Let's first all agree on one thing. No one is pro-abortion. You are either for or against the right of women to have one, but believing a miniscule, insentient fetus shouldn't have the same rights as the adult woman carrying it doesn't mean you think terminating that pregnancy is just another medical procedure.
I am close to at least 6 women who have had abortions. All of them, years later, still feel ambivalent about their choice, just as they did when they made it. But they are clear it was better than the unsafe, illegal abortion they might have pursued, or having a child they didn't want to have. It doesn't mean they wouldn't have loved those children. But it would have almost certainly meant they wouldn't have borne at least one of the children they later did have, intentionally--children born to parents who got married because they wanted to, not because they had to; who completed their education and could afford to feed and clothe and house their kids properly.
"Every child, a wanted child" seems to be a rarely heard pro-choice argument these days. But it strikes me as the most important.
When I was prison I talked to innumerable other inmates about their lives. A tiny minority had been born of two married parents. The overwhelming majority had been raised by a single woman (mother, grandmother, aunt or foster mother) economically and often emotionally underequipped for the task. Almost all of these guys had been regularly struck or beaten as children, although none would call it abuse. ("Oh, but you don't understand" they'd tell me. "I deserved it. I was a bad kid.") A great many had been sexually abused by older men, though I admit that information was harder to come by. (The percentage of female inmates reporting sexual abuse in studies is close to 95%.)
Congressman Bart Stupak is so certain that women with access to better insurance might have more abortions that he is threatening to torpedo the entire healthcare reform bill. It is not at all unlikely that his blackmail may have the end result of forcing insurance plans that want access to federally subsidized premiums to cancel abortion coverage altogether. This may have the effect of reducing abortion; but it will also have the effect of increasing the number of unwanted children.
Let me ask the Congressman a few questions: What kind of lives does he think most unwanted children actually end up having? Does he really think they get adopted off to pretty suburban homes or turn into Tim Tebow? Why does he think most women get abortions now? Could it be because two lives might be ruined otherwise?
It would seem Mr. Stupak and his cronies don't care what kind of lives poor children have, just that they have lives. Otherwise he could never risk torpedoing a healthcare bill that is the single best hope those very same children, not to mention their mothers, have to break the cycle of poverty, abuse and neglect that so often mark their time on earth.
Not every child will be planned. But every child should be wanted. It should be the most fundamental right there is.
Follow Mark Olmsted on Twitter: www.twitter.com/MarquisMarq
None of the adolescent and pre-logical arguments propounded by my Catholic commenters address the validity of my argument: that children have a right to be wanted. They alo have a right not to be hit, verbally abused, miseducated, sent to prison, underfed etc.
As for whether "being dead" is better than a life of poverty, that would assume I accept the proposition that abortion is death. I do not. Never being born is not "death." or contraception would be murder. I do, however, see the real and virtual death of all the poor women forced to have children that they cannot care for, that get them thrown out of the house, that force them into prostitution or work abroad that forces them to be absent mothers. Read the articles about the real lives of Salvadorean and Nicaraguan women who can't have safe legal abortions. The valuing of virtual maybe babies over actual human beings is galling at best, contemptible at worst.
The case of a pregnant Nicaraguan woman who has been denied treatment for cancer is yet another instance of how women's health is disregarded by anti-abortion advocates.
By Michelle Goldberg
In the Nicaraguan city of Leon, a 27-year-old, known only as Amalia, is being denied treatment for cancer because she's 10 weeks pregnant and chemotherapy would harm her fetus. Since 2006, abortion has been illegal in Nicaragua under all circumstances, even when a woman's life is at stake, so while Amalia is in the hospital, nothing is being done for her. Amalia's sister has gone public, desperately seeking to pressure the government to help keep Amalia, who has a 10-year-old daughter, alive. La Prensa, Nicaragua's main newspaper, quoted her sister making a public statement interrupted by sobs. "We are asking that my sister be given treatment, we are asking that you don't forget that my sister is a human being, we are asking that this treatment be immediate," she said, before being unable to continue...
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=a_pro_life_death_sentence
No one can tell that the child is more important than the mother, or the other way. They are worth the same.
What would you do if there were cojoined twins, one of them has cancer and need chemotherapy, the other one refuses to participate?
I'm not pretending to have the right answer for that, but im quite sure that the right one can't be to take the healthy brother by force into the chemoterapy.
http://peru21.pe/noticia/354243/sigue-polemica-iglesia-esta-dispuesta-acoger-bebes-no-deseados
I stand by my conviction that only the woman, her doctor and her family, and if she chooses - her spiritual counselor - have a right to consult - and ultimately it is the woman's decision as to what is best for her.
The same people who want government out of their business want government in mine when it comes to abortion. They are all a bunch of hypocrites.
No one thinks abortion is good. No one!
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So you think that performing an abortion on a raped nine year old whose hips are to narrow to carry ( nevermind deliver ) twins is a not-good thing? I will disagree with you on that.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/brazil-rocked-by-abortion-for-9yearold-rape-victim-1640165.html
Abortion is just a medical procedure. "Good" or "Bad" depends on the circumstances.
