So-called “mainstream” anti-abortion activists have taken pains to distance themselves from the murder of Kansas Dr. George Tiller, assassinated outside his church yesterday morning. The suspect, Scott Roeder, was a member of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, whose leader, Troy Newman, issued a statement declaring himself “shocked” at Dr. Tiller’s murder yesterday. (The group’s former leader, Randall Terry, used the occasion to again call Tiller a “murderer” killed because he violated the “Law of God.”) Newman added that the group “has worked for years through peaceful, legal means, and through the proper channels to see [Tiller] brought to justice. We denounce vigilantism and the cowardly act that took place this morning.” Meanwhile, officials called the murder “the act of an isolated individual,” and President Obama said in a statement, “However profound our differences as Americans over difficult issues such as abortion, they cannot be resolved by heinous acts of violence.”
The problem with statements like Obama’s is that they presume each side is equally responsible for the contentiousness of the abortion “debate”—that the belief that women have a right to take part in a legal medical procedure without threats and intimidation is somehow equivalent to the belief that women should be forced to carry every child to term, even if it kills them. Or, put another way, that supporting judges and elected officials who are pro-choice is the moral equivalent of standing outside a clinic and screaming at every woman who enters. Killing doctors is only the logical conclusion of a movement whose primary currency is intimidation. No other activist movement in this nation relies so heavily on the implicit threat of physical violence to get its way. And if you believe, as anti-abortion extremists do, that abortion is “murder,” then murdering in retaliation makes perfect sense. An eye for an eye.
Those of us who are pro-choice—and I include in that group all shades of pro-choicers, from those who believe abortion is morally fraught to those who support the liberalization of abortion laws— will never find “common ground” with those who are anti-choice, because there is no common ground. On one side, we have those who want to protect women’s right to obtain a legal medical procedure; on the other, we have those who think abortion is murder and will use any means necessary to prevent women from obtaining one (even while they fight against measures, like accurate sex education and emergency contraception, that would make abortion less common). On one side, we have those who believe in women’s right to determine their own destiny; on the other, we have those who believe women should cede control of our bodies to the state. On one side, we have those who attempt to protect women’s access to abortion by supporting pro-choice judges and elected officials; on the other, we have those who use violence and the threat of violence to intimidate women and abortion providers. Tell me, where is the common ground between those two groups?
So no, President Obama, those who believe in a woman’s right to choose should not “open our hearts and minds to those who may not think like we do.” Because “common ground,” in this case, is code for ceding away our rights— women’s rights—in the interest of calming a storm we didn’t create. And because you don’t negotiate with terrorists—whether they’re threatening doctors or taking hostages.
Obama declared himself “shocked” by Tiller’s murder. But why? Tiller had been shot before. For years, he had worn a bullet-proof vest, driven an armored car, and protected himself with security guards. As Jill Filipovic notes, anti-abortion activists had harassed his patients, bombed his clinic, and published his address and the addresses of everyone who did business with him. So why should anyone profess surprise when one took those actions to their logical conclusion?
Tiller provided abortions past 21 weeks, to women whose pregnancies had gone tragically, life-threateningly wrong. They were women, as Lynn Paltrow notes, with wanted pregnancies “who learned that their baby had no brain, or kidneys growing on the outside of their bodies or things their doctors described to them as ‘severe fetal cardiac malformations.'” They were rape victims as young as 10 or 11, some of them too young to even realize they had had periods. For these women and girls, Tiller was a godsend. His death leaves the US with just two doctors willing to perform late-term therapeutic abortions—and a medical community in which providing late-term abortions will be seen, rightly, as increasingly dangerous. And who can blame them? Terrorism works. Its means is intimidation—don’t go into the clinic or you’ll be harassed and threatened, don’t provide abortions or we’ll harass your family, don’t provide late-term abortions or you’ll be killed. In the battle to eliminate women’s right to abortion, the terrorists are—undeniably—winning.
Washington State pro-choice groups are holding a candlelight vigil in Cal Anderson Park, 635 11th Ave, at 6:00 tonight. NARAL Pro-Choice Washington is Twittering updates here.
