What kind of life would those fetuses grow up to have, given that their mothers weren't confident that they should be born for whatever reason?

It's arguments like these that they ignore. They don't really have any clue. no one really does.

Even before he gets to the offensive comments, he already sets things up for me to dismiss what he says. When he says "in this country we had slavery for God knows how long." God may know how but also any person with some knowledge (or with access reference information) the history and law of this country. Its not some big metaphysical question that needs an eternal all-seeing being to answer.

Daily Kos points out that Franks doesn't know the difference between a percentage and a ratio. The actual amount is 32%. Still pretty high. I guess more abstinence-only education is needed.

Another white man thinks he knows what's best for African americans and women? What are the odds.

@4: And that father was likely to be the white slaveowner, since planters would quite often rape their female slaves and then sell the children produced.
And hey, even if the children were born from a loving relationship, they were liable to be separated from their parents and sold at auction during their early childhood. Anyone who thinks that abortion is worse for blacks than slavery is a moronic hypocrite.
Slavery ruined the lives of countless innocents; the judicious use of abortion can prevent lives from being ruined.

Dan,
Did you read this?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/27/us/27r…

Right. Because this country would be so much better off with all those millions of unwanted black kids raising hell. What a maroon.

10, 11 are you Rachael's mom?

Hey Rep. Franks, maybe all those black women would feel better about bringing their kids into this world if they thought that old, rich, white men like yourself actually gave a shit about them?

I love the first comment after the article:

"His mother should have aborted him!"

The Republicans have a genius for seizing on injustices they themselves create and using them to gain votes. Three things help teen girls not get pregnant: a sense that they have a future to look forward to if they don't bear children early, a healthy family or community that supports their self-esteem and empowers their self-determination, and access to sex ed and birth control.

Which of those things does the GOP support?

So really, in an odd way, the high abortion rates among black teens, like the high motherhood rates, do reflect racism and the legacy of slavery. You just gotta love the chutzpah of someone seizing on this as a political talking point for these old white guys and their token brown men.

Wow. Trolls out in force today. Can't you guys get dates? I thought Kim had slain the abortion troll with her kindness yesterday, but obviously I was wrong.

Off to dress for dinner....

Ah, yes. The old "abortion is genocide" ticket. I've read many essays and watched a 2 hour video on this nonsense.
This concept is utter bullshit. "Margaret Sanger was a Eugenicist" is just the tip of this floating pile of shit.
Just ask black president of planned parenthood from 1978 to 1992 Faye Wattleton. Did I mention she's black?

this makes me crazy. forcing women to give birth to children they don't want is THE ACTUAL GENOCIDAL TACTIC. there isn't a genocide of any stripe that hasn't included rape as a tactic both for the psychological trauma it inflicts and the damage done to a culture when women bear and raise children they don't want.

@20,
Rail all you want against abortion, but don't act surprised and pissy when people demand better access to health care, better sex ed., more funding and support for adoption agencies, and more paid leave from work after childbirth.

If you want to force women to have kids they don't want, especially women who are poor, with low self-esteem and ignorance about sex due to society's training them to feel shame about it, then you'd better chip in to help make sure this kid doesn't end up like the mother or become a criminal.

It's sad that so many abortion opponents are more concerned with making sure the mother feels punished and shamed, rather than making sure the kid grows up well.

@25

Or we could just allow women to take charge of their own reproduction, provide easy access to education, birth control and abortion in order to make sure that children are born into homes that are able to care for them.

@23

Yes actually, if you're not willing to help raise the child you are a giant hypocritical ass if you want to force the mother to incubate it until it becomes sentient enough to suffer.

Thank you for giving me this opportunity to state that I always wanted to be raised by a 13-year-old.

And based my observations, yore "intact families" are also a joke.

How can Franks breath when he has his head so far up his ass?

ATTENTION, CITIZENS!!

YOUR URB IS SHRINKING!!

MOVE TO SECTOR G > > > SECTOR G ! ! !

Bing-emphasizes-need-to-shrink-city

Quote:
Mayor Dave Bing said Wednesday he "absolutely" intends to relocate residents from desolate neighborhoods and is bracing for inevitable legal challenges when he unveils his downsizing plan.

