quidditchgrrl

I wonder if his OTP is Rick and George.

*shudder*

My icon has a new meaning.

(Icon ♥ !!)

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singtoangels.livejournal.com

Whoa, is that really the Shrub doing that? I thought my husband had found the only picture of him flicking a bird!

Sing

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( ♥ on your icon, that is!)

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I think I'm the only one on my flist who is glad they went all out on the abortion ban. If the argument is that abortion is murder, there can't be any loopholes in abortion bills except for the one given--that the life of the mother is threatened. Rape isn't a good enough reason, nor is incest, because if you make those two exceptions, then you're basically treating unwanted pregnancies that are the cause of "accidents" as punishment.

I'm not about that. I'm pro-Choice politically, but if you're going to try to sell me abortion and your selling point is life begins at conception, you cannot make those rape/incest exceptions to me because a life is a life no matter how it is conceived.

Either way though, I'm not a fan of this bill, but I doubt it'll stand for long. The higher courts will strike it down.

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avidbeader.livejournal.com

That's true. Because they've gone all-out in South Dakota, they're not only likely to run up against Roe v. Wade precedent in the Supreme Court, but they're also dividing the Republicans, a great many of whom don't have such an extreme anti-choice view or preferred the slow-and-in-small-bites process that was previously being used.

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You know, with the exceptions, I think this bill is likely to pass muster, unfortunately. Hopefully it will be brought down on privacy grounds.

I look at incest and rape pregancies as resulting from a crime, not an accident.

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Incest and rape are crimes, but why should the baby be killed for that, if the anti-abortion argument is indeed life begins at conception and abortion is murder. While the circumstances of the conception are unfortunate and criminal, the baby shouldn't pay for it, according to true anti-abortion argument.

But I really don't think this bill has legs. Precedent is still Roe v. Wade, and unless the lower courts rule in favor of the bill, I don't see it reaching the Supreme Court. And even if it did, and even with Roberts and Alito, they're still going to lose 5-4 because the only two others who would be in their corner is Thomas and Scalia.

And honestly, I think there would be enough women in this country to get the republicans out of office nationwide should the bill stand.

Maybe that's highly naive of me, but I don't understand why people don't see this as a horrendously bad idea.

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Although I disagree with you, I admire you for your stance. You are one of the rare people who really are Pro-Life. You see through the hypocricy of the rape and incest loophole that so many people under that banner insist upon. If those two loopholes are present, it isn't truly a stand for "life begins at conception" - It is a punishment for premarital sex directed at women.

This is a much more complicated picture than it was in the early '70s when it was originally decided. I'm looking forward to seeing what happens with it.

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Politically, I'm pro-Choice. I'm all for a woman to choose. Personally, I'm pro-Life. I don't think I could ever go through an abortion, but that doesn't mean I think the option shouldn't be avialable. Abortion happens all the time--whether intentional or not--I'm just saying if you're going to be pro-Life, really be pro-Life, or else your position is weak to me.

And it's not even for pre-marital sex. What about the married women who don't want kids or who can't afford them? Same thing.

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*heddesk* I shoulda known. Then you are just a reasonable, thoughtful person who can see both sides.

You are absolutely correct in everything you say. :)

I also admire the Pope for his pro-life stance. He is also against the Death Penalty, which truly makes him Pro-Life.

You don't hear the religious anti-abortionists talking much about married women who don't want kids. Even if they do, married women are supposed to hear the same message. The answer to the question within the issue goes right back to the same thing: Accept what god gives you or keep your legs shut.

In the case of rape and incest, a woman doesn't have a choice in the matter. That's why the religionists can allow the exceptions there.

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I'm not always correct, lol, though I do try to be fair.

Rape, there's definitely no choice--that's the very definition of the word. Incest . . . that's a bit trickier. There is such a thing as consensual incest, but we're not supposed to admit/talk about that. But either way, there's still a life involved. I know there are exception to murder such as self-defense, but that's usually against the perpetrator. This baby is anything but.

If the belief is birth begins at conception, the circumstances of said conception then become irrelevant to the allowance of an abortion, right?

I'm not saying, thus, it should be Pro-Choice, I'm just saying if you're going to be pro-Life, you have to be aware that you poke holes in the argument by making such allowances. If the pro-Life's main concern is the baby, then make it about the baby, not a moral statement about the mother, which that's what it seems like to me to be.

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This is shaping up to be an interesting battle.

