1. I hate to burst your bubble, slick, but I am a woman with a Master's degree and I'm also not a child.
2. I am against the federal War on Drugs. It's a failed policy, it's unconstitutional and it's stupid, to boot. It should be returned to the states.
3. Are you honestly going to argue for murder, because you think it would cost too much money to enforce? Really?
Again, Liberty, you've supplied nothing to back up any claim, just pure emotion and that's unusual with people like me who have advanced degrees. One would think that an educated person would be able to provide logic to a situation along with fact. But the main problem is that no one side is looking for a solution, just a way to point fingers and cry havoc.
And to answer your question, which I had already done: Yes, it would cost to much. It's cold. It's callous, but it's true. The burden your morality would have on the justice system would be devastating. Unless you can show how we can prosecute the right people without burdening the justice and penal system as well as not raise taxes 2 billion dollars a year or more and not impede a woman's right to choose between her life and that of fetus or have to suffer 10 months with a child that was forced upon her.
You're only response and point to this entire debate has been "Abortion is Murder". So let me take that away from you. During the first trimester embryo is no more conscious than a kidney or spleen. To back up my point:
1. The neurons must be sufficiently mature to develop an
action potential, that is, the electrical inequality from one end of the cell to the other which allows a charge to pass through the cell.
2. It helps if the myelin sheaths of nerves have developed. Without that insulation, nerve cells cannot transmit the charge from one end of the nerve cell to the other without it being attenuated, interfered with, or lost. This is why demyelinization diseases are so devastating.
3. The body
must be producing neurotransmitters; these chemicals allow the charge from one neuron to be transmitted across the interstitial spaces between cells. Without the presence of neurotransmitters, each neuron is isolated.
And we know roughly when these things start to happen in the developing fetus, although it varies slightly from one to the next. But based on that, we can say that there is definitely NOT anything like a fully working nervous system before week 20, although spontaneous, disconnected neural activity can be observed starting about week 17 -- but spontaneous, disconnected neural activity of precisely the same sort can be observed in people in a mostly brain-dead, vegetative state, so I do not think that can count as "consciousness" in a logically consistent system.
A fetus will start responding to sound about week 21-22, so at that point we know that perception at some basic level is hooked up. And by week 36, there is certainly some rudimentary consciousness, although even the consciousness of a full term newborn is pretty primitive in terms of processing stimuli and making any sense of what is going on around it. So your best bet for pinpointing "beginning of consciousness" would probably be, somewhere in the weeks 21-36, as vague as that is. But there is no reason to think that consciousness is like flipping a switch, first it isn't there and then suddenly it is! It's far more likely that it is like tuning in an analog radio; lots of static, and then, as you slowly rotate the dial, more and more snippets of coherence, finally becoming enough of a coherent signal to say that you have something. Function will just "fade in" as the systems supporting that function mature.
And because I supply facts:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=when-does-consciousness-arise
Even then, our planet is already overpopulated, last thing we need is more mouths to feed.