Is Barack Obama the next Bernie Madoff?

http://yrihf.com/viewtopic.php?t=3974&si…

@46 From everyone here in Olympia: so sorry you never got laid while you were here. Though, not.

@43,
Calling someone a "Maroon" is from an old Bugs Bunny cartoon.

We need Love Child's expertise here

@ 43, great cultural reference fail. See @ 51.

@10: If you'd read any accounts of the Middle Passage, you'd know that enslaved Africans often killed themselves, whether by jumping overboard or refusing to eat, rather than be subjected to such degradation. It's the same spirit as "I'd rather die on my feet than live on my knees." MIRITE?

To all who jabber "Aborted embryos don't have a choice!":
So? They are not human beings. They are clumps of cells within their mother. Embryos lack even the most rudimentary sentience of a newborn. From the standpoint of depriving an innocent being of its life, it is far worse to slaughter a pig; pigs have intelligence comparable to that of great apes (including humans) and cetaceans, while human embryos, but for their genetic code, are no more human than the embryo inside a chicken egg. We don't seem to have a problem with killing pigs, though, and human genetics don't mean a whole lot; you kill human cells every time you clap your hands.
So what is it about a semi-amorphous cluster of cells with no sentience, no consciousness, and no ability to survive without leeching off of their mother by use of a placenta that makes their destruction so abhorrent? Riddle me that.

@54: Their potential.

You can't prove that anything else is sentient or suffers. What would you do, give people an IQ test and bump them off if they fail?

He is simply making a quantitative comparison. It's like saying more people died of influenza in 1920 than died fighting in WWI.

If you have any qualms about abortion, any notion that personhood is formed before the child leaves the womb and that child is not just a lump of cells until it takes its first breath unaided (I'm just a lump of cells, as far as anyone can tell) then the numbers give pause for reflection on a disproportionate, self-inflicted evil.

If those children weren't aborted, they would be voting to advance the rights of their community today.

Sorry, Allegedly (@20), deadbeat dads‡ aside, there are plenty of cases in which paternity cannot be established, when a man is unsuitable to parent (or when the mother is unsuitable to parent, for that matter), and when parents are abusive to each other or the child. There are also plenty more cases where circumstances are just plain wrong, such as in the present economy (and notably in the Reagan/Bush economy) in which an otherwise suitable parent cannot provide support due to lack of adequate employment. (Most workers are underemployed and underpaid.) There are also plenty of cases in which an infant at the wrong moment will ruin the opportunities for one to become a suitable parent. But we radical liberals have been arguing that issue for years and you obstructionists have been ignoring it.

So, if the state is going to enforce birthing (even partially, through reproduction health care and contraceptive limits and obstructions), it naturally follows the state will provide support for the child when said support is unavailable through the parents' personal means, including adequate medical care, food, shelter, child supervision and schooling opportunities to thrive (which means through secondary school, if the child / young adult qualifies). If you're going to proceed on the pretense that every elective abortion could have been President of the United States (or a football star, or a science prodigy, or whatever), you have to guarantee an actual opportunity to become President (or a football star, etc.). That means school opportunities (through college) and a stable home and community environment that will nurture proclivities to study. Are you ready to put your tax dollars where your mouth is, Allegedly? The best I've heard from an abortion-obstructionist such as yourself is the willingness to donate some diapers during the neonatal months. (Which is not only inadequate, but insulting.) I can't imagine you'll give better than your snarky, insulting excuses, but go on, surprise me.

In the meantime, I begin to wonder, Allegedly, what would you imagine would happen when all the surrender sites (and, consequently, the foster-care system) were flooded with unwanted children? Draft them all into the military? Open adoption to corporations? Give them guns and let them slaughter each other in the slums? (That's pretty much what we do now). Tell me, Allegedly, what is your protestant conservative, small-government, free-market solution to this problem? Mmm?

‡ A grotesque term to refer to those fathers who are able to participate in parenting and support of a child, but do not (according to the laws described as such). Deadbeat dad laws, instead, tend to be applied to fathers who are disabled, who are unable to parent or support, themselves, or whose relationship to the mother is untenable, hence their rights to equal custody are denied due to circumstances.

Some Old Nobodaddy, I way prefer maroon in the Warner Bros., Bugs Bunny tradition.