Circumstances vary. Widely.
And there is considerable disagreement as to what situations abortion is the proper response as well. But a pretty common denominator is any situation where the child is going to die anyway but an abortion can prevent it from taking the mother with it. In that case abortion is pretty clearly a good thing ( unless the kid is a boy and you don't consider women to be people I guess in which case its 6 of one and half a dozen of the other since the person dies either way ).
Most people think there are times and places where abortion is good. That any attempt to argue for reproductive rights is spattered with disclaimers like your is a disturbing symptom of how successfully the anti-choice have framed the debate.
It weakens the pro-choice position to play to them like that because by denying that the procedure has any virtue you put yourself in the position of arguing for something that you have declared is always bad.
How can I say this?
Because countries that DO that have 1/10th the abortion and teen pregnancy rates of the US.
If we concentrated on root causes and results instead of forcing policy around what we WANTED the answers to be, we would be much better off.
All I ask is that right-to-lifers exhibit the same kind of interest in real human beings as they do in embryonic versions of them. 45,000 real adults die every year from lack of health insurance. Those are real, adult, thinking, feeling people with families and relationships and histories. A non-viable fetus is part of a woman's body, not a distinct person.
As for geniuses, Hitler, Stalin, Mao and a very long list of serial killers would certainly qualify. It's a a weak argument that taken to its extreme would insist that every woman should have as many offspring as she possibly can because some of them might be geniuses. A lot of them will also be rapists, murderers, wife-beaters, sexual molesters too. (I would contend it's far more likely when they are unwanted children who come from violent upbringings.)
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The difference between Men and Women is that if a Man spent ever had to pass something this size of a basketball out of his body, he'd never want to see that basketball again.
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The real decider is not your gender ... it is whether or not you *want* the basketball. If you do, then the pain and suffering to produce it just strengthen your attachment. To abandon it now would be to render the pain you endured to obtain it pointless.
This is the basic premise of rites of manhood the world over so I'll go out on a limb and say men not only "get it", they artificially create trials to mirror pregnancy and labor.
But the very pain that makes these trials meaningful to voluntary participants, makes them torture to the involuntary ones. Unwilling participation also robs the experience of all its character forming properties. Its the difference between bungee jumping and being pushed off a bridge. It doesn't take any courage, self examination, determination, or well, maturity, to be forced into doing something you don't want to do.
Rather the opposite in fact.
Jack Hitt
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/09/magazine/09abortion.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
Pro-life "policies" can accomplish no more than making abortions more dangerous, women more terrified, and the non-dangerous prisoner count in our prisons higher.
Pro-life fails because it focuses on grandiose principles rather than policies and actions that can reduce the demand for abortion and increase communication about it.
Pro-lifers and pro-choicers can agree on the value of making abortions less common.
Also, I'm not so big on trying to draw up a static difference based on trimester. A majority of the so-called "partial birth abortions" are medical surgeries that take place when the woman is in danger and more often than not the child is likely to have a defect, often a mortal one.
No one but a doctor and patient should be weighing the risks and possibilities when such a difficult choice is made.
So even if you believe a mindless clump of cells is a person, you still have to classify pregnant women as less than people to say that the others has greater rights to her body than she does. That is how we treat animals, not people.
The right to choose goes hand in hand with capacity not to get pregnant in the first place, because all options are offerred in the educational context of full reproductive services. When Planned Parenthood and a full range of reproductive services are available, abortions are reduced because contraception is increased. Educated women and teenage girls are far more likely to feel empowered to say "no" to a man who won't use a condom, or to go on the pill. I'll start respecting the position of right-to-lifers when they are also the fiercest advocates of sex education and access to contraception. They are quite the opposite.
I wrote a piece on abortion and my thoughts once and that was the point I brought up. Where are all these pro-lifers when these "fetuses" and "babies" are children, teens, or young adults suffering through poverty, juvenile delinquency, abuse, etc.? Where are they when these same young people become inmates on death throw - most of them are usually the first to want to throw the switch.
They'll never see it that way, but it's true. What you insist should be born today needs taking care of later. It's easy to force a woman to have a child she doesn't want or can't afford - and it's easy to then walk away and let her deal with it and the child suffer because of it; not your problem anymore - the fetus survived, right?
Men have no right telling a woman she cannot have an abortion. If men could get pregnant, we would not be having this debate. We'd see abortion clinics on every corner and ads for abortions like we see ads for erectile dysfunction.
The fact that a child was or wasn't planned doesn't make him more or less valuable as a human being.
If we can kill an unborn because he is not wanted, then, why don't we go to jails (to use ur same cases) and just kill all the guys that were unwanted?
Until the so called pro-life people care more about people once they are outside the womb, they have no credibility with me.
Why not fighting for BOTH lives, instead of choosing one?
One child might not be termed viable but God terms it viable and it's called a miracle.
I was one such miracle in 1956
Of course once a child is born, he/she is equal to every other child and deserves every chance to thrive--which is why healthcare reform is so important. Stupak's logic values a particular definition of life over the real lives of real women and children.
I have a problem too with pro-life people being pro death penalty. For me, that's nonsense.