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.
Yes, and wondering what mommy will do to them now when they aren't being perfect. This woman is pathetic.
or, having gotten pregnant, she could have chosen to give the baby she didn't want up for adoption by some stable, married couple who were unable to have a baby of their own. But that thought never occurs to these people.
I guess if she'd carried them and put them up for adoption, instead of killing them, she'd have to deal with Catholic or other faith-based charities, and that would probably have been a fate worse than death (or at least the death of her unborn children) for her.
A friend of mine was told that the only possible way for some test result to be so high was if she were carrying multiples, and they ALL had spina bifida.
One child, perfect little girl.
No, slice and dice is their first consideration.
I suppose if she ever gets too poor to support all her children she will do the right thing and kill one so she can remain a "good Mother" to the others.
"Choice can be easy, as it was in my case, or truly agonizing"
I guess, using her own statistics, that the women who had abortions and do not support abortion on demand, are "truly agonizing" over their decision to abort. Maybe their lack of support is because they don't want another woman to make the same mistake. The author's own research seems to make this point perfectly clear.
*** I should acknowledge that I had two abortions during my all-too-fertile years.***
"All-too-fertile years" translated, "when I was in heat and had the morals of street walker."
***You can call me a bad woman, but not a bad mother.***
Bad Mother? You? Nah. you just arranged for your children to be slaughtered in the womb using means less compassionate than spraying a cockroach with diazinon.
Hey if you kill cockroaches in your den, might as well kill kids in your womb. Right. Yeah, you're a great mom.
The move is already afoot. I forget the guy's name, but he's a philosphy professor and he's started a movement in academic circles to pass legislation granting personhood only to children older than 2 years old. Rush has mentioned this guy and his warped, evil ideas a number of times.
He actually espouses the belief that you should be able to end the life of your 1 year old if you find raising him to be to bothersome.
The bulk of the article is admission against interest.
He actually espouses the belief that you should be able to end the life of your 1 year old if you find raising him to be to bothersome.
Evil is alive and thriving in America
I call you a bad mother. You are a bad mother. Bad mother.
If you lost your job would you shoot your "extra-uterine" children because you could not longer afford to feed them? You decided to kill your pre-born children rather than give them a chance at life. You decided you knew enough about the future that they would not be able to live, or at least live as well as you wanted them to. Or perhaps you decided that you would not be able to live as well as you wanted to if they lived.
Whatever excuses you can make for your selfish choice, you chose to kill your own children rather than give them a shot at life.
That makes you a bad mother. There is no other "choice."
Shalom.
Okay, she paid a butcher to kill two of her kids. It was cheaper than raising them. It was, she says, "easy".
But she's not, she says, a bad mother.
If this is supposed to be sanity, thank you, sweet Jesus, for making me insane.
Anything to avoid that grubby, lower middle class horror.
Fawlty: That's not a hamster. That's a rat!
Manuel: No... is hamster.
Shalom.
Predictable...
I would have liked a "Barf Alert", however.
How sad. In order to assert her love for her children, this woman has to distinguish between the kids she choose to keep, and the ones she had eliminated for convenience's sake. She's quick to point out that she loves and protects her "extrauterine" children.
I think when I get home, I'm gonna throw open the door and shout "extrauterine children, daddy's home!"
As a conservative, it's nice to be on the right side of arguments, so that I don't have to use weasle words and euphamisms to defend my beliefs. And I, a right-wing extremist, don't have to specify which children I chose to love.
Fletcher J
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