NARAL Pro-Choice Washington is holding its 17th Annual Chocolate for Choice event on Tuesday, January 22… the 35th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision. The event takes place at the First Base Club at Safeco Field, and tickets start at $35.
I’ve been invited once again to serve as a VIP Judge (along with folks like Darcy Burner, Dow Constantine, Jean Godden, Mike Kreidler, Larry Phillips and others), and let me tell you from personal experience that it is well worth the price of admission. Last year’s event featured an amazing and overwhelming selection of chocolate treats from some of the region’s best confectioners and pastry chefs, and of course, all proceeds go toward protecting women’s reproductive rights.
Hope to see you there; I’ll be the one stuffing my face full of chocolate.
If Dino Rossi gets elected, and the Supreme Court overturns Roe v Wade, sending back to the states, look out.
In the upcoming election, it should be made real clear that he is a danger to a woman’s right to choose in Wa.
Anybody who votes for Rossi, is voting against choice.
Of course, if Fuckabee gets elected, he’s going to put God back in the Constitution and Rossi won’t have to do a thing.
Heh. We’d rather see you at DL on the 29th, when you’ll be all broken out from eating all that chocolate!
Invite pro-choice republicans too – but not the blue dog democrats – chocolate is dangerous for dogs.
Mike sez:
What do you mean back? The Constitution of the United States is, and always was, an entirely secular document. Nary a mention of “god” or “God” or “creator” or “higher power”.
Right to choose? Uhhh, yeah.
While I wouldn’t dispute a womans “right to choose” (men can’t really have a *valid* opinion on this imo)I personally have some serious problems with abortion. I’m curious as to how some of you more rabid pro-choice advocates get around the more unsavory aspects of abortion.
I mean essentially we’re saying that you can abort this child one day, but the next day is some arbitrary boundry beyond which you may not abort. Doesn’t that bother any of you? How can it be a living human being one day, but not one the day before. Or how about the fact that we’re charging killers with two murders when the woman is pregnant? We say that in this instance it’s murder, but not if you choose to abort the child instead?
I have no clue what the answer should be. I’m not comfortable with government having the final say either. I damned sure wouldn’t want the government being able to say that “YOU MAY NOT”. On the other hand, abortion is wrong! For a whole host of reasons…
Where is King Solomon when you really need him…
I mean essentially we’re saying that you can abort this child one day, but the next day is some arbitrary boundry beyond which you may not abort.
I think that you’re right.
I’m pretty adamant about abortion rights, but I have NO problem stating that you can only get one up to eight weeks after conception, or 12 in very specific circumstances. In many “godless” European countries, you’ll find similar restrictions.
The fact is that boundaries are the major sticking points with both the extreme pro-choice and pro-life positions. The idea that “life starts at conception” is pretty far off base for most, and to call a zygote a “person” and attach human feelings and emotions to it is not entirely correct. Should we lament every single fertilized egg that fails to attach to the uterine wall as a lost child? Probably not.
On the other hand, I think that declaring that a baby is a person once it takes that one-way trip out of the uterus is not entirely correct, either. If a fetus would be viable outside of the womb, abortion in that case is pretty much infanticide, regardless of what you declare a woman’s rights to be.
It’s the wibbly-wobbly period in the middle, between more-than-a-ball-of-cells and can’t-survive-outside-of-the-womb that’s the real question. Where does life begin? Is it the beginning of a heartbeat? Brainwaves? Soul? What? None of these questions are really being asked, simply because both sides have a lot to lose by asking them.
bma: Very good points about abortion. The simplistic “abortion is murder” argument of some people would have you believe that every fertilized egg is sacred. Most fertilized eggs fail to implant and are flushed down the toilet.
The same pathetically ignorant argument has been used for stem cell research. These are fertilized eggs that will be flushed away – but we can’t use them for actual life-saving research because …well, because all fertilized eggs are sacred.
