@alaska5123:

Author Keith Akers, in A Vegetarian Sourcebook (1983), notes that by arguing against the killing of plants, the meat-eater "seeks to reduce vegetarianism to absurdity. If vegetarians object to killing living creatures (it is argued), then logically they should object to killing plants and insects as well as animals. But this is absurd. Therefore, it can’t be wrong to kill animals.

"Fruitarians take the argument concerning plants quite seriously; they do not eat any food which causes injury or death to either animals or plants. This means, in their view, a diet of those fruits, nuts and seeds which can be eaten without the destruction of the plant that produces the food.

"Finding an ethically significant line between plants and animals, though, is not particularly difficult. Plants have no evolutionary need to feel pain, and completely lack a central nervous system. Nature does not create pain gratuitously, but only when it enables the organism to survive. Animals, being mobile, would benefit from having a sense of pain; plants would not."

In determining a boundary between sentient and insentient life, Peter Singer in Animal Liberation suggests that "somewhere between a shrimp and an oyster seems as good a place to draw the line as any, and better than most."

Keith Akers states further, "Even if one does not want to become a fruitarian and believes that plants have feelings (against all evidence to the contrary), it does not follow that vegetarianism is absurd. We ought to destroy as few plants as possible. And by raising and eating an animal for food, many more plants are destroyed indirectly by the animals we eat than if we merely ate the plants directly."

(Meat-eaters indirectly kill ten times more plants than do vegetarians!)

"What about insects?" asks Akers, "While there may be reason to kill insects, there is no reason to kill them for food. One distinguishes between the way meat animals are killed for food and the way insects are killed.

"Insects are killed only when they intrude upon human territory, posing a threat to the comfort, health, or well-being of humans. There is a huge difference between ridding oneself of intruders and going out of one's way to find and kill something which would otherwise be harmless."

According to Akers:

"These questions may have a certain fascination for philosophers, but most vegetarians are not bothered by them. For any vegetarian who is not a biological pacifist, there would not seem to be any particular difficulty in distinguishing ethically between insects and plants on the one hand, and animals and humans on the other."

I'd like to see a return to organic farming. In 1989, concern over the use of the pesticide Alar on apples caused many Americans to consider organic produce. We produce pesticides at a rate some 13,000 times faster than we did in the 1950s. Our environment is being flooded by pesticide compounds.

Poisons used to kill insects accumulate on crops, in the soil and in greater concentration in the tissues of living creatures higher on the food chain. The EPA's Pesticide Monitoring Journal reports that "Foods of animal origin (are) the major source of pesticide residues in the diet."

In his Pulitzer Prize nominated book, How to Survive in America the Poisoned, pesticide authority Lewis Regenstein writes: "Meat contains approximately 14 times more pesticides than do plant foods...Thus, by eating foods of animal origin, one ingests greatly concentrated amounts of hazardous chemicals."

A 1976 study by the EPA found the breast milk of mothers who consume animal products to be 50 to 100 times more contaminated by pesticide residues than the milk of vegetarian or vegan mothers.

Organic farming and Integrated Pest Management (IPM) are getting more attention today. These utilize natural insect controls, such as predatory insects, weather, crop rotation, pest-resistant varieties, soil tillage, and other environmentally safe practices.

A 1979 Department of Agriculture task force of scientists and economists came to "...positive conclusions on the importance of organic farming and its potential contributions to agriculture and society." Until the end of the Second World War, American farmers produced bountiful harvests without relying on pesticides. There is no reason why America cannot do so again.

In response to the poster who tells us that Sarah Palin does support birth control, I beg to differ. The group Feminists for Life, of which she is a vocal member, is coy on the issue, saying that "some of its members support the use of non-abortifacient birth control methods." But when you dig in to this, you discover that they consider "hormonal birth control" methods, know generally as birth control pills, to be abortifacients. This is a point that needs to be more widely understood. Many anti-abortion activists have as their ultimate goal the restriction of birth control. This explains why they defund programs to support giving out birth control information, and pass laws allowing pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions for birth control bills. No big deal for people in cities, you say, you just go to another pharmacy. But for rural women, often that means a very long drive. Women who use birth control pills and are ga ga for Palin because "she is just like me" are in for a shocking surprise if this ignorant person---who is on Youtube speaking in tongues in her church, and believes the world was created 6000 years ago---gets into power.

As a member of Feminists For Life since the mid-1990s, I can tell you that its "opposition" to certain forms of birth control has more to do with the fact that some forms of birth control are not contraceptives, but DO function as abortifacients.

“Is birth control an abortion?”