Great post, Erica, and I completely agree with you. The pre-lifers (I refuse to call them pro-life, they’re only interested in the pre-life – in controlling women’s fertility) will not be happy until they can make sure that women are afraid to have sex again.
@21 for the win.
My nieces’ mom miscarried before she had the twins, and that was very hard on my brother and her.
Interestingly enough, it’s mostly people who say they are anti-choice who end up using clinic services for abortions.
@50 when it comes to my body you have no choice. There is no “common ground” there. It is my fucking body. Not yours. That’s all there is to it.
You either let me take care of myself as I need to or you restrict my freedoms and take away my power.
When it comes to my body there is no common ground. There is my body. There is my choice. There is your choice to stay out of my body and mind your own goddamned business. That’s fine. You can do that. And if you call that “common ground,” then fine, call it “common ground.” But you still have no say in what I do with my body.
I think it’s time to go down to OPERATION RESCUE and pump some bullets into their brains. Maybe after that pro-choicers while have common ground with the anti-choicers.
@53: And that is the bottom line. The decision to terminate a pregnancy belongs to the pregnant woman. No person, nor any governmental entity, has the right to interfere with this very personal decision.
As long as the pro-life crowd accepts that fact, we can work toward common ground in whatever other area they want.
@ 41;
you know what; the bilble clearly defines life as BREATHING (right from genesis untill revelations), so those bible thumpers should shut the f*ck up already and alowe abortion even right up till the delivery or better yet until that slap on the arse because acording to GOD you are only alive when he has given you the gift of breathing.
but then again those christians made selective reading almost an offical sport
Not only that, but Thomas Aquinas says that the soul doesn’t enter the body until the second or third trimester anyway, so a zygote, etc, isn’t really human. Did someone shoot Aquinas?
@53,
The common ground is, if they’re really interested in reducing the number of abortions, fine. The decision to have an abortion is never made lightly and nearly always involves great personal hardship of one kind or another. So, let’s reduce the circumstances that lead to that hardship. Let’s make birth control and sex ed widely available so girls don’t get pregnant in the first place. Let’s focus on women’s health. There are lots of ways we can reduce the number of abortions without taking anyone’s rights away, and if pro-lifers are really serious about that, they’ll work with us on this common ground.
ECB makes a great point. Are there any pro-choice groups out there thinking about blowing the national headquarters of Operation Rescue up to smithereens?
@55 how is that common ground? That’s the point. That is not a common ground. As soon as they say that it is okay for me to do what I want with my body than they have left their ground and joined mine. As soon as they say “okay, let’s take the government out of this and let woman do what is necessary for their lives with their own bodies and stay out of it” then all that they have done is joined the “pro-choice” ground, not created a common ground. That is the point. What common ground is there in that? If they accept that it is my body and stay out of my business and stop trying to place restrictions on my ability to take care of my body, then the argument is over … that is not common ground, that is pro-choice ground. I am all for that … but there is no in between.
You either leave my body alone and let me take care of myself as I see fit or your prohibit me from doing so and there is nothing in between those two things.
@58 I agree that is an idealized version of reality. I would prefer there just be less unwanted pregnancies in this world. Far more often teenage pregnancies result in unwanted children rather than abortions and that is appalling to me. However, the majority of anti-choice extremists are also anti-birth control.
I am not saying that we should just willy-nilly forget about sex ed and let all problems be solved with abortion, good god no.
I am saying that it is my body and what I do with my body and to take care of myself and my life is my business. And there is no “common ground” there.
Increasing sex ed is a different issue if you ask me. It has to be done. Sex education should be taught in all schools starting younger than a lot of people would be comfortable with and birth control should be easier to obtain, etc.
But that is not the issue at hand. The issue is whether or not someone is going to tell me how to take care of my body. There is no common ground there. That’s just the way that it is. That is the point.
It is my body.
Stay out of it.
If you want to focus on less pregnancies, than please, by all means, do that, but don’t make it about “anti-choice” or as a means of justifying restrictions on my body and medical choices as an informed adult.
You either allow me to take care of my body or you prohibit me from doing so. There is no in between.
@60 – Who are you arguing with exactly? The phrase “common ground” comes from a speech Obama gave at Notre Dame; relevant excerpt:
What do you disagree with there?
