linderman

it just amazes me how anyone thinks the government has the right to dicitate what a woman should do with her own circumstances .........


make laws against late term ..... of course thats common sense



and dont kid yourself ........ I dont believe McCain would consider anyone for the courts that wasnt an Anti

Religion pushes that line of thinking as a means of boosting their "membership" ......... to think any different is nothing more than "dreamer"

those strict anti's like John ........ why doesnt he adopt a couple hundred of them ....... he can sure afford it ????? nobody has the right the tell others how to run their lifes circumstances unless they want to "fund" another life ......... put up ......$$$$$$$ or shut up

linderman

given a choice between seeing a woman with no child or a neglected, mentally abused, poorly raised child or worse yet watch a whole family struggle harder from the impact of another mouth to feed ........ and you bet ....... the 'choice" becomes more clear


after all ...... christian religion is sooooo self rightous ..... given the history of christianity....... anyone still believe the crusades were all about religion and not $$$$$ & power to influence ?



religion and its imapct should never even be uttered in governement ........ not in ANY form whatsoever

SABL

Good point/s linderman!

I am the father of 5 and gfather of 8. At NO time would I have considered aborting any of my children..... I was somewhat in control of my own circumstances. As for any other person I feel I cannot dictate what they can and cannot do in their circumstance.

When should a life be terminated?? In the first trimester?? Nah, let's outlaw abortion.... that way the law enforcement agencies can do their job when they retrieve the body of an abused child who has fallen prey to irresponsible parents.

You go, John and Sarah.

yustr

Powerful stuff. This girl has some real guts. When a 16 year old can make Palin and all of the other zealots look medieval, what's that say about their humanity?

Note: my friend mimo also posted this clip.

EnglishPaul

What does it say about humanity when we are quite prepared to kill our unborn if it suits our lifestyle choice? Or murder our runts before they ever get to term?

If we are happy to abort the unborn on grounds of preventing dysfunctional families, perhaps we should do it by shooting the pregnant slapper mother.

This is not about being enlightened, it is about being clinically barbaric.

linderman

life style choice ????????? I think "properly" raising children has a wee-bit more impact than "life style impact" how about when a woman is alone, without support and barely taking care of herself ....... who are we to judge her as barbaric or tell her how to assign her life's responsibilities ? and further more ........ what business does a Senators religious beliefs get pushed on to her ?

anyone that is so anti-abortion ........ please dont let me hear them whinning in the future about the rising cost of taxes for taking care of "the saved ones" as they get older ....... those "individuals" you saved with your forced beliefs are the same ones you later must take care of that fill the "doles" of our society !

mommabear

Or better yet, castrate the guy who can't keep it in his pants. Sounds to me like that might make you think of things in a different light.

flipper

I wouldn't. I saw a special on some of youth in America. This one guy had 10 kids by 10 different girls. He took no responsibility for the kids. Never sees them, never paid child support. I would all be for him to be castrated. The really sad part. No one blamed him. His father did the same thing so they said its not his fault.

While I do think its the womans choice, when you see the same females having 3, 4 or even more abortions it really makes you wonder.

However, what really scares me is that Obama supports the Freedom of Choice Act. This proposed legislation would create a federally guaranteed "fundamental right" to abortion through all nine months of pregnancy, yes this includes the last few weeks of pregnancy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pf0XIRZSTt8

Drew1369

The guy keeping it in the pants does have to do with the lady spreading her legs...

Please dont attack me... its just as much the males AS IS the females fault... so we punish the life growing in the womb!

Wierdly, I am pro-choice TO A POINT. Obviously, partial birth abortion is just sick, and not right to do at all... heck I was against voting for the ban at all untill I actually learned what the procedure entailed. Then I was just grossed out, and fully agreed with the ban.

All in all, I dont think it should be up to the federal government, it should be state to state.

yustr

Come on flipper, we demand more from our posters than this. I knew that that quote was clearly propaganda even before I read the actual bill:

But then again, maybe protecting a woman's life is not important to you and the other zealots out there.

EnglishPaul

But if you were putting up a logical argument, you could claim that all childbirth is risky. And as such a late term abortion would satisfy the criteria of protecting the woman's life and health.