These are the same people who have the non-sensical argument against plan B. If you want to argue that contraception is amoral because it prevents the fertilization of the egg – than using the wrong position during intercourse (for married couples) is also immoral because it decreases the likelihood of fertilization.
A slippery slope of nanny state here….
I like your analysis: abortion should be illegal when the fetus is viable outside the body on it’s own.
Oh, shit, an abortion thread.
bma: “It’s the wibbly-wobbly period in the middle, between more-than-a-ball-of-cells and can’t-survive-outside-of-the-w omb that’s the real question.”
That is absolutely not the question. The question is who gets to make the decision. Unequivocably, the woman should have that power.
Will ultra sound images of pre-aborted children be available for puchase? Maybe on a before and after basis? Will there be demonstrations of how to effectively suck a pre-born child down a sink be offered just after attendees ingest copious amounts of pre-barfed chocolate? Will an award be given to the abortionist of the year? The person who’s killed the most children in the past 12-months?
Will there be a demographic analysis of the disparate impact abortion has on the black versus the white communities? A symposium on how it can be argued that abortion is but another attempt by the white community to control and de-populate the black community?
http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs.....rtion.html and http://www.blackgenocide.org/black.html
Will there be a show of hands of those in attendance glad that their mothers didn’t have them sucked down a sink?
Abortion…the genocide of our time.
The Piper
Piper: “A symposium on how it can be argued that abortion is but another attempt by the white community to control and de-populate the black community?”
But, but, but…conservatives always argue that racism has magically disappeared….except, it would seem, when it hasn’t.
Conservatives: Always trying to have it both ways. The inescapable conclusion is: They have no morals, only the threadbare shabbiness of a naked will to power.
@10 Piper: Actually no- there have been 3 genocides in “our” time:
Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Darfur. We intervened in one and helped to stop it (Yugoslavia, a little late but the Europeans had to be pushed along).
In Darfur – we have done nothing – and it is on Bush’s watch.
Rwanda we should have acted – but Monica was more important for the republicans.
Abortion is at an all-time low for the US – where it should be. If we had unlimited access to contraception/family planning and plan B – then abortion would be even lower – like in other countries.
@6 “I damned sure wouldn’t want the government being able to say that “YOU MAY NOT”. On the other hand, abortion is wrong!”
Bingo. Until someone can figure out when a cell mass becomes a person, let the individual decide. That is the essence of Roe v. Wade and the “choice” argument. Add the idea that responsible individuals will decide abortion is a moral wrong and you’re all the way there. But this is for the INDIVIDUAL to determine according to her own religious beliefs and moral scruples. Anything less is one group of people dictating to another group what they must think and do; add government to the mix, and you’ve got tyranny.
Anyone besides me notice the news story yesterday that the number of abortions being performed in the U.S. is falling dramatically? This issue is going to resolve itself without the help of SCOTUS, Dino Rossi, or the shrieking Bible Thumpers on the right: Abortion will simply fade away. It’s a temporary phenomenon, a cultural aberration unique to one or two generations, that is dying a natural death.
And when it’s gone, there will no longer be any excuses for putting far right nuts on courts, and the fascists will lose their most potent issue and their best vote-printing machine. It would be like young Hitler suddenly finding himself in a country with a stable currency, expanding job market, and rising stock market — he would have to get out of the demagoguery business and go back to hanging wallpaper, but there would be plenty of wallpaper jobs in a booming housing market.
Well, that’s what’s going to happen to the wingnuts. Their world is falling apart. The three-legged stool their orators stand on is down to its last leg, and that one is full of termites. It’s all going to collapse on them very shortly. When abortion goes away, so will the Republican Party. Like cheap plastic melting in a hot sun, there will be nothing left but a misshapen pile of discolored goo.
@12 Rwanda we should have acted – but Monica was more important for the republicans.
Since the killing took place several years before the Monica Lewinsky scandal, that isn’t, strictly speaking, true.
