Letters to the Editor
LeCastor
Published Letters: 1916 Editor's Choice: 86
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Wakeman, please stop telling me that a fetus has more rights than i do.
[Read the article: Fetal labor]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]1) I still believe that there's a social reason that underlies the acceptance of abortion in this country. We are a convenience-driven, consumer country. We have drive through banks, pharmacies, fast food, next-day home delivery, 1-click shopping(tm), etc.
Oh yeah, the broadly-generalized criticism of "our society." Abortion is acceptable in many places around the world. Much of western and some eastern european countries also have a lot of abortion, as well as most scandinavian countries. Iceland, Canada, Israel, all have abortions. Are they acceptable there also because all of those societies are "convenience-driven, consumer countr[ies]"?
2) Abortion is just so much more convenient than taking responsibility for your actions. And all you pro-choicers have embraced the holy grail of political action, ideology, to hide the real reasons that you support abortion, because you can't justify "convenience" as easily as "human right." You're no better than the religious right, claiming that something is wrong because God says, "Thou shalt not."
Speaking of responsibility for your own actions, suppose you show up at the emergency room with a heart attack. You're overweight, you've been eating McDonald's your whole life, you don't exercise, you watch American Idol instead. Should the doctor simply say to you, "well, you have to accept responsibility for your own actions. so, if you live, you live. and if you die, you die. but i'm not going to facililate your lifestyle with angioplasty, just because it's convenient for you to get an angiolplasty once instead of jogging and eating salmon for years."
I don't need to read up on anything. I've read up on all those statistics. You forgot the important statistic about how many women who have abortions already have one or more children, and the corollary statistic about how many women who have had an abortion say they plan to have a child in the future.
Look it up. It's all about convenience.
Yes, maybe it's about convenience. What's your point? It's about the convenience of choosing what to do with your own body and controlling your reproduction. What is wrong with that?
In my own personal story, my girlfriend got an abortion because she didn't want to take any time off from college, and thought the first couple years raising a second child would prevent her from continuing her education. Her education wasn't at stake, however. I won't list them all, but suffice to say that every option that you could imagine was on the table in trade for the life of my child, but none were as convenient as an abortion.
My girlfriend, whom I loved, intended to marry, and have kids with someday anyway, already had a daughter, and just a few months before her abortion had been talking about having another child "someday." She said that going through the pregnancy wasn't all that bad. I wouldn't really know about that, but I asked about it. I guess some people just accept it as a natural part of life.
Well, your story may be heartbreaking, but it may be the best of all possible worlds. Alternatively, you would favor allowing men to somehow FORCE women into carrying children that the women don't want to be pregnant with or give birth to? Would you then allow the men to sue these pregnant women if they smoke or drink or take drugs or eat sushi or hang around cat poop?
And like the rest of your body, when your pregnancy has a problem you want to get it treated. Pregnancy is not a medical problem that needs treatment in and of itself, however. Some problems will require an abortion.
Yes, it kind of is. It's a large mass that is growing inside of you, a fetus is remarkably like a parasite. And it happens against your will. As elizabeth said above, if you wanted to get a cancer removed, it's your choice. no one is arguing for the right to life of those human cancer cells. same for a fetus.
I'm not against abortion, I'm against unrestricted abortion rights. Think about that for a few seconds. I'm against treating abortion as the right of every woman for the sake of convenience.
Why won't you trust women to make the choices that they think are best for them?! That's what baffles me. You talk as if women don't know what's good for them, that individual women are not to be trusted with deciding their own lives and how to manage their reproduction. Why do you want the government involved in these choices?
If you don't want to get pregnant then get sterilized or don't have sex. Excercise your control over your body that way, then you can leave my unborn children, myself, and my heart out of it, and not trample any one else's rights in the pursuit of your own.
You're advocating trampling on my right to decide my own destiny and reproduction. The whole question comes down to this: whose rights are more important, a woman of child-bearing age to control her body, her life and her reproduction, or a first-trimester fetus?
Pro-choicers choose the woman.
Pro-lifers choose the child. Pro-lifers not only equate women with children by implying that women cannot be trusted to make these kinds of choices for themselves, they actually place the rights of the fetus above the rights of an independent scentient woman. And honestly, as a woman, it is perhaps the most insulting idea possible.