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http://thinkprogress.org/2009/10/08/okla…
Semi-relevant article I came across today.
Saying it doesn't make it so...
He's issuing a challenge to the naysayers: back up your criticism with evidence. Or at least that's how I'll interpret it.
Does outlawing Gay bashing end Gay bashing?
Should we legalize murder and Gay bashing?
Admit it-
people who want to outlaw murder and Gay bashing don't care about reducing murder and Gay bashing; they just want to punish people who murder and Gay bash.
the fact being that elective abortion kills an innocent human life.
We will gladly allow abortions in the 0.03% of cases resulting from rape if you join us in protecting the other 99.97% of the 800,000 babies a year slaughtered for convenience.
How does abortion impact "nonprocreative sex".
Do you know what that even means?
Let us hope that science, reason and justice can eventually overcome selfessness and irresponsibility.
I am the parent of two and an abortion activist and provider. If you don't like abortion, don't have one. If you don't want other people to have them, support access to inexpensive, effective contraception for all age groups. The point of the Guttmacher Institute study (which replicates the findings of countless other studies, you idiot @ #3) is that most effective tactic in limiting abortion is to make contraception widely available. If you really hate abortion, do what works to limit it.
This is what they call "assuming facts not in evidence"
You stupid bitch.
What should the punishment be for a woman who has an abortion? How much jail time should she do?
And don't say "none" because if I hire someone to kill my husband, I do time. If Abortion = Murder, then hiring someone to commit that murder is just as much a felony as any other hire job to commit adult murder.
So how much time should one in four american women be forced to get for having an abortion?
While we're at it, I would like to remind you that in the days before abortion was legal, women who had back-alley abortions that went wrong were routinely denied medical care until they confessed that they'd had an abortion and ratted out the doctor or boyfriend. And no matter how good and Godly and life-worshipping you think you've raised her, anti-choicers: that could be your daughter, scared, alone and dying of a perforated uterus while being yelled at by a police officer in her last moments.
Pro-life my ass.
Aw, you're not even going to pretend to respect women when you're telling us what we can and cannot do with our bodies?
If they were really "pro-life", they'd be against anything and everything that threatens human life. And yet, most pro-lifers are pro-war, pro-gun, pro-death penalty, and generally pro-everything that makes it easier for human life to be destroyed. So are they really pro-life? Hell no. I have yet to meet a person who is holistically and completely "pro-life". So far all I've met are hypocrites.
Ah-
COUNTLESS "studies" by abortion proponents-
all reaching the same conclusion.
Irrefutable!
And the ever lame but ever popular
"don't have one" non-response.
I haver a counter offer,
abortion provider parent-
if you don't want to see abortion outlawed
don't work to outlaw it.
You're absolutely right, you shit-smeared asshole who can only achieve climax by furiously masturbating to thoughts of naughty sluts getting punished for having forbidden sex.
No one is telling you what you can and cannot do with your bodies.
There's never yet been the body of a woman who had an abortion chopped up and dumped in the trash outside a clinic.
We would appreciate it, however, if you refrained from chemically burning and dismembering the bodies of innocent children.
Bloodlust.
The prospect of losing the 'right' to slaughter makes us a little crazy, eh...
I know, we don't really matter.
You care about babies? Take care of WOMEN, and you take care of babies. Make sure women have safe homes, enough to eat, protection from assault, access to health care and contraception, and the abortion rate goes down, the neonatal mortality rate goes down, and everybody wins. You want to save babies? Save women and the world gets safer for babies.
That's just being practical. But you aren't interested in that, are you?
Ah yes, anecdotal evidence!
It makes the slog go 'round...
States that accepted Abstinence Only Federal funds saw the rate of abortions per 100,000 girls under 15 fall from 20 in 2001 to 15 in 2005. The rate for girls 15-19 fell from 55 to 44.
States that refused Abstinence Only Federal funds had much higher rates of abortion and insignificant drops. The rate of abortions per 100,000 girls under 15 was 21 in 2001 and 20 in 2005. The rate for girls 15-19 was 69 in 2001 and 66 in 2005.
