…doesn’t reduce the number of abortions.

Restricting the availability of legal abortion does not appear to reduce the number of women trying to end unwanted pregnancies, a major report suggests. The Guttmacher Institute’s survey found abortion occurs at roughly equal rates in regions where it is legal and regions where it is highly restricted.

Banning abortion only makes abortions more dangerous and kills women—which is what many opponents of abortion are after, really. They want people who have sex to be punished. Seventy-thousand woman die every year as a result of unsafe abortions in countries where abortion is illegal. So let’s just say it, shall we? American opponents of reproductive freedom—people who seek to ban abortion—are trying to kill American women. The end.

Guess what does reduce the number of abortions? Improved access to contraception.

225 replies on “Banning Abortion…”

  1. Uriel @ 98, thanks. I was trying to follow your links and was mightily confused. I appreciate your correction, particularly since I always look forward to your comments.

    101, you’re not very good at debate. It’s foolish to play the Nazi card in this case: the Nazis were strongly anti-abortion. It’s the eugenics thing—killing off the undesirable Jews while forcing the “Aryan” women to reproduce.

    Likewise, the “slavery used to be legal” argument works against you. If forcing a woman to carry a pregnancy and give birth against her will isn’t enslavement, I don’t what is.

  2. 103

    right

    FORCING a woman to carry her pregnancy is SLAVERY.

    FORCING someone to pay their mortgage is SLAVERY.

    FORCING someone to pay for the meal they just ate at a restaurant is SLAVERY.

    FORCING someone to pay their car note is SLAVERY.

    FORCING someone to provide for their kids is SLAVERY.

    Heaven forbid we FORCE anyone to carry out the obligations they have entered into freely and willingly….

    I’ll concede one point-
    some peoples’ kids are better off dead.

  4. 89 I’ve read the link you provided concerning “ectogenesis” and with all due respect, i think it’s irresponsible, to be more blunt, simply criminal on par with premeditated homicide, or better put, a crime against humanity to even be considering something like that. Do you really want to mess with humanity on that level Uriel-238?

  5. I’m pro-life, and I don’t believe in the abolition of abortion, for those reasons that you cite. I believe financial aid should instead be given to pregnant women. I’m also a die hard feminist and it sickens me how excluding the feminist movement is of those of us who believe in non-violent choice.

    You talk about women who die in abortion; fair enough. What about the fetuses who survived abortions, like Gianna Jessen? Isn’t her suffering also worth noting?

  6. Well, I’m a person who wouldn’t be here if my mother had NOT had an abortion. The abortion [performed in the ’50s, long before Roe v. Wade] was done in a Catholic Hospital with a priest in attendance, because my mother was a very strict Catholic. But as both she and the ‘baby’ would have died if she hadn’t had the abortion, the church and law sanctioned it. I was born after the aborted pregnancy.

    I love it when pro-lifers ask me ‘What if your mother had an abortion?’ and I tell them she did – and it saved my life.

    But, while being very Pro-Choice, I know I could never have an abortion myself. I had a pregancy scare right after I was in a terrible car accident. I learned I’d been using the pill incorrectly, and the initial urine test came back positive. All my doctors insisted I have an abortion – if I kept the pregancy to term, I’m probably be paralyzed from the waist down [I had broken my back], and the fetus had been exposed to mutagenetic drugs and x-rays. If I was lucky it would only have a hare-lip or spina bifida, but the most likely course is that I’d miscarry and be paralyzed anyway. Thank God a second test came back negative.

    I couldn’t do it. But it made me realize just how difficult a decision it really was. And I became more Pro-Choice than ever.

  7. 101, 104,

    For those of of you saying that women should “Take Responsibility” for the consequences of having sex… abortion IS taking responsibility. When my dog gets truly sick, I am responsible for his life, suffering, and death, so I do the responsible thing and have the vet put him down with as little pain and suffering as possible.