I think the full insult is ultramaroon.

Regarding the quantification of sentience or pain:

Higher brain functions.

It is the rule by which we salvage a beating-heart cadaver for organ transplants.

If it works to mark the end of a person's life, why cannot it work to mark the beginning?

So, Allegedly (@49), do women get a choice? Who gets priority? The person, or the potential?

Are a woman's rights honored always? Or does she lose the status of human citizenship because she's pregnant?

Are women allowed choice to find their own destinies? Or is destiny chosen for them as breeding vats?

Where do a woman's rights fit in, Allegedly?

Or do you just disregard them?

What if the fetus is female? What then?

You can't prove that anything else is sentient or suffers. What would you do, give people an IQ test and bump them off if they fail?

Um, yes, yes you prove that sentient beings suffer, likewise we can prove that embryos and fetuses before a certain stage of development do not suffer during an abortion because their central nervous systems are not developed enough to process "pain", nor do they have any sort of consciousness whatsoever. When a sentient being suffers they can tell you, or you can observe it yourself.

Bullshit Raindrop, pure bullshit.

If people like you were REALLY concerned with the issue of "potential", you'd be doing EVERYTHING in your power to ensure that actual born children are given every opportunity to thrive and realize that potential: by making sure they have adequate nutrition, housing and education, by striving to provide them with a positive and nurturing home environment, by keeping the planet in good working condition so it will be there when they're old enough to take over responsibility for it themselves, by giving them access to resources that help them in developing their intellectual and physical capacities.

I don't see ONE SINGLE plank in the GOP platform that promotes ANY of the above; rather the opposite, since pretty much everything you-all advocate: cutting government spending, relaxing environmental regulations, giving more power to corporations than to people, rejecting universal health care, et al, are intended to do nothing but at the very least maintain the status quo with the folks at the top firmly and permanently entrenched there, to make sure the people what gots keep gettin' and them that don't stay down in the gutter where they belong.

In fact, I would posit that the very notion of tens of millions of these children growing up to actually achieve this potential scares the living daylights out of you folks. Can you imagine a nation with several million Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr's? Or Malcolm X's or Ralph Ellisons, or Cesare Chavez's, or Doris Wilkinsons, or Cornel Wests, or MarÍa Elena Toraño-PantÍns? Because, if you actually practiced what you're preaching Raindrop, that's what you'd get - an unstoppable army of minority authority figures with intellects so far surpassing your own that you'd piss yourself in terror every morning.

So yeah, keep harping the hypocritical "it's all about their POTENTIAL as human beings" canard, while simultaneously not lifting so much as a finger to see that they ever in fact realize that potential.

Unless of course by "potential" what you actually mean is: "their potential to be cannon-fodder for our wars, their potential to our flip burgers, mow our lawns and pick our vegetables, or their potential to provide 'prayer warriors' for our Ecumenical Army", then yeah, I guess I would call that at least being consistent with your message.

But, of course, you'd actually have to come out and SAY that, wouldn't you? And I'll bet you and your ilk don't have the coglioni to publicly avouch what you really believe, now do you?

@61: Does an embryo walk, talk, metabolize, respire, think, interact with others, or sense its surroundings like a person? No.
Do people of other races? Yes.
Completely invalid comparison, corkstacker. MIRITE?

how would he know?

"Now Moynihan's basic premise—that slavery destroyed black family structure—has apparently been laid to rest by City University of New York Historian Herbert G. Gutman in his new book, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925.

"Gutman's conclusion: from the earliest days of slavery until the eve of the Great Depression, the black family was surprisingly close, strong and intact.

"Gutman found that the two-parent household and long-lasting marriages have been typical among blacks for most of their American experience. In the slave quarters, marital fidelity was highly regarded and defended

"Gutman finds the same strong sense of marriage and the extended family (including grandparents, cousins and other relatives) in the postwar years and well into the 20th century. "

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/articl…

"Gutman focuses primarily on the family unit and showed that a unit consisting of man, woman, and child existed in about two-thirds of the cases of slave unions during the last decades of slavery on the large plantations in the Southeast.
"Gutman dispels the assertion made by Daniel P. Moynihan in The Negro Family in America: The Case for National Action (1965) that "the deterioration of the Negro family," were "rooted.in a historical process that had its origins in the enslavement of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Africans".
"Gutman demonstrates that slaves, in spite of their condition, did exercise some control over their lives and developed their own unique patterns of culture and social organization. His book is as much about the existence of a black family unit as it is about its function."

