timroy,
I agree that it isn't fair to beat up on women who have succumbed to the siren songs of the abortion industry, pressures from their boyfriends or spouses, or some other influence. The many fights over sonograms and also what risks, etc. to include within "informed consent" for an abortion implies that many women are making bad judgements based on incomplete information, not because of evil within their hearts.

I absolutely reject your statement that "nobody wants abortions to happen." There is a whole industry built on the premise that an abortion is no big deal - just another harmless procedure to prevent inconvenience. There's a whole PR and lobbying industry built on the same premise. These people DO want abortions to happen. I'm happy to "demonize" them. We saw ideologues throughout the twentieth century, for treasure or political gain, classify human beings as if they were objects - always with the same deadly consequences.

This is news to me. Where do you find this thriving industry? It's not like that here.

i'm pro-choice, and i don't want to argue about abortion rights. i just want to say that 'industry' is the wrong word. nobody is making money off this.

and nobody likes abortions...it's pro-choice, not pro-abortion. people are just scared that taking away a women's right to choose will set a standard for the gov. telling women what they can and can't do.

does this mean i and others like me are right? i don't know. but i can guarantee you that nobody is out there encouraging women to terminate pregnancies just for fun.

When the "pro-choicers" gave themselves that name,it was done for a reason. That reason is also what the case of Roe vs. Wade was settled on - that a women has the right to privacy, and that means that the government doesn't have the right to invade it and dictate to her and her doctor what they can or cannot do to ensure her future health and welfare. She has a legal right to her choice of care.

Look, the Constitution was not intended to be a static document, nor was it intended to keep the US in a rut forever. The Founders provided us with two ways to evolve that document over the centuries. One was the formal amendment process, based upon popular elective processes. The other was through the court system.

The amendment process is hard to complete. It was meant to be, to prevent it from being easily changed to benefit an elite few. On the other hand, the courts were designed to protect the rights of the minority against the power of the government, and to help the Constitution, and how it is interpreted, evolve with the times and how the law is practiced.

You see, the Constitution is a blueprint - a blueprint of how the Government should be organized, how it should operate and what powers it should have. It is done this way to LIMIT the power of the government. Just because the Bill of Rights was designed to protect a few specific rights does NOT mean that ONLY those rights are ours, and the government should only be prevented from violating those few.

The main problem with the pro-lifers is not just their hypocrisy, but the fact that they want the Federal Government, or failing that, the States, to interfere in the rights of every American to decide, for themselves, what health care they should be able to procure from a legal, licensed practitioner.

Your assertion that the argument should be decided by limiting the NEED for abortions is laudable - but shortsighted. Yes, we should do all we can to limit the need for abortions, but that must include economic issues too. Millions of women do not decide to abort only because of health or rape, but because they just can't AFFORD it.

Children are expensive. They've gotta be fed, sheltered, clothed, educated, raised. Take it from a guy that's raised three girls to adulthood - I coulda done a LOT with the money I spent on those three! Of course, I wouldn't trade the experience, nor the money, for anything in the world. But the point is that there are millions of Americans, most of them poor, that truly don't have the money to raise another child - many can't even afford the ones they've got.

And Conservatives want to keep them from ANY kind of assistance, including the idiotic abstinence programs they put into place under the Bush Administration.

I am sorry, but the fact that the Conservatives have always been against government interference with Americans' privacy - except for abortion - is so beyond simple hypocrisy that it is hard to describe it.

It is NOT the job of the Federal or State governments to enforce religious dogma - and if we let anti-abortion laws get passed, that is EXACTLY what will be happening, along with an alarming amount of privacy violation to boot.

[Oh, and in fact, for religious groups to claim that god is against abortion - that is false:



So god places less value on the life of a fetus than that of the life of the mother. Otherwise, there are NO prohibitions against abortion that god laid upon his people, nor did Jesus make any changes to that in his ministry.

There may be some arguments regarding Jesus' preaching about the sanctity of life itself, but other teachings he gave also noted that he did not replace the law, but that it would stand unchanged.

