everything but the girl

I think McCain had a lot of fantastic points that are being completely overlooked due to Obama's "hero" status. It's rather sad how the country is hero-worshiping this guy who has done nothing to deserve it other than give a few pretty speeches about how he's the best person in the country to be president and knows better than everyone else.

That being said and most bias against Obama aside, the way I took the air quotes is to mean that the majority of women do not have abortions because of their health - they do it as a form of birth control, yet it's still referred to as "women's health". It isn't women's health anymore, it's the health of the baby and the total rejection of the child's right to life without any valid and reasonable justification for it other than "I didn't feel like having/can't afford to have a kid right now".

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Um, that's why it's necessary to have adequate sex education and access to contraception. It doesn't make it OK to restrict abortion just because it doesn't fit personal principles.

So, so do not agree with you on this. I'm a Brit, but I cannot believe McCain would be so very very stupid. And as much as I disapprove of a lot of reasons for abortion, it's just as awful to condemn a woman to a life she doesn't want just because she was more than slightly stupid. Sorry,

heidi8 I just had to say my bit.

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I never said that access to contraceptives and sex education were evil; on the contrary, I highly agree with you there. But I also believe that it shouldn't be solely up to the schools to provide this either - it's the parents' responsibility to raise their children, not the school's.

In regards to it being okay to restrict abortion just because it doesn't fit "personal principles", I think you'll find that with a lot of pro-lifers, it has absolutely nothing to do with "personal principles" and everything to do with the baby's right to life. Even if it's "only" a fetus at that point, it is still a human being, and the mother had the right to choose whether or not to keep her legs shut (cases of rape notwithstanding, clearly).

It's just awful to condemn a baby to no life at all just because it had the misfortune of being conceived by a careless and selfish woman who isn't willing to face her own responsibilities and face the consequences of her actions. No one is forcing the mother to keep the child - adoption is always an option, and that child has the right to life, even if it might start off rocky. Weighing the effects of nine months of pregnancy in a healthy woman versus the baby's chance at an entire lifetime - sorry, the baby wins.

Life isn't fair, and people are "forced" into situations they don't want to be in all the time. That doesn't justify murder.

Anyway, you're not going to change my mind and I doubt I'm going to change yours, so let's agree to disagree, yeah?

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I can live with that. The kind of abortion that really distresses me is if a mother is told that there is a possibility of having a child with a level of disability and then they immediately decide to abort. I have a disability and it really upsets me when a woman dismisses the possibility that raising a child with a disability without even thinking about it. And the adoption thing makes me nod my head as a woman who cannot conceive herself.

I find it fascinating that the abortion issue is so much higher up the agenda in the States than over here. Even if we disagree, it's still a good thing to hear each others' opinions, yes ?

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Agreed! Hearing others' opinions is always a good thing. :)

That is especially upsetting, I agree. For me, personally, the touchy issue comes up with my mother having been told to abort me by her doctors for her health. They were right - I could have killed her - but the real issue for me is the fact that I was born in the second trimester, at the same place in development where some babies are aborted.

Also, my brothers are adopted, so I've seen the benefits of that as well. I just honestly cannot comprehend why any human being would do something so heinous as aborting an innocent child for no reason other than 'I don't want to deal with it right now'. It's very frustrating for me and saddens me greatly to hear excuses like that, along with 'I don't want to be a mother'. I can completely understand aborting for health issues and in cases of rape, though I would never personally do that myself. It's when abortion is used as a means of birth control that I'm really concerned with.

Anyway, thank you for the civil discussion! :) Usually this sort of thing degenerates so quickly into mud-slinging when both parties are completely unmovable that there really isn't a point to it.

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I really sympathize with your feelings here.

Out of curiosity, at what point do you think the fetus (scientists, pardon me: I don't know the right terms for each stage of development) becomes a person?

I think that a lot of people who support abortion rights would agree that when a child is old enough to survive outside the womb, it ought not be aborted (or only be aborted in extreme and rare cases). But it sounds like perhaps you believe that human life begins before that...? I don't want to put words in your mouth.

