Abortion is a difficut issue. I'm sure most of us - regardless of which side we are on - are uncomfortable with the so called Chinese abortion. Which was brought on by the Chinese law allowing only one child per family. It involves the drowning or suffocating of the child shortly after birth if they are not of the desired gender.

I really hate the cheap and disgusting way right-wingers use Nazism as a way to demonize anyone they disagree with. To be clear: Nazism was a pseudo-ideological belief system which saw the world in terms of rigid racial categories. The lowest of these were condemned to death either by shooting, starvation or, at the end, gassing. This was the fate of most Jews and Gypsies. It sought, moreover, territorial expansion across all of Europe as a means toward continental racial purity. Thus Russians and other Slavic peoples, deemed outright as “inferior”, were used as slave labor in the most demeaning way imaginable (if they were healthy enough after the enormous slaughter on the Eastern Front). Their lands were expropriated for ethnically “pure” Germanic types. As “Untermenschen” – literally, subhumans – Slavs were to be given only the most elementary of education such as writing their names and counting to ten (this was seen by most Nazi visionaries like Himmler as the ultimate utopia).

Germans and other kindred peoples had obligations, namely the perpetuation of the “superior race.” To get an abortion under Nazi rule was therefore considered a serious crime against the state, punishable by imprisonment and, in rare cases, death. This, of course, defined the very essence of Nazism, whereby the individual was subsumed under the brutal pressure of the state to comply and believe. If you doubt this, you can read the excellent work by people like Claudia Koonz, Saul Friedländer and Gotz Äly.

The reason I have gone on like this at length is that I know quite a bit about Nazism – what O’Reilly calls “Nazi stuff” and what Laura Ingraham has referred to as “Hitlerian.” During the struggle against Nazism, it was accurately described as an evil regime, at a time when the term actually meant something, when civilization was literally under threat. To equate abortion and the doctors who perform them with Nazis and Nazism, then, not only shows a total lack of respect for historical meaning, it reveals how low and feeble-minded the proponents of fanatical pro-life positions can be. Abortion is a societal concern, the unfortunate result of either poor education or limited economic means. It is not the harbinger of some secular fascism that some dolts on this blog and elsewhere pretend it to be. Moreover, people who think this way, who believe that they represent the vanguard of some new holy crusade are deluded. Individuals like Randall Terry and Bill O’Reilly, who condone violence and hatred instead of reasonable discourse are mostly unhinged and quite dangerous themselves. But they are not Nazis; not by a long shot.

The Nazis were opposed to abortion too.Just like Bill and the far right in America. So is the Taliban. The Nazis regarded any form of contraception as a plot to reduce the number of soldiers they had at their 'disposal' in a war. The abortion debate is really a debate over whether men have control of women's bodies. All the rest is just noise and lies. The pro-lifers are usually pro-war too. Which means they're pro-death and pro-life. Dizzy-making isn't it?

Kegan, I don't suppose you've given that 60,000 figure much thought. Let's do the math. Together. To help us, I'm going to quote the moron Steele the First, who, like a broken clock, was right at least once today.

60,000 / 365 = 164 and change.

So this doctor, if he performed one abortion a day, has been working for 164 years straight. Let's say he did two abortions a day. That's 82 years straight. How about three a day, every day? That's 54 years. Wow. He has worked every day, for 54 years straight, performing 3 abortions a day. On top of all of the other medical services he provided to women, besides abortion! Fucking Amazing.

What lots of people seem to be missing is that late-term abortions are almost always performed on *wanted* pregnancies in which something has gone horribly wrong with either the prospective mother or baby. These are extreme circumstances in which the mother's health is in immediate danger and there's no way to save the baby, or else the baby has a catastrophic birth defect and would either be stillborn, die shortly after birth, or have no quality of life. I won't say "never" because there probably are a few exceptions, but women are not having late abortions for frivolous reasons like "oops - should have used a condom!". This is an extremely important point that many in the anti-abortion camp are missing. To suggest that women are waiting until they're 6, 7, or 8 months pregnant and then deciding "nope, changed my mind" is misinformed at best and an outright lie at worst.

I don't remember the exact figure, but less than 2% of all abortions in the US are performed after 16 weeks of pregnancy. Only a tiny percent of those are performed after 20 weeks. Almost all of these are medically necessary, and the situation is heartbreaking for the women involved.

When I was 18 weeks pregnant with my daughter, routine blood tests and the mid-pregnancy ultrasound showed a high risk of a chromosomal disorder (e.g Down Syndrome, Trisomy 18, Trisomy 13, etc.) I waited 3 agonizing weeks to see a maternal-fetal specialist, and I had to wait another week after that to get the results of my amniocentesis. During that time, my husband and I were faced with the horrible decision of what we were going to do if something was wrong. Some genetic defects, like Down Syndrome, are not catastrophic. Some one with DS can go on to live a happy fulfilling life. Other chromosomal defects are incompatible with life. We ultimately decided that if the baby had a catastrophic chromosomal defect, we would terminate the pregnancy. It would be unnecessarily risky for me to continue a pregnancy in which there was a zero probability of a good outcome. And we grieved and grieved and grieved. I wouldn't wish that scenario on my worst enemy. We wanted this baby SO much. Fortunately, the amniocentesis showed that everything was fine. Our daughter is now a beautiful, perfectly healthy five-month old.

Other families are faced with this excruciating decision every day. And, some women develop life-threatening complications during pregnancy that can only be relieved by ending the pregnancy. In these cases, doctors try to save the baby whenever possible. But if it's not possible - if the baby cannot live outside the womb - they can and *should* save the woman. Anyone who suggests that late abortions consist of healthy women killing healthy infants that could survive outside the womb is grossly misinformed or blatantly lying.