65: Wow COMTE, since you’ve gone off the deep end, extrapolating up-the-wazoo, my 3-word philosophical answer to Venomlash’s philosophical question, maybe I should clarify.
I support a woman’s right to have an abortion. Period. Any other reason besides health of the mother (note I didn’t say ‘life of the mother’), rape, or incest is an incredibly sad choice in my opinion. But it’s the woman’s prerogative.
Also, AZ Rep. Franks made an incredibly stupid and mean-spirited comparison, that should damage his career and it will.
That’s all.

Well, if that's what it takes to get you to actually articulate your position on the issue Raindrop, then I consider it time well-spent.

Oh, look 72, you're making fun of my name again! You know how totally mature that makes you look, as if you learned that one at recess. By deriding my name you tell the world This is the man who has something to say. This is the guy that has it all together. This is the frood who really knows where his towel is.

Tell ya what, you send me a secret signal each post letting me know it's you and I'll use your very special name. Yes? What shall we call you? How about:

Monstercock, because it's so obvious you have one.
Titanium, impenetrable, like your arguments.
Candyfloss, since your personality is so saccrine sweet!
Powerdrill because your posts probe straight to the core!
Ultramaroon, that very, very special color of your upholstery.
Iamnotajackass, because, you know, you aren't.

Get back to me, dude, and we'll work something out. 'Kay sport?

@71: Agreed, and COMTE did fall prey to the hazards of extrapolating.
http://xkcd.com/605/
An embryo's potential could be considered to make it more important. However, potential must be weighed against probability.

Let us consider a concept which I will call the "weighted expected quality of life", abbreviated as WEQOL. I would define it as SUM( outcome(i)*prob(i) ), where the sum is taken over the i's, i being an index variable with different values representing different outcomes of the embryo's life should it be brought to term and grow into a child; since we live in a highly complex world, there will be infinitely many unique i. Outcome(i) is a series of values, each value approximating the overall quality of life for the embryo given that its life proceeds by the outcome indexed at some unique value of i. Prob(i) is the probability that the outcome indexed at i would occur, and all values of prob(i) will be between 1 and 0 by the laws of probability.
Positive values of outcome(i) would represent outcomes resulting in a high quality of life (i.e., social and economical success, healthy in body and mind), whereas negative values would represent outcomes fraught with misery, illness, and/or poverty; the higher/lower the value, the better/worse the life represented. Basically, outcome(i) is a crude representation of the quality of a certain life.
Outcome(i) will be considered to be the same for all computations of WEQOL; this is trivial to prove. What differs from embryo to embryo is the values in prob(i) that correspond to those in outcome(i). For example, for an embryo in the womb of a poor single mother already raising two children and struggling with a substance abuse problem, values of prob(i) corresponding to high values of outcome(i) will be relatively low and vice versa; such a child, should the embryo grow into it, would be much less likely to become a professional from a loving and close family and much more likely to become a drug addict and die young and painfully.
There must be some cutoff value for WEQOL below which it is best to abort an unthinking, unfeeling, barely alive clump of cells rather than condemn a thinking and feeling human to almost certain misery and torture; let us call this value alpha. Alpha will always be below zero, and its exact value depends on one's sensibilities and the distribution given to outcome(i). If an embryo is in such a position that any child coming from it would be born into a family where it would almost certainly live a short and painful life (i.e., WEQOL

@76: Have you ever seen a human baby in your life?
Well, I'll tell you something. The answer to the question you posed is actually "yes"; newborns actually do all of those things, albeit on a level somewhat below that of adults.
Babies from the beginning make primitive attempts at locomotion in the form of crawling.
Babies vocalize to the point of depriving their parents of sleep.
Babies exhibit active brain patterns from a very young age.
Babies identify faces and associate them with their owners from early in life.
Babies track objects in their field of vision quite well from very early on.
Embryos neither crawl, vocalize, think, recognize faces or identities, nor utilize any senses. In fact, until even a fetus is nearly old enough to survive out of the womb, it doesn't really do any of these to an appreciable degree. Your comparison is not only invalid but factually incorrect. I advise you to let someone else inspect your hemorrhoids.