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I believe that while life begins at conception, a zygote (which I believe is the technical term?) becomes a "future baby" (for lack of a better phrase) at the point where it attaches to the uterus and becomes dependent on the mother in that sense. Sort of strange and a little confusing, but to add onto that, I am moderately okay with the Plan B pill and think that every woman should have access to it. I see that as a pregnancy preventative rather than an abortion aid.

On that note, going off of what you mentioned with a fetus surviving outside the womb, I believe that a mother who is no longer able to carry her child at that point (for health reasons or otherwise) should give birth to that child rather than abort it. Even though the risks are high at that point, some (like me) do beat the odds, and even if they don't, a disabled life is still better than no life at all.

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I'm glad you were willing to talk about it too. I think there's a lot more common ground here than either of us could ever realise.

I think over here in the UK, there was a terrible time in our social history where young women weren't given a choice about whether they could keep a child if they became pregnant outside of marriage. The child was just taken. Then we have gone the other way and now a person gets given a load of money if she is a single mother and there is nothing then done if she goes on to have a second child with no visible means of support.

You see, both countries, all countries need to talk about how we handle the way we treat women who have an unwanted or unplanned pregnancy. Talking to you helps me think about those things differently. Thank you too.

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and the mother had the right to choose whether or not to keep her legs shut

I'm sorry, but I just want to point out that you might not want to use that kind of phrasing. On the one hand, I understand that you feel very passionate about this issue, but to me it reads like "slut-shaming" and I have a very strong reaction to that.

I realize that this all comes down to a question of when a fetus counts as human - at what point a fetus is in fact a life. I also realize that, if I believed a fetus was a human being at an earlier stage than I do, I would be vastly angry at the possibility that abortion would be legal - because I would see it as equivalent to murder. I am not trying to say that you shouldn't feel emotional about this issue.

Nevertheless, when you use phrases like "had a choice to keep her legs shut," it makes me think that you aren't just angry about women choosing to abort, you're actually angry at women for having sex in the first place - and that makes it easier to dismiss your arguments as rooted in fear of and anger at female sexuality.

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sundancekid.livejournal.com

ILU.

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No anger behind it, promise. I'm a woman myself and have no issues with sex between responsible parties. It's when it's done irresponsibly and an innocent child has to pay the price with its life that makes me angry, not the topic of sex itself.

It's very easy to dismiss another person's point of view when it disagrees with your own and to interpret phrasing to mean what you'd like it to mean instead of what the writer intended for it to mean. "...keep her legs shut", for me, has no negative connotations. It's just another way of saying "have sex".

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Okay. I'm glad that you clarified.

Since neither I nor a lot of people who will presumably read your comment know you, it's hard to know the context in which you said it. I think that there's an equal burden on people who write things and people who read them to make their meaning clear. So that's why I responded to you - because I wanted to let you know how I understood your words - and I'm glad that you replied, because I think it might help other people know how you meant that.

(Phew, that was convoluted; does that make sense?)

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It makes sense, no worries! And thank you for your response as well. :) I can certainly see how it could be taken in a way I didn't intend it, though like I said, I certainly didn't mean it negatively. It's a phrase that's used rather heavily among my group of friends, mostly in a joking manner. I'll admit I'm pretty sure it stemmed from a line in a certain embarrassing 1997 band film.

But yes, I'm 22 and a strange conservative in the sense that I'm not religious at all, and like I said, zero problems with responsible sex. :)

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flourish.livejournal.com - Date: 2008-10-16 10:48 pm (UTC) - Expand

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blackink.livejournal.com - Date: 2008-10-16 10:51 pm (UTC) - Expand

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I don't think the comment about women keeping their legs shut was meant in that way.

I truly believe that if a wpman feels she wants to have sex, she has to be willing to deal with the possibility of pregnancy. No, it's an inequality but it's the way it is. The best way of preventing unplanned or unwanted pregnancy is not to have penetrative sex to begin with.