Personally, I knew two girls in high school back in the 80's in our Bibley little town who "lost their babies" by enducing miscarriages (God only knows what that really involved) and another girl who had two legal abortions at her parent's insistence, because they hated her boyrfriend (to their credit, they had a point - he was a dreadful person). Luckily, they were wealthy and well-connected. If they hadn't been, and had still been that determined, who knows what would have happened to that girl.
All outlawing abortion would do is tidy up the statistics, and sweep everything under the rug. Unfortunately, that's more than enough for some of the "pro-life" crowd.
What % of the babies you killed over 22 years were elective abortions?
54% of women having abortions used a contraceptive method during the month they became pregnant. Among those women, 76% of pill users and 49% of condom users reported using the methods inconsistently, while 13% of pill users and 14% of condom users reported correct use (AGI).
Yes.
Some people aren't fit to be parents.
How about if we kill them and leave their poor kids out of it?
• Forty-six percent of women who have abortions had not used a contraceptive method during the month they became pregnant. Of these women, 33% had perceived themselves to be at low risk for pregnancy, 32% had had concerns about contraceptive methods, 26% had had unexpected sex and 1% had been forced to have sex.[9]
• About half of unintended pregnancies occur among the 11% of women who are at risk for unintended pregnancy but are not using contraceptives. Most of these women have practiced contraception in the past. (Abortion as Birth Control)
the incredible arrogance of the pro-life crowd is assuming that they don't need to SHOW how a zygote/embryo/fetus has the same personhood/bodily integrity/rights as an autonomous, sentient woman. we currently live in a society where women still have reproductive choice. THE BURDEN OF PROOF falls on the pro-life side.
and sorry folks, bodily integrity is defined as having an autonomous body and a consciousness to recognize that -something young infants as well as the mentally disabled have too. the only exception to the rule is if you previously had sentience and left instructions about turning off a feeding tube in a last will and testament/or similar.
potential life is not the same thing as an already life. abortion isn't murder unless you believe all conceptions have a soul, which is fair, but that's your spiritual take and not applicable to everyone else.
a major facet of bodily integrity that was defined by courts before roe v wade was that as a person you cannot be forced into a medical procedure you don't want nor forced to live with one you don't want. see mcgall v shrimp. and don't give me "an abortion is a procedure the zygote/embryo/fetus doesn't want" because a "zef" doesn't want anything; it isn't capable of wanting, isn't yet capable of wanting anything. a woman is capable of wanting/not wanting and forcing her to live for 9 months with a medical condition would be outrageously unique to current law. nobody else can be legally prevented from a routine medical procedure. only pregnant women are ever subjected to this bullshit.
also, personhood is all or nothing. you can't say, "i'm pro-life unless the woman was raped or pregnancy would kill her." if the zef is a person then a woman can't do anything, to her benefit or not, regardless of circumstances, to end its biotic functions. pro-life argument slips right there.
a zef is not a legal person. i've read a lot of case law and theory and have yet to come across a legal definition of personhood that could hold water when applied to a zef. i don't want to hear, "well the nazis didn't think the jews were people." no, the nazis thought jews were a sub-race and were in a nationalistic struggle to "purify" germany. duh. not remotely the same thing as abortion.
finally to end on the note of current events, the biggest financial contributors to the religious fanatic crazy lobbyists in washington are health insurance companies. why? because it's highly financially beneficial to health insurance companies to be able to legally deny certain rights and coverage benefits to another 10% of american couples and their children. and because women's healthcare is super-expensive so putting pressure on women not to have sex -saving the health insurance companies on copays for birth control and abortion surgeries and follow-up/complications of the same- is financially beneficial too. the same bullshit was applied to stem cell research by the bush administration. stem cell research doesn't require a dead fetus. it requires the umbilical cord, at a minimum. aborted fetal waste matter has been used in the research but isn't necessary to development. health insurance companies were all for stirring up the pro-lifers on this cause because, of course, stem cell procedures are very, very expensive and they don't want to have to pay for it.
i hope all you anti-choice-anti-gay assholes feel good knowing that your spiritual values and piggish propagation of your personal values combined with inability to objectively consider the greater world has been taken advantage of for the primary purpose of keeping a few other assholes rich.
but oops...that's falling apart slowly but surely too when a senate panel signed the most significant so far healthcare reform bill today. suckers.
abortion, legal or otherwise, is nothing as a threat to the lives of women compared to AIDS given to them by their lying downlow cheating partners.