@14: OK – I ddin’t hear any republican arguments for intervention at the time.
@7 “None of these questions are really being asked, simply because both sides have a lot to lose by asking them.”
That’s not actually true — lots of people have grappled with these questions, and no one more so than the SCOTUS justices who wrote the opinion in Roe v. Wade. If you actually read the decision, you’ll see that it examines at length these very questions; and concludes no one — not doctors, not theologians, not philosophers, and certainly not lawyers — knows the answers to them. The Court, in the end, left them unresolved and said it could not answer the question of when human life begins. From there, it proceeds to drawing boundaries, and acknowledges that it’s doing so arbitrarily, because there’s no alternative when even the definitional question can’t be answered.
But the most interesting thing about Roe v. Wade that’s overlooked by 99% of Americans is that abortion is not the main focus of the Court’s discussion — privacy is. Roe is the case that explains, with unassailable logic, that while an individual right of privacy is not explicit in the language of the Constitution it necessarily must be inferred. I won’t go into the legal mechanics of why that is so here; suffice to say that, unless a privacy right exists, certain explicitly stated rights become mere hollow words that are unenforceable, and the Framers are assumed to have written no hortatory surplusage. They meant what they said; and for what they said to have meaning, you must have a right to privacy because that is the means by which the explicitly stated rights are assured and enforced.
But enough of this. It is error to argue that the ambiguous question of when human life begins has been ignored; rather, that question is the sword of Damocles that hangs over the arguments of both sides, and everyone is aware of it. Because it is unanswerable, both sides have resorted to rhetorical tricks — and arbitrary boundaries — to stake out their ground; and from both a logical and philosophical perspective, neither are honest or necessarily right. The truth is, how you as an individual answer the question of when human life begins governs all that follows: Whether you consider abortion acceptable, how you vote, etc. Just because people don’t talk about it doesn’t mean they don’t think about it; that is the gorilla that waves the banana, so to speak, and people are very much aware there’s a gorilla at the fruit stand.
@8 “The simplistic ‘abortion is murder’ argument of some people would have you believe that every fertilized egg is sacred.”
To expand my comment @16, if you believe a fertilized egg is a human, then under our Judeo-Christian cultural tradition it is very hard to avoid the conclusion that abortion is murder. If you are suggesting that some people start out with the conclusion that “abortion is murder” and from that draw a belief that a fertilized egg is “sacred” (as you put it), then yes, there’s no doubt some people have the horse pushing the cart instead of pulling it, and these are the simpletons who must have someone tell them what to believe because thinking for themselves is too much work/too uncomfortable. This approach, however, is unable to deal with people who do think for themselves and come to a conclusion that a fertilized egg is a fertilized egg, and if the other guys figure out a way to hold it up to a light and see a soul in there, please let the rest of us know, so we can see it too!
Here’s a question for the Bible Thumpers: If abortion is murder and therefore a moral wrong for which you go to Hell, do monkeys go to Hell for kiling their own kind (over territory, females, or whatever), or is there a different rule for animals?
Here’s another question for the Bible Thumpers: Was Rev. Paul Hill a rescuer or a murderer? Is he in Heaven, or in Hell? (Hill was electrocuted by Florida for murdering an abortion doctor.)
And even if Hill was a rescuer who committed a justifiable homicide in order to save innocent lives, as he dropped his appeals and essentially volunteered to be executed, did he go to Hell for committing the sin of suicide?
Man it’s fun to tie their little minds into knots!!! Easy to do, too. =:-D
@11…PTBAA…
I never said racism has disappeared. Heck, it’s alive and well and on display daily in the race for the Dem Prexy nomination.
Wouldn’t be at all surprised to see the Clinton’s put on a minstrel show what with all the stuff they’ve said and done so far.
