As a woman, as a mother of two toddlers, and as an ordained minister, I find Amendment 62 offensive. I find it insulting, hurtful and demeaning.
Amendment 62 on the Colorado ballot is this year's version of so-called "Personhood," and it seeks to extend legal and constitutional rights to fertilized eggs. The truth about Amendment 62 is that it eliminates a woman's right to make private decisions about her body, her health, and her future. Amendment 62 assumes that women are not smart enough -- it assumes that we are not competent enough, or strong enough, or compassionate enough, or trustworthy enough - to make personal decisions concerning our bodies or our reproductive health.
The proponents of Amendment 62 want to outlaw abortion and access to emergency contraception -- including for women and girls who have been brutally raped, or have been assaulted by family members. They want to ban common forms of birth control, including IUDs and the Pill.
Amendment 62 takes an extremely stressful, personal decision and puts it under public surveillance.
Last weekend the NAACP Colorado State Conference weighed in with strong, unwavering opposition to Amendment 62. In doing so, the NAACP joined forces with more than 60 other state and national groups representing doctors, nurses, medical researchers, faith leaders, attorneys and health advocacy organizations. As NAACP State Conference President Beatrice Madison noted, "This is not about the morality, the right and wrong; this is about upholding the constitution, and a woman's constitutional right to choose. This is about ensuring that all women maintain the right to that choice, especially women who are low-income. Reproductive rights should not belong only to the wealthy but to all of us."
Let there be no doubt, this is a civil rights issue. This audacious invasion is not civil, and it is not right. This is an issue of personal freedom. Who should make the choice concerning a woman's body, her reproductive health, her future? Should politicians or religious leaders force women to have children? Should politicians or religious leaders prevent women from using technology to build a family? Or is the decision to be made by a woman, her loved ones, her doctor and God?
A society that forces a woman to reproduce against her will -- a society that prevents a woman and doctors from using advances in technology -- is not civil. That society is not right.
As an ordained minister, over the years, I have counseled numerous pregnant women who have been physically, emotionally, psychologically abused by their partner. Often the women say that they don't want to have children because they are terrified for the child's safety. What should these women do?
At the churches where I've worked, many women have entered the doors in tears, informing clergy that they are pregnant and cannot afford a baby or that they don't have a support system to help care for a baby. What should these women do?
As a faith leader, I must share with you the main reason that Amendment 62 chaps my hide: It assumes that proponents of Amendment 62 have dibs on faithfulness to God. It assumes that passing Amendment 62 will please the Most High God.
But not all Christians, or -- perhaps more accurately, all people of faith -- believe that this intrusive, oppressive legislation pleases God.
We are not simple. We cannot be tricked. We will not be bamboozled. God gifted us with free will. And Amendment 62 attempts to usurp our God-given free will. Amendment 62 trumps our God-given right to make choices. But thanks be to God our freedom, our liberty given to us by God, politicians cannot -- and fringe groups such as the one promoting Amendment 62 will not -- take these away.
They didn't take our rights two years ago, when similar efforts to extend legal and constitutional rights to fertilized eggs failed with a nearly 3-1 margin in Colorado. And they won't take our rights this year. They won't take our rights in the next election, or the next, or the next, or the next ...
Together we will win. That's right, together we will win. Because the health and future of women, children and families in Colorado depends on this victory.
If the fetus is a person, s/he has no more right to my organs, any of them, than anyone else does.
Getting in a car does not imply that I consent to organ donation, so why is it that if I have sex, forced birthers claim I am consenting to organ donation?
PASS that bill!
In addition, my 16 year old is seeing a girl who is seriously ill (waiting for a kidney transplant) and if she were to become pregnant she would have to choose between abortion or hoping she could live long enough to deliver a baby. I have encouraged them not to take any chances but if it were to happen I would hope she would choose to live so that someday she could truly be a mother.
I choose pro choice because I do not have the right to tell someone else what to do with they're lives, they're bodies, they're will. That is not my right and nothing or no one can or ever will convince me that it is my right, or yours to interfere in someone elses private decisions.
Isn't ending the life of a defenseless human being essentially "telling someone else what to do with their life, their body and their will"? You are correct. That's NOT your right
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Actually it can be. You, for example, are doing it right now. 6,000 people die for lack of a kidney donation every year and there you sit with two kidneys in your body.
As you have every right to do.
Because your property rights to your own body supersede other people's right to life. While I support socialist policies in several areas I do not support a socialist or communist approach to the parceling out of people's flesh. The state shall be given no eminent domain over the bodies of citizens.
That a mindless ball of cells is not a person is gravy. Even if they were they would not be entitled to gestation in an unwilling host.
Your right to interfere begins at the precise moment where you can provide for the child *better* than the child's parents. Clearly better. Indisputably better. As in, 95% or more of the population would agree that giving you the child is in the child's best interests. And then you only get to take the child and do better, not force compliance to your will from the parents.
