. . . I fully concur with those who see abortion as an important tool enabling women to have control over their bodies.

I also find the whole general idea of snuffing out a potential human being not a pleasant one viscerally. And even rationally, I do share the concerns of some (see closely related article by R. Traister expressing concern about the practice of aborting fetuses having a genetic predisposition toward some diseases), that who knows where it will end.

I'm not concered about the specific issue of aborting fetuses that are severely diseased or show a strong likelihood of becoming so at some later point.

I see cause for concern about just how far this "eugenic" practice should be taken; surely there is some point it should not go past. Plus cause for concern over who gets to decide when and on what grounds would a fetus be aborted.

And precisely because there is no obvious moment that a fertilized egg becomes human (in many ways newborn babies are almost as not-yet-human as an embryo), I have some concern that abortion not get taken too far -- the slope is indeed slippery. Do we "postnatally abort" five-year-olds who show certain behavior problems? It could happen.

So I'm fine with the way abortion is currently legal, and I'm not at all fine over the way that abortion is illegal in some states and de facto increasingly difficult to obtain: The number of abortion clinics in the country has decreased ever since certain extreme elements of the anti crowd began threatening the lives of doctors who perform abortions.

No doubt some will feel my overall viewpoint as wishy-washy or hemming and hawing, but imo this is a very complex issue.

Here is a passage from this article:

In any case, Adam continued to think of himself as a "man's man" until last fall when he "hooked up with a sophomore -- at her urging." . . . See, the sophomore wanted him, he wasn't into her, so she offered to be his "friend with benefits," which is cool because that means sex with no emotional responsibility and he really didn't see anything wrong with that. But then, the first time they tried to do it, he couldn't get it up.

Now, I read Adam's story and I think: Hey, maybe Adam is just a really great guy! The kind of guy who actually wants to have sex with someone he really likes and is attracted to. Clearly he wasn't so interested in this sophomore, and so his body didn't respond to her. I don't see this as a disaster so much as a positive indicator of a healthy attitude about sex. I get that men and women often enjoy sex with people they despise or are indifferent to, but wouldn't the world be a generally more cheerful place if our bodies nudged us toward those we found physically and emotionally alluring to begin with?

[boldface mine]

"Clearly", Rebecca Traister has an M.D. degree as well as special training in psychotherapy, and in addition is an expert in diagnosing the causes of erectile dysfunction.

(Or, maybe she has no such credentials and is just showing how arrogant she can be about an event she read about in a newspaper and whose subjects she never met, no less communicated with.)

------------------------------------------

Later in the article the author confirms her lack of understanding of anything related to what she's writing about by groundlessly turning it into a political story:

But why, when there are all these perfectly reasonable explanations -- explanations that, not for nothing, could turn out to be productive if we reacted to them by educating boys about the effects of recreational substance use, or developing and prescribing pills with fewer sexual side effects, or encouraging guys to get used to a sex life in which they're on equal footing with their partners -- do we have to immediately start in on the ghoulish, desire-sapping, sexless succubus of women's liberation?

It evidently hasn't occurred to her that social behavior for thousands and perhaps millions of years isn't easy to change radically in just a few generations! It's entirely possible that what kind of sexual interaction between men and women has a strongly instinctive component. And there may also be a strong cultural component, also not readily changed, that is passed down to each generation of males and females.

We are in a new era spawned by Betty Friedan's 1963 book "The Feminine Mystique" and it will take a while for men and women to settle into their new roles. At present, we don't even know what those roles will turn out to be.

It's really a shame that Salon seems to think an author's ability to write grammatically is sufficient for publishing her writing, regardless of how ignorant and illogical her message may be.

If you read what I wrote, which I seriously doubt, you saw that I emphatically supported women's right to choose abortion.

I *also* said that since there is no well-defined point that life begins, the idea of aborting a potential human, or human for that matter, is a slippery slope.

In reading what *you* wrote, I see that you make an argument based on the definition of what is a human life and what isn't. Such arguments don't hold any water, since there is no such universally agreed-upon definition.

Maybe try re-reading what I wrote more carefully this time.

1. I have *never* used the phrase "snuffing out a human life". The phrase was "snuffing out a potential human life".

If you're gonna go around misquoting people, kindly don't do it here.

2. SCIENCE, or as most people call it, science, has no definition of when a human life begins, since scientists worthy of the name recognize that it's a continuum from conception to birth and beyond.

3. Try not to tell people what categories they "probably" belong in, when you don't have the information to even guess. There is a thin line, if any line at all, between donig that and name-calling.