The Piper
“In a statement before his execution, Hill said that he felt no remorse for his actions, and that he expected ‘a great reward in Heaven’.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Jennings_Hill
Even though I’m personally opposed to abortion based on my personal religious and moral beliefs, I see no difference between this guy and a jihadist who straps a bomb to himself and blows people up in the name of Allah, believing he will immediately ascend to Paradise and receive 40 Virgins.*
* Only a whackjob would want even 1 virgin, let alone 40 of ’em! Too goddam much trouble and work to break ’em in. You waste a lot of time dealing with squealing and wiggling, with very little action, if you know what I mean. I prefer cute female rabbits that have some experience, if you know what I mean.
Correction: Hill died by lethal injection, not the electric chair.
@12…CnR…
While the total number of abortions may be declining, the “low” number of 1.2 million in 2005 is still 1.2 million abortions too many.
http://www.breitbart.com/artic....._article=1
While Rwanda, Darfur and the former Yugoslavia had and have their own unique tragic features, this is a genocide in our own country of the most vulnerable and completely innocent. To stop it wouldn’t cost the American taxpayer a dime nor risk the lives of any American military personnel. All win, no loss.
Shall I sign you up?
The Piper
@22…RR…
Because two wrongs don’t make a right, Paul Jennings Hill got what was coming to him.
The Piper
@9 “That is absolutely not the question. The question is who gets to make the decision. Unequivocably, the woman should have that power.”
Oh, I’m not so sure it’s “unequivocal.” We don’t let parents kill their children, or even neglect them, and most of us recognize that government has a duty and role to step in and prevent child abuse and neglect, and prosecute infanticide. If you carry the fetus to term, give birth in the bathtub, and toss the squealing little bundle of cells into a dumpster where it subsequently dies, you’ll go to prison. The point is, whether you conclude a “murder” has been committed depends on whether you believe the “cell mass” was a person, and as no one can answer the question of when a cell mass becomes a human, the question of whether a given abortion is “murder” is anything but “unequivocal” — it’s ambiguous as all get-out, and that’s the whole problem. That’s why we can’t resolve this issue. Whatever I may think of Right-to-Lifers and their actions, I think it’s unwise and unjust to dismiss their sincerely held beliefs and their arguments with a pretense of certitude where, in fact, no certainty exists or can be obtained. We should, at least, respect both their sincerity and the intellectual difficulty of the issue.
@15 You sure as hell hear them squealing about Clinton’s intervention in Kosovo. It’s hard to fathom, since Clinton stopped a genocide without the loss of a single American life to combat. The only thing I can figure is they simply hate it when a Democrat succeeds at something they can’t do themselves.
@23 Do you feel that way about wars, too, piper? How about unnecessary military interventions, even when based on faulty intel/bad judgment, and therefore arguably a well-intentioned mistake? (I’m talking about Vietnam, not Iraq.) Why stop with abortion? Wars kill far more people than abortion, and in far uglier fashion; if you intend to strive for a perfect world, why confine your aspirations to eliminating abortion, and why not strive for the larger goal of eliminating war?
Oh, I forgot, you war-lovers LIKE war — or, at least, you like the spoils you’ve deluded yourselves into believing can be obtained through war (e.g., a limitless supply of free oil).
To eliminate war, you have to first eliminate politicians who start war, and you also have to eliminate the damn fools who support the politicians who start the wars.
@24 My, my, you DO have a modicum of reasoning capacity, after all. If I were on a jury, you could sell that argument to me. Why didn’t you pay your bar dues? Why did you give up on the legal profession so quickly and easily? Where the demands of the profession too much for your constitution, so to speak?
Actually, my comment @29 is a bit misleading, because you don’t need any reasoning capacity to be a lawyer, and what piper said @24 is not a product of reasoning, but rather of rote memorization, which is the most essential trait needed to (a) graduate from law school, and (b) practice law (as it is practiced in the U.S. by most lawyers).