53
When you have an abortion it is not “your body” that the abortionist grinds up and rips apart. It is the body of another human being. You CHOSE to use your body to make that person but once you’ve made that CHOICE you can’t unmake it. When you have an abortion you are KILLING that separate human being to avoid the responsibilities you freely incurred when you made the CHOICE to engage in behavior that resulted in the pregnancy.
If you wish to hire an abortionist to rip YOUR BODY to shreds and dump the scraps in the trash we will not complain.
When you instead do that to an innocent helpless baby the rest of humanity has a moral obligation to weigh in.
Why is it you use the term anti-choice, but I am sure get offended by being called pro-abortion? I am Pro-life, I believe, as a woman, that the choice comes with chosing to have sex. I do not condone the murder of the Dr. Not at all. However I also do not condone the murder of an unborn child. The choice of a woman comes when she choses to have sex. I realize some women are raped, in that instance if she choses an abortion fine. If her life is going to put in danger by haveing the child, again abortion fine. My problem is when women use abortion as means of birth control. Women who have abortions for any reason other than rape or her life being in danger is a selfish person who is apparently uncapable of keeping her legs closed and being responsible.
i agree that there’s no common ground for the extremists on both sides, but there are plenty of people in the middle or people only a little one way or the other. behaving like there is no common ground alienates these people and forces them into a group they might really agree with all that strongly.
To be frank, what horrifies me most about this incident is the response by the Pro-Life community. The Pro-Life community says stuff like, “We have fought for years through legal to bring people like Dr. Tiller to justice, and killing Dr. Tiller wasn’t legal,” but there is no moral outrage, no true horror that this man was killed. I shouldn’t be surprised by this, and my mother has been warning me about it for years, but it never really sunk in before today.
The fact is, Dr. Tiller’s murder is not inconsistent with the general Pro-Life viewpoint. On this very site, I have seen Pro-Lifers put Pro-Choicers on the same level as slave owners and the Nazis who were responsible for Holocaust. And how many people would be horrified, TRULY horrified if they heard that a slave owner was killed in the effort to free his or her slaves, or that a Nazi was killed to save the Jews? Very, very few.
To Pro-Lifer individuals, Pro-Choice individuals are baby killers. Would we, people who support the right to abortion, mourn if we heard that a doctor who had drowned 100 toddlers had been shot on his way to drown more toddlers? I think that, on the whole, we would not.
Erica is right. There is no common ground. To the Pro-Life community, we are Nazis, slave owners, and baby killers. Why are we surprised when some of them take it to the next logical step and kill us?
I posted @2 above that I agreed with everything Erica said. But I went back and read her post again, and she said one thing I do not agree with.
They’re not winning, Erica. They’re losing, and they’re getting desperate enough to gun down a doctor in cold blood in his church. Whatever power they have is slipping away from them, and they can sense it.
I agree with the rest of this post, though.
@44: Sorry if I was unclear (and for misspelling “scientists”, arrrgh). I agree with you and Erica. And I think Erica wrote a great post. I especially liked the “you don’t negotiate with terrorists” line.
My feelings on abortion and Fundies can be summed up HERE and HERE.
66
If Osama were murdered in cold blood how would you feel?
@70
My point exactly. How can we have any common ground when you view me as the moral equivalent of Osama bin Laden? How can we work together for anything when I know both that you view me as equal to Osama bin Laden and what you would do to Osama bin Laden if you had the chance?
71
What common ground would you find with someone who advocated re-instituting slavery?
What common ground would you find with someone who advocated gassing Jews in camps?
I agree almost 100%. My only quibble is with language. You said repeatedly our side supports women “receiving a legal medical procedure.” But what if it was illegal? You’d still support it, and you’d be right to. If any asswipe troll here wants to say to my face “I value the life of a lump of anencephalic tissue over the life of a full-grown woman with thoughts and dreams,” I will do it to you proppa. Eat shit and die, homeys.
@72
. . . That’s my point. I’m not understanding why both you and 70 are repeating it. Am I somehow not being clear that what you are saying is what I’m saying?
You view me as someone who would re-institute slavery. You view me as someone who is advocating gassing the Jews in camps. What would you do to those people?