    As for a fetus… it is made of living human tissue, I’ll grant you that… left inside a woman’s body, allowed access to feed on her bloodstream for the full nine months, it does have a percentage chance (NOT a guarantee) that it will develop from a parasite into an infant. But that is not what makes us human beings special. The mind, the will, the ability to to think, all of those things that we value in humans over animals are not present yet.

    Oh, and if you bring up the question of why we should not “abort” the mentally handicapped: they are NOT inside someone’s body. Anyone can take care of them.

    YOU consent to drive a car. YOU assume all risks when you step out on to the road. If a drunk driver hits you (your fault for choosing to drive and being in his way, rather than walking as God intended) shall we make it that law of the land to take a few pints of your blood? A kidney? 50% of your liver? HE needs them to live, and YOU consented to that risk when you got behind the wheel.

    Shall we play it that way?

  8. With all due respect in return, Loveschild @106, why do you think ectogenesis is irresponsible or simply criminal on par with premeditated homicide or a crime against humanity?

    By the way, I think it rather hyperbolic of you to say that even considering something like ectogenesis is a crime against humanity. To be sure we consider war and sanctions which have a far clearer death toll (and no life toll), and those are far clearer crimes against humanity than ectogenesis, or for that matter (assuming it’s the technology that scares you), cloning and genetic engineering of humankind.

    To answer your question, yes, I do want to mess with humanity on that level. One of the great problems of the abortion controversy is that, as Jon Stewart well put it*, of sovereignty. A woman’s body is her own, and shouldn’t be regulated by the state. Ectogenesis, especially if we could create a safe, cheap transition from natural pregnancy to artificial womb, could save every viable pregnancy and eliminate every abortion while simultaneously preserving the sovereignty of every woman over her own self.

    So please be specific: what is particularly criminal or irresponsible about ectogenesis? To the contrary, I think it is an elegant solution.

    * Jon Stewart’s discussion with Mike Huckabee on abortion. Here’s part 1 and part 3.

  10. 111

    Yep. The doctor does the procedure, just like, oh, what was it… the vet does the procedure when you take the responsibility of putting a pet down.

    You don’t respect life. You fetishize it.

  11. 101, who is apparently also 104, and probably 111 but won’t register…

    I’ll make you a deal: you help me prevent unwanted pregnancies and I promise I won’t terminate a single one that you prevent.

    Because, as the Guttmacher report makes plain, if you really want to stop abortion, THAT is how it’s done.

  12. Allegedly @101 I take you are also aware that many people find abortion to be acceptable, yes? Argumentum ad populum will get none of us anywhere.

    Biologically ‘Life’ is a simple concept, but it doesn’t mean what you think it means, even through you try really hard to emphasize your point in couplets. I take you didn’t follow my links. You didn’t study did you? Without your premise, which you consider axiomatic, but the rest of us don’t. The rest of your argument is founded on sand.

    You make a relevant point; where moral philosophy fails us, law can be arbitrary. Some day we might make the same argument regarding artificial intelligence, or man made sentient creatures, or intelligent aliens, since human law only preserves full rights to human beings. But in the case of the unborn, we’ve thought about it more thoroughly than you think.

    The elective abortions you so vehemently oppose do not feel pain when they are extracted or terminated. They don’t yet have the nervous system to process their own destruction, let alone the cerebellum by which to process their brief lot in life. You’d do better to argue the rights for your laptop computer, or a refrigerator.

    And in the meantime, who mourns for the mother you so eagerly villanize? What about her pain, her loss, her emotional lot?

    Frankly, you don’t give a damn.

  13. MarythefifthAgain @102 my awareness of the obstructionist freak shows is from the videos here which is a documentary about the situation in Wichita during Operation Rescue’s Summer of Mercy (which in retrospect reads like Newspeak).