That's got nothing to do with attempting to inhibit sexuality. My mother did a good enough job of that all by herself.

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Right, we worked it out - but I did want to mention that I suspect other people are also reading it the way I initially did.

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Good. I like being able to learn about some of the reasons for the passionate nature of the abortion debate in the US, actually any way of understanding any American political issue by talking to people. LJ is good for that.

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belleweather.livejournal.com

Wow. That was such a well articulated way of making that point that you now officially win at the internet.

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Thank you! /takes a bow

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judyserenity.livejournal.com

Even if it's "only" a fetus at that point, it is still a human being

Is it? I certainly don't think an embryo (earlier than 3 months post-conception) is a human being. What's your grounds for saying that an embryo is a human being, other than religious beliefs about the soul that many other people don't share?

I think you'll find that with a lot of pro-lifers, it has absolutely nothing to do with "personal principles" and everything to do with the baby's right to life

The thing is, every right involves a corresponding responsibility. If I believe that everyone in the US has the right to health care (and I do), that means that someone must have the responsibility to provide health care (I believe that this responsibility belongs to the federal government and the taxpayers.)

When you say that a fetus has a "right to life," you are implying that the pregnant woman has a corresponding responsibility to give that fetus what it needs to survive. I don't agree with this, because in our society, it's generally assumed that people don't have an obligation or responsibility to let others use parts of our bodies, even if they would die without it.

If I need a bone marrow transplant, no one has the responsibility to give me their bone marrow, even if I would die without it. For that matter, if I needed a kidney and someone who had recently died was a good match, that person wouldn't have the responsibility to give me their kidney, even though they were dead and didn't need it any more. The laws of our land say that the corpse's right to bodily integrity outweighs my "right to life." Thousands of people die each year waiting for kidneys and other organs, while hundreds of thousands of perfectly good organs that could have saved them are cremated or buried. Why should a living, breathing person have less of a "right to life" than an embryo? And why should a living woman's desire for bodily integrity count for less than a corpse's?

I don't see why pregnant women should be seen as having more obligations than everyone else. In fact, I think the whole reason the abortion debate exists is because women are seen as having this huge obligation as a result of getting pregnant, while men are seen as having little or no obligation. If society would hold men responsible when they get women pregnant, far fewer women would feel that they needed an abortion. You refer to a "careless and selfish woman who isn't willing to face her own responsibilities and face the consequences of her actions." Why don't you (and other sin the pro-life movement) say anything about the man and his actions? Why is the responsibility purely the woman's?

At any rate, I don't think most women who want abortions got pregnant because they were "careless and selfish." I think most young women are under tremendous pressure from their boyfriends to have sex. The vast majority of young women want to be in a relationship and hope to marry someday. Most young men will not continue to date a woman who refuses to have intercourse. Because contraception is just not that reliable, this means many women are going to have to choose between a real probability of having an unwanted pregnancy before marriage, or never have a chance to marry at all.

As for adoption, I have been unable to have children, and have not had any luck in trying to adopt a young child -- there just aren't many available for adoption. But, I would never want another woman pressured into giving birth just so I could adopt. Giving a baby up for adoption is far, far more traumatic than having an abortion. Other women not incubators whose job it is to grow a baby for me.

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I'm going to do this point by point.

- The fact that when a zygote attaches itself to the uterine wall, outside of a miscarriage or abortion (potentially other factors), a baby will be born nine or so months later - that's what I base my belief of when life begins on. Also, for the record, as I've said previously, I am not in any way, shape, or form religious, nor does the concept of souls have anything to do with my thoughts on abortion. The concept of the right to life, however, has everything to do with it.

- When you say that a fetus has a "right to life," you are implying that the pregnant woman has a corresponding responsibility to give that fetus what it needs to survive. Absolutely. Or place the baby in responsible hands that will make sure that baby receives the care it should. Anything less would be selfish and irresponsible. She had sex; she (and the father, if he's in the picture) is obligated to deal with the consequences, not try to press an imaginary 'undo' button.