So no real help there.]

See that's just what I'm talking about, the fallacies of both arguments.

You point out Biblical contradictions, which shows why that argument sucks, and you also justify abortion with economic reasons.

Having to justify it means that there is inherently something wrong with it. Either you shouldn't have to justify it, or you should be able to justify any crimes people commit.

I'm not preaching here, just saying that's why the argument doesn't get anywhere...both sides are seriously flawed, but both are repeated ad nauseum.

I don't see your objections, Timroy. That was a lovely and well-thought out comment from rwahrens. Your complaints read off the wall to me. No, he doesn't point to Biblical contraditions, he flat out says that the bible doesn't preach against abortion. For hundreds of years, the Catholics believed that it was okay until quickning; until some Pope came along and changed that. And he is certainly not justifying abortion for economic reasons. He was attempting to explain the obvious; this is a fact-based statement of why some women do it. Justifying abortion has nothing to do with it. It seems to me that your own arguments are pretty seriously flawed.

Timroy,

MplsVala is right, I was pointing out that the Conservatives' excuse that "god hates it" is a lie. It is simply a "hot button" issue that the leaders of the right wing use to excite the base, nothing more, nothing less.

The fact is, abortion exists. It happens. It has happened for thousands of years, as long as women have been getting pregnant with children they didn't want or couldn't afford. Instead of sweeping it under the rug by outlawing it, we need to address it and regulate it.

What the right wingers don't seem to understand, and this applies to such things as drugs, sex and what the Conservatives think of as "sinful" - is that one cannot successfully legislate values or morality. Oh, one can TRY. But as we found out during Prohibition and lately in the War on Drugs, it never works. You just make criminals of normal people, fill the jails and prisons, spend boatloads of money doing it - and at the end of the day, you haven't accomplished anything of worth. In fact, you have done plenty of harm, by ruining the lives of the people you criminalized and threw in prison, killing (in essence) those who got addicted to the substance you outlawed instead of treating it as an illness, and created a whole new, violent class of criminal in the smugglers that went into business to provide the substances you outlawed instead of regulating them properly.

Same thing in the sex trade.

Because the religious majority has decided, based purely upon biblical "values", that prostitution is "bad", those that sell their bodies, and those that trade in those bodies, are lower than second class citizens. Prostitutes are ignored as a class of folks that deserve nothing, get no protection from law enforcement, and are left to be exploited, and often, enslaved and mistreated until they are discarded as too old or unattractive to be sold. They then are left to fall through the cracks of society to the rock bottom, where they die.

The "oldest profession" has not always been so maligned. Any number of ancient societies actually had classes of prostitutes that were honored as having high status. Many were priestesses, honored to use sex as a way to worship their goddess. Prostitutes in some societies were a safety valve, where husbands could go to "stray" in places that were socially acceptable instead of preying on another man's wife, or where young men could go to be introduced into the pleasures of the flesh and the social mores of their society - safely, without violating taboos and getting in trouble.

Again, abortion happens. It exists, and as long as there is a woman that finds she is pregnant and doesn't want to keep it, it will continue to happen. Legislating it away does NOT make it go away. It is simply forced underground, where those that practice it will be exposed to exploitation, possible physical harm, and possible prison if caught.

Yes, the root causes of abortion should be addressed - rape, incest, irresponsible and unprotected sex, economic hardship and poverty, irresponsible attitudes about using abortion as casually as a condom, oh the list goes on. Without addressing these problems, the numbers of women wanting abortions will only go up, so we do need to take action.

But in the meantime, forbidding abortion to those that feel the need to have it available is wrong, cruel and counterproductive.

...besides being a violation of a woman's right to decide her own form of medical care without the intrusion of the State.

rwahrens -

Good points...lovely comment

I think one notable difference is that all the other issues involved a person doing something and society, or the government, or whoever, telling them not to do it. The concept that there is a third party involved - the unborn child, or the fetus, or whatever people want to call it - is maybe what sets the abortion argument above the rest in terms of complexity and intensity.