    This documentary (albeit from the pro-choice perspective) is from before the assassination of Dr. George Tiller which preceded my awareness Bill O’Reilly’s thirty-odd segments on Tiller, The Baby Killer (he said it verbatim, multiple times, every segment) that didn’t show any indication or recognition of the extreme conditions of all cases that came to Dr. Tiller (our regulations of late term procedures are rather strict). I went onto the pro-life sites and saw a complete absence of the condemnation Scott Roeder as an extremist who went too far — indeed mostly he was heralded as a hero — nor any consideration that Tiller served a function, at very least, by saving the lives of mothers who were endangered by their own pregnancy. It was at this point that I believed the obstructionist movement is intrinsically misogynistic. I still am pretty sure it’s peopled mostly with misogynists

    Randal Terry’s nonchalance about Tiller’s murder (complete with hot-wings and beer) didn’t help to slow the slide of my opinion.

    I still think of it, as I mention above, a matter of sovereignty. I, personally, consider personhood to begin as it ends, based on the presence of higher brain functions (cadavers lacking these, including mine, should I be so fated, are open to harvest for organ transplants), which happens around twenty-two weeks. We say twenty to give a window of safety.

    Also of interesting note is this article which, while merely anecdotal, reflects the Guttmacher statistic that about a third of all abortions in the US are performed on women of right-wing (typically anti-abortion) religious backgrounds.

  14. Hey, people who are anti-abortion: Listen to what Dan says:

    IMPROVED ACCESS TO CONTRACEPTION DECREASES ABORTION RATES.

    If you can’t get behind that, you don’t care about kids, babies, fetuses, embryos, zygotes, or poor little eggs and sperm– you just want to punish women for having sex without wanting to have a baby.

  15. Also interestingly, Inga Muscio stated that, after she wrote aobut inducing her own abortion through massage, visualization, and herbal tonics that many (presuambly right wing ) Christians wrote to her approvingingly. Ms. Muscio wrote that anti abortion activists seem to consider that “there is a crucial distinction between the way one aborts a fetus and the actual end result. It seems that …taking herbs to keep ones period regular is a lot different than going to an abortion clinic. ” Loveschild, her book is called Cunt (yes, you read that correctly:) reading it would do you a power of good.

  16. @113
    How many of the babies you killed over 22 years were elective abortions?

    If there is nothing wrong with abortion why bother preventing unwanted pregnancy?
    Why strive to make abortion ‘rare’?

  17. We want to make early-term abortion rare, Allegedly @118 the same reason we want to make heart surgery rare: The procedures we have are harsh on the patient. We’d also like to reduce incidents of unintended pregnancy since the symptoms of pregnancy itself are harsh on a woman’s body; yet another reason I’ve expressed before I see it as a violation of a woman’s rights to require her to carry a pregnancy to a nine-month term.

    I’d advocate improving abortion procedures to make them easier on the patient. I’d also advocate better and readily available contraceptives to everyone who wants to not get pregnant (or get someone else pregnant).

    If only you asked that question out of genuine interest to learn and understand, rather than as part of your usual routine of seeking to provoke logical missteps.

    Late term abortion is already very rare and very necessary when it happens.

  23. 114
    “The elective abortions you so vehemently oppose do not feel pain when they are extracted or terminated. They don’t yet have the nervous system to process their own destruction, let alone the cerebellum by which to process their brief lot in life. You’d do better to argue the rights for your laptop computer, or a refrigerator.”

    THIS WON”T HURT…..

    http://1.bp.blogspot.com/__Sj-cVJmmxQ/SC…

  24. Y’know, Allegedly @120 to 123, when dead fetus pictures were passed around my tenth-grade class in high school (yes, they actually did that, and in some places still do), my ability to be sensitized to gorn like that began to wane. At this point, thanks to your crew being eager to whip them out as quickly as Craigslist guys are with snapshots of their cocks, they register in my head as merely low-brow propaganda.

    Some thoughts:

    ~ Firstly, are you aware of how your fellow obstructionist allies use pictures like this? They blow them up on the sides of trucks and parade them around town, in school districts. They shove them under the noses of vulnerable teens at your alleged Crisis Pregnancy Centers. Your willingness to attack kids on the subject does show that indeed nothing is beneath the obstructionist sector, and your interest in post-born kids is nonexistent. I sometimes suspect abortion provides your cronies with a reason to behave badly (i.e. bomb buildings and murder people) and is worth nothing else to you.