I’ll tell you what many people would do. They would support the killing of such people. They might even support such people being tortured to death. “A clean, painless death is too good for such people!” such people would cry.
What does that say about what you would do to me?
I cannot work with Nazis, and I cannot work with people who advocate for slavery. Why, then, would I expect that you could work with me? If you view me as a Nazi, if you view me as a slaver, than I need to stop pretending that you can work with me and need to start recognizing that you probably wish me bodily harm. Even if you wouldn’t kill me yourself, even if you wouldn’t torture me yourself, neither would you defend me, just as you do not defend Dr. Tiller. I need to remember that.
There is a lot of food for thought here. I appreciate reading everyone’s comments, including the unregistered. This is an incredibly complex and gray issue. People want to make it simple, and it isn’t. Not one of us can really understand what it means to walk in another’s shoes. I don’t think I could have an abortion for any reason, but my conscience will not allow me to make that decision for another woman. So, I will remain a Pro-choice Christian. And, hope that we can reduce the need to perform abortions, by providing better comprehensive sex education, reliable and affordable birth control, increased access to maternal and pediatric health care, maternity leave, and an increase in the minimum wage. Perhaps, then we can lessen the need for abortions, be removing some of the reasons why women need to seek them in the first place. Abortions must be kept safe and legal, making it ilegal will not prevent them, it will just result in the death of many women.
What kim in portland said. Agreed. Except that I don’t believe in god or the soul. But, y’know, morals don’t come from God. They come from the part of a human mind that wants to nurture and support other humans – from reasoned compassion. My morals and kim’s morals agree well with the majority of western civilization. Fundies need to get with the times. We’re not interested in living in blood-drenched caves anymore.
Lorran @ 66 – that is slanderous and false.
“To be frank, what horrifies me most about this incident is the response by the Pro-Life community…there is no moral outrage, no true horror that this man was killed.”
“From the Kansas Catholic bishops:
We, the four Catholic bishops of the dioceses of Kansas, unequivocally condemn the murder of Dr. George Tiller that occurred in Wichita earlier today. The Catholic Church believes that every human life is sacred. The murder of a human being is the gravest of crimes and is an intrinsic evil. Such an act of violence against human life is a contradiction of the most fundamental principle of the pro-life movement. The fact that this attack occurred in a church, a place of prayer and worship, only adds to the horror of this terrible crime. “
there are more:
http://www.ncregister.com/daily/pro-life…
@77
That there is the first, and absolutely the first, condemnation I’ve seen of Dr. Tiller’s murder for it’s own sake. Sadly, it’s a condemnation that someone had to bring to me as proof that not all Pro-Lifers are reacting one way (and I acknowledge if you take a large group of people, you’ll never get them to interact all the same way) rather than one that is being displayed by the Pro-Life community as a whole. Tell me, in this thread of comments, how many Pro-Lifers have you seen who condemn his murder? Now compare that to the number of people who are saying that he, and the Pro-Choice community, are morally bankrupt Nazis and Slavers.
All I have to go on is what I’ve seen, and the people I’ve interacted with. This has been a severe blow to me, as people who I thought at least at respect for me as a human being cannot find it in their hearts to say this was terrible because Dr. Tiller shouldn’t have died. Instead, I’m hearing about how terrible it is because it was against the law or how it will set back the Pro-Life position.
I will look at the website you quoted to me, but honestly, these are prepared quotations being put forth by a very large organization that has to deal with PR. I’m not sure that it can overcome the spontaneous declarations of every day people.
How am I supposed to process every day people declaring that this doctor shouldn’t have been killed . . . but they understand why he was, and think they brought it on himself? Or the people who say he deserved it? Or that they hope he suffered?
Tell me, please. Because I don’t know. I expected there to be a certain number of people who were stupid about his death. But I find that the overwhelming majority of the response from Pro-Lifers is not to condemn his death, and that has thrown me.
I’m curious, at what trimester does it become acceptable for an anti-abortion whackjob to murder somebody? Apparently trimesters 1-3 are out, but in trimester 268, fire at will!
