Posted on 02/02/2002 10:51:56 AM PST by FreedomFriend
This is a simple question in which I want to gain insight. At least in terms of the opinions of the FreeRepublic population.
I'll tabulate the responses.
So what are you? Pro-Life or Pro-Abortion.
The only exceptions to pro-life that should be allowed are rape, incest, or a threat to the mother's life.
Why?
Anti-Government Meddling in People's Lives.
So you're for the most profound instance of meddling in U.S. history, Roe VS. Wade? For the federal government overturning countless state laws?
Anti-Religious Tyranny.
Abortion is a humanity issue. There are religious people on either side of it.
Defend your position.
If you can.
People's positions on the issue are largely driven by their religious beliefs; the force of law should not be supporting one religious viewpoint while opposing another.
In my belief system, it is utterly immoral to devote time and energy to championing the rights of embryos and blastocysts while millions of children are literally being sold into slavery by their impoverished parents. The lucky ones (mostly boys) just get viciously beaten and underfed for a few years, until they're so weak that they're thrown out on the street and replaced with newly purchased slaves. The not-so-lucky ones (mostly girls) are sold into prostitution, sometimes as young as 8 or 9, and are thrown out on the street when they begin to show visible signs of AIDS, sometimes by the time they're 10 or 11. I can only imagine what these children would feel if they could hear American pro-lifers carrying on about how important it is that somebody's unwanted blastocyst be carried to term, and if they could know how much time and money is being spent on this crusade. Fortunately they can't hear it, while they're chained to a loom in an Indian "carpet school", or chained to a bed in a Thai brothel servicing 4 "customers" an hour.
However, healthy American-born babies of all colors can be adopted into good families. How can you reasonably apply the "lifetime of poverty" argument to your opposition to laws against aborting them?
Put another way, those who would adopt hard-to-place kids, and those who would adopt healthy saved-from-abortion babies may well be two distinct groups, with no real likelihood of them ever being anything but two distinct groups.
So if aborting healthy babies doesn't increase the number of adoptions of hard-to-place children anyway, how does the unwanted children scenario then justify the aborting of wanted babies?
Whew!
At any rate direct adoption isn't the only way to improve the plight of abused or neglected parentless children. There is something very disturbing about the mindset of many pro-lifers, who are willing to make a tremendous amount of self-righteous noise trying to persuade pregnant women to do something which they don't want to do and which will be very disruptive to their lives, but who aren't willing to undertake similar disruption to their own lives to adopt a hard-to-place child, or to raise h*** about the state of our foster care system and adoption laws, or to take any kind of action to improve the situation of children in the foreign world countries where they are most exploited.
"often experiencing serious abuse in one or more of those foster homes."
What kind of abuse are you talking about? What state has these cases occuring? Who did any research? I can tell you right now that the foster parents I know have paid out of their own pockets for all the many expenses that the state allowance doesn't cover, that they have walked the floors and sat up nights with their children, whom many of us loved as our own...we've made Christmas, and Easter, and Thanksgiving, Fourth of July and a closet full of clothes, and a room of their own, and a peaceful, plentiful dinner table, night after night, sent them off to school with a prayer and a blessing, hugged and kissed them, and when they went back to their "real" parents, cried and prayed that they would be okay...
You know NOTHING about foster parents. NOTHING.
We were a couple who were meant to be parents of a large family...due to health problems I had in my pregnancies, we couldn't have as many children as we had love for...so we were foster parents...we would have adopted the children, but their parents felt they could take care of them just fine...all of them, when they were sent back home, went back into foster care within a year...that was heartbreaking, devastating, especially when we knew where they were coming from...finally, we couldn't take the heartbreak and loss anymore...
I know lots of foster parents, and former foster parents, just like us. You have to put up with a lot in any state's system just to be one...your bank accounts, your family history, your work history--everything is investigated...a criminal background check is done, home visits take place, announced and unannounced...the funds the state allows for the children's care are woefully short...you have to WANT to help children to be a foster parent.
Your throwaway remark was uninformed. You have no idea what you are talking about.
Pro-capital punishment
Both positions are Biblical.
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