EnglishPaul

Be careful where you are heading. The support of abortion on behalf of society finance is eugenics. And if you are prepared to kill for cost cutting, I would start with the prisons, then the old peoples homes, and perhaps the spinal/ brain injury rehabilitation units.

There has to be consequences with responsibility. If someone does have unprotected sex there is always the morning after pill. But to have abortion accepted as an extension of birth control skews the public perception and acceptance of it. Abortion as a special measure is one thing; but abortion as a free choice is quite another.

mommabear

Now for some catching up.

Abortion is not an extension of birth control for the majority of women and girls who must face such a terrible decision. To imply that, as the far right often does, is disingenuous and insulting to women as a whole.

This has been argued and debated for centuries. The problem is the religious concept of the soul. If you believe in a soul, then you believe the soul makes the embryo-fetus a human being, not biology. The fetus grows through all stages of "life"...animal life. It starts out as a few cells, then has gills like a fish, a tail, etc. At about 10 weeks it starts to look "human", but is it a human "being"?

Does the fetus know it's a human being? Does it have a consciousness, an awareness that it exists at this stage? Is it even aware of a consciousness after birth?

When exactly do we come to the quiet realization inside ourselves that we are different from the animal world, that we are human "beings"? Who can answer those questions positively and without a doubt, outside of a declaration of their Faith?

I can't.

And so because I can't answer those questions outside of whatever Faith I may ascribe to, I cannot, will not, attempt to convince or force another woman to have, or not have, an abortion based on my personal or religious beliefs.

IMHO, separating Faith from policy is exactly what Roe represents and must not be overturned.

Chode

It seems to me that most of the debate around abortion ignores the fact that permissive abortion laws never force a woman to have an abortion. I don't think anyone is so omniscient as to know the exact moment a fetus becomes a human being. Abortion is a personal decision, and the government needs to stay out of it.

I said this a long time ago on this forum, but I don't see any Fundamentalist churches holding funerals for miscarriages at any stage of pregnancy. If a fetus is a human life at conception, where are the funerals! Is the loss of a human life through accidental injury or a genetic problem somehow less important than the loss of a prematurely born infant who failed to survive? Or a child who lived a few months? If every human life is sacred, how can Fundamentalists ignore the loss of so many? How can they ignore the human tragedy of unwanted birth?

yustr

Chode, you're falling into the same trap as other thinking people: expecting religion (any religion) to follow even a rudimentary logical progression to its end.

Here's another one: if god thinks abortion is so despicable why is the human mind capable of thinking otherwise? Why is a prospective mother not instinctively precluded from aborting her pregnancy? We know that there are some of god's creatures who will die before they'll abandon their eggs. Why didn't he design this into humans too?

So common zealots, we're waiting your answer.

Chode

Don't tell me that didn't feel better than barbed wire

EnglishPaul

Well I am no zealot, and certainly not a common one, but I will pose an answer (all be it agnostic).
Society plays a large part in peoples perceptions, and thus decisions. If enough people around you encourage you to have an abortion you are going not have that instinctive preclusion that you look for. If society finds nothing wrong in abortion, people tend towards believing the wisdom of the masses, and will not see anything wrong in it.
But it doesn't make it harmless (or harmful).


It is interesting that Mommabear calls abortion a terrible decision that a mother has to make. That doesn't sound like the language of a trivial choice. And if there is so much importance on the decision, then it
must have substantial consequences both ways, which is at odds with Chode's view of life in the womb as having minimal significance.

And, yes, I still stand my ground. You can't have it both ways. Either abortion is a free choice and so gets used as a form of contraception, or abortion is a special measure that has special criteria, checks and balances.
And the easier and more accepted it is as a practice, the more it will be used as a contraceptive.

yustr

EP, if I understand, you're saying that the instinct is present but gets changed by who you hang out with.

I think you missed my point completely. Most people (here in the US anyway) object to abortion on religious grounds. Plus, almost all of those who take the position, as does Gov. Palin, that all abortion should be illegal no matter the circumstance, do so because of their stated religious beliefs. Said another way: god says that abortion is wrong, period.

My point is: How do these people reconcile these beliefs with the inherent free will that all people have?