    ~ Secondly, you’re aware that all of these are old photos, right? Once one has seen the same bit of gore for the third time, it starts becoming just an annoyance. Once I’ve seen them over five times here on SLOG, it begins to smell as if you only have a handful of biohazard loot to pass around. Yes?

    ~ Thirdly, shock content such as this doesn’t say crap about an issue. Sure, it’s great emotional punctuation, but some things are disgusting while quite benign (i.e. compost) while other things are all clean and nicely packaged while dangerous (i.e. junk food). All the dumpster gore in the world doesn’t justify taking rights and quality of healthcare away from over half the population.

    ~ Lastly, and foremostly, elective abortions don’t generally look like that. It’s the late-term ones that provide the best photo-ops for your purposes of grossing people out, since they look most like neonates, and this means most of your gore pictures are non-elective abortions, i.e. ones performed due to fetal anomalies incompatible with life. Those images are of babies doomed despite abortion, possibly ones that would kill their mothers.

    So, in the future, when you’re going to post such inconsiderate trash, please mark them NSFW, and while you’re at it, make sure to cite the circumstances surrounding the specific procedure of which it was the result. Otherwise it’s just a lie.

  25. 110 There is this tendency in the immature to try and mess with nature and many a times that has proven to be fatal. Women are provided by nature with a reproductive system that’s intelligently designed to produce and nature human life in the womb till the new human has develop fully and can live outside of it, Uriel-238.

    It seems to me that what this whole criminal hypothesis that you seem to naively be in favor of is being introduced by people with ulterior motives like eugenics (like the Nazi try to do (do you favor that?)), human cloning, the creation of human-animal hybrids or attempts at producing offspring between homosexuals. All of which are clearly against nature because if nature had intended for such things to become a reality they would happen without having to be concocted on a lab. There is no telling what kind of detrimental consequences such creations would bring about but it is safe to say that these things would render humanity as we know it non-existent in the long run.

    I honestly believe that no human being with a clear conscience and a clear moral compass would be in favor of or attempt to these types of affronts to nature. I sincerely hope you are one of those Uriel-238. I know you are an atheist but i’ll still be praying for you to God, now more than before, to guide you and channel your apparent intelligence for the good of humanity and not its destruction.

  26. Wow, 120-125, here I am a 22-year veteran abortionist and guess what? I’ve NEVER seen anything like your pictures in my operating room.

    What does that tell you? That that’s NOT what abortion looks like. Most of what I do looks kind of like a pink spongy thing, about the size of a hen’s egg. Sorry to disappoint you.

    Of course that’s just my first-person, twenty-two year, right up there in your face anecdotal experience.

    Now I have seen some late-term stillbirths, intrauterine deaths occurring spontaneously, that looked like some of your pictures, but you’d never try and pass those off as abortions would you? Sure you wouldn’t. That would be dishonest.

  27. Wow, 120-125, here I am a 22-year veteran abortionist and guess what? I’ve NEVER seen anything like your pictures in my operating room.

    What does that tell you? That that’s NOT what abortion looks like. Most of what I do looks kind of like a pink spongy thing, about the size of a hen’s egg. Sorry to disappoint you.

    Of course that’s just my first-person, twenty-two year, right up there in your face anecdotal experience.

    Now I have seen some late-term stillbirths, intrauterine deaths occurring spontaneously, that looked like some of your pictures, but you’d never try and pass those off as abortions would you? Sure you wouldn’t. That would be dishonest.