@77: Respect personal boundaries? HAH! That's a laugh, coming from the rabble who want to prevent women from exercising a fundamental right of theirs!
Seriously, nobody likes you. Go yammer somewhere else.

@79: I don't freak when you make fun of my name, you twat. I just point out the lunacy of expecting me to believe you've got the big things right (i.e., your argument makes logical sense) when you can't even get the little things right (e.g., getting my name right, basic grammar and mechanics).

@78: I think you're reading into my post a little too much. That was not intended as a list of criteria for life. Sponges, for example, are alive and do none of the things I mentioned.
What makes a human, anyway? You really just gave circular definition. If you go by the rule of "anything with a non-chimeral genome typical of Homo sapiens sapiens", then a blood sample is also to be afforded the rights of a human being. I'm not sure if that's your definition, though, so enlighten me.
If you think, by the way, that we are saying it's just fine to kill embryos, you're dead wrong and should probably have yourself sectioned. It is traumatic to the mother and kills an embryo (which, while not taboo, is still bad). What we say is that it is acceptable; to in most cases be discouraged, but not for us to judge. You lot (thankfully less than 1 out of every 5 Americans) think that you somehow have the right to make that decision for everyone else. So really, you're just arrogant punk bitches.

Actually, Allegedly (@78), I bet Venomlash does want to go there, since you already dropped the haggis.

But tell me, Allegedly under your true list of criteria for life, does a pregnant woman qualify? Does she qualify as a freewoman if she's born in the United States?

I gave you the chance to change what I called you to Titanium once before. Sure you want to throw away this valuable opportunity? Going twice...

So, if I impressed you into being stuck in a hospital bed for nine months and used your bodily fluids via apheresis to save the life of a violinist, you'd be okay with that, yes, Allegedly?

I promise you, he's a really good violinist, and we're talking about his life.

My point remains, a woman's body is hers, and it is still the burden of the State to determine if and why she should be conscripted into birthing involuntarily, which includes establishing what is part of her body as a separate identity from herself. Once you do this, of course, you challenge her rights to liberty as a US citizen. Once you force her to birth involuntarily, you are taking those rights away, in deference to the rights of another citizen (the fetus gestating inside her). You can do so only on the basis that the fetus rights supersede the mother's. Since the fetus depends on the mother's own life, This also makes her life the property of the state (or of the fetus - it's debatable) rather than her own. Are you sure you want to do this, Allegedly?

Do you believe a living mother is the property of any fetus she carries, Allegedly?

Why would how babies are made change the nature of the exercise?

Now that I think about it, this could be set some interesting precedents: If a woman's body can be seized as property of another (slavery is such an ugly term...we'll say drafted into medical service) it would infer that any US citizen can be equally drafted into medical service either if a situation was dire enough (i.e. it was necessary to maintain the integrity of the chain of command) or if the rights of another superceded your rights (such as, another man's life depends on a procedure that only risks your life.) So any fellow citizen needing a kidney (you have two) or a VIP required for your liver since he's in the chain of command and necessary for the continuity of operations needs your liver (you'll be put on a waiting list), they could very well have the right to take it by order, and if necessary, force.

How about that, Allegedly, you might be of actual service to your nation after all.

Uriel, the blank-verse abortion troll outed him/herself on Friday as a grieving parent of a mid-trimester loss (Read the comments on the "miscarriage as a crime" thread and start reading at 125, continuing to the end). Apparently s/he is under the misapprehension (not uncommon, in my experience) that s/he can undo/rectify/negate that loss by preventing other women from having abortions. Her post on that thread is heart-breaking, and very instructive.

I once worked with a gifted ICU doc who had several children. His wife was pregnant again and got a terrible uterine infection, had to be aborted at about 19 weeks (she would have died otherwise). You would think that would make him an advocate for safe and legal abortions but you'd be wrong: he became the most rabid pro-lifer you can imagine. He'd hector and lecture us, simply couldn't believe that there were any valid reasons for abortion EVER--and yet we'd saved his wife's life.