I guess the justification for murdering the guy in his 268th trimester is that he is a murderer, so it’s ok to kill him. But. . . occasionally somebody who’s only in, say, their 48th trimester will up and kill some innocent person. Shall we go ahead and shoot them as well? Or is that still too early in life?
I just wonder where the line is.
36 Julie, I’m really impressed in a nice way by your comment, the abortion debate is one that truly can be understood in more than one possible way. People who take the life of those in the womb for granted so carelessly are just as bad as those who take it for granted once they are fully developed humans as the murderer of Mr Tiller did.
@62 sorry, my argument is that I don’t want abortion to be an issue within this supposed “common ground.” I think that abortion should be a decision left to individuals to make privately with their physicians, as any medical procedure would be.
My argument is that increasing sex education and making birth control more readily available does not and should not, ever, effect my right to choose what happens to my body. I agree that those things must happen. That it is essential that we increase the sex education of children as young as 12 years old in order to prevent unwanted pregnancies and babies.
I do not agree that things should have any bearing on abortion, it’s legality, or that any common ground can be had on that particular subject. Abortion.
@63 and @64
It might surprise you to learn that I have never been pregnant so have, therefore never had an abortion. I was properly educated in sex ed, because my parents were not blind to the fact that teenagers have sex. I am not trying to justify a behavior of my own.
Also, newsflash, a fetus is not a human being as one does not come into “being” until it has existed outside of the womb.
I am not pro-abortion, and I am sorry that you choose to feel that way. My stance is that it is none of yours or mine or the governments or the church’s damn business if a woman chooses to have an abortion.
And you are anti-choice. You basically just said that carrying out an unwanted pregnancy is a woman’s punishment for making the adult, perfectly human choice to have sex. How is aborting the product of that choice any different than disposing of the condom afterward? Or having your period every month? The same DNA that you are so interested in forcing into existence is being thrown away, so how is that any different? Because instead of throwing away two baggies you are throwing away one big one?
I am not saying that abortion is an easy decision or one to be taken lightly, I am saying that it is none of your business and that you have no right to place those kinds of value judgments on someone for making an informed, adult decision to take care of their own body and life as they see fit.
And I am sorry, but if you can so easily dismiss that “child” that you are going on and on about being such a precious life based on the way that it was conceived, than can you really consider yourself anti-abortion? Why is it so easy for you to place such a value judgment that makes it okay to “kill” something that two sentence earlier you referred to as a “child”? That’s pretty fucked up if you ask me. I know people that were conceived by rape, is it okay to kill them now? I mean, if their conception makes it so easy to dismiss them and all.
YOu are a stupid moron. I am saying that the effects of having a child born of rape can be and often times are psychological and horrible on a woman. You would never, no matter why find me haveing one. But, if like my mother you are haveing one because you have 2 small children and if have this third baby you will die, I can understand that. A fetus is a child, a human life. And abortion is not a difficult dicision for all women. There are many many women out there you use abortion as birth control. That is totally wrong. And for everyone who thinks that if abortion was illegal women would be dying from back ally aborotions, the “safe legal” on my mom had almost killed here. She lost so much blood and got the worst infection the ER dr. had seen in his 25 years practicing. They gave her the strongest antibiotic they had, and still were not sure if she would live. YOU ARE pro-abortion, I am not Anti-choice, I am anti-abortion. And I am sorry if a woman gets pregnant and does not want the baby, but the father of that baby does, she should have to have the baby. It would not kill her to take care of her body for nine months, have the baby, give it to his or her dad then mommy can go back to being an immoral whore.
I agree with Erica that there is no common ground. However, on the increasingly rare occasion I talk to someone who claims to be pro-life, I ask them what they really believe. Turns out every one I’ve talked to (obviously not in militias) is a conservative pro-choicer. They believe it’s morally wrong to have an abortion, and would never have one, and would try to convince their friends/family not to, but don’t actually take it the extreme step of legislating their personal morality.
My mother, who is a conservative Christian actually used those words in a recent conversation: legislating morality. And my aunt, same religion, doesn’t want to go back to the days of hangers and back-alley abortions. The difference here is that they are old enough to remember pre-Roe. And they are logical enough to understand that abortions happen, whether they personally like them or not.