- I'm going to ignore the fact that you just compared a child to a kidney or bone marrow. When a kidney can learn to walk, talk, sing, dance, cure cancer, and lead a country, then we can have that conversation. Otherwise you're comparing two completely different things, and your argument lacks the validity necessary to be one worth addressing properly. If a woman conceive a child, it is her responsibility to carry that child to term. If a woman isn't willing to do that, she ought to get her tubes tied rather than make an innocent child pay the price for her selfishness. Huge difference between that and giving a stranger your bone marrow.

- And why should a living woman's desire for bodily integrity count for less than a corpse's? Because that woman chose to have sex and take the risk of conception. I'm guessing the corpse didn't choose to die, and neither did that woman's baby. If we were talking about a woman having to give up a kidney in order to give birth, then that would be one thing; but we're talking about nine months, not a life-changing organ donation. A child is not an organ; it does not belong to the woman as part of her body. It's an entirely different entity.

- I think the whole reason the abortion debate exists is because women are seen as having this huge obligation as a result of getting pregnant, while men are seen as having little or no obligation. No, the abortion debate exists because some people believe it's acceptable to kill growing life and others don't. There are other factors, of course, but in the end, it isn't the woman's life that's the one that's most affected. Like I said before as well, nine months of inconvenience for a healthy woman vs. an entire lifetime taken away from a child? Sorry, the baby wins.

- I fully believe men should be held accountable, and in our society, they are. If men had a larger say in whether or not their children were aborted (and Roe v. Wade shows that that isn't the case), they would be brought into the debate as well, but right now it's solely up to the woman, hence why the focus is on her. Even then, just because men sometimes suck doesn't give women the right to kill their children either. And yes, I do consider abortion to be murder, and no, nothing anyone says (short of a fetus giving its consent to be aborted) will change my mind.

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judyserenity.livejournal.com

I'm going to ignore the fact that you just compared a child to a kidney or bone marrow. When a kidney can learn to walk, talk, sing, dance, cure cancer, and lead a country, then we can have that conversation. Otherwise you're comparing two completely different thing

I'm NOT comparing a child (or a fetus, for that matter) to a kidney. I am comparing a fetus (or "unborn child," if you prefer) who will die without the use of a woman's womb to a child or other person who will die without a kidney transplant. You believe that the right to life outweighs all other rights, and that this gives a fetus the right to a woman's womb even if she doesn't want to be pregnant. But if the right to life outweighs all else, why doesn't someone who will die without a bone marrow or kidney transplant have the right to the use of, say, my bone marrow or your kidney? Why does a fetus have the right to the use of its mother's womb before it is born, but the exact same child, have NO right after birth to, say, a bone marrow donation from the father, if he's the only suitable donor? Why would that child, after he or she is born, have no right to even the kidney of a dead person who didn't need it anymore?

The fact that when a zygote attaches itself to the uterine wall, outside of a miscarriage or abortion (potentially other factors), a baby will be born nine or so months later - that's what I base my belief of when life begins on.

This is a very arbitrary definition of when life begins, but besides that, it really doesn't work well at all. A zygote can split and form multiple fetuses, which become identical twins (or even triplets or quintuplets, in some cases.) Also, some proportion of zygotes actually merge with another zygote in the womb and form a single baby, although it's not known how frequently this happens. So, it's not like one zygote = one baby, even assuming no abortion or miscarriage.

She had sex; she (and the father, if he's in the picture) is obligated to deal with the consequences, not try to press an imaginary 'undo' button.
If he's in the picture? Why should the father just be allowed to walk "out of the picture" and away from his responsibilities?

I fully believe men should be held accountable, and in our society, they are.
They are? As the daughter of a man who walked out on me, my sister, and my mother, I did not personally find that to be the case at all. Many absentee fathers pay nothing towards their children's care at all, and millions don't even send a birthday card to their kids. Men who are obligated to pay child support usually pay more in monthly car payments than they are required to send to their kids -- and even so, they are more likely to default on their child support than on their car payments. This is true even when the parents were married and both wanted the child, so men being kept out of the abortion decision has nothing to do with these cases.

