* child.

The opposite case, of course, was my wife’s aunt who lost a baby at 7 months. At that point, you can’t deny that you’re losing a child, not a non-person fetus.

This is, of course, one of humanity’s most difficult moral questions. But my whole point of this post was to point out one thing: If the people of the world were to agree on the moral beginning of “humanity”, it would be a remarkably easy political question to solve.

If potential of human life prevails, then how can there be any such thing as death when the heart still beats, but there is no brain function.

There is a difference between death and murder. That difference depends heavily on rights.

I.e. if I kill a cow for food, that is death. But since we don’t live in a worldview where that cow has rights, it is not murder.

The question that prompts all of this, is whether a human zygote/fetus has reached a level of “human-ness” where it has rights. As I say, it’s really an a priori moral determination (whether scientific or religious), not obtainable by the use of political reason. Political reason (i.e. whether you criminalize abortion) is a function of taking that a priori belief and plugging it into your political philosophy.

You appear to fall into camp #1, where human-ness begins at conception. I’m not going to agree or contradict you on that, only point out that this belief necessarily causes you to consider abortion to be murder, whereas the opposite belief you’d see it a no more morally troubling than the killing of an animal.

(PS – I’m a bit confused by your language, and extrapolating what I think your position based on my reading of the three sentences limited you wrote. If I reversed your position, I apologize.)