Did you know that Homosexual men account for 59% of all new AIDS cases? And that 97% of women who get AIDS get it from an infected male?
"but oops...that's falling apart slowly but surely too when a senate panel signed the most significant so far healthcare reform bill today. suckers."
dear, your hope for today's healthcare bill is the very definition of SUCKERHOOD.
If illegal abortion means more women die, and you push for illegal abortion (knowing that that means more women will die), then that means you would rather that more women die than that abortion should be legal.
For all those wondering, 46's lovely little contribution is courtesy of VoteYESforLife.com.
Admittedly this is the fantasy land in your head we're talking about here, but have it at least make some sense if you want to troll successfully, k?
So why don't we spent more energy fighting to get more people in social services to protect the already born from their unfit parents than fighting to stop the unfit from having a child in the first place. I do agree that making contraceptives will decrease abortions, but lets face it....if someone is unfit to make healthy choices for a child, they aren't making healthy choices for themselves. Having the option of abortion gives someone one more chance to save a life from entering the world of social services.
@55 did not say that homosexual men give AIDS to women.
Thank you. Well said.
What bothers them so fucking much? Is simply mentioning that such things actually happened that inconvient to their worldview?
Of course, the biggest way to prevent women (not to mention men) from being infected with AIDS (and all other STDs) is to promote abstinence until marriage and fidelity within marriage, which incidentally also reduces the number of unwanted pregnancies, and abortions.
Why don't we spend more energy ENCOURAGING abortion in the poor?
If you got them to admit your grandmother's story, they'd tell you that that could NEVER happen now. Uh-huh.
Margaret Sanger (founder of American Birth Control League (which eventually became Planned Parenthood)) said about her 1939 "Negro Project";
"We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the minister is the man who can straighten out the idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members."
And also, Clarence Gamble, president of the American Eugenics Research Association, said, "There is a great danger that we will fail because the Negroes think it a plan for extermination. Hence lets appear to let the colored run it as we appear to let [the] south do the conference in Atlanta." Under this policy, Planned Parenthood of America hired a full-time "Negro Consultant" in 1944.
This is the most telling part of the article. It would seem that if they can make an instant pregnancy kit, they can also make an instant fertility kit...or maybe something that turns a vulva blue during ovulation. The marketeers can brainstorm...
Well in the interim ... while I try to figure how to take care of myself with this lofty degree (assuming the "right thing" was in fact the right thing to do with my ambition), in this society, without losing my soul, the occasional bout of premarital sex, helps me actually love humanity and give me some hope for it's future. It helps me restore confidence that I'm a competent human being. Helps me not feel alone and feel that this whole thing means something.
Unlike the rest of my male scientific counterparts who have given up dating all together because they've been out of the loop for so long. They are now the miserable, jaded, self-righteous men I have ever met, who scour the earth for the next lab project, in solitude.
In the meantime, I'm applying for jobs ALL OVER THE COUNTRY. Each one has the chance to last within the 2-5 year range ... and it's going to get worse as time goes on ... the new economy is going to make financial success dependent on ones mobility.
Remember in the "global economy" finances are transported around the world in the blink of an eye to maximize profit, but not workers.
Where is there room for children? It gets delayed if it is going to happen at all. Are we all supposed to wear god damn chastity belts until we are 33? Look contraception is necessary, but it's not fool proof. And because of this, why should we bring more unnecessary suffering into this world.
Since only non-elective abortions are performed in the time frame when personhood is expected, you are wrong @13: elected abortion does not kill innocent human life. To the contrary, it terminates a pregnancy before it becomes a human life.