Even then, just because men sometimes suck doesn't give women the right to kill their children either.
Again, you have completely missed my point, which is that is pro-lifers really wanted to reduce the number of abortions, they would be working hard to make sure that men took responsibility when they got a woman pregnant, so that fewer women would feel a need to get an abortion.

I believe that women in our society are put in an untenable position. They are under tremendous pressure to have sex, but if they get pregnant, there is little pressure on their boyfriends to marry them and support the baby. A young woman on her own is very unlikely to be able to both raise her child and support herself and her child. My belief is that this is why so many women have abortions.

If you really want to reduce the number of abortions, you should work to make men more responsible for the children they father and to make it easier for single mothers to raise their kids. Otherwise, even if somehow you could make abortion illegal, it would just mean that millions of women would have illegal abortions, which was the case at various times in the past (the 1930s and the 1960s, in particular.)

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- I think most young women are under tremendous pressure from their boyfriends to have sex. ... most young men will not continue to date a woman who refuses to have intercourse. That guy isn't worth dating or marrying in the first place then, and that's a self-esteem issue that has nothing to do with the baby.

- Because contraception is just not that reliable, this means many women are going to have to choose between a real probability of having an unwanted pregnancy before marriage, or never have a chance to marry at all. That logic is so faulty that I don't even know where to begin. These aren't the Dark Ages - an unwanted pregnancy doesn't mean banishment or being stoned to death, nor does it mean that woman will never be able to get married. Any bastard who makes a woman choose between unprotected sex or a relationship ought to be castrated. I don't know the circumstances around your own life, but if any boyfriend of mine tried to pressure me into something I wasn't ready to do by threatening to break up with me, he wouldn't have the chance, because he'd be flat on his ass on the curb in an instant with a set of very bruised balls.

Oh, and as far as contraception being unreliable goes? Completely untrue. A condom, when used correctly, has somewhere around a 97-99% chance of working (and even then, that 1-3% it doesn't work doesn't mean pregnancy; it means that the sperm escapes the condom, and the chances of pregnancy after that are slim - then, after that, there's Plan B, which I believe is damn near 100% effective). That doesn't sound like unreliable to me. That combined with birth control (same percentage, I believe, if not higher) means that an unwanted pregnancy with those preventative measures would be so incredibly unlikely that to say otherwise just sounds like ignorance. No offense meant, of course. But even a couple that is trying to get pregnant has something like only a 70% success rate in the first year. The numbers do not add up to "unreliable" at all.

- there just aren't many available for adoption Whoa, who's telling you that? There are thousands of children in the US alone that are in need of an adoptive family. And if you go into countries like China or Russia or Ethiopia, their orphanages are overrun with infants and young children. My brothers are adopted, as it happens, and I've done some research into it. The adoption process might be difficult, but it isn't because of too few babies.

- Giving a baby up for adoption is far, far more traumatic than having an abortion. Again, it's this sort of logic that baffles me. I've known women who've had abortions, and I've seen first-hand the tremendous, gut-wrenching guilt every single one of them went through afterward. One of my friends even attempted suicide because of it - not because she was pregnant, but because of the choice she made to have an abortion. That is also a factor in my pro-life belief, having seen what some women who are unprepared for what they will experience after an abortion go through. I'd imagine that guilt (not for all, of course, but I'd like to think that anyone with a heart would at least feel some amount of guilt for their actions) of having an abortion for her own selfish reasons is a hell of a lot worse than the mother who knows her child is out there somewhere being raised by a family that loves them.

- Other women not incubators whose job it is to grow a baby for me. No, it's their job, responsibility, and obligation as biological mothers to give birth for their child, not for you. It's fantastic that you want to adopt, and I applaud you fiercely for it, but when you get down to it, adoption isn't about you; it's about the child. And abortion isn't about the mother; it's about the baby, who has the most to lose because of it - again, nine months vs. their entire life and existence.