  28. @125
    “A tendency to mess with nature….”
    You mean like doing C-sections? Or using antibiotics? Or putting broken arms in casts?
    Or building houses? Growing food on farms?
    Look, Loveschild, if you think that interfering with Nature is always immature and evil, then please stop using your computer, stop taking medicine, and stop trying to live past age 30.
    Without medicine interfering with Nature, God aborts 75% of fertilized embryos, and kills the majority of children. God wants you suffer through life that is “nasty, brutish, and short.”
    There is nothing intelligently designed about a reproductive system that puts women through more pain than any other animal suffers during childbirth, and that was the major source of adult female death until the 20th century.

  29. Hmmm…

    If God did not want abortions to happen, they would not be possible.

    Until then, women should have a right to determine what does or does not happen to or with their bodies.

  30. Hmmm…

    If God did not want abortions to happen, they would not be possible.

    Until then, women should have a right to determine what does or does not happen to or with their bodies.

  31. Hmmm…

    If God did not want abortions to happen, they would not be possible.

    Until then, women should have a right to determine what does or does not happen to or with their bodies.

  32. While I appreciate you getting back to me, Loveschild @127 you never really answered my question why is ectogenesis irresponsible or a crime against humanity, though I cannot imagine the answer to be what you inferred, that the nature of the universe is too great a thing to be tampered with by mortal hands. Indeed it’s a very Victorian way of looking at things, if not outright medieval. I think, if there is a God, She put the universe before us so that we might analyze and understand it, that it is intended as a puzzle to be solved.

    Again, you disparaged ectogenesis, referring to it as a criminal hypothesis. To the contrary, there is no law against pursuing such sciences. Yes, new technologies get abused, but this is no new thing. Even antibiotics are used recklessly by our meat industries, but to a greater extent by magnitudes, antibiotics save lives. The same will be the case with cloning, or our present experiments with grafting animal genes (including human ones).

    Obviously you threw in eugenics to disparage the rest of your list. (It wasn’t singularly a German idea, either; the US had its own eugenics programs and also believed in racial purity at the time, but we also believed in phrenology.) I, therefore, won’t bother to ask your question. You’ve read enough from me to know what I feel about things.

    But while the ways cloning and genetic engineering can be frightening — indeed dozens of stories have been told speculating their dangers — I’m still not sure what there is to fear of ectogenesis, or homosexual reproduction. Since I don’t believe in the angry wrathful god that you do, since I don’t believe that women are a perfect womb (just one that doesn’t have to be manufactured), you’ll have to come up with a better answer than a melodramatic It’ll doom us all!

    As for science destroying humankind as we know it, this has been said about dynamite, the radio, the bicycle, the telephone, the refrigerator, the automobile, the telescope, the printing press, the typewriter, the television, the digital computer, the word processor, and, for goodness sake, the Nintendo Game Boy. It isn’t naïveté or immaturity that lends me to believe the technologies above will not spell our extinction, but the consistency of history: We are still here.

  34. I think women should have the right to decide. I don’t have any children of my own, just step kids (and they all thave mental issues). I decided not to because I am BiPolar and I would never put a child through this hell. If my husband and I were to get pregnant I just could not keep it.

  35. Regardless of whether or not you think abortion is ok, abortion should be a widely accepted, legal practice.
    Why?
    Because ii reduces infanticide.
    Because it reduces deaths from illegal abortions.
    Because it reduces the number of single mothers.
    Because it saves tax dollars (less single moms needing well fare = less money spent on well fare)
    Because it reduces poverty.
    And if you don’t believe me, open up a fucking history book.

  36. The starving children in Africa are far away and we can’t hear their cries over here and who watches TV anyway so if we don’t see their suffering it doesn’t matter.

    Young developing humans don’t really look cute or cuddly yet and they don’t cry so if you kill them it’s really not that bad.

    A lack of empathy and imagination are very handy in some fields.

  37. thank you, dan.
    opponents of abortion want WOMEN who have sex to be punished, specifically. but otherwise spot-fucking-on, thank you thank you thank you.

  38. @138 sure,seeing embryos are not fun for you

    you would much rather watch them being born and then strangled or dumped in the toilet or in the garbage bin;
    being born cocain-addicted and die after a short painful life,or to see a woman bleed to death after a botched back alley abortion, etc.

