Oh phooey, even if everything these dudes are claiming is true, it still doesn't amount to a hill of beans. Because, and I think that it is something people often forget, the debate really isn't about the morality or rights associated with abortion, it is the simple proposition that we should put women, doctors, and helpers, in jail, for having/aiding an abortion. That is the stark choice: banning abortion means criminalizing it, and aside from history showing that it doesn't work and is counter-productive, it is also pretty cruel to put the desperate and compassionate behind bars for being desperate and compassionate.

So even if these guys are correct, are they seriously proposing that women be held at gun-point a la The Handmaid's Tale and forced to gestate and give birth, to ensure their rights?

And rights have nothing to do with it. Whether you are a man or a woman, you do not in fact have the right to reproduce. You have the right to try and reproduce, which is possibly the most fundamental right of all, but there is nothing that says anybody or anything can be compelled to help you in this.

If you father a child with your girlfriend and she aborts it, you are exactly where you started: childless. You want a kid? Find a woman that does too, and get busy.

None of this has anything to do with maternal or paternal rights for existing children, which is a whole other, unrelated topic, and should not be conflated with this one.

Scalia once pointed out in an interview I saw, that the fact that abortion rights had been created by the court, not the legislature, was one of the problems driving the ongoing messy debate. It would have been better if the matter had gone to the legislators: harder and longer to win, perhaps, but probably more final once accomplished.

Which was essentially what happened here in Canada, the Supremes did not discover a right to an abortion, just found that the existing law banning abortion was unconstitutional, and sent the hot potato back to parliament, and parliament, with an eye to the opinion polls, found itself unable to pass a new ban of any kind. So we have legal, publicly funded abortion. Which would probably have happened in the US too, at the time.

I suspect Scalia may be right: Roe vs Wade has probably harmed the abortion rights movement, in that it took it off the direct political agenda. As long as it stands, politicians are off the hook on the issue, and can ignore it if they are pro choice, or pass stupid grandstanding laws with no enforceability/accountability if they are pro life.

"women should admit that in addition to the burdens they have real choices and real power that men don't"

Admit? Proclaim and glory in it rather: women have real choices and real power over their own bodies, and men do not have power over and make choices for women's bodies. Any other situation would amount to slavery.

Dudes, being forced into a body altering, risky to your life and health, and extraordinarily painful experience, with life-long life-changing burdens and consequences, is not in anyway the moral (and legal) equivalent of being stuck with a monthly bill for 18 years as a result of a night's pleasure or accident. Nor is the failure to become a father the equivalent of a mother's experience of the difficult and distressing experience of abortion. It just ain't so.

Once a child has been born, it has to be provided for. Most of the time, it will be at least in part by the mother, and some of the time by the state. But I see nothing wrong in requiring the father to contribute as well. There may be accidents, there may be intoxicated foolishness, but I do not want a world where men can scatter their seed as they will, and walk away scott free any time they want, leaving a single mother mired in poverty and causing great expense one way or the other, to me, the taxpayer. Isn't that the much touted problem with the welfare population?

Instead of going on about rights and compulsion, perhaps you all should lay out how you think it ought to work, you know, be constructive or something. You know what that is, don't you?

Perhaps if the Germans want their Turkish immigrants, sorry, guest workers, to integrate, perhaps they could actually, I don't know, let them acquire citizenship just a little bit more easily? Right now, there are multiple generations of non-citizen Turks in Germany.

Germans and French and other Europeans seem to have the notion that you can have immigration without social and cultural impact, that all the immigrants will become good little standard-issue Germans, French, etc. Those of us in high-immigration countries have a slightly better appreciation of the situation, I think, and it doesn't really involve solving everything by attempting to co-opt one section of the community.

Oh, and survey after survey of immigrant populations in Western countries yields the same answer again and again: why did you immigrate? "For my children..." You often hear: "I could actually make more money in the old country, but I didn't see much future for my children." Purely economic migrants (like the guest workers in the Gulf) rarely bring their families along.

So I rather doubt that "they don't actually want to integrate," rather, they don't want to morph into sufficiently acceptable homogeneous standard issue Germans (who would?), which is what most Germans seem to mean when they say "integrate."