It's also a common fallacy to presume a fetus or a zygote equates to a baby or a child. The difference in time, growth and developmental viability is magnitudinous. The common reason expressed by many in the conservative abortion-access obstructionist crowd is that a fertilized zygote has a genetic makeup that is significantly different from the mother, but this doesn't take into account that so does cancer or other significant mutations that occur continuously within a human body (most of which are harmlessly contained and discarded) or the fact that a the same fertilized zygote has a less than 20% chance of naturally developing into a healthy baby.
They have a 100% chance to avoid pregnancy and STDs.
You run in a sleazy corner of the Real World.
Priceless
innocent human life ≠ personhood.
You always throw up the strawman of 'personhood'.
Life is a biological concept.
Biologically conception creates a human life.
It is alive.
It is homo sapiens.
It is neither the mother or the father, it is a new member of the species.
If you dispute that please explain what species the living organism created by conception belongs to. All living organisms belong to a species, what is our mystery organism before it becomes human?
Abortion KILLS a homo sapiens.
You may ponder 'personhood' and fairies and angels on a pinhead if you wish but please don't distract a discussion of Life (and Death) with philosophical mental masturbation.
I came back here today and now I find this post about abortion. Do you seriously believe that "American opponents of reproductive freedom....are trying to kill American women"? Or do you think it's cute to connect the dots on that way? The vast majority of people I know would self-identify as pro-life. Not one of them wants American women to die. Not one of them wants women barefoot and enslaved in the kitchen (as I hear so many pro-choicers accuse). They simply believe that life begins at conception and that a fetus has the right to life. It's a complicated issue, for crying out loud. Most of the pro-lifers I know would acknowledge that. I find your characterization of them (and the issue) extremely disappointing and small.
For the record, I'm a straight, married, suburban mother of four. I'm very left but surrounded by righties. I used to be pro-life but now I'm pro-choice. I got there by considering the arguments of the other side. I know plenty of Bible thumpers and a lot about them drives me bat-shit crazy. But I try to be calm and reasoned with any of them if touchy issues come up. Maybe, just maybe, they'll hear my point of view and that, along with the respect they have for me and the respect I afford them, will give them pause. I've had exchanges like this with them about marriage equality ("Oh, you're concerned about gay marriage becoming legal in our state? Really? I'm actually a huge supporter of marriage equality...blah blah blah"), religion, etc. and in many cases made some headway. I don't see how open disdain or contempt gets anyone anywhere.
It's clear to me now that both sides of the abortion debate have zero interest in understanding their opponents' views. Problem is, you don't change any minds that way. Might be safe for keeping Roe v. Wade on the books, but what about marriage equality? Minds have to be changed....and you aren't going to change any with open contempt for your adversaries.
Sorry for the lengthy post. But this has been bothering me since I read your blog yesterday about the Mormon couple. I've seen your articles in publications here and there over the years and enjoyed them. I just can't believe this is really you. Came as quite a surprise.
For example, my grandfather worked in USAid and would go to third world and developing nations and dig wells, build irrigation facilities, and generally help people develop their farmlands into stable, sustainable fields through careful water management. He had to deal with a lot of superstitious local clerics who would try to tell people that The Americans Had Come To Poison Us All, and so if pressed, you could probably have heard my grandfather say something to the effect of "We do not want word to go out that we want to poison the wells, and the minister is the man who can straighten out the idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members." In other words, we should make sure that the ministers know what our agenda is so that they can stomp out any misinformation of exactly the sort you yourself are spreading at the first sign of it.
Sanger knew that being able to control one's fertility and limit family size was the first critical step in stabilizing one's family and giving your family an economic future. Shame on you for spreading lies about her mission. You know what lies make the Baby Jesus do, after all.
LC, you're clearly using that quote to imply that there is some sort of conspiracy to exterminate black people using abortion, and while I'm not entirely clear on how that would supposedly work, I think more pertinent here is the fact that that quote is clearly, in context, about how the organization does not want their work to be mistaken for such a conspiracy.
Giving people the tools to control their own sexual lives is not, except in the most bizarrely convoluted extremist logic, the same as or even related to exterminating their race. You will note that pogroms do not generally begin with the distribution of condoms.
Get a fucking grip.
