Not every liberal is a whipped pussy unable to say the supposedly unsayable. Here, I'll say it:

Sometimes abortion is the best thing for everybody, all around.

See? Not that hard. I had my abortion for several of the reasons listed in this article, and have never felt bad about it. Yes, indeed, you read me right - I have never felt bad about it. It was the wrong time, we were the wrong people, the genetics were not good, all of it.

Of course, this was before American culture decided to throw in with the anti-abortionists and act as if there is no way a woman could disagree with them and still be moral and good. Why we keep taking positions that guarantee the most fucked-up, damaging results possible is beyond me, but that's America for you!

Women should be allowed to make this decision for themselves, with no influence in either direction. I don't care who you think you're advocating for, it's none of your damn business what is decided.

1. Not once was the possibility of adoption mentioned in this article. I'm not saying that placing a baby for adoption is in ANY way an easy thing to do--it's probably the hardest, most gut-wrenching choice anyone can make. But the fact of the matter is, waiting lists for healthy infants in the U.S. are LONG. There is no shortage of people willing and eager to adopt babies here. That includes black and biracial babies.

Where is the social support for the women who realize that they can't give their children the life they want for them? Why is it OK to admit that you had an unplanned pregnancy, and even in some circumstances and social circles to admit that you had an abortion, but women who admit they placed a child for adoption are still treated like pariahs? They didn't abandon their children in dumpsters. They realized that they couldn't care for their children and found people who could, at great physical and and usually emotional cost to themselves. Why is making that sort of self-sacrifice still considered something shameful?

2. There aren't enough government social services in place to help women with unintended pregnancies...so the answer is to federally fund abortions (as Ms. Kissling has argued in an earlier piece on Salon) instead of working like mad to expand those services? Oh, wait...those services are EXPENSIVE compared with the cost of funding abortion. This may not be a a national moral dilemma so much as an economic one.

3. Aid to Families with Dependent Children or A.F.D.C. doesn't exist anymore. It was drastically overhauled under Clinton's welfare reforms. It's called Temporary Assistance to Needy Families or T.A.N.F. now, and the rules about who gets it and for how long are much different. If you're going to talk about government welfare programs, you might want to talk about ones that haven't been dead for 12 years.

Salon, you have lost me. This is simply an outrage.

The idea that government funded abortions would be an adequate replacement for AFDC and other welfare programs and supports for working families makes me feel nauseous.

I sometimes wonder if Kissling, more than anything, is reacting against her Catholicism, seeing how far in the other direction she can push before she falls off the map.

...on the "1 in 33 babies in the U.S. is born with a birth defect" thing:

That means that 32 out of 33 babies (or 97%) are born without them.

(That statistic also lumps common and easily treatable birth defects like polydactylism (extra fingers and/or toes), club feet, cleft lip, and cleft palate with far more debilitating birth defects like spina bifida.)

A 3% chance that something might be wrong with the baby and special social services may be hard to access if that's the case is hardly a good reason to push abortion on anyone.

Is it always or almost always morally superior to bring a child into the world once conceived than to decide that it would be better that this potential person, at this time, under these circumstances should not come to be?

Yes. Yes it is. It's one thing to decide that you cannot continue to live with a certain handicap or poor, but quite another to decide that someone else can't. Are we any better than ancient Sparta when we make choices like that? My parents sure as hell were poor and not ready for me when I came along. I guess I should have been aborted.

Language and imagination are amazing human capacities. We imagine things, assign meanings to these imaginations and express these meanings with words WHICH BECOME OUR REALITY.

A fetus has the capacity to become a future baby. But it is not a baby yet. It will be a baby if allowed to proceed into its imagined future as a child but if the woman in whose body the fetus is developing does not want to be the mother of a future child, she has the legal right to remove that undeveloped mass of future possibility from her body. It doesn't matter to the fetus, which has no comprehension. It doesn't matter to a lot of women either, that unknowable mass of future. What bothers some women is their imagination of a hyper-conscious God who is watching and judging them.

In the wise words of the old nursery rhyme that so many children used to know by heart, "Life is but as dream."

Of course we have a higher birth defect rate than other countries. That's b/c we don't force women who show signs of having a DS baby or a dificult birth, to abort. Other countries do. Once we start doing the same, we'll be able to brag about a non-existent birth defect rate too.

That said, I'm a hardcore Rush Limbaugh and Savage Nation listener, yet I'm still pro-choice.

Once the liberals find a way to make abortion a race issue(b/c of the disproportionate abortion rate in minority communities), everyone will be pro-life out of fear of being called a racist.