I think grief is very powerful, and that our blank-verse troll may not be capable of rational discourse on this subject. You and I both know that forcing other women to carry unwanted/abnormal/risky pregnancies won't bring that child back, but I don't think the troll has been able to accept the finality of that loss.

Wow, raindrop @71, I had written you off. I see now I was wrong. Thank you for articulating your position. FWIW, I would express myself similarly. I'd rather work to prevent pregnancy than to end it.

It would seem that the argument boils down to the belief that the woman has no rights, she is only a uterus? Her hopes, dreams, goal, aspirations, potential, health, and human rights are all subject to the will of the state? Men have rights. The state has rights. But, the woman she is nothing... just a uterus to incubate without person hood and subject to the rights of an embryo which can not survive without her forced compliance? And, should that embryo finish gestation and develop and be born a female, then she will join the ranks of uteri with less rights than she had as an embryo?

Sad.

I am so very sorry, unregistered commenter(s), if you suffered a loss of a much wanted pregnancy. So, so very sorry.

A wise person shared with me in the midst of my own grief a quote by Elizabeth II, after 9/11, that "Grief is the price we pay for love." and it is the truth. There is no balm of comfort. Again, I am sorry.

@83: It's bad to kill an embryo because you're destroying living tissue and also wiping out its germline. It is, however, always overridden by the mother's welfare and the welfare of any child that may grow from the embryo, since the rights of thinking beings come before the preservation of unthinking tissue, even if it is genetically distinct. What I don't understand is how you think that abortion is not traumatic to the mother. Miscarriage of any sort may cause very little physical damage, but the emotional trauma can persist for years.

@84: The right to kill would not show up on anyone's list of criteria for life, unless that person was a raving lunatic. If it was on the list, then you and I and Uriel-238 would all be nonliving, since none of us has the right to kill others. Try to think about what you post, as difficult as such mental exertion may be for you.

@Uriel-238: Bravo! I've just been dealing with the biological and moralistically analytical sides of this, and it's good to see someone who can cover the legal ramifications.

What really gets me is that you hear a lot from pro-life protesters screaming about how we shouldn't "murder" our babies, and you hear the pro-choice protesters screaming about how it's a woman's right to choose...and you hear from fundie Christians about how they "chose life", and look at little Timmy and how amazing he is...but you rarely, if ever, hear from women who actually had abortions telling the world about how it benefited them.

The implicit rule is this: "Sure, you can have one, but you'd better shut up about it!"

I'm sick of women being silenced about exercising our legal rights as citizens because we are told to be ashamed, and any woman thinking about getting an abortion has never met another woman who has (that she knows of...), and she is stuck making his unpleasant decision on a lose-lose situation by herself.

And @Uriel and Venom: You guys are geniuses. Really. :)

And here we get to the simple solution for all you pro-lifers out there who can understand and respect U-238's basic point: A woman's life is her own and it is the greater evil to force her to shoulder the non-trivial risks of pregnancy against her will than to tolerate abortion.

You still want to end abortion? Fine.

Take all that energy, all that money, all that passion you're wasting trying to save the fetuses of today and put it into developing the uterine replicator to the point it can be used to save the fetuses of as little as ten years from now.

This technology is already up and running and being used to cook up little gray nurse sharks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uterine_rep…

It'll take years and cost billions to get it developed to the point where it can be used to gestate little humans, but hey, y'all gots the billions, doncha?

@96: A better and more practical solution would be to prevent unwanted pregnancies. Fetus adoption would lead to a surplus of children in foster care (and there are already few enough people looking to adopt). Also, the human population is already above the normal carrying capacity of the planet; only our technology is maintaining us, and must continue to improve if it is to continue doing so. It's really better that such unwanted children never be born, given that we are limited to just this one planet.
So yes, religious types. None of us think that abortions are good, and if you too want to stop them from happening, throw your weight behind comprehensive sex ed and research into better and cheaper birth control medication. And stop calling contraception immoral, seriously, guys. Problem solved.

Sadly, attitude devant one of the consequences of having the option to post in SLOG anonymously is that those who do so cannot be identified from one post to another except by context. Usually, this is to a troll's advantage as it makes it harder to identify inter-post contradictions (assuming the troll is not interested in his or her own ideological consistency). But this also makes it more difficult to build an empathetic comprehension of the people behind these posts. The cutting edge of anonymity cares not what it divides.