I'm a bit dismayed at the idiots the Democrats are picking to run against the morons in PA. The main candidate they are running against Mr. Icky-Stuff is someone who seems to be pandering to the Religious Right as well.

I'm not sure why, but I am far less concerned about the abortion debate as I am about the science and speech debates that are going on. With the advent of RU-386 and the other chemical methods of upsetting pregnancy and making it go buh-bye, I can only see this turn into a new medical privacy issue. Especially in the age of electronic data.

They will regret this.

BTW, my mom was a nurse. In the bad old days of illegal abortions and sterilization, she worked for a doctor (who is long dead now) who provided them - Free of charge. If a woman came to him in distress over a pregnancy, he helped her. He treated women like adults who knew what they wanted for their own lives, and for their own bodies. Not like playthings for the masses to demand obedience of each and every one.

Not a single person in that office would have said a word to law enforcement about it. Stuff like that commands loyalty when repressive fascism squeezes individual rights and puts the individual under mob rule. And yeah, this was during the McCarthy years too. Wear that hat, eh?

Those doctors will continue to exist even if Roe v. Wade is overturned. I'm not so sure that it will be though. The financial reward will have to be much greater for it to be overturned. I'm not getting the dollar angle yet.

I'm not sure if Napoli will work with that. Santorum SOUNDS like something disgusting and it doesn't have any connotation attached. Napoli already has an Italian regional thing and it doesn't fit. I clicked anyway.

I looked on the source code - Did she do Meta-Tags? Coz I didn't see any.

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I'm thinking that abortion will go on - but only for people who can "afford" them - the daughters of the rich and privileged never have to worry about unwanted pregnancy.

I don't know about the coding - I just made a link. :B

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That will certainly be part of the problem. The poor will be able to get them when there are people willing to help. The doctor for whom my mom worked was more likely to do abortions on adult women. Poor or rich, it didn't matter. He did them for nothing. Same with teenagers who were there with Mom.

The advent of chemical abortions has changed the landscape quite a bit. I don't think that the divide between safe abortions and back-alley abortions will be as wide this time. There is FAR more awareness. People talk about it now - They didn't even breathe a word of it 'back in the day'.

No one talked about abortion before the late '60s and '70s and the advent of the women's movement. It simply "didn't happen". And if something bad happened to a woman, the woman deserved it. That was the prevailing attitude and it was accepted. Single women didn't keep children and accept public assistance. It simply wasn't done.

Ha.

You won't see that now, that's for sure. Now there will be women PUBLICLY and loudly driving to Canada and going to states where they can get abortions. There will be abortion trains. And on and on. It's gonna get noisy.

I'm waiting to see where this one goes.

There will always be home abortions for the women who know about herbal miscarriages. They aren't a sure thing, but they do pack a punch.

This will also change the landscape of IVF and Infertility treatments. As I said above, this issue is far more complicated than it was in the early '70s. If life begins at conception, (or even before according to some doctrine and dogma), what are the implications?

Of course, I am an extremist. Life begins when a child can sustain itself outside the womb. I don't argue abortion anymore either way. It's a useless task. I have extreme views on the subject and they are all in one direction. I got fed up with the middle ground in this one a long time ago. I have nothing but admiration for the people who are still fighting with the philosophical and logical debate points. They are the interesting ones.

It's the religionists who are trying to insert their punishment for original sin into law that piss me off. They are the ones I don't even bother talking to anymore.

Sorry about my long-windedness. I hardly ever talk about this subject. I think about it, but I hardly ever engage in discussions about it. It's sorta useless to engage the religionists, and they are the loudest, so I just ignore them over this issue.

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OMG. You are the first person I've known that agrees with me - I truly feel that life begins at 'viability'. If the fetus can survive outside of the womb, that's a kid. Before that, it's part of the mother's body, not a separate entity.

I remember reading an old criminal investigations handbook, and under the section on dealing with rape victims, it cautioned the investigator to carefully question the victim (as to her previous sexual activity, etc.) to be sure that she wasn't claiming rape so she could have an abortion. -.-

I've been tickled at the guy who's suing not to have to pay child support because his girlfriend "tricked" him into having unprotected sex. Let's see if the double standard holds up - he shouldn't have had sex if he wasn't willing to accept the consequences, eh?

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Wow. I didn't think anyone agreed with me on that. I've never met anyone else either. Viability is pretty young these days with medical treatments for premature infants. Before that, all yer cells belong to me.