BTW: This same question is valid at a higher level. Namely, if god wants us to beleive in him, why leave it to chance? Why not hardwire it into our brains? If he were truly omnipotent he could have. And if he were truly omniscient he would know that some (most) would question it.

All bunk as far as I'm concerned.

Then there's still the fallacy that chode brought up.

Should have been come on not common - we know your uncommon EP.

EnglishPaul

I was saying that I think there is a basic instinct, but it can be affected by social forces. Which, in part, is why abortion is such a hot issue.

There is a saying here to not throw the baby out with the bathwater. The points I laid out, I did so with no religious slant. I don't think religion has to come into the debate.
Perhaps I was trying to hijack the thread to a more general one on abortion, and as such was talking at cross-purposes. Sorry for the hijack, I just thought it was a bigger topic than just a political football.

mommabear

One woman's perspective...mine.

I'm gonna try to give you men an idea what goes through a woman's mind when faced with an unexpected pregnancy. I have a husband in the picture and it affected him too, but let's just stick to my side. We've been married almost 45 years and we're so joined at the hip, that the feelings I'm going to describe were pretty much his feelings too. It just makes it easier to write this out in first person.

We have two children. We always wanted a house full of kids. But finances and life got in the way and we decided to stop at the two we had. So, I had my tubes tied in the early 70's. They may do it differently now, but back then I think the standard proceedure didn't really involve cutting the fallopian tube and closing the two ends off. I think they just "tied" the tubes some way so that the sperm and egg would never meet. Well, one should never say "never".

I can't remember the exact year now, but it had to be in the late 70's, early 80's that it happened. I'm using where we lived at the time as my method of recall rather than spending time counting on my fingers.

Anyway, at roughly 38-39 years of age I found myself pregnant. I wasn't far enough along to go to the doctor for confirmation. I also had a history of false-negatives if I go to the doctor too soon, so I wanted to wait. But I'm one of those women who just knows and start showing the signs within a few days of conception. In fact, while I'm suspecting but not saying anything, my husband noticed the changes in my body and it was he who brought it up first. "Are you pregnant?", he asked. "Yes, I'm pretty sure I am."

The next couple of weeks were a roller coaster ride of emotions, from the serious to the silly.

Can we afford another child? We'll need a bigger place eventually. Should the hubby get a second job? Should I go back to work after awhile? What about daycare, if I do? How much is that? How will our two girls take it?

We'd be in our 50's with a kid high school. Can we handle that?

Do maternity clothes look less frumpy than they used to? While trying to find maternity clothes in the past that didn't make me look like a Hershey Kiss with legs, a sales clerk bluntly said to me, "Well, what do you expect? You're pregnant." I went home and cried.

And what about the weight gain? I gained 45 pounds the last time. I walked out of the hospital at a whopping 165 pounds on my 5'2" frame. It took me three years to finally get it off.

There were also the jokes that this one had better be a boy since we already had two girls. But how does one raise a boy?

And then there was the Big One to consider. What if there's something wrong with the baby? At my age, the odds go up for that. We decided to cross that bridge if and when we came to it.

So we started thinking everything will work out (somehow) and began to get excited at the possibility of starting over again with a little new one. We told the girls. They were mostly grossed out at the idea that their parents still had sex, but they seemed to take it well otherwise.

Enough time had finally passed to avoid a false-negative. It was time to see a doctor.

And then I took a fall. Yes, it was an accident. I lost my footing on slippery deck step and I went full down on my behind. I went to bed, propped my legs up hoping that would help, but several hours later I was no longer pregnant. I was maybe 4-5 weeks along, so there were no contractions or anything like that. I just started bleeding like an almost normal period.

My point in telling all of this is to show just some of the things that go on when faced with an unexpected pregnancy. It wasn't due to rape. To my knowledge I was still healthy enough to be pregnant,and the baby was probably healthy too. (That was yet to be confirmed though.) I wasn't a young or older unmarried woman. I had a support group around me. I wasn't alone.

Had I been unlucky enough to be without one or more of those avenues of support, I also knew that I had a "Choice", if there was no other way.

So, try to imagine what it must be like for another woman who might not be as lucky as I was. Try not to be so absolute in your judgments.

That's all I ask.