“Definitely not. An abortion kills the life of a baby after it has begun.”

---Planned Parenthood pamphlet

August 1963

Past president of Feminists For Life, Rosemary Bottcher, spoke openly about contraception when she criticized the American Left for its failure to take a stand against abortion:

“The same people who wax hysterical at the thought of executing, after countless appeals, a criminal convicted of some revolting crime would have insisted on his mother’s unconditional right to have him killed while he was still innocent.

“The same people who organized a boycott of the Nestle Company for its marketing of infant formula in underdeveloped lands would have approved of the killing of those exploited infants only a few months before.

“The same people who talk incessantly of human rights are willing to deny the most helpless and vulnerable of all human beings the most important right of all.

“Apparently these people do not understand the difference between contraception and abortion,” concluded Bottcher. “Their arguments defending abortion would be perfectly reasonable if they were talking about contraception. When they insist upon ‘reproductive freedom’ and ‘motherhood by choice’ they forget that ‘pregnant’ means ‘being with child.’ A pregnant woman has already reproduced; she is already a mother.”

Writer and activist Jay Sykes, who led Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 antiwar campaign in Wisconsin and later served as head of the state’s American Civil Liberties Union, wrote a "Farewell to Liberalism." Sykes cited several areas of disagreement and disillusionment, then added, "It is on the abortion issue that the moral bankruptcy of contemporary liberalism is most clearly exposed." He said that liberals’ arguments in support of abortion "could, without much refinement, be used to justify the legalization of infanticide.”

In her essay, “Life and Peace,” Juli Loesch wrote: “In a revealing article published in Seven Days, Michelle Magar suggests that the New Right’s relationship with Right to Life has been ‘more a marriage of convenience than true love.’ She suggests that the anti-abortion position adds ‘a certain moral luster’ to the New Right, which otherwise has a distinctly different set of priorities (threatening war for the possession of Persian Gulf oil, and so forth). Magar points out that, in a practical sense, the New Right’s concern for the unborn gives it access to the ‘grassroots anti-abortion network of the Catholic Church—a ready-made constituency which they had so far never been able to win.’”

If you read pro-life feminist anthologies such as Pro-Life Feminism: Different Voices, or Pro-Life Feminism: Yesterday and Today, you'll find pro-life feminists openly discussing contraception.

“The press has been cautioned about its bent toward stereotyping pro-lifers,” noted columnist Nat Hentoff, a liberal Jewish atheist, in 1992. “...many readers and viewers have a decidedly limited sense of the diversity of pro-lifers. Feminists For Life of America, for example, includes women who came out of the civil rights and anti-war movements and now work for what they call ‘a consistent ethic of life.’...(then Feminists For Life president) Rachel MacNair has been arrested at least 17 times—for protesting against nuclear plants and nuclear weapons...”

Gays Against Abortion (now known as PLAGAL, or the Pro-Life Alliance of Gays and Lesbians) was formed in 1991. They issued a statement:

“We acknowledge that, from conception, the fetus is a human being entitled to basic rights, including the right to life. We hold that abortion denies that right and destroys that human being. We know first hand, from homophobia, what it is to have our rights denied...Like homophobia, abortion tries to get rid of the persons who are considered undesirable...We volunteer time and energy to pro-life pregnancy centers and pro-life agencies...”

Similarly, in the May 1992 issue of Harmony: Voices for a Just Future, in an article entitled, “Coming Out of the Closet for Life,” Donna Marie Kearney wrote: “It is difficult to understand why so many gay and lesbian people can support the so-called ‘woman’s right’ to abortion. While living as oppressed people, they are blind to the subversion of the rights of the unborn, the weakest and most powerless among us.”

Kearney is a lesbian Christian peace activist, a member of the Faith and Resistance Community, and has been arrested in protest against nuclear weapons storage, and arrested along with Daniel Berrigan and others for trespassing at a Planned Parenthood building.

According to George McKenna in a 1995 article entitled "Abortion: A Lincolnian Position", which originally appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Feminists For Life supports the entire feminist agenda, except abortion rights.

When I heard Serrin Foster, Executive Director of Feminists For Life, speak at UC Berkeley several years ago, I asked her if FFL supports LGBT rights. She told me FFL works with PLAGAL on a regular basis.

In These Times, a progressive political newspaper in Chicago observed in the late 1980s: “Our reaction to scenes of anti-abortion activists engaging in civil disobedience outside of clinics is similar to that of many on the Left: ‘What are THEY doing using OUR tactics? One major factor may be uncomfortable for many of us to admit: that many of them ARE us.’”