    You are one sick animal.

  39. Funny that this information only contained the number of women who die from botched illegal abortions (70,000). It failed to include, however the TENs of BILLIONs of people who die every time an abortion is performed (i.e. the babies)

    Although it is horrifying to think that any of these women died in the first place (ALL life is sacred, mother AND child). They would NOT have been a fatality due to a botched abortion if they had not tried to have an abortion in the first place.

    Having said this, I realize that many women in countries where abortion is illegal are also much more exposed to rape, incest, and other heinous crimes wherein unwanted pregnancy is a result. My heart goes out to these women. No matter what the outcome, death of an unwanted baby, death of a woman through abortion, having to live with the progeny of an evil man, etc, it is NEVER pleasant. In these circumstances, abortion is not going to fix everything. The only thing that will fix the situation is professional counseling, and loving support. Imagine having to not only deal with the memory of a sexual assault, but then having to live with the guilt of having killed a defenseless baby. It’s not a quick fix.

    Legalized abortion results in cold-hearted women, trying to find satisfaction in fleeting pleasure and justifying the death of their children to keep them from having to ever grow up and accept responsibility for their actions.

    As for the argument that some women would die in childbirth… this is a grossly over-used and unprovable argument. The only way to know if a woman would actually die during childbirth is to have a trial of labor. I was told that I would have to have a hysterectomy if I had more than 3 cesarean sections… I have had 4 and my uterus is not only intact, but my OB told me it actually looks surprisingly healthy… that said, I am not having any more children, and the man I am in a monogamous relationship with (i.e. husband) has had a vasectomy. Medicine has come way too far to substantiate the bulls–t that a woman should abort her baby because she “might” die during labor.

  40. Funny that this information only contained the number of women who die from botched illegal abortions (70,000). It failed to include, however the TENs of BILLIONs of people who die every time an abortion is performed (i.e. the babies)

    Although it is horrifying to think that any of these women died in the first place (ALL life is sacred, mother AND child). They would NOT have been a fatality due to a botched abortion if they had not tried to have an abortion in the first place.

    Having said this, I realize that many women in countries where abortion is illegal are also much more exposed to rape, incest, and other heinous crimes wherein unwanted pregnancy is a result. My heart goes out to these women. No matter what the outcome, death of an unwanted baby, death of a woman through abortion, having to live with the progeny of an evil man, etc, it is NEVER pleasant. In these circumstances, abortion is not going to fix everything. The only thing that will fix the situation is professional counseling, and loving support. Imagine having to not only deal with the memory of a sexual assault, but then having to live with the guilt of having killed a defenseless baby. It’s not a quick fix.

    Legalized abortion results in cold-hearted women, trying to find satisfaction in fleeting pleasure and justifying the death of their children to keep them from having to ever grow up and accept responsibility for their actions.

  41. BTW… the idea that proponents of an infants right to life don’t care what happens to it after it is born is rather obviously false when one looks into the number of pro-life crisis pregnancy centers who offer adoption counseling and other post childbirth relief. If we didn’t care, then these centers wouldn’t exist.

    I personally have volunteered time, finances and other resources to help women with unwanted pregnancies. This information seems lost on those who would like to black-ball anyone who disagrees with their pro-death (abortionist) viewpoint. I am currently seeking adoption (specifically of children who are older and less likely to be adopted) of these children who weren’t desired but somehow made it into the world unscathed. Not sure yet how many I am going to be able to help.

  42. Love how the fundamentalist mind cannot distinguish between ‘legal’ and ‘mandatory’. No-one is forcing you to gay-marry. No-one is forcing you to have an abortion. No-one is even forcing you to give up your intellectually-challenged hateful religious beliefs.

    And racial eugenics? Yes, quick, warn pregnant young women of color that if they voluntarily seek out an abortion provider and choose to have an abortion, they will not give birth to a happy, healthy baby! I’m sure they will thank you for bringing this heinous conspiracy to their attention.