So if you want a leg to stand on get off your lazy butt and establish freezer facilities to store unwanted embryos in until you get artificial wombs figured out.
"Amendment 62 assumes that women are not smart enough -- it assumes that we are not competent enough, or strong enough, or compassionate enough, or trustworthy enough - to make personal decisions concerning our bodies or our reproductive health."
No, Ms. Duval, it assumes that you ARE smart enough, ARE competent enough, and ARE compassionate enough to finally acknowlege the truth that science has proven over and over again. That fetuses are human beings. They have rights, and are not property to be disposed of.
2 - Embryo's aren't people.
They are living tissue that contains human DNA. When I die my hair and nails will continue growing for some time because they will still be alive. But living tissue with my DNA is not me. This lung breathing in a jar is also living tissue with human DNA in it ... ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXqMsraSb84&feature=player_embedded ) .. shall we give it rights?
An embryo is a human factory. It is a thing that makes people, not a person itself. Like bone marrow *makes* blood but bone marrow is not, itself blood. To demonstrate this:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-465788/The-extraordinary-moment-baby-two.html
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Researchers now hope the footage will help them understand why so many IVF embryos develop into twins.
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You simply can't expect to be taken seriously claiming that something is a person when you don't even know *how many* people it is yet. The converse is not true. If you could accurately tell me that wouldn't mean they were people. But inability to do so definitely means they aren't.
Does one expect that these children will be instantly loved by the birth mother, or is it more likely that we might find more newborns in dumpsters? Are rape victims going to get proper pre-natal care, or might more women die as a result of back-alley abortions that will inevitably take place? The social impact of this amendment is not worth making a few santimonious people feel morally correct.
If you aren't emotionally mature enough to be a parent then the responsible, proper, and just plain good thing to do is to end your pregnancy and wait until you are these things. The only thing more short sighted and selfish than keeping a pregnancy for the wrong reasons is forcing someone else to keep a pregnancy for the wrong reasons.
Hint: There is only one right reason to keep a pregnancy.
Sincerely wanting the child.
Every other reason is wrong.
And if you bide your time virtually every woman will come to a time in her life where she does sincerely want a child and can have one responsibly. Forcing a woman to bear out of her proper time generally means that she won't have kids in what would have been her time ... its just trading her chosen children for unwanted children. Trading maternal love for maternal obligation. Trading a stable home life for stress and fear.
It's bad for everyone involved. It doesn't matter whether you claim to put the mom or the kid first. Both are served best by Planned parenthood. Anything else is putting *yourself* first, not the mother or the child.
Secondly, you open with the fact that you are a woman and a mother of two toddlers. Do something for me. Take a long look into your childrens eyes tonight. Hold them in your arms. Feel them breath. Hear them giggle. Watch them sleep. Then come back to this story tomorrow and tell me that it would have been ok if you had instead made a personal decision about your body back then and aborted them instead. Imagine every moment they have laughed, cried, lived - every new experience they looked at with open wondering eyes - every breath they have taken - never happened because you made a decision for them. Come back and tell me that you think that would have been ok and you would have no problem having done that instead of letting them live. Come back and honestly tell me that your "reproductive health" is more important then the life they now have.
Imagine you are talking to a happily married, college educated, successful mother of two.
Who had an abortion back in high school when her adolescent "true love" stopped returning her calls after hearing about the pregnancy.
Without that abortion, you wouldn't have gone to college. No college, no career ... and no meeting your current husband in chemistry class.
No meeting him ... means no conceiving and bearing the two children you have now. Chosen, planned children. Children born to two loving parents in a stable relationship. Parents who are emotionally adult enough and financially stable enough to give them a good life.
So the children you have now ... they **owe their lives** to the abortion you had then.
When you looks into their eyes, holds them in your arms, feel them breath, hear them giggle, watch them sleep ... you knows that this was only possible because of your previous abortion.
Every moment they have laughed, cried, lived ... every new experience they have ever had ... WOULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED WITHOUT THAT ABORTION BACK IN HIGH SCHOOL BECAUSE WITHOUT THAT THEY WOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN BORN.
Your sword has two edges and cuts both ways. Plenty of women who have had abortions keep pregnancies later on. Pregnancies that would never have happened if their lives had gone a different way.
In my example, the child that wasn't aborted got a chance at life because someone cared enough about THAT life at THAT moment.
In your example, a life was given a chance, but only because another life was PURPOSLY and WILLFULLY denied that chance. Big difference. Your example is more analogous to saying that a child was given a chance at life because one day I decided to go out for coffee and I happened to meet my future spouse that day. If I hadn't gone out for that coffee, that child would never have been born. Your example doesn't address the loss of the first life at all, and that is the main problem. There is no justification for that loss, especially not the lame one you have given as an example here.
If this is an example from your own life, then I am sorry you had to make a choice like that. I hope it goes better for you the day you also have to explain to your current children how it was that they were given a chance at life, and another child (their sister or brother) was intentionally not given that same chance.
But they are not the only arguments for choice. The fundamental right springs from the simple fact that no person EVER has the right to use another person's body against that person's will. No matter how dire the need or how trivial the donation, consent is required. If I as an adult needed a measly 2 ounces of blood from my mother or I'd die ... and she refused ... then per the law I die.
It isn't a question of my person hood. It is the fact that my right to life does not trump her property rights to her own body. They don't now, and they certainly didn't back before I could think.
But the fundamental motivation to protect abortion rights is a truth easily seen when comparing red and blue families. Both types of families have about the same number of children. But blue families get established in life and then have kids while red families have kids before they get established.
This doesn't just mean you have less to give your child, it also leads to much higher divorce rates and broken homes.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126653602
Or should we believe those that don't believe in man-made global warming, in part, for these very reasons, and because there is no evidence to support the claims of man-made global warming?
Or this one weeping tears of blood:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weeping_statue#Hoaxes_and_skepticism
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In 2008 church custodian Vincenzo Di Costanzo went on trial in northern Italy for faking blood on a statue of the Virgin Mary when his own DNA was matched to the blood.
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Because that was a fake all claims of divine intervention are fakes. Whew! Glad we settled that!
Of course, you are kinda stuck on that what with there being no evidence of God's existence at all while there is piles and piles of peer reviewed evidence for climate change that isn't actually invalidated by a couple of hoaxsters.
Her argument is that we're trying to define the fetus as a legal person so that we can outlaw abortion. No. We're trying to outlaw abortion because the fetus is a person, and the law should treat it as such.
Because she argues in the wrong direction, she doesn't see why we want to outlaw abortion, and so she resorts to the childish explanation that it must be because we're bad people. She doesn't grasp that the personhood of the fetus is why we oppose abortion in the first place. Since she doesn't grasp the argument, she can't understand the objections. In her ignorance, all she can do is throw insults: we must be "anti-woman."
This is just a case of someone who doesn't understand the arguments, and therefore assumes that her opponents must be either evil or stupid.
And by the way, it is anti-woman when you put the rights of 2 cells equal to or above the rights of a living, breathing, thinking, independent WOMAN. This type of "argument" is both stupid and evil.
You complain that only religious people claim that the zygote is a person. Well, that's demonstrably not true. The argument is that the zygote is human life, and that all human life must be considered a human person.
Every scientist agrees that the fertilized egg is life. The simple biological fact is that nothing starts developing into an adult before conception. After conception, it inevitably starts developing. That's a scientific fact, not a religious tenet.
That's only the first part of the argument. The fun is in the second half. "Person" is a legal term. The legal issue is whether there is any such thing as a human life that isn't also a human person.
Until Roe v. Wade, there were legal "persons" who weren't organically alive (i.e., corporations) but never a human life that wasn't also a person. Roe v. Wade admitted that the definition of life had never been drawn, and Harry Blackmun arbitrarily drew that line at viability. Opponents argue that Harry Blackmun had no authority to draw lines in the first place. Further, lacking any hard and fast justification to draw it in a specific spot, it shouldn't be drawn at all.
That's entirely a legal question, and is argued as such. You injected religion, not me. So your objection is not only demonstrably false, but it diplays your own bigotry.
Until now.
Bravo.
Progressive clerics and religious adherents have ALWAYS been active and outspoken in this country in opposition to their more regressive counterparts. But unless you're a part of that segment of society, or someone who tries to get news from a much wider spectrum of sources, you're unlikely to hear much about it.
Mainstream news media has little or no interest in covering the religious left, when the religious right is ever so much more attention-riveting and unscrupulous in dominating any discussion. And unlike the religious left, the religious right has been successful in partnering with the leaders of a major political party to control the party image and direction.
For some examples of modern progressive faith adherents:
Sojourners: Christians for Justice & Peace
http://www.sojo.net/
The Center for Progressive Christians
http://www.tcpc.org/template/index.cfm
World Center for Progressive Judaism
http://www.wupj.org/
The Interfaith Alliance
http://www.interfaithalliance.org/
But unless you're a part of that segment of society, or someone who tries to get news from a much wider spectrum of sources, you're unlikely to hear much about it.
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I don't have to seek out the religious hate speech. It percolates into pretty much every news source. I can't get away from it. If the progressive faithful are just circle-jerking their message that doesn't do much for me or anyone else as they are not putting their message anywhere that matters.
Nor is there any point in going into their echo chambers. I'm not the one that needs to hear their message. I agree with being good for goodness sake and am not interested in their theology.
What I want from them is for them to go to where the religious hate speech is and counter it there. I can't do it for them because I don't believe in anything the Bible says and to even begin to start reigning the crazies in the speaker must Believe. They won't even talk to you if you don't. So you have to fight crazy faith with sane faith.
Which we can't do if sane faith won't call crazy faith crazy to its face.
that watching an ad made me physically ill. This should outrage this nation, no matter if you are Dem
or Repub....Our president in NOT HITLER