Letters to the Editor
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Unfortunately the pro-lifers still have an argument
I doubt that the pro-lifers' stand is as inconsistent as Chomsky and the reviewer evidently think it is. It's true that pro-lifers can be maddeningly unsympathetic to large swathes of human society. But all children and adults have certain measures of protection under the law, while the fetus has next to none. It seems to me that the pro-lifers can argue that they are defending the weakest member of society.
One need not agree with the pro-life viewpoint in order to recognize that it is more consistent than the reviewer and Chomsky apparently believe. If one feels, in fact, that pro-lifers are one's enemy, then one should accept this consistency, because it is always unwise to underestimating one's opponents.
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Ah, my former church
The Church is sane on the matter of the Death penalty, so I agree with them, and on just war, pretty good. On matters of sex, I truthfully think the Church is just a bunch of celibate nuts trying to control what they're very afraid of: women.
The Church doesn't want people to use birth control, and me and most American Catholics find that position laughable. I completely understand the Catholic position on abortion, and it's just as absolutist as many other positions it takes. Well, a person who believes in a religion has every right to follow it in the U.S., but he has zero right to dictate that the law conform to his theology. That would make us like Iran, wouldn't it? And by the way, you can ask the present Pope to butt the hell out of American politics, even though he was behind a vicious campaign against John Kerry, threatening him with excommunication for taking a position for all Americans, not just for the Catholics. If there are Catholics who didn't vote for Kerry because he's pro-choice, well, what do you think of that vote now?
And of course, we can look forward to U.S. society being a priest-ridden bog of superstition like Ireland used to be, can't we?
I realize we're in touchy territory here, as we may rouse the slumbering Donohue faction -- the former Legion of Decency types now recast by the right wing into a (snicker) civil rights group -- but the truth must be faced even when it's painful.
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@ Jim H.
You wrote "but the truth must be faced even when it's painful." and that is exactly what Andrew stated in his review of "Lake of Fire".
Being pro-choice and having known women of all ages who have had abortions, both legal and illegal, including a family member who died as a result of a self induced abortion, I must maintain that the euphemizing of the terms surrounding the abortion, while delivering some comfort to those women who make the sometimes painful, and unfortunately, but rarely the cavalier choice to abort their babies do a disservice to all involved.
When a woman becomes pregnant with a wanted child, she is "having a baby", no matter how early she finds out. When a woman choses abortion, she is aborting a "fetus". The life growing inside her is called "products of conception" on the pathology report. We speak of terminating a pregnancy, but in reality what we are doing is ending a life, no matter how young, no matter how non-viable it may be. We all began as two cells merging to form a zygote, then an embryo and fetus and finally a baby. Now as the lines begin to blur from first and second trimester abortions, and the smallest and earliest a live baby may be delivered and live with the aid of technology, where in your and many other minds does the fetus magically turn into a baby? In the rare, and sometimes necessary third or late term abortions, the baby is actually delivered partially and killed in the birth canal, so it will enter the world dead, therefore ending the quandry of what to do with a live birth occuring during a partial birth abortion.
I completely understand and agree on the need for safe, effective and legal abortions, and see erosions to Roe v Wade as abominable, but I cannot agree with euphemizing the situation and the life that is ended for the sake of being delicate towards the mother. Every woman who has an elective abortion, one not deemed as life saving to the mother must realize what she is actually doing, it must be a part of the decision process or else she is attempting to delude herself and others that an abortion is no more serious as having a wart removed.
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Ban abortion from state to state
As long as all those unwanted children are automatically made wards of the state on the public's dime. I bet you'd see a reversal on the so called sanctity of life faster than you could say 'tax increase'. I mean the fat baby Jayzus is one thing but we're talking the divine holy dollar here.
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RE: Wow, a bunch of guys yakking about Abortion
I've noticed though that miscarriages (which are far more common than clinical abortions) seem to evoke about zero reaction--no funerals, no huge outpourings of grief and despair about a third of all babies dying before they're even born. Suddenly, that baby's not a baby after all.
Having had four miscarriages total and three in the past year--one of which ended in an abortion after three weeks of excruciating pain and fevers--I can say that Uriel is exactly right. Women who have multiple, unexplained miscarriages have little in the way of support or help, but they are subjected to scorn and propaganda if they must undergo an abortion. I'm just grateful that I could still get an abortion to remove my failed pregnancy. In a few years that may not be an option, and that's a scary thought indeed.
When people learn that I've had multiple miscarriages, the women (especially those who've had a miscarriage) are full of shared grief, but the men almost always say something like 'well, it wasn't really a pregnancy anyway.' How were these pregnancies any less a pregnancy than the ones that end in abortion? Why don't we see billboards trumpeting the hard fact that most women will have an early term miscarriage? Why don't women who undergo the experience have access to a shared cultural process for dealing with their grief?
It's easy to settle on a positon in the abortion debate, especially if you're a man. I just wish those men who oppose abortion would spend as much time comforting those of us who lose these precious lives through no fault of our own as they do scolding women who choose to end their pregnancy. Perhaps learning to value life in a different way--i.e. through the grieving process with women who genuinely need to grieve--is a better use of their energy. It would certainly make me believe that the people who oppose abortion actually care about the women who carry that life inside of them.