I used to think you had to be pretty smart — in fact, brilliant — to be a lawyer. But not anymore. After nearly 35 years as a lawyer myself, I’ve (sadly) reached the conclusion that most lawyers practice law at a superficial level, which is necessitated by its commercial aspects: No one can afford to pay for a thorough job, except large corporations when huge amounts of money are at stake, in which case people paid $1,000 an hour will pick apart straws to their individual fibers, and not for the purpose of settling weighty questions but only for the purposes of (a) billing hours, and (b) winning the case (i.e., taking a shitload of money out of the pockets of one group of anonymous shareholders and putting it in the pockets of another group of anonymous shareholders). None of this has ever made sense to me; and so, to deal with it intellectually and emotionally, I settled for being a mere government lackey, a bureaucrat, figuring out small questions in exchange for $25 an hour and a modest pension that isn’t adjusted for inflation.
If I had done it the other way, my head would have exploded. Then my cute pink ears wouldn’t have had anything to attach themselves to.
One thing a good lawyer CAN do, though, is take a simple concept like “two wrongs don’t make a right” and turn it into a 7,000-word essay. If a lawyer can’t do that, he’ll never succeed financially, because you can’t get billable hours out of simple concepts expressed in 6 words. What you have to do is take the simple 6-word concept and make it complicated. That forces them to hire their own lawyer; and then you’re happy, you’ve made another lawyer happy, you’ve give the judge something interesting to do, and everyone is happy.
My poli-sci professor summed it up best for me when he said, that in his opinion, it’s not just the life itself, it’s the QUALITY of that life. Can you say with absolute certainty that every child that comes in to this world will be cared for? Clothed? Fed? Loved? No, you can’t. And it’s all well and good to talk about carrying a fetus to term and then giving it up for adoption, but I can’t tell you the number of female friends of mine who got knocked up and decided to give up the child, only to renege when said child made its debut.
The standard Republican argument against birth control, really against all things sexual in nature, is to sweep it under the rug in the name of ‘protecting our children’ (who then, not knowing any better, proceed to get laid and impregnated that much sooner). That lack of education at the time when it’s needed the most is why I have a friend back in my hometown recently became a grandmother at 35, when her daughter had her first child with her husband after she graduated from college. You do the math.
But the problem is, guys, that a pregnancy happens inside a woman’s body. If you do not allow her the right to decide when to have children, you are advocating enforced pregnancy. Some people seem to think that the rights of the potential person in the woman’s womb take primacy over the right of an actual person, the woman herself, not to have a pregnancy and the ensuing responsibility of a child forced on her.
I just wonder how many men would accept having something equal to that forced on them…especially when so many men don’t want to take any responsibility for the actual children they father, and how many other men make excuses for such men.
Those of you (you know who you are) who keep referring to abortion as a ‘holocaust’ should consider this ‘holocaust.’ as well. So you don’t like abortion, think they are ‘icky?’ Well, even if you get them banned outright, it doesn’t mean abortion will stop, or even that the abortion rate will go down. Women will control their own bodies and futures, even if you don’t approve. In fact, we aren’t even asking for your approval.
Roger @ 25: “I think it’s unwise and unjust to dismiss their sincerely held beliefs and their arguments with a pretense of certitude…”
And I think it is in bad form to build straw men. How the fuck do you get the idea that my statement questioned in any way the sincerety of anybody, and I really don’t understand how you can address my ‘pretense of certitude’ unless you can read my fucking mind.
There are many legal subtleties to the Roe v Wade debate, especially wrt constitutional law. There are many sociological and political complexities that may reasonably be considered. There are many ways to engage on the controversial subject.
That said, I see no point in basically conceding the argument by agreeing that ‘defining the beginning of life’ is the “most important question that needs to be settled” regarding this topic.
But you’re a friendly, and I shall let it pass. Keep giving those cheap labor conservatives hell.
With Sincere and Warmest Regards,
I’ve got a Baby Ruth I can squeeze out my ass cheeks for these nasty dyke looking hags.
Hey, Goldy: Who’s gonna narrate the partial-birth abortion videos?