This “common ground” conversation is really just semantics. I can convince someone we have more in common than we do, if I’m trying to make persuade them or work with them or something. It’s just a selling point. Ultimately it’s either my business only what I do with my body, or it’s the government’s. There’s always, at the end of the fake talk of getting along, a line drawn in the sand.
@83 The point is that it is none of your damned business if a woman uses abortion as a means of birth control. The point is that you yourself just admitted “that the effects of having a child born of rape can be and often times are psychological and horrible on a woman” and guess what, the same fucking argument goes for ANY woman having a baby conceived under ANY circumstances, just like a woman who gets pregnant because of rape can go on to have and love that baby and allow it to grow into a happy, healthy, well rounded human being.
You are placing value judgments, creating circumstances under which you could possibly “forgive someone” for having an abortion. If you were truly “pro-life” than why would you care how the baby was conceived? And on the other hand if you truly believe that the life and psychology of the mother outweighs the potential life she is carrying than how can you be anti-choice? Pregnancy does not only have negative psychological effects on rape victims, dumbass.
And, hello, woman die in labor too, and have infections and miscarry and so many other things.
And I would NEVER tell you that you have to have an abortion. I would NEVER force my belief on you. I would ALLOW you to have the choice whether or not you wanted to go through with your pregnancy. All I ask is that you acknowledge that it is MY choice to make for myself and not yours. You don’t have to agree with it to allow someone else the opportunity to make their own informed decision, to mind your own damned business about it and to keep the government out of it.
And just because an abortion seems easy to a lot of woman out there does not mean all woman are like that. Because if you ask me there are a lot more woman out there who don’t seem to mind filling this world with unwanted, resented, uncared for, state-funded children that just grow up to repeat the cycles of their irresponsible parents.
ECB thinks that there are only two groups: “those who want to protect women’s right to obtain a legal medical procedure”, and “those who think abortion is murder and will use any means necessary to prevent women from obtaining one.” According to ECB, every single person is either in one group or the other, apparently. If that were true, her argument that there is no common ground might make sense. But this is obviously a false dichotomy.
In fact, it is so painfully obvious that there are lots and lots of people whose views on abortion fit in neither of these groups, that the question on my mind is: “How can a person as intelligent as ECB be making this mistake again and again?” She has a lot of experience covering politics. I’ve read her stuff. I know her (a little). She’s not dumb. Not at all. So what’s the explanation? How could an intelligent person who knows politics think that every person is either in favor of unlimited abortion rights or wants to murder abortion doctors?
@13:
Yes.Just like you make a choice every single day to drive your car. You try to be as careful as possible to avoid collision, but you know that by driving, probably every single day, that you will get into an accident. You don’t want an accident, but no matter how careful you are, it can happen.
And so because you made the choice to drive, the CHOICE, I will deny you medical attention when you get into a crash. Sorry, that is just my religious belief.
Same goes for the fatties that are diabetic. You made the choice to be diabetic, so yeah, no medicine for you. It was your choice, and even if there is medical help available for you, I am going to say fuck off.
No offense though. (also, I will picket in front of hospitals that give you treatment, or doctors that provide you care)
Your choice = suffer always. (did I get that right, religious nutbags?)
87
Who said anything about religious beliefs?
The bigots on Slog are so anti-religion that anyone who disagrees with them must be a ‘religious nutbag’?
Open your mind.
Your analogy misses.
Let’s fix it:
You drive around in your car;
you speed on pedestrian filled crowded streets;
you drive while drunk;
you know your brakes are shot.
“Surprisingly” you have an “accident” and kill someone-
a small child playing in their yard minding their own business.
Full of hopes and dreams and waiting to grow up and get their turn at life.
oops.
Erica.
Your ignorance never ceases to amaze.
You will know that people are “use(ing) any means necessary to prevent women from obtaining one” when you have a story like this every week to report.
