There's no need to attack someone who is clarifying their position and speaking on behalf of their beliefs. "Oh, and while I'm at it...yes, your beliefs about meeting perfect people in heaven are absurd" is just an ignorant attack. Why are you so fired up to tell this poster what you think of their beliefs, even if you think they're absurd? I know you have the right to, but why would you want to bother? Also, how are they supposed to know why Sheppard didn't "say so instead of saying her babies would be there saying 'hi mama' and all that crap"? Your attack on Christianity is hypocracy. You are just as intollerant and ignorant as the group you are lashing out at.

By the way, I am a Christian AND I'm pro choice. Attack away.

I'm sure she's aware that her fetuses weren't old enough to talk. If she believes that they will be old enough to talk in heaven, she's following a very ancient tradition: the writer of "The Pearl" (the same poet wrote 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight') is weeping on the grave of his two-year-old daughter and bemoaning the fact that she will never live a life when a shining, grown-up lady, his daughter's soul, speaks to him from heaven.

Speaking of my own beliefs, I'd rather not go there; I have no idea what heaven will be like and think it seems both silly and blasphemous to speculate. But that's my opinion, not a dogma I feel like forcing on anyone else. Sherri Shepherd is also entitled to an opinion, and if her religious views seem crude and primitive to you, well, you're entitled to think that, but not to belittle her in public. As long as she's not trying to get legislation passed based on her beliefs, they're her beliefs, and stupid or smart, she's allowed to have them and share them.

Also: Sherri Shepherd doesn't have to structure her sharing of her experiences into something that will please Jessica Wakeman. They're HER experiences, not a screed, and her honesty about her reactions is more valuable than some calculated statement designed to be PC.

My main concern is that she lumps having abortions in with abuse and low self esteem, as though a young woman with a positive outlook on life would never make the decision--or be in the position to.

Given that birth control is very easy to obtain and use, yes, I'd say that repeated unwanted pregnancies are a sign that the woman was suffering from something, and if she says in her case it was low self esteem, I believe her. A young woman with a positive outlook on life might miss a pill, but she's not likely to make the same mistake "more times than she can count."

If this woman has the right to express her opinions in public, others absolutely have the right to belittle them in public.

I don't know why Sherri is the View's whipping girl to the rest of the media, but Elisabeth Hasselbeck is much more anti-woman. Did we talk about her bursting into tears last week because the women wouldn't let up on her about African Americans using the N-word? Her homophobia and militant anti-choice stance?

Seems that she made mistakes, had a hard time and is trying to make the best out of it.

So, she isn't well-informed. Big deal. I doubt that most of the women who abort their babies are sparkling conversationalists. Mostly they are scared young women who made a mistake. I personally find abortion distasteful but support the right of women to make her own moral judgment. I certainly don't feel that they deserve scorn and certainly do not need some guy coming up and kicking out whatever emotional crutches they have holding them up.

The poor thing grew up w/ Jehovah's Witness's as parents, so she's going to be a little tweaked. She's finding her way through a new religious experience, all while being a voice on a popular national television show.

Whoopi Goldberg & Barbara Walters seem to be mentoring her through the gaffes, so she's in good hands.

thought Jesus came before the use of the letters "B.C."

I had to click on the link to determine that what she actually thought was that Christians were around even in years numbered BC. On the other hand Jesus, or at least Christians, obviously existed before the use of the letters "B.C." since that designation wasn't used until centuries later.

is that in heaven, all those aborted fetuses go on to Harvard and become doctors. And they call on Mother's day.

Here 'tis. She read it at the White House in 1979 or 1980.

The Mother

Abortions will not let you forget.

You remember the children you got that you did not get,

The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair,

The singers and workers that never handled the air.

You will never neglect or beat

Them, or silence or buy with a sweet.

You will never wind up the sucking thumb

Or scuttle off ghosts that come.

You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh,

Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye.

I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed

children.

I have contracted. I have eased

My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck.

I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized

Your luck

And your lives from your unfinished reach,

If I stole your births and your names,

Your straight baby tears and your games,

Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches,

and your deaths,

If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,

Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.

Though why should I whine,

Whine that the crime was other than mine?- -

Since anyhow you are dead,

Or rather, or instead,

You were never made.

But that too, I am afraid,

Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said?

You were born, you had body, you died.

It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.

Believe me, I loved you all.

Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you

All.