@82
Personhood is in fact the issue. If you want to make it about life, then we need to extend protection to all life, of all kinds, all of which is qualitatively equal. Moss, fish, dogs, chimps, and humans are all equally alive. That does not make them equally sentient or equally entitled to legal protection. Why don't you just come out and admit that it's not about life, either, for you, but rather about souls? Your concept of a soul is the only distinction you can possibly be trying to make between a human embryo, which doesn't even have differentiated neural tissue, and any other sort of simple animal life like a siphonophore or flatworm.
oh boy - mindreading!
can you guess my height and weight?
card tricks?
450,000 abortions a year by women who were using contraception. Another 550,000 women get pregnant using contraception but keep the baby. And it is a lot easier to catch a STD than get pregnant so there are millions of people a year whose 'safe sex' let them down.
I'm also pretty sure that Dan wants abortions to be, as Clinton put it, safe, legal and rare. (Correct me if I'm wrong.) The liberal position on abortion is similar to the conservative one in that we want fewer of them to occur. It's our tactics to affect this change that are different. Rather than regulating abortion further, we'd rather reduce the number of unintended pregnancies by providing better and more readily available conception, and encourage low-income expecting mothers to consider following through with a pregnancy by providing childcare benefits sufficient enough to make parenting feasible at the lower incomes, even when the biological father is a poor candidate as a parent.
I don't think those of us who are concerned with overpopulation (an issue which has some legitimacy but is outside the realm of control of teh government really would turn to abortion as a means to this end. To the contrary, my own hope for a solution, ectogenesis, which I've brought up elsewhere, will likely cause a population boom in its first years of usage. Of course, I suspect Genesis-minded literalists will fight its implementation tooth and claw for the first while.
You got me to look up vociferous.
The short version: Personhood, referring to the point when a neonate or prenate is legally individual from its mother, is the term used by those of us who actually discuss the legality and morality of abortion access, since it will probably be used in any future law. Even those on your side use it. The term life is sloppy because it means something different to layfolk than it does in biological sciences. Thus we avoid it.
Interestingly, I wouldn't challenge that a zygote is human, rather I would challenge whether or not it is necessarily an organism. (Though, again, biologically, one could debate a single skin cell is an organism.) If you want, we can use that word instead of person. My arguments won't change either way. Nor will yours, I suspect.
Still, Abortion KILLS a homo sapiens only after that point it is legally defined as an individual homo sapiens.
I've found that when I dig deep into why people don't want abortion, it tends to be about misogyny, controlling women, and punishing them.
p.s. If you hate abortion you must also hate God because GOD is the cause of most spontaneous abortions (miscarriages). They thought the miscarriage rate was 25-33% before 6 weeks, but now with the new early response pregnancy tests they believe it's more like 50%....and that's not even the embryos that never implant at all. Only one in four embryos implant in the womb and become a pregnancy. Suck on that "Every Embryo Is A Human Being" crowd. 75% of all women experience a miscarriage at sometime in their lives. GOD KILLS LOTS AND LOTS OF BABIES!!! More than any OB/GYN in the history of world. More than all OB/GYNs in the entire history of the world ever
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/arti…
70,000 women dying every year trying to get an abortion? Lovely. Until you realize that a desperate pregnant woman will do anything, take any risk, to end her pregnancy, you will never get why abortion providers do what we do: because if we don't make it safe, the women WILL try for it anyway. Women have always had abortions; they always will have them. I've said it here before, and I'll say it again: my dad took care of women dying from unsafe abortions back in the 50s. He's the one who talked me into performing abortions now. Every thinking person should make it safe for them or be culpable in their deaths, and in the orphaning of the children they already have. If you have sisters, daughters, mothers, aunts, YOU have a stake in this.
And if you are against abortion, work to prevent unplanned pregnancies.
The point is that Personhood is a critical concept. Nobody grants that quality for sperm, or oocytes, even though they are human life. Nobody who thinks about the issue would grant that quality to single-celled zygotes, either.
So when does human life begin?
Oh, about 6 million years ago. (Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk).
