In case you missed it at Shakesville , What Tami Said, and on Twitter.
I haven’t got through it all yet, but I think it’s important for people to have a chance to tell their stories. Often times, the legislative and other battles over reproductive freedom get turned into abstractions pretty quickly. And there’s a temptation to forget the real people who have their lives effected by policy decisions. But abstractions aren’t the ones who have their lives improved by Planned Parenthood.
I believe abortion is a moral wrong. My daughter had a legal abortion. She naively thinks I don’t know. She will never know that I know, and I will never love her any less because she did it.
@1
Given your intellectual and moral honesty that is so often manifest on these threads (no joke), I expect, therefore, that you’ll never have one.
However, you, as a papa rabbit, will never face the desperation of knowing that you’re pregnant when you felt that you couldn’t or shouldn’t bring a new bunny into the world. You’ll never face the overthrow of your own personal autonomy when some bunch of old white men who believe in Noah’s ark and the Laffer Curve and subservient women (think Orrin Hatch, or Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, or Ricky Santorum) decide what you can and what you cannot do with your uterus.
Moreover, you will never be a casualty of a war perpetrated against women in general under the guise of a ‘moral crusade’ to save the babies. You’ll never lose your access to affordable general health care when Planned Parenthood or some other less well known entity has to close down because it is under relentless and dishonest attack by neanderthals who are really against birth control and sex and health education and emancipated women in general.
We have a situation in this country where a large faction of people are intent on disenfranchising a whole segment of the population, based solely on their gender. It is one facet of a coordinated attack on working people in general, with the intent of disempowering and silencing opponents and concentrating power and wealth – think about it – how does one have time to participate in the public discourse if your too busy working three low wage jobs just to keep a roof over your family’s head? Or caring for kids you cannot afford and might not have had if you had access to birth control, and reproductive health care, and yes, abortion?
This is part of the march to the theocratic neofeudal fascism that is at the heart of Michelle Bachmann’s or Tony Perkins’ or David Koch’s dreams for our lives. If you believe that a blastocyst is indeed a human being, than by all means don’t have an abortion, but be very very careful telling the woman next to you what to do with the blastocyst in her uterus.
Because it’s her damn uterus.
2
Well-said.
Killing babies is such a progressive value…..
Call a spade a spade: its murder for the sake of convenience. Period.
@4
You’re an ass.
4
Plainly, as you have all the answers, you should be God’s own representative on earth. Or, at least dictator or something.
@4
When abortions were illegal they went on anyway. Doctors performed D&C’s on people and didn’t bother to note that they were pregnant at the time. Or people went to Canada, or states where it was legal, or had back alley abortions.
We are the one’s that are calling a spade a spade. It will always be around. Better to have it above board and regulated.
@2 Thank you for your thoughtful response. I’m not asking any woman to let her moral choices be dictated by what I think, feel, or say. The difference between me and right-to-lifers is that I don’t try to force my personal beliefs on others with molotov cocktails or guns.
2,3 – I think society has an obligation to protect its most vulnerable members, and no one is more helpless or vulnerable than an unborn child. The vexatious question here is, when does a blastocyst or cell mess become a “child”? I don’t how or where to draw that line, and neither did the court that wrote the Roe v. Wade opinion. We don’t let mothers kill their children after they’re born, and if the argument is that they’re not human beings until birth separates them from their mothers’ bodies, I think that’s an arbitrary (and untenable) distinction. The farther along a pregnancy progresses the more human-like the fetus becomes. There is no drastic transformation at the moment of birth; the creature that has just come out of the uterus is the same as the creature that was in the uterus the moment before birth. So how do you deal with the definitional problem here, the question of when a blastocyst becomes a human life that society is obligated to protect? Or does society have any obligation to protect any human life? Do we want to say that every human is on his/her own, that we collectively (“society”) have no moral obligations toward our fellow human beings? Do we really wish to live in a completely amoral world? And if not, how are moral distinctions to be made, and who shall make them? Both sides of the abortion debate have tried to control the outcome of the debate by framing the terms of the debate with ideological rhetoric. Choicers refuse to call a fetus a “child” and lifers refuse to call a fetus anything but a “child.” This type of debate has no intellectual content and doesn’t resolve the issue; it’s just two emotionally-charged crowds shouting past each other, and no one is listening. This issue does need some sort of resolution and we won’t find it by parroting talking points. What is missing from all the public discourse about abortion is a thoughtful analysis of how the concept of right and wrong applies to one person’s actions affecting another person. We’ll never get there as long as the debate remains stuck over the question of whether the person is a “person” at all.
“cell mass” not “cell mess”
@2 If by saying I’ll “never have one” you mean that if I ever get a woman pregnant again (a highly unlikely proposition) I’ll prevent her from getting an abortion, I don’t see how I could. I’m not a woman, I’ll never be a woman, and I can’t control any woman’s decision about something like that. Expressing my opinion is the limit of my power in this life on this earth regarding this subject.