I remember the era and that rape story fits in perfectly. That era is idealized by so many (*cough*Neo-Con*cough*), but it was not an ideal time. The only people who had it relatively good were Christian white males who were happy with a stereotypical family structure.

I think that there should be some sort of protection for males - It's true that they get the short end of the stick (*cough*) on reproductive rights. There should be some way for them to say that they want to have a child - That they are against a woman having their child aborted. It is half of their genetic code, after all.

Hopefully science will catch up in this area and someday we can extract the embryo and raise it in an artificial environment. (In vast fields of pods, tended by giant machines, on farms of humans that produce electricity. *eep*!) Then the fathers can have the children if they desire and the mothers will be unable to "trick" them.

The Anti-Abortion crowd can just STFU after that. Overpopulation be damned. They can have all the unwanted kids to raise themselves, support them, and make sure that they have the best of everything until they reach the age of majority. That will be interesting, no?

But - tricked into unproteced sex? Dude. Nice try. No one gets "tricked" into unprotected sex. Fucking idiot.

Do you really think there is still a double standard in BC? I don't think there is a double standard on that one now. AIDs took care of that. I thought that was starting to fade away in the late '80s.

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I've been gratified with the response I've seen to this guy - no one seems to be taking his complaint seriously. So the double standard does indeed hold ground here, albeit with less overreaching consequences for him. All he has to do is pay for his sprog, not raise it, and there is no stigma attached to that.

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I'm glad that the whole "trick" thing isn't being taken seriously. That's just bullshit.

Here's the secret word of the day: Vascectomy.

If a guy really doesn't want to have kids, he should do the Vas thing. Or make sure he wears a raincoat. The same goes for women and protection.

There's no stigma attached to bastards anymore. I'm not sure why people are still behaving as if there were.

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Uh, that would be Vasectomy.

*heddesk*

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avidbeader.livejournal.com

Count me in as another person for whom life begins at viability.

I've also been tempted to post about that story about the guy trying to sue for "men's rights". If he's not going to cover his own bases and use birth control, then he's partly responsible and does indeed owe support costs.

As for me, when I was younger I would have definitely considered abortion in my options; when the fiancé and I had a condom break on us I went to Student Health for emergency contraception immediately. (I was in grad school and we were poor.) Now that I've had a child, I doubt I would abort unless tests showed that the fetus had major genetic damage that would result in extreme disability.

But there's no way I would be arrogant enough to dictate someone else's life by saying they had to go through a pregnancy that wasn't intended or have a child they couldn't support. And if the religious conservatives are so hot to prevent abortions, then they need to accept full-disclosure sex ed as a preventative measure. Not much has been made of the fact that abortion numbers declined during the Clinton administration and has been steadily rising since Bush and the era of "abstinence-only" sex-ed programs in schools.

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When I was in my thirties my husband and I tried to have a child. I was petrified of birth defects because of my age and because I had no idea of my family history. (I'm the product of a closed adoption.) I KNOW that if there had been even a hint of disability or birth defect I would have aborted.

You are absolutely right about the abortion statistics. One of the reasons is also the economy. It sucks despite the manipulated numbers that are being thrown at us. Hope in the future is poor with wars being fought on multiple fronts. There are so many reasons that abortions are rising.

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singtoangels.livejournal.com

Okay, I'm going to pickle myself here and get into this.

This is my personal view on abortion (meaning as it applies to myself:

I would never have an abortion whether I was raped, or even to save my own life if I was given a choice between myself or my child provided I knew there were people like my husband or family that would take care of the baby. I would be willing to risk death for a child because I see abortion as a form of murder.

But on a global and humanitarian scale:

I agree that every woman has the right to control her own body and what it contains. And I also think that if abortions are banned, women will go back to almost killing themselves to achieve their desired end. One life lost is better than two any day. Back alley abortions caused thousands of deaths before they legalised abortion. Probably many more than that.

So in conclusion, whilst I see abortion as something that deeply grieves me, I know that I don't have the right to tell someone that they aren't allowed to do it because I don't agree with it. I don't think anyone has that right.

Sing`

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I'm a little old to be having an abortion, that's my opinion.

But then again, as a person who's been raped, the idea that I could have been compelled to raise any offspring resulting from that - that makes me feel ill. (I don't believe in adoption, so there would be no other avenue for me) The abuse/abandonment issues alone are terrifying.

I think I would have less issue with abortion law if there was a corresponding increase in safer sex education and availability of birth control methods. Not that that will happen soon. :\

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