Posted on 07/22/2004 7:50:08 AM PDT by ruddigore
bortion is legal - it's just not supposed to be mentioned or acknowledged as an acceptable option. An article in The Times on Sunday, "Television's Most Persistent Taboo," reported that a Viacom-owned channel is refusing to run the episodes of a soap opera in which the teenage heroine chooses to abort. Even "Six Feet Under," which is fearless in its treatment of sexual diversity, burdens abortion with terrible guilt. Where are those "liberal media" when you need them?
You can blame a lot of folks, from media bigwigs to bishops, if we lose our reproductive rights, but it's the women who shrink from acknowledging their own abortions who really irk me. Increasingly, for example, the possibility of abortion is built right into the process of prenatal care. Testing for fetal defects can now detect over 450 conditions, many potentially fatal or debilitating. Doctors may advise the screening tests, insurance companies often pay for them, and many couples (no hard numbers exist) are deciding to abort their imperfect fetuses.
The trouble is, not all of the women who are exercising their right to choose in these cases are willing to admit that that's what they are doing. Kate Hoffman, for example, who aborted a fetus with Down syndrome, was quoted in The Times on June 20 as saying: "I don't look at it as though I had an abortion, even though that is technically what it is. There's a difference. I wanted this baby."
Or go to the Web site for A Heartbreaking Choice, a group that provides support for women whose fetuses are deemed defective, and you find "Mom" complaining of having to have her abortion in an ordinary abortion clinic: "I resented the fact that I had to be there with all these girls that did not want their babies."
Kate and Mom: You've been through a hellish experience, but unless I'm missing something, you didn't want your babies either. A baby, yes, but not the particular baby you happened to be carrying.
The prejudice is widespread that a termination for medical reasons is somehow on a higher moral plane than a run-of-the-mill abortion. In a 1999 survey of Floridians, for example, 82 percent supported legal abortion in the case of birth defects, compared with about 40 percent in situations where the woman simply could not afford to raise another child.
But what makes it morally more congenial to kill a particular "defective" fetus than to kill whatever fetus happens to come along, on an equal opportunity basis? Medically informed "terminations" are already catching heat from disability rights groups, and, indeed, some of the conditions for which people are currently choosing abortion, like deafness or dwarfism, seem a little sketchy to me. I'll still defend the right to choose abortion in these cases, even if it isn't the choice I'd make for myself.
It would be unfair, though, to pick on the women who are in denial about aborting "defective" fetuses. At least 30 million American women have had abortions since the procedure was legalized, mostly for the kind of reasons that anti-abortion people dismiss as "convenience" - a number that amounts to about 40 percent of American women. Yet in a 2003 survey conducted by a pro-choice group, only 30 percent of women were unambivalently pro-choice, suggesting that there may be an appalling number of women who are willing to deny others the right that they once freely exercised themselves.
Honesty begins at home, so I should acknowledge that I had two abortions during my all-too-fertile years. You can call me a bad woman, but not a bad mother. I was a dollar-a-word freelancer and my husband a warehouse worker, so it was all we could do to support the existing children at a grubby lower-middle-class level. And when it comes to my children - the actual extrauterine ones, that is - I was, and remain, a lioness.
Choice can be easy, as it was in my case, or truly agonizing. But assuming the fetal position is not an appropriate response. Sartre called this "bad faith," meaning something worse than duplicity: a fundamental denial of freedom and the responsibility that it entails. Time to take your thumbs out of your mouths, ladies, and speak up for your rights. The freedoms that we exercise but do not acknowledge are easily taken away.
But what makes it morally more congenial to kill a particular "defective" fetus than to kill whatever fetus happens to come along, on an equal opportunity basis?Absolutely nothing.
Got to hand it to her--she's an equal opportunity baby-killer.
So in this nauseating piece of trash, Ehrenreich lambasts women who abort for defects such as deafness or dwarfism, yet refers to her choice to abort 2 healthy children based on her monetary situation at the time as 'easy.' Bullshit is to liberals as water is to fish.
She neglects to mention whether Bill Clinton was the father.
She didn't have the freedom not to get pregnant again?
This is a pretty accurate statement. Lionesses sometimes eat their young, don't they? Hamsters do, but I guess to say, "I was, and remain, a hamster..." doesn't have the same ring to it.
"Yeah, I killed two babies, so what? I was poor."
Just sick.
She's right.
There's no way you can call a woman who pays someone to murder two of her children a bad mother, can you?
And I am sure she is a lioness toward the other children that she allowed to be born - lionesses do eat their young, don't they?
No matter what one thinks of abortion, this woman is an a moral elitist.
Personally,
I think she shouldn't be a mother at all.
"Yeah, I killed two babies, so what? I was poor."
Avarice spreads his wings in triumph.
Latest LibLine: "We kill the children because it's for the children."
BTTT
Abortion will be abolished and history will look back on the age of abortion as an age of barbarism. School children will read of it in history books and will crinkle up their noses in disgust much like we now regard infant exposure practiced by the Roman empire and slavery practiced by the colonial powers. Tapes of defenders of abortion and editorials like these will appear in special interactive formats so that children will take away the appropriate frightening lessons that such people did indeed exist and could return some day again. Then we will all work with more conviction and zeal to eradicate such opinions from our society.
The trouble is, not all of the women who are exercising their right to choose in these cases are willing to admit that that's what they are doing. Kate Hoffman, for example, who aborted a fetus with Down syndrome, was quoted in The Times on June 20 as saying: "I don't look at it as though I had an abortion, even though that is technically what it is. There's a difference. I wanted this baby."
Oh really? She wanted her baby and says her abortion is only "technical". She wants the kind of baby she wants--not the gift God has given her. What message does this send to people with down's? They aren't of value because they aren't "perfect"? What is the definition of perfect?
I have heard of women being told that their babies would have down's syndrome but chose to have their babies anyway---guess what? The babies didn't have down's.
Gee I wonder why dwarfs complian of this practice. Maybe they worried that society will start POST natal abortions....
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