That said, I still would rather the option to anonymously post be there, and to suffer the nameless, than to force registration on casual posters.

One of the Allegedlies (the one who sometimes reverts to modernist verse - also the one who might be Titanium‡) takes pride in being legion, both that he is one of multiple posters with the same style of moniker (that sometimes disagree with him) and that he is allegedly representative of a significant silent bloc (one of the reasons he was so dubbed).

I have no idea if this Allegedly is the same person as Rachael's Mom or Dad. Generally I identify each Allegedly iteration by his‡‡ behavior, and the usual one on abortion articles hisses at personhood as if it were demon-possessed.

Rachel's Mom or Dad's situation reminds me of Erin Runnion whose daughter Samantha was one of the ~50 school children per year abducted, molested and murdered by a stranger in 2002. Erin was driven to make the world better and safer for children, but realized quickly that abduction by a stranger is extremely rare compared to, say, sexual assault by someone known to the family (or in the family), or for that matter, vehicle accidents and life-threatening cases of influenza.

Rachael's Mom or Dad, I'm truly sorry for your loss. I hope you can come to realize there are far, far better, more effective ways to save innocent lives than directly getting in the way of abortions, and that ultimately we want to create a world in which such procedures are absent (or, at least, rare) due to lack of necessity, rather than lack of availability.

‡ I am titanium was Allegedly's response when I once mentioned we were all gray iron here (hence equally scorched by the fires that blacken the kettle). If I could consistently single Titanium out, I'd call him thus. On the other hand the one who consistently takes offense at being called Allegedly and intentionally revises my and venomlash's handles is new. I'll start calling him Candyfloss whenever he outs himself unless he gets back to me.

‡‡ I usually assume Allegedly, in whatever iteration, is male, especially in this case, as it's hard for me to understand why a woman would advocate her own social disregard. Yes, many do, usually out of ignorance. Most abortion access obstructionists are male, and I've yet to be corrected by Allegedly.

Kim, I suspect most often it is a matter of defensive or lazy thinking; obstructionists seldom are willing to openly admit they regard women as walking incubators, but this is either through a dismissal (e.g. she squatted on a cock and hence sewed the seeds she reaped‡) or through avoidance of the topic by focusing on the rights of the unborn and avoiding the topic of the mother altogether. Indeed, Allegedly in all his accusations of intent to murder and of neglect of responsibility he's yet to admit outright that the rights of a woman to her own life and body are superceded by the rights of a fetus. Indeed, I've been waiting for him to cross that very line.

Granted, there are plenty of institutions that have misogyny built right into their mission statements (the Church of LDS and the Southern Baptist Convention are big ones in the US), which allows parishioners to reframe their own issues as loyalty to their faith. Dissolution of responsibility allows these institutions to be more bold in their displays of animosity, and once again, this is why human rights fronts tend to be furthered in the courts and not through referenda.

As I've stated plenty of places elsewhere, the first order when addressing abortion access (even before the personhood question arrises) is the sovereignty problem. Women own themselves, and to take that away leads to some dark human rights implications (some of which I suggested above). I think the courts know this, which is why they're not in any hurry to overturn Roe, even in the face of squicky issues such as abortion addiction (it happens!) and gender selection. Heck, suggesting that a woman's duty is to her womb is one morality skip from allowing the rich to harvest clones of themselves for transplant material. Wheee!

The Max's idea is one I've been advocating all this time, though I referred to the more general ectogenesis, since, fully developed (a clean, low-risk, low-invasive transfer procedure and vats available to all who want them), it would eliminate the sovereignty problem entirely. And venomlash, while I do think there will be a short baby boom (smaller than the WWII boom), it will be short lived as we narrow eligible candidates (to probable viability) and increase access to contraception to compensate.

‡ It's disturbing how often this comes up, completely failing to acknowledged that a) women are sometimes raped or otherwise coerced into sex, b) contraception isn't 100% effective ever, and c) it is good, proper and healthy for an adult woman to be sexually active even if she doesn't intend to procreate; unwanted pregnancy is not a punishment for sex.