    Abortion has prevented TENS of BILLIONS of babies being born? Meaning our entire planetary ecosystem has not yet collapsed under the weight of overpopulation? Now that is something to thank God for!

  43. @143
    your posts made me laugh 🙂

    As you were told many times on this thread, anti-choice nazis and people like you lose all interest to what happens to those babies after they are born.

    “Caring” for those babies by offering a adoption counseling is not real caring.Newborn babies (esp. white and healthy) are always in demand. Even without your so called “care” there are enough people and agencies that will adopt/find adoptive parents for those babies.

  44. Hey, bethimus @141, welcome to SLOG and its ongoing abortion debate.

    Before you get too involved, you might want to read up on what’s already been said, so that we don’t have to retrace ground already covered. You also may want to study the actual statistics, rather than making up numbers, indeed ten billion abortions (let alone tens of billions) would be (roughly) three for every woman and girl alive on earth, sterile or otherwise. In the future, if you want to quote statistics, feel free to provide links. This will help.

    You also may want to read what’s been said already, so we don’t have to retrace ground already established. For example, one of the issues that is still not yet established is the point of personhood, i.e. when a prenate is considered legally (or morally) separate from the mother. Despite the beliefs of most who oppose abortion access, it is not axiomatic that this moment is conception as opposed to the many other logical alternatives. Even scripture is conspicuously vague about it.

    It, of course, would follow that an abortion does not kill until after the point a fetus reaches personhood. Yes?

  45. Also, bethimus, @143 I am not aware of what kinds of postnatal relief and adoption advocacy provisions Crisis Pregnancy Centers offer. Can you provide a link that details these benefits, and the qualifications for them? I’d also be interested in the full spectrum of counseling CPCs provide (e.g. regular psychotherapy, benefits advocacy, social work, etc.). It would be a relief, indeed, to know that even at CPCs such services were secured for America’s young desperate pregnant women at their most emotionally vulnerable hour.

    As I’m sure you know, low income mothers (the homeless, those on welfare and those who rely on contingent work) and teens who have tenuous family lives are the demographics that are most likely to have abortions, and to visit a CPC. Indeed, this is especially the case, since they have the least access to contraceptives and health services (including abortion), exasperated in recent years since obstructionist pharmacists have taken it upon themselves to deny (and often fail to return) birth control prescriptions.

    I take, when you personally volunteered time, finances and other resources it was to an CPC, yes? You may have the stats yourself: How much postnatal relief does an CPC typically provide to a mother with a newborn, and what are the qualifications to be granted such a benefit? Again, links would be awesome.

  46. @16 if you are so righteously pro-life, then get your anti-abortion groups to join my progressive groups and end our military conflicts where your tax dollars are paying for VIOLENT death daily via wars overseas. Lobby for the abolishment of the death penalty. Have your protestors block recruiting stations as often as they block abortion clinics. Make full color placards showing not embryos but the ugly death we deal by our military, or the broken bodies of our girls and boys coming back in coffins… Give blood! Stand in front of tanks, like the Unknown Rebel! Build schools for kids in Pakistan or in Pittsburg!! Circle the wagons around Muslims, Jews, and minorities threatened by bigotry and hate!

    No? Riiight.
    The reality remains as it has for over 200 years: In this nation, liberty is more important than life. Patrick Henry had it down. It’s baked right into the founder’s documents. Stand up for your country!

    It’s got nothing to do with when hearts start beating or women’s rights or racism or zygotes. It’s more important than the quran/bible/torah/kamasutra/LRonHubbard’s plan. It’s about humanity and our commitment to improve ourselves. It’s about besting tyrrany. About freely thinking and praying. Choice = Freedom.
    Therefore, despite how I might disagree with some specific abortions, I will always vote for freedom of choice. It is the safest default. Prochoice. It’s the only patriotic choice. We must all vigilantly defend the right to choose what we each believe to be right.

