Letters to the Editor
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Ok Anonymous, I don't know how else to get you to understand
I've gotta say, I'm about to give up on you. There is obviously no way to get you to answer any of my questions directly which leads me to believe that deep down in your God fearing heart, you know I'm right that it really IS none of your business. And that we should have no room to make vast generalized decisions for the public regarding their own bodies.
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Thank you Kim - Terrific article
http://dir.salon.com/story/mwt/feature/2002/07/24/late_term/index1.html?pn=1
This really answered a lot of questions. The ones that remain are 1) Has anything in the medical field changed in the last 5 years, such as studies comparing the effects of different types of late-term abortion and 2) how does the law just held up by the supreme court compare to the Nebraska law discussed in the article. I hope that Salon writer's will write an update and publich this article on the front page, where more readers can see it. This is the kind of information that is missing from most discussions of the Supreme Courts decision.
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Anonymous, cite your source
You have still not cited any actual sources. You yourself say "Sounds human to me." I'm not asking for your personal opinion.
I don't mean to sound so harsh, but don't say you're answering a question when you're really not.
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'nother one
I'm not talking about those rare exceptions when an abortion is the only possible course; even the Roman Catholic church allows exceptions when continuing the pregnancy will clearly kill the mother, e.g., an ectopic pregnancy or uterine cancer.
Gee, I'm glad the church allows exceptions. But ectopic pregnancy is a medical emergency that becomes life threatening within hours, and would never, ever, lead to even a fetus. The pre-hospital care is to get such a person to the hospital priority 1, and monitor vital signs for deterioration. The emergency procedure at the hospital is immediate surgery.
How, in the name of anything, is that relevant to abortion debates? Anonymous, you're scarier than I thought. I'm eternally grateful none of you has decided that the soul originates in the appendix.
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"if the wording is vague then the bloody truth can be ignored"
“In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. . . . Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. [This inflated style is] itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latinate words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.” --George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language"
And ...
“The English language becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”--George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language"
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The Abortion of Liberty
As we all know, last year South Dakota proposed the most sweeping anti-abortion legislation since Roe…and rejected it.
Their ballot measure would have prohibited all abortions, except when necessary to save the life of the mother.
Nationally, the biggest & most prestigious anti-abortion lobbies were NOT in support of this law, because it jumped “too far” ahead by not providing rape & incest exceptions.
Their fear was that the “pro-life” voting base is ethically split, and that the South Dakota ban was too strong too soon: if used as a wedge issue it might wedge in the wrong direction.
This conflict within the anti-abortion lobby revealed, among other things, the operational difference between the “pro-life” and “anti-choice” positions on abortion.
If a person were really “pro-life” his or her base ethic would have to be that human life is sacred, period.
That person would oppose euthanasia & the death penalty, and would also oppose war on an ideological level.
This position is perfectly ethically consistent on the issue of people killing people.
If, however, you believe that life begins at conception but you also want to see rape & incest exceptions to abortion law, then you are actually “anti-choice.”
Because if abortion is murder, it’s murder.
If the unborn have the same ontological standing as the born, then they have the same rights.
If a post-pubescent 11-year-old is raped by her father and conceives a child with horrible defects, then that fetus’ life is as sacred as any other and it should be given breath.
And if you believe that a fetus has the same rights as a person, then the ethical question becomes: can we kill people or not, and if so, who gets to decide who gets killed and when?
Apparently, the one thing the pro-lifers and anti-choicers have in common is that they answer this question by saying: “the government.”
The anti-choice movement is growing because it supports a bias against women who have “unnecessary” abortions or who “use it as birth control.”
They are morally troubled by these women, and the best way to express it is by claiming that these women are killing children.
But surveys show that the vast majority of Americans are actually in FAVOR of keeping “necessary” abortion legal (rape, incest, gross fetal deformity.)
And in most cases, if a pregnancy threatens the HEALTH of the mother (not the life, merely the health) they are also willing to allow it.
But they’d still like to vote to retract a woman’s liberty to abort a fetus simply because it is her choice to do so.
So interestingly, what we normally think of as the more humanistic stance (make exceptions for undue circumstance) is in reality the clearly “anti-liberty” stance.
If you don’t want that 11-year-old victim of incest-rape to carry & birth her grossly deformed baby, but you DO want a wealthy white woman to have to carry and birth her healthy one…you’re indisputably anti-choice.
You’d like to explicitly retract a woman’s bodily sovereignty simply in the interest of imposing personal morality.
If the majority of America believed that a fetus is a living being, the South Dakota abortion ban should have passed with flying colors.
But in reality, many Americans are simply anti-choice…and don’t even know it.
This is why the anti-choice lobby needs to retract women’s reproductive rights gradually rather than abruptly.
We now have proof that our Supreme Court is anti-choice and anti-woman: they favor the life of the unborn over the health of the mother.
Despite the anti-choicers’ derisive cries that our civil rights are intact and they’re just trying to save the Poor Innocent Babies from the Big Bad Irresponsible Sluts…every woman alive knows in her heart what restrictions on women’s reproductive rights actually mean.
There’s no way around the truth that this is the return of government misogyny on a national level.