@5
oh go fuck yourself…and while you are at, go tongue-punch your boyfriend in the fartbox.
@6
Well, it would seem it is you who have decided to play god as far as who lives and who dies. The rabbit turd kinda hit on this in post #9. It would seem YOU(and your ilk) have decided to play god by drawing some arbitrary line in the sand that determines when a baby is a baby.
so tell me smart guy, just when is a baby a baby? after birth? At 6 months after conception? when it is, oh Mr. God-player.
killing for the sake of convenience. period.
Rabbit @ 9,
Well-said. In my family, we do not agree on the abortion question. My father and younger brother are anti-choice. The rest of us are pro-choice. We are all pro-life. We oppose war, the death penalty, and denying food to starving people. So, we all vote Democrat. If I knew that a blastocyst was a human, I’d be against abortion. But, I don’t know much of anything for certain, and I don’t have a uterus, so I don’t think either the government or me should get to make decisions for women with blastocysts in their uterus. Abortion, from my humble perspective, should be legal and accessible.
@12 Wasn’t Shrub playing god when he decided to start a war with Iraq, a country that had not threatened or attacked us?
@13 I have always thought the best solution to abortions is for individuals to decide against having them; and instead of trying to coerce this result, the pro-lifers should focus on changing the culture so people won’t want abortions.
But we don’t leave it up to individual discretion to not rob banks or shoot people; and when someone commits such an act then governmental powers and processes of arrest, trial, and punishment kick in. We don’t let Casey Anthony kill her 2-year-old tot because she doesn’t want to be a parent; a what point, if any, should we step in and tell a woman she can’t kill her unborn child?
It seems obvious the definitional question is at the heart of this problem. “Moment of birth” provides a convenient dividing line between “murder” and “not-murder,” but it’s not a dichotomy grounded in reason. I think an argument can be made that a fetus is a “human being” deserving of the same governmental protection as a 2-year-old toddler at some point prior to birth. Not everyone will agree with this, but I think there is a point — however difficult to define — when at least some observers (myself included) will recognize a fetus that has reached a certain stage of development as having sufficient characteristics of a sentient human being to be considered a human being. This line of reasoning ineluctably leads to a cutoff point after which society steps in and says, “this cell mass now is too much like a child and its life is no longer in your hands and it is now under the protection of the state.” Any such dividing line will be somewhat arbitrary but there is no way to do this that doesn’t have a certain amount of arbitrariness to it.
It seems the reasoning of the Roe v. Wade decision is that the woman loses her protected privacy interest in the child’s existence after it leaves her body.
@14
you could say the same about Yugoslavia(the former) and Libya too.
…and Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, etc…
@2. Liberal Scientist wonders why the Intelligent Designer made Republicans such assholes spews:
——————————
Scientist your stinking Mao wannabe ass, do you have a degree in arrogant asshole?
@17 No, you can’t say the same thing about Yugoslavia or Libya, because there were already wars going on there and Clinton/Obama intervened to save lives, not take them. There was no war in Iraq, and nobody was dying in Iraq, until Bush opened fire on a country that did NOT attack us on 9/11.
(Or are you one of those idiots who still believes Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11?)
To equate Bush’s unprovoked attack against Iraq with Clinton’s intervention against Milosevicz’s genocide or Obama’s intervention against Gadhafi’s use of jet fighters, helicopter gunships, and tanks against unarmed civilian demonstrators is sheer lunacy.
But then, lunacy is what you get from lunatics.
@21
irrelevant. the point of your original post was that Iraq was not a threat, with which I agree. I also gave a list of nations we have attacked that were not threats.
after being shown your ass, NOW you want to change the criteria of your argument…sorry turd dropper, that dont work.
owned.
Killing babies is such a progressive value….
And making kids pregnant and keeping them that way is a right wing value:
http://www.republicanoffenders.com/Pedophiles.html
As Sharon Angle, a right winger would say:
MAKE LEMONADE!
Too bad this motherfuckers parents didn’t know what an asshole he was gonna turn out to be.
I’m just sayin”.
The abortion issue has been decided: it’s legal. If you don’t want one, don’t get one.
It’s that simple.
@25
too bad for you people know the difference between shitty music and stuff worth listening to.
So have done what I ordered you to do and examined your life and just where it went all wrong? Was it the teen years? the 20’s? the 30’s? Have you figured out when and why you have never done anything with your life and why even mediocrity is a status which you will never see?
Dont worry Rujaxoff, people like me and my family will continue to fill the state’s coffers to support life’s losers like you..dont worry, we wont let you starve on the streets – you should be thankful we are so graceful and allow you to survive, even if you are a lazy, underachieving, angry little man.
Awwwwwww…mr touchy feely got his feelings hurt?
What kind of judgemental motherfucker are you anyway? You’re some kind of christian? You’re some kind of asshole.
@28
my feeling hurt? LOL..not hardly.
I’m the kind of judgmental motherfucker that supports losers like you, thats what kind.
Where did I mention I was Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, or any other religion?
shouldnt you be at banjo practice?