Letters to the Editor
Gwool
Published Letters: 353 Editor's Choice: 40
-
It is wrong to view it as a SERIOUS THREAT to Abortion rights
[Read the article: Conflict in the antiabortion camp]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Partial Birth Abortion estimates range from 500 to about 5,000 of the 1.2 to 1.3 million performed annually if the Alan Guttmacher institute can be trusted. At it's highest, it represents less than 0.5% of all abortions performed.
That is not a serious threat, it's a waste of time and energy.
The ban is on a medical procedure. If someone still wants to obtain an abortion at that state in the gestation process, they still can do so, only it will have to be a different procedure.
This procedure collapses the skull to facilitate passing of the fetus through the vaginal canal. The more dated procedure relies on in utero dismemberment to remove the fetus from the birth canal. I personally do not see how dismemberment is more humane than skull collapsing, but that appears to be the radical right's argument.
It's less than 0.5% of all abortions performed. It bans a procedure but not the right to an abortion by a different procedure. The pertinent legal point was whether states have the right to regulate medical procedures, and they do. They regulate medical procedures all the time.
It's not the end of the world as we know it. It is not going to end the 1.2 to 1.3 million abortions performed annually. It's a PR campaign sought to begin building consensus from birth backwards rather than from conception forwards from the right to lifers and yet they still manage to find a way to screw it up.
Choicers do the same thing by taking any discussion of altering abortion law as the beginning of the end.
Partial Birth Abortion is a noise level issue seized on by lifers as what they hoped would be the most obvious consensus building PR campaign for "their cause."
The amount of time wasted on this boggles the mind. It will not reduce by one the number of abortions performed.
Relax.
-
Life's Inexorable March
[Read the article: I'm younger than that now]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Life is the only game we all play feverishly knowing that we'll utlimately lose.
I read the article with some interest. I am a little younger than the author at 48, but I had two knee operations before I was 30 thanks to youth sports and jogging. Still, at this age I have already outlived my father by three years. My older brother called me on my 46th birthday to congratulate me, saying that by making it to 46 I was now "playing with house money."
I drank and smoked like a fiend up until a year and half ago. So I have no escape valves anymore. It took a decade to give up the butts, which only happened after giving up booze as a night in a bar would always bring me back to the nicotine sticks the way booze brought Burton back to Taylor until he finally drank himself to death. That decade long struggle added countless pounds to my body I have yet to shed, which sucks more than staying sober and nicotine free.
No booze and no butts. I have been married for 24 years as well, so we know what that means about the volume and variation of my sex life.
My kids are a little younger. My youngest will not graduate from high school until I am in my late 50s. I will be going to my last college graduation when I am 62. Broke from educating four kids, I can consider retiring to a trailer in Florida and switching over to Eukanuba for senior dogs as my sustenance.
So yeah, you have to laugh about it. What the hell else are you going to do? Some internet study said men start being happy again at 49. I'll believe it when I see it. Near as I can tell I am going to be able to enjoy watching my wife go through menopause around the same time my youngest and only daughter goes through puberty in a few years, so I seriously doubt my life has nowhere to go but up once I turn 49.
Then again perhaps a mid life career change is in order. Lord knows I would certainly love to be on the road more as the hormonal hurricane comes in and demolishes the family setting the way a hurricane takes out a trailer park. Perhaps it is time to shed the high tech sales and marketing consulting career and take a crack at stand up comedy. If Lewis Black can burst onto the scene this late why can't I?
Oh, right.
Talent.