More seriously, when do we develop into human persons deserving of rights? That answer is going to be different for every individual. The general consensus has always been "not before 3-6 months of pregnancy." You together with your partner have the right to decide an earlier date for the zygotes you produce, and I don't get to tell you otherwise. Likewise, you don't get to tell me and my partner what to do with our zygotes before that 6 month time.
I'm still not sure why personhood is so nonnegotiably defined by obstructionists as at conception over all other options (i.e. implantation or statistical viability or first blood). I don't understand why they have such a monotonal strategy for reducing abortions, namely obstructing access to them. Why are there not bipartisan efforts to make parenting a viable option to single or low-income mothers? Or to make contraception better and more available to everyone who is sexually active, married, adult or otherwise? Why does this value of life not extend to the post born? To children without medical insurance? To soldiers? To prisoners on death row? As more and more of these questions go unexplained, I've begun to suspect the issue is really something else than saving unborn babies.
The most obvious issue to blame is the developing rise in feminism, the equalization of rights for women, and the degenderization of society. From this perspective, the rights of the unborn do seem to weigh more heavily to the obstructionists than the women on whom the unborn depend. When these women are discussed, the rhetoric falls back on women deserving their lot and not taking responsibility, as if childbirth was intended to be (as per Genesis) a punishment for giving in to sexual urges. While I think Dan's statement is hyperbolic, it's been pretty clear that obstructionists would rather pregnant mothers die than legal abortions occur, and that if they continued with their plan to criminalize abortions with foreknowledge of these statistics, that they were doing so knowing women would die as a result of their actions. (They would probably justifying it by saying such women deserved it.)
The other option is idealism of the unborn. To borrow a quote from past SLOG discussions (apologies for missing credit to the original poster) obstructionists believe the needs of hypothetical children outweigh the needs of actual children here on Earth...After all, hypothetical children are so much better in so many ways. They are angelic Hummelware fantasies, unchanging, fragile, pure, to be sheltered in a dusty curio cabinet where they can be mooned over as consistently adorable possessions that mirror a world view of similar unchanging simplicity.
When she told me what was going on, you could have knocked me over with a feather: I remember wondering how such a peculiar looking person got someone to have relations with her, but all cats are gray at night I suppose. It turns out that she'd been hanging out at the Trailways station, and meeting up with men. She said she was practicing the rhythm method (which was odd, since she hates Catholics) and insisted that I take her for an abortion right then.
So we went, and I missed the trunk show (just as well - Halston's star was really fading by then - everything looked like the uniforms he designed for the Branniff stewardesses) and of course LC "forgot her wallet", which meant I had to pay the bill.
Well, I got her on the planned parenthood free birth control thing, but she just kept messing up. After the sixth abortion, they offered free sterilization, but she said she wanted to have some babies eventually, and refused.
But then she disappeared - just dropped off the face of the earth. It turns out she became part of the lesbian separatist movement, and was living with Alix Dobkin's roadie in a cabin in the Berkshires.
I thought she lived happily ever after, but she showed up here on Slog a few months ago, talking about some children she supposedly has and being disagreeable about the gays. Oh, and she's supposedly black and Christian, which is odd because in reality she is white and Jewish.
I tried reaching out to her, and asked to lunch at the Sunset Club, but she made such a scene that the management asked that I not bring her there anymore.
I'm just at my wit's end about Loveschild. If only she'd let me fix her up with Lord Basil. They both love mildew and muumuus. They'd be perfect together.
Sorry, all, for the error.
Alcohol kills plenty of people. But prohibition didn't work. It probably killed more people through bathtub gin poisonings and underworld killings than it saved from death related to alcohol. (I suspect, but I admit I can't prove it).
If we believe studies showing that legal restrictions do not reduce the number of abortions, then banning abortion will not save lives. You would lose more women (and fetuses!) through illegal abortion and self-induced miscarriage.
That's why I believe we need to work to end abortion from the demand end, not the supply end. Promoting contraception saves not only avoids deaths but also increases quality of life.
Laws are manmade.
Laws change.
Laws are fickle.
Slavery was once legal.
Abortion was once illegal.
Morality is also fickle and fluid.
Whose morality?
You are aware that many people find abortion immoral, aren't you?