In America especially, since we *theoretically* are a live-and-let-live society, for those who think the unborn is a living being, scientifically or religiously or whatever, it would seem abhorrent that that entity wouldn't have a say in the matter. Just the same, for those who don't think of the unborn that way, it would seem just as awful to infringe on the personal rights of a pregnant woman.

Whatever it is, abortion seems to be THE topic that nobody budges on...that's the real reason to focus on prevention, because the discussion end of things hasn't accomplished much.

As far as social norms, should "right" or "wrong" be relative to current ideas? Sometimes it seems not - we accept that racial or sexual predjudice is wrong, no matter what the majority in a given society think. But sometimes is seems so - think about the FCC fining broadcasters...maybe a society should have the right to decide what is acceptable and not in its public sphere.

The biggest issue that I have with the debate (as it relates to how this article started out, aka about federal funding of abortion) is that when you use statements like the one above, it is too easy to take the word abortion and replace it with any other elective surgery. Yes, that's right, ELECTIVE, I said it. In the 93% (mentioned earlier) of abortions that have nothing to do with health, only choice, the decision to have or not have a baby has to do solely with how the mother feels about it. So, if we use abortion as a precedent to federally funded elective surgery, where does it stop? People will claim that they are clinically depressed because their boobs aren't big enough, and the only fix is a little silicone. Or their nose doesn't match their face, and has caused them to be made fun of their whole life, and if it's not fixed, they'll go postal on someone. I'd like to think that most of the pro-life vs. pro-choice debate is more about where the FUNDING comes from. I might not like the fact that someone goes out and gets an abortion, but looking through a non-partisan filter, as long as I (speaking generically as an honest US citizen and taxpayer) do not have to pay for it, then more power to you. It's a free country. But when you come crawling up to me (again, the US citizens) and demand that I pay for your CHOICE, what CHOICE do I have in the matter??

Since we cannot determine, as a society, where that beginning is, the default is, legally, where it has been traditionally. That is where the fetus is considered to be a viable separate living entity, before which, it is simply parasitic and has no ability to live on its own. Those who have a different opinion, based mainly upon religious values, are free to live accordingly, and refrain from obtaining abortions on their own. None of the rest of us want to get into your business.

The issue is NOT whether abortion is right or wrong, but whether the government has any say in when, where, how or why any person should choose to have one. There is no legal precedent to settle this issue, so we are flying new territory.

Traditionally, also, an important waypoint is that of birth. We register births, we count age from birth (at least the US does, the Chinese count age from conception), we only allow the father legal claim to the child upon birth, and a whole host of other legalities are based upon when we are born. The only place where the law cares about us before birth is if the mother is murdered while pregnant. Then we use the fetus as an excuse to tack on more prison time for the murderer. If an estate is divided between the decease's children (and has a clause that cuts in future children), and the wife is pregnant when the father dies, it is not divided to include the unborn child, assuming the estate is finalized prior to the birth, but only includes the living children that have already been born. A child is not legally named until birth.

You cannot claim an unborn child on your tax returns. An unborn child is not considered a legal person before a court, but is considered a part of the mother. (This may be a bit hazy, as I am not a lawyer, and do not have access to search engines that may be able to determine if a court somewhere has granted such status to an unborn child - I have not read a news article to that affect as of this time.)

So it seems that our society has pretty much decided up until now that an unborn child is not a real person until he/she is born. Some exceptions are granted after medical viability, but legal personhood is only enabled at birth.

There is a reason why a Birth Certificate is considered a legal document of your identity! If you are not born, you have no birth certificate and have no legal identity.

So just as living children are considered under the care and guardianship of the parents after birth, the unborn fetus is considered part of the mother, which, medically, she is. Until that child is or can become (after viability) a legal entity, it has no say in how the mother obtains medical care that affects it.

It is HER decision, and the government has no say in it. It is funny how the Conservatives go all ape-sh*t over government intrusion in almost every aspect of their lives, until sex and abortion are mentioned.

You can't have it both ways.