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.
They will spend their life with babysitters, grandparents, friends, boyfriends, strangers. And maybe, just maybe, someone that can give them love and guidance out of the cycle of selfishness and dispair.
Probably Peter Singer.
My reading of the piece is that she lambastes women who abort their children for congenital deficiencies, for not owning up publicly to their actions.
I think abortion is killing. However, if we do make it illegal, how do we enforce this? Fines/imprisonment/forced sterilization?
I just read through all of the comments and noticed that, apart from your initial statement, you have had nothing else to contribute to the thread. I am interested: what do you think of this woman's decisions and assertions? C'mon, speak up now.
What's bold is the increasingly brazen stance of the pro-abortion types. For a long time, the argument was supposedly over when life begins. But in the last year or two, many of them have abandoned that ground and essentially admit, "Yeah, OK, so we ARE killing babies. Big deal. Sometimes killing babies is the right thing to do."
This writer freely acknowledges murdering her unborn children in favor of the "extra-uterine" ones. And she wants not mere legal tolerance but active public approval for her infanticide. Evil, yes, but bold.
I'm sure she'll be completely understanding then, when her children, locked in their own struggle to escape the grubby life of the lower middle class, opt to put mommy to sleep in lieu of wasting their money on that expensive assisted living facility.
To: ehrenreich@nytimes.com
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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.
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Ms. Ehrenreich,
Did it not occur to you that there are tens of thousands of families in the US waiting to adopt infants? That a healthy child born to a healthy mother with a known medical history often has a list of prospective adoptive parents, all vying for the good graces of the mother, which reaches a dozen or more? That right now, over 1.5 million children in the US **live** with adoptive parents? [http://www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/censr-6.pdf]
My wife and I have struggled with infertility for over a decade, and are right now going through the steps necessary to adopt a boy and perhaps also a girl. I find it deeply tragic that you chose to kill your unborn children - that you forfeited the opportunity, 18 years hence, to meet them and befriend them and discover what they've done with your gift of erudition and intelligence - a precious opportunity which my wife and I will never have with our own flesh and blood.
Was it perhaps the shame you felt at the prospect of having to accept charity from willing adoptive parents or faith-based organizations which cost them their lives? Or perhaps the astonishing bureaucratic and legal red tape and pitfalls that plague the US domestic adoption and foster care system?
I hear some abortion advocates say that abortion should be rare, but I rarely see self-identified abortion advocates calling for the reform and streamlining of adoption in the US. Instead I read in the New York Times Sunday Magazine about a woman killing two of her children because she didn't want to have to buy big jars of mayonnaise from CostCo.
-Michael Pelletier.
She seems to hope that women who are post-abortive will "out" themselves, thus making abortion more acceptable, a la homosexuality.
I very much doubt she wants post-abortive women like me to speak out--women who discuss the guilt and anguish which follow abortion. I don't think she wants to hear from me.
She can't shut me up, though.
I'm inclined to agree. My post was actually a bit of a taunt.
"Paging ruddigore, paging ruddigore. Your opinions are required on aisle five!"
"But what makes it more morally congenial to kill a partcular "defective" fetus than to kill whatever fetus happens to come along on an equal opportunity basis?"
That's a chilling statement. I can't believe it was written in this country in the year 2004.
This woman is probably utterly untroubled by the fact that a man has no "reproductive rights" that a woman is bound to respect, whether in nor out of marriage, to keep the baby or not. The course of their lives and their hope for posterity is entirely dependent on the woman's "choice".
I remember hearing a feminazi screeching about how vital "reproductive rights " were for all human beings, insofar as their ability to determine the course of their lives is concerned. It got me to wondering how it is that no comparable "reproductive right" exists for men other than the right to keep your trousers zipped up. A man's income can involuntarily be confiscated to care for children that he does not want, affecting the course of his life. He doesn't even have any "reproductive rights" in marriage, because his wife retains "reproductive rights" if she "chooses" to exercise them.
I don't think either sex should have these "reproductive rights", and should deal with the concequences of a pregnancy, wanted or not. But if as the feminazi says, these rights are vital to human beings, than I wish to suggest the following remedies. An unmarried man, upon being promptly notified of an unwanted pregnacy by his mate, should have the option of a paternal veto (abortion) absolving him of financial and legal responsibility for the child. A married man who discovers that his wife has had an abortion against his wishes should recieve presumptive grounds for a divorce or annullment of the marriage, with the same holding true for one who concieves against his wishes.
Than again maybe the feminazi thinks that men shouldn't qualify for "reproductive rights" since she probably thinks men aren't human anyway.
I pray for that day. Like we read about Nazi Germany now.
Like all liberals she is terrified that if post-abortive women speak out about their guilt, they may actually save a baby's life. Oh, the horror...
She is the voice of today's Democratic Party. If the polls are to be believed, about half (maybe even more) of Americans now agree with her "ho-hum" view about killing babies, as well as the various other formerly taboo behaviors her Party condones or supports. Why else would 48% or more plan to vote for Kerry/Edwards?
Over three adoption seekers per child - perhaps because so many healthy children are being slaughtered in the womb?
Heheheheheh, I haven't seen that show in years. John Cleese is a genius.
I just remember the one scene where Manuel is learning English from a tape, and keeps repeating, "My name is Manuel, I speak English very good..."
Any woman who kills her children is a bad mother. Just because you let one or two survive doesn't make you a "lioness", it makes you a hyena-ess with a guilty conscience, more commonly known as a Democrat.
Extra-uterine child. What a cold, cold new phrase from the party of compassion.
I think it is Peter Singer. Is he at the University of Colorado?
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