1. This is a tough one. My outlook and idealism was shaped by a comfortable distance to the whole topic until it was brought starkly into my face. Suddenly your airy liberal absolutism flies out of the window when your head is full of conflicting thoughts on what it is you actually want and the practical realities of the World.

I was always staunchly pro choice, but again this was from the standpoint of a man looking at the situation remotely with no real dog in the fight. I was also disgustingly judgemental of those who had to make that choice. So it was a case of "yeah, you should be allowed to do it, but I think you're a bad person for doing it". Basically an ill thought out version of "I may disagree with what you say but I will fight for your right to say it" but applied to people.

Then reality hit, suddenly it was my offspring on the line and the clear lines and colours didn't seem so clear anymore. Suddenly the realities of a women sitting in front of you not wanting to have a choice brings the whole thing into focus. She asks you "what do you want to do?" and you see that it isn't as simple as her just flipping a coin and taking a trip. She's heartbroken, you're heartbroken and you're both there trying to decide about this life. Rest assured, when it's you sitting there scientific rationalisations suddenly hold little to no water.

Before that very point I would say zygote, embryo, collection of cells with all the affection a dentist shows a tooth, but in that moment when someone says to you "what do you want to do?" it becomes your baby. Try not to imagine a child. Try not to see you in the future playing with your child. We're having to make a decision by exploring our situation, our careers, our ability to provide the lives we wanted for our children and to do that you explore that future...you put a body and soul to that collection of cells and then you choose to end that life, no matter how imagined.

So I remain pro choice, but tinged with regret and a more thoughtful consideration for those who have to make that choice.

2. Again, it's easy when you're not at the frontline. No one I know or care about has been murdered. It's easy for me to sit here and wax lyrical about exacting the same barbarism on the criminal as they have on their victim and being no better and the state having no right to take life and blah blah blah, but now my I know to be a little more empathetic in my reading of situations. I can't speak as the family or friend of a victim but I can see that some of them may have that need. What I am sure of is that revenge should not be the concern of our authorities. I say that even if we are 100% sure the accused is guilty.

Which brings me to the main reason I oppose the death penalty. Nothing is 100%. I'd rather guilty people sat in jail than innocent people die.

Apologies if I don't know what I'm talking about. I've never been in a lived situation that had any relevance to either of these issues.

1. Abortion is an interesting topic because it remains illegal in Ireland except in cases where there is a threat to the mother's life. There have been some high-profile cases in the media in recent years - including the death of Savita Halappanavar in 2012, who was refused an abortion alllegedly because this is a "Catholic country" and ended up dying of sepsis. More recently, a rape victim was refused an abortion and had to be given a Caesarean section (by the time she was assessed by a psychiatrist, it was too late to terminate the pregnancy).

It's a banal truism to say that abortion is a complex issue (as is capital punishment). Personally, I think it should be legal, and have participated in a few of the protests in Dublin precipitated by the Halappanavar case. What others have already said rings true for me, I suppose - that it is better to abort a foetus than to bring an unwanted child into the world, and that women should have control of their own bodies.

There remain, however, some interesting issues in the life v. choice debate; either side stems from fundamental beliefs about personhood that are ultimately irreconcilable. Deciding when a foetus is a person deserving of life strikes me as fairly arbitrary - some people think it begins at conception, others after a certain number of weeks, and others at birth. These seem to me like a priori beliefs that do not, and possibly cannot, have any real justification. And it's from this that the whole notion of murder arises; a pro-choice person can say that abortion is not murder, because the foetus is not a person; a pro-life person can argue that it is murder, because the foetus is. These ideas are so fundamental to either side that they seem impossible to resolve, for me. What I take from it is simply that it is insufficient for either side to argue that abortion is or is not murder, because the argument is reduced to people shouting at each other about their own ideas of personhood.

It's important to acknowledge that cultural ideas about what constitutes personhood are extraordinarily varied, and more importantly, I don't think it's possible to argue that one constitution of "personhood" is more valid than another.

Which brings us to what galen is hinting at below - the problem of infringing on another person's rights because of your own beliefs, and the problems that poses for any democratic system. We do not allow people to commit murder - and that's the rub, because for pro-life people, foetuses are people and abortion is murder.

I think it is also important to consider that religion is embedded into society, rather than existing as some sort of separate stratum.

2. Capital punishment is a big issue, though not a salient one in Ireland (where execution is no longer carried out as a means of punishment). It seems reasonable enough to suggest that executing someone is a better idea than imprisoning them for the remainder of their life, whether for economic reasons or moral ones (is imprisoning someone for decades really better than killing them?) Naturally, it seems clearer in cases (possibly imaginary) in which the criminal has committed multiple heinous crimes (like a recidivist murderer rapist). Sort of what bioemerl is saying.

But the death penalty has its own problems, namely that of sufficiently ascertaining guilt, without which innocent people can and have been executed. That, or the extreme cost of keeping someone on death row, because the process isn't exactly quick (that's today; in England a hundred years ago, it usually took about three weeks for someone to get hanged, rather than twenty years). Consider the Japanese man who was on death row for decades before being released - and in Japan, they apparently don't tell you when it's coming, so for him every day could have been his last.

Then, of course, there are the logistical matters of the execution itself, although I think they're secondary to the moral justification of capital punishment in the first place. Naturally, I think it's best if it's quick and painless. I remember hearing about a recent execution in the US in which it took two hours for the victim to die, which is quite horrific. Maybe bring back the guillotine?

Capital punishment, to my ill-informed mind, seems like too much of a headache, really.

I did have an interesting conversation about corporal punishment recently, though, in which the other person claimed that whipping would in many cases be preferable to a prison sentence. It's extraordinarily painful, yes, but after the healing period the criminal can integrate back into society, instead of going to prison, or "crook college", and building up a network of criminal contacts for when they're back on the streets. I actually think it's a very interesting idea.

We do have to think about the purpose of imprisonment, which I think has a hell of a lot more to do with attempting to remove people from society than it does to reform them or even to act as a deterrent (which I think 25 lashes probably would do), and, in the States at least, with feeding money into private companies.

OftenBen mentions the problem of granting a particular body (i.e. the judicial system) power over human life, when perhaps they are not to be trusted. I haven't given any thought to this before.

In my opinion the difference is;

The fetus in utero did nothing wrong to deserve to be terminated. The decision to terminate is being made by someone else. Which is why so many people fight for the right of the unborn.

However; the man (or woman) made the decision to commit a crime that warranted the death penalty, like take another human beings life. So the decision to be put to death was theirs and theirs alone.

It’s easy to say you’re pro-choice, but until you’re the one making the choice, it’s difficult to understand.

Trust me, when someone tells you you’re pregnant, you realize you have another life inside of you and know your life will be forever changed no matter what choice you make.

I was 17, pregnant and on my own when I had to make that choice. For me, I know I made the right choice.