@64,
I agree that using abortion as a form of birth control is wrong on many levels. However, that implies that someone is not using birth control, just thinking “oh well, I can always get an abortion if I get pregnant.” This could be one of several situations
1. The situation you are implying where someone is being extremely irresponsible
2. A situation where there is no access to contraceptives and the state provides abortion as a form of birth control (the previous situation in ex-communist countries in Europe)
3. A situation where the participants lack knowledge about contraception because of ignorance-only education.
However, it sounds like you are implying that any unwanted pregnancy that is not the result of a rape is the fault of a woman who can’t keep her legs closed. First of all, why should all the responsibility be on the woman? It seems it is also the fault of some man who can’t keep his pants zipped. Also, unfortunately there are condoms that slip off, pills that are thrown up or counteracted by other medication, etc. etc. So just because there is an unwanted pregnancy does not mean that there has been irresponsible behavior.
Personally, I think someone who faces an unwanted pregnancy should seriously consider all the options before having an abortion. But I would not want to take that right away from someone who has considered the options and decided abortion is the lesser of evils.
I love how the anti-abortion crowd seems to think that only irresponsible whores have unwanted pregnancies. I have had two married friends get pregnant unintentionally — both using birth control at the time. The first had some sort of pharmaceutical interaction that the pharmacist didn’t advise on, and the second was just one of the 2% with correct usage failure statistics.
@91: 2%? Unlikely! I bet your friend was driving her vagina (drunk … on SPERM!) on a street crowded with cocks. She probably slapped little children while having her abortion.
Incidentally, the one unwanted pregnancy I know of was my own married mother’s. She was already forty-one (so her fertility was not at its peak), was on birth control, and as far as I know, used condoms with my father (and I know because she used to casually toss jumbo value packs of Trojans into the cart at Costco, while I coiled back in horror). She ended up having my second brother, though at the time I told her explicitly I’d support her if she decided to abort.
Any replies, please try not to accuse my mother of being a cheating whore. Thanks.
@92 how come when his friend gets pregnant she’s a cheating whore, but when your mom does you ask us not to call your mother a cheating whore?
what was the point of your comment anyway?
Referring to my own @93 — sorry Julie in Eugene that should have read “how come when HER friend gets pregnant…”
@93: Well, I think the first part of my comment was sarcastic. Maybe the part where I say “2%? Unlikely!” was too subtly ironic, but I firmly piled it on with the rest of that first paragraph.
I was trying to point out with my comment — like Julie in Eugene’s — that unwanted pregnancies happen to women who are monogamous, even married, and are practising safe sex, and yet according to the beliefs of many anti-choice activists, she would be automatically be a “cheating whore.” Or that an unwanted pregnancy surely could not be the product of a loving marriage, but only a secret affair.
I guess that’s what happens you try to inject humour, even sarcasm, in an abortion discussion. Mea culpa.
@95 Haha, I guess that is why I was so confused … but then I read your posts on another thread and realized you must have been being sarcastic. Damn this interweb and it’s inability to read sarcasm!!!!
Great point though 🙂
@96: Ok, good. No problem; I gotta work on my delivery, is all 😛
“And I am sorry if a woman gets pregnant and does not want the baby, but the father of that baby does, she should have to have the baby. It would not kill her to take care of her body for nine months, have the baby, give it to his or her dad then mommy can go back to being an immoral whore.”
There, you reveal your real arguement. You want to punish women for having sex, not protect zygotes.
I was trying to think of something to say… but, I’m a Man. I do not have the ability to give birth. This is a woman’s own private issue. It is her body.
With this latest murder, Religion continues to maintain its grasp on violence throughout the world. “In the name of God” has killed more people than anything.
Wake up. Religion is what needs to be stopped.
Who cares about the “morality” of a woman who has an abortion? So what if she is married or a “lose whore”? (Arguing that “immoral” women should be forced to have abortions is more logical, but still wrong). It is not the place of anyone to define when a human life form becomes a person within the body of another and under what circumstances a woman’s body can be used for the life or well being of another. As for making compromises on the issue; so what the hell are those calling for compromises going to give up? Their right to have multiple children in a very crowded world with a dwindling water supply? Who are they to say having an abortion is more immoral than over breeding? And as for “father’s rights”, what a load of crap. One person being able to have their own biological offspring is not worth another having ten minutes of menstrual cramps, let alone enduring pregnancy or birth. Men have no comparable interest and those who can’t respect that should not even look at women.