Now, if we could only stop the fundies from turning nouns into verbs (not that the fundies are the only ones who do that - ‘GOOGLED‘, indeed!), so that ugly and emotionally charged words stop being used as punctuation… The trouble is, unless you’ve lived it, it’s so easy to see any morally or ethically unclear situation as some sort of point-scoring, who-can-scream-the-loudest game.

Oops. Back to my medication…

I believe nobody has the right to make the choice except the woman who will have to change the diapers. Her man has a say, as long as he’ll be changing them too.

I believe that we should be honest with kids about sex and babies, so they’ll know what they’re getting into.
I believe contraception should be freely available: better a fornicating teenager on the Pill than a pregnant teenager dropping out of school.

I believe it is the height of male chauvinist arrogance (remember male chauvinism?) for a self-righteous pharmacist to deny the “morning after” pill to a woman who has tried to use a contraceptive and had it fail. I’ve never heard of female pharmacists doing this, somehow.

I believe it is very close to theft for any pharmacist to refuse to fill a prescription and also to refuse to return it to prevent it being filled elsewhere. I wonder if anyone has filed charges? I wonder if anyone will?

I believe in choice.
I believe that fetuses are potential children.
I would do anything to change the mind of one of my children if they wanted to abort their child (my grandchild) for almost any reason, including handicapped, excluding annacyaphalic or anything that dooms the child (I had a niece with fetal alcohol syndrome, who tore up her parents before she died at 4 years old, blind and unable roll over).

When the Right says that the Bible claims the soul begins at conception, they are mistaken. What did the people at the time of Jesus know about sperm, eggs, uterus, implantation, etc? All they knew is sex and babies. What happened between them was called conception. So a definition of conception that starts at fertilization can’t be accurate, when the medical definition of pregnancy is the implantation of a fertilized egg into the uterus. Therefore an IUD or a morning after pill can’t abort a child because it is not medically considered a pregnancy up until this point. To misread the Bible and say that fertilization equals pregnancy makes everything more difficult.

I believe in a compromise. I believe that life is defined by brain waves. When they stop, life stops. When they begin, life begins.

This means that up until about 8 weeks an abortion is acceptable, but after that you really are messing with a separate life. I’m willing to live with that. It’s earlier than the 13 weeks of the 1st trimester but 8 weeks later than implantation.

I know 6 women who have had abortions, (none mine) every one is haunted by her actions and everyone feels it was the only choice at the time. I am sure that each would have had an illegal abortion if abortions were illegal. My heart hurts for each of these women and the suffering they’ve had to endure, it wasn’t an easy choice but at least they had the choice to make.

The Roe vs. Wade “debate” should not be such a polarising argument, the way I see it. I guess that the probability of the life of the fetus should be sacrosanct (in the full meaning of the word), unless the mum has been (or could be) violated in some way, physically, emotionally, or morally. It’s not a matter of “life at any cost”, it’s a matter of possibilites. Does the possibility of a healthy, happy, baby outweigh the probability of an unhealthy, unhappy mother? And what about the life of both individuals after birth? Doesn’t that count too?

I heard news today that the Virginia legislature has legislated that pharmacists MUST dispense the birth control pill (even the ‘morning after’ pill) when it has been legally prescribed by a registered physician. Isn’t that nice of them? Kinda proves my final point. Maybe the religious fundies don’t have anything good left to argue about, so they’re sniping where they can.

As the unwanted child of a 15 year old Melbourne schoolgirl who was quite brutally raped in late 1962, I guess I am a wee bit biased. Just not in the way I “should” be, I guess. It’s the oldest dilemma - my belief system dictates that I should not even be here to argue about my belief system. Catch-1?

Just my AUD$0.02 (that’s, er, carry the 4, USD$0.00000035 or something)

I just wanted to try to point out the single-issue fixation, not open it up.

But here are my two pennies anyway.

Both sides in the abortion debate are a bit disingenuous in how they try to frame it, probably because the real question is too painful and inscrutable.

To wit: Pro-choice people insist on framing the debate as a woman’s choice and nothing else, as though the fetus doesn’t exist. The insincerity of this stance is evidenced by the fact that most pro-choice people do not favor unrestricted late-term abortions.

Pro-life people insist on framing the debate as “life begins at conception.” Most of them don’t really mean it either, or else there would be a hue and cry surrounding in vitro fertilization that would rival the abortion clinic protests. After all, the discarded embryos (the discarded Human Lives) from that process rival the abortions performed each year.

[The stem-cell debate touches on this, but it’s mostly political hot air. Few people have seriously suggested stopping in vitro fertilization or similar baby-making procedures.]

In short, you won’t find many pro-choice people advocating making abortion legal up until the very moment that labor begins. Nor will you find many pro-life people insisting that a woman who was raped by a relative yesterday shouldn’t be allowed to have an abortion if she proves to be pregnant. In those extreme circumstances, the shouts of “It’s my body!” and “Murder!” ring hollow.

The slippery and uncomfortable fact is that the facts about where life begins are slippery and uncomfortable, and there are few people on either side of the debate who honