I know of NO person who is 'pro-abortion'.
It is pro-choice, or no-choice. Semantics are important.
I know of NO person who is 'pro-abortion'.
It is pro-choice, or no-choice. Semantics are important.
I think we well understand the importance of semantics in the debate. Pro Death or Pro Infanticide is so distasteful.Originally Posted by peggy
"Things should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler." ~ Albert Einstein
I don't know. You can consider abortion to be a distasteful last resort, that should still be legal. Call it discretionary infanticide.
***MOD HAT ON***
Just wanted to remind everyone to take a deep breath. Abortion is a subject where feelings are usually fairly well entrenched. We've been down this road before, sometimes with less than stellar results, which is the reason for this somewhat more proactive than usual mod comment. Please just keep in mind that everyone here has the right to respectfully voice their opinions and beliefs without worrying about being chastised. Carry on.
Might I suggest a couple minor changes? Education that might actually help reduce the unplanned pregnancy rate (is) a danged sight more useful than anything else.
I don't know anyone who thinks lowering the number of abortions performed by lowering the number of women/girls who get pregnant is a bad idea. It's easy to see where moral opposition to abortion comes from. Not hard to figure out why some are theologically opposed to birth control. But its impossible for me to comprehend why we do not start teaching our kids basic human biology at a very early age and continue that all the way through high school.
I am not "pro-abortion," I am "pro-choice." If there were never another abortion performed on the planet because women had no further need for the procedure, it would be fine with me and every other pro choice person I know. We have no attachment to abortion. We don't hold it as a sacrament. But in this world, the real world, where real women are often faced with unplanned/unwanted or harmful pregnancies, the option must exist. When it is criminalized, women suffer and die.
What makes me angry, almost rageful, is the notion that anyone else, particularly some man, should dictate to me that I must be forced to bear a child against my will, that THEY have the right to tell me I must use my body in any particular way or that they have the right to intrude in MY private decisions about something that is so very personal. They would tell me that a fertilized egg or cytoblast or newly implanted embryo have more rights than I do, a grown sentient woman. I also hate the patronizing attitude as though women don't know what they are doing or the gravity of the decision. What makes me also very angry is that many of the same people who want to control women in this way and force childbirth on unwilling women in the name of protecting "babies" are the same folks who don't want to pay taxes to help other people with medical care, education, etc. So, all the instincts to protect life seem to end once the baby is born. Some of these same people support war, support the death penalty, want to eliminate foreign aid to starving children, don't want to spend any money so that poor women have access to birth control, applaud assassination of abortion doctors, harrass women going to clinics, have a punitive attitude towards women who have been brutalized by abortionists where the procedure is illegal. These attitudes which often, not always, but often, go hand in hand with the "pro life" movement have nothing to do with compassion and reverence for life but with imposing their belief systems on other people and in particular with controlling and punishing women.
BTW, a fetus is not a baby no matter how many times you say that. That is a belief, not a fact.
If a fetus survives an abortion, is it a baby?
"Things should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler." ~ Albert Einstein
Rosebud, brava!
I knew from an early age I didn't want children, so I was very careful not to get pregnant. I've never had to face the abortion issue directly. But I have an observation and a question.
My observation is that adoption is no panacea. The idea that unwanted children invariably find themselves in happy homes, with never a thought about where they came from or who rejected them is a myth. If you don't believe me, take a stroll through Bastard Nation or any other adoptees' rights site. And every day, it seems, there's another horror story about actual children--not zygotes or fetuses--being neglected, tortured, killed. Given a choice, they might have preferred to materialize in some other situation--or not to have been born at all.
Which brings me to a religious/philosophical question. For those of you who believe in an eternal soul (as I tend to), wouldn't any individual whose earthly journey was cut short through failure to implant, miscarriage, abortion, or stillbirth just return to its spiritual home to await another opportunity? That seems like the logical course of events to me, but as far as I know (jump in here; I'm no religious scholar) no religion spells that out. Certainly there's nothing in the New Testament about it, or about abortion itself, as far as I know.
Jane, that sounds almost like reincarnation to me.
Something like that, though if its embodiment was thwarted it might not count as an incarnation at all. Also, if we have eternal souls, do we just get one shot at an earthly experience and then it's all harps and enlightenment? That doesn't seem right, so I lean toward reincarnation. I have many questions.
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