Abortion is not as easy an issue as it seems to many people.

To me, the battle lines are between those who see parenthood as a way of life, and children as a gift; and those to see parenthood as an option, and children as a project.

Beth, having gone through so much to have a child, realized that in a real sense children are a gift.

I'm not necessarily trying to score pro-life points here. It is perfectly consistent for Beth, even now, to be pro-choice; there are other factors to consider in the abortion question, after all. But it was good to see someone be honest about how complex our feelings are about an "embryonic" stage of life.

If the horrors of being a teenage boy were appreciated as much as the horrors of being a teenage girl. But too often, girls' plight is portrayed with earnestness and sensitivity, while the boys' is played for laughs. This film is just more of the same.

You should return to putting in the first panel, "Wall Street Journal Comics Presents". Let 'em sue you. They were the ones who coined the phrase referring to poor people, after all. Good publicity for you, deservedly bad publicity for them.

Schaller knows Delaware from seeing it on a blip on the map, kinda on the upper left hand corner of the country (two thumb-widths from New York while may five thumb-widths from Georgia), and possibly from getting ripped off at the toll plaza on I-95.

But if you go in a few miles, down toward the shore, and hang out in the small towns, you will see the same people, culture and cuisine that you find in the Deep South. Delaware, as Biden stresses, was a slave state. It didn't vote to secede because to secede would have been suicidal (this is an example of when looking at a map is instructive).

1. The few Mormons I know have been nice people, though I didn't feel like I had anything in common with them.

2. If not for overbearing ultimatums by the U.S. Government, Mormons would still be officially polygamous and still exclude black people as an evil race. They gave up polygamy in exchange for statehood (Utah) and they gave up discrimination in 1978 when Carter threatened their church's tax-exempt status.

3. Mark Twain's hilarious takedown of the Book of Mormon in "Letters from the Earth". For example:

"Wherever he [Joseph Smith] found his speech growing too modern -- which was about every sentence or two -- he ladled in a few such Scriptural phrases as 'exceeding sore', 'and it came to pass', etc., and made things satisfactory again. 'And it came to pass' was his pet. If he had left that out, his Bible would have been only a pamphlet."

Most pro-lifers are women.

I think this is because women, who are the ones who get pregnant, are more likely to view the fetus as a baby. Men, more likely to view it as a blob of cells. Also, if you view women as sexual conquests, the availability of abortion cleans up some messy consequences. It's always been endorsed by Playboy magazine, right?

Odd role reversal in the comments here. Uriel, the woman, is talking like a man. Anonymous and the others, men (I think), have viewpoints that women are more likely to have.

Add to the above links:

turntheclockforward.org/ (which has other links)

Add to the list of pro-life liberals:

Just about every feminist who wrote about the topic up until the 1960's.

A hundred years ago, abortion was seen as anti-woman. Now, OPPOSING it is anti-woman (even though most of the ones opposing it ARE women).

A hundred years from now -- who knows??

Would you support ANY restriction on abortion? Even up to the moment of birth?

If so -- why?

That, over the decades, women have been, by a slight margin, more pro-life than men, is one of the most rudimentary facts about the abortion issue.

See polls cited in the wikipeda artcile on "Abortion in the United States".

Among Latinos, the gender gap is significant. 66% of men are pro-choice, while only 51% of women are. See gaston.umb.edu/publications/gr/5xxnl/5nl.articles/505research.html .

In the U.K., there is no overbearing (and hypocritical) fundamentalist group that pushes otherwise freethinking women into the pro-choice camp. So the gender gap there is slightly greater. See a poll commissioned by an abortion providers group at abortionreview.org/index.php/site/article/103/

"Women are more likely than men to disapprove of abortion where a woman does not wish to have a child (42% compared

with 34% of men)."

Nat Hentoff's writings contain more extensive documentation.

Single men are quick to realize that, if you don't proclaim yourself as pro-choice, you don't get laid. Pro-choice women might feel comfortable with a guy who apparently respects her right to control her own body (as she might put it). Actually they're being played for fools.

Religious conservatives aren't as narcissistic, elitist and out of touch as leftists are. They are too smart to throw their votes away (like leftists did with Ralph Nader) because they know that, bad as Rudy might be for their agenda and their sensibilities, any of his possible Democratic opponents will be worse.