I totally get why you avoid the term 'Life'.
Do you consider yourself layfolk?
Biologically 'Life' is a simple concept.
Not manmade or fickle.
An enlightened society would use scientific biological fact as a starting point in determining what is Legal.
Unenlightened societies wallow in ignorance and superstition.
Our society is not unenlightened.
Oppressive evil societies pervert, distort and ignore scientific fact enroute to abusing and mistreating.
The Nazis distorted "science" to justify denying non-Aryans basic human rights. Such as life.
Slave holders and segregationist did the same to justify mistreatment and exploitation of Negroes.
Did they know better?
Were they willfully ignorant?
Politically powerful rule makers perverting "science" to justify their exploitation and abuse.
Abortionist claim 'Life' is a sloppy confusing concept best avoided.
They gaze piously heavenward and solemnly proclaim that "we Don't and Can't know When Life begins...".
Biologists know it is neither sloppy or confusing.
Merely an Inconvenient Truth.
The youngest and most helpless members of our species don't vote,
or march in protest,
or hire lobbyist,
or donate to candidates and PACs.
They don't even audibly cry out when they are chemically burned to death or ripped apart.
They are easy prey to those in society that find their existence inconvenient.
It is a very unequal struggle.
The Jews in the ovens of Auschwitz and the slaves in the dungeons of Elmina had it easy by comparison.
If ones own mother and members of the profession sworn to preserve life and Do No Harm conspire to kill you, often before anyone else even knows you exist, what hope do you have?
Drought and Famine ravage far away dusty hopeless lands.
Children starve, bellies bloat, death slowly but inexorably eats away.
We see images on TV.
Are we moved?
Do we respond?
Why?
The death of these children does not affect us.
It inflicts no cost on our economy and does not inconvenience of daily lives in the least.
Do we turn the channel or look away?
Do we help?
Why should we care?
What is the Moral Choice?
A tiny young child grows in it's mother's womb.
She conspires to kill it.
It's life or death is of no material consequence to us.
Do we care?
Do we help the innocent helpless child?
What IS the Moral Choice?
Abortion is legal.
So was slavery.
The Nazis passed laws legalizing the Holocaust.
Nice and Legal and Tidy.
So- "Abortion KILLS a homo sapiens.
Only after that point it is legally defined as an individual homo sapiens."
Nice and Legal and Tidy.
I think there is a large segment of the anti-abortion camp that just hasn't thought through every aspect of the issue. That's a fault of theirs, to be sure, but it doesn't warrant accusations that they want American women to die or even want them punished for having sex. The women I know are just like me: suburban moms, most Catholic, who grew up hearing that life begins at conception, abortion is wrong, etc. etc. They don't think pregnant women deserve to be punished. Most of the women in this crowd had premarital sex and are on the pill! They are willing to part ways with their church on some issues. It's also not true that they "don't care about the baby after it's born" as has been stated here. Decent numbers of the women I know vote for candidates and policies that would benefit women trying to raise a family. But if you grow up Catholic and stay that way (which I guess I have, though I'm barely hanging on at this point), abortion is the biggie. I believe if many of these women thought long and hard about the implications of criminalizing abortion they might change their minds, as I have. Why do they pick conception as the beginning of "life?" By default. Because it's too hard to establish any other point. Your comments about personhood/zygotes/etc are things I read that eventually changed my mind. That's my point, really. The wild accusations and disdain don't help anybody. But a respectful(ish) exchange that gives a tiny bit of credit for the other side's possibly good intentions and yet puts forth sound arguments--that can accomplish something.
Are there obstructionist freak shows out there who really are as they are painted in these comments? Yes. But I don't personally know any, and I know a lot of people who are anti-abortion. The women I know who oppose abortion are smart, caring mothers and career women. They are just suffering from underexposure to the solid arguments for choice. And if those women's only interaction with the opposing side is to hear the views expressed as they are on this blog (with some notable exceptions), I believe it will only strengthen their anti-abortion resolve. Then where are we?
Thanks for your comments, though. I filed away some points to make should I ever find myself in a future discussion with anti-abortion friends.