Anyway, again, like I said above, you're not going to change my mind and I'm fairly certain I'm not going to change yours, so this discussion is relatively pointless beyond this (and spamming Heidi's inbox is never nice). Thank you for your opinions and thank you for listening to mine. I'm going to bow out now.

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judyserenity.livejournal.com

I don't know the circumstances around your own life, but if any boyfriend of mine tried to pressure me into something I wasn't ready to do by threatening to break up with me, he wouldn't have the chance, because he'd be flat on his ass on the curb in an instant with a set of very bruised balls.

Well, here are my circumstances. This is the first time I have ever told anyone about this, other than my husband or a doctor or while in therapy.

I have a medical condition (vulvodynia) that sometimes makes intercourse extremely painful. I have had all sorts of treatments, including surgery, but they didn't work.

Presumably, most women want to have sex, so the issue of continually telling their boyfriends "no" probably only comes up if the woman is quite young (so the problem goes away as she gets older) or if she has a religious objection to sex before marriage (in which case she can look for a man with the same religious beliefs.) But because of my health problem, I didn't want to have sex even after I was well into my twenties, and even though I wasn't particularly religious at the time.

What I found was that guys would break up with my in fairly short order because I wasn't willing to have sex. And, some of them would do worse than just break up with me; some of them literally wouldn't take no for an answer.

When I was a teenager, a guy who was supposed to be driving me home after a date tried to kidnap me in order to make me have sex with him. A few years later, a guy I was dating and had known for months tried to hold me down and forcibly rape me when I told him I didn't want to have sex with him because it would hurt.

Luckily, I have been married for 15 years to a wonderful husband who loves me despite my sexual dysfunction and who never pressures me for sex. But, I was 30 before he proposed to me, and before that, I couldn't find any men at all who would date me if I wasn't going to have sex with them by the 5th date or so.

I don't know what the circumstances of your life are, either. Maybe you are in your 20s or older and not religious and still find that your boyfriend doesn't mind at all if you won't have sex before marriage. If that is true, though, I suspect that you are very much in the minority. I really don't think I've known any women who fall into that category; their boyfriends all expected sex. So, I stand by my statement that most women either have to have sex, or will be unable to marry because they can't keep a boyfriend.

As for contraception being unreliable, I'm not talking about the risk of getting pregnant if you have sex once or twice before marriage; I'm talking about the chance when a person is in a relationship and has sex regularly. Again, most women are in sexual relationships for years before they find a guy who wants to get married. Even if the risk of an unwanted pregnancy is only 5% a year, that gives a 1-in-4 chance of an unwanted pregnancy in 5 years.

About women being very upset after abortion, that may be, but women who give up babies for adoption tend to be more upset than women who have abortions. There is in fact data comparing women who were able to get abortions with women who were not, and the women who were unable to get abortions are, on average, more upset.

About having trouble adopting, that is a separate issue. I was specifically talking about young children, not older children. There are children available for adoption in the US, but they are mostly over age 8. As for outside the US, my husband and I were in the process of trying to adopt from China, but China changed the rules, and now we don't qualify due to our age. Now, I very much want to adopt a teenager from the foster care system, although everyone I talk to about the idea thinks I am crazy to want to try this. My husband, unfortunately, also thinks it won't work. He's a wonderful guy, but he's just not as committed to having kids as I am.

There is much less social pressure on men to be parents than there is on women, and (perhaps as a consequence) most men are just not as interested as women are in having kids. Until we change that and start seeing men as having equal responsibilities regarding children, I think abortion is here to stay.

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heidi8.livejournal.com

That being said and most bias against Obama aside, the way I took the air quotes is to mean that the majority of women do not have abortions because of their health - they do it as a form of birth control, yet it's still referred to as "women's health".

No, it isn't referred to as "women's health", at least it isn't in the courts. The language about abortion being legal throughout a pregnancy if abortion is necessary to protect the woman's life or health comes directly from Planned Parenthood v Casey, which included

a confirmation of the State's power to restrict abortions after viability, if the law contains exceptions for pregnancies endangering a woman's life or health

Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992), quoting Roe v Wade

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