    Your claim of being ‘pro-life’ rings hollow. Your allegiance belies how you’ve settled for being ill-informed.
    At best, you may agree with the above robust view of pro-liferism, and want to stop the wars, but instead of fighting the hard fights,… you pick on pregnant women. Shameless. Might as well pick on kids burning ants if you’re going to miss the point of being pro-life so readily.

    Good Parenting and Sound Spirituality can change morality, not law. We have to guarantee the right to choose while simultaneously ministering to those in need. That’s the good work to be done. Choice, freedom, a right to think how we think: It’s how we vote, for goodness sake!

    And yes, I’ll even claim it’s for the unborn’s sake too: (I would rather die and ) I’d rather a viable 38-week fetus even die, than see a defenseless baby born into an America that’s lost, or sold off to the highest bidder, the very soul of democracy.

  47. A fun tip about CPC’s:

    “people with a clear theo-political agenda are operating ultrasound equipment and providing intimate information to women and teenaged girls about sexuality, prenatal development and medical issues outside the scope of public regulation or expert supervision.”

    http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2009/…

    CPC’s are interested only in convincing pregnant women to carry to term, them kick them out the door. They don’t provide one lick of help to real babies, for they have commited the sin of being born. No help for you, kid, we have goo-blobs to save!

    And, call me crazy… but wouldn’t Planned Parenthood receive more funding for all the medical costs, tests, appointments, check-ups, and equipment associated with a full term pregnancy rather than an early term abortion? The entire idea that there is a financial incentive, that PP persuades women to have abortions, that they do it for money instead of to help women… that entire argument has always been a steaming crock of shit.

  48. Oh bethimus @141, you cannot be serious:

    “As for the argument that some women would die in childbirth… this is a grossly over-used and unprovable argument.”

    Oh? Worldwide over half a million women die every year from complications of pregnancy (my source is United Nations stats from 2000). As I’ve said above 70,000 of those deaths are from illegal abortions.

    You care about babies? Go to Afghanistan, where prenatal care is so poor that ONE IN NINE pregnant women dies in the post-natal period (source: UNICEF 2007). That doesn’t shock you? How about this: if an Afghan woman dies in childbirth, the chance that her baby will survive to its first birthday is less than one in four. Do we have your attention now? Can you see why a mother of small children looking at that mortality rate might consider ending her next pregnancy? What will happen to her children if she dies? Oh I know: you’re going to help them “with adoption counseling.”

    You think you can tell women around the world that what they need is “professional counseling and loving support?” Please grow up. What they need is safety, a stable society, the right to refuse arranged marriage, adequate nutrition, and access to contraception and skilled care. Sometimes they need abortions–and who are you to tell them otherwise?

    You want to help babies? Help the moms. And if they want abortions they’re going to get them. You can say your “heart goes out to them” but if you’re making abortion unsafe, you’re hurting them and the babies you claim to love so much.

  49. Bravo, Uriel @147. The CPCs are founts of misinformation and coercion. My favorite CPC story comes from my sister, who used to run the Planned Parenthood office in a midwest town. They’d heard some scary stories from clients who’d been to a local CPC, so when she was pregnant (with her much-planned first) she posed as a client to see one from the inside. Her tale is simultaneously hilarious and horrifying, but the best part is this: she was told she was at eight weeks gestation (this was correct), and when she expressed doubt about her plan of action, the “counselor” smiled and said, “Then let’s bring out the kids!” and produced a row of jars of apparently real fetuses at various stages of development. She was shown a particular one (which she estimates as being about 16 weeks from her own anatomy studies) and told her baby was just about that size and stage. When she expressed doubt over the age of the fetus in question, she was assured that, oh no, that’s the size babies are at eight weeks.

    An innocent mistake? Hmmm…..the typical eight-week fetus weighs about one gram and is less than an inch long, while at 16 weeks 100 grams and 5 inches are average.

    We have often puzzled over where those specimens came from….

  50. @11 You know what happens when women have unsafe illegal abortions? Both the woman and the fetus die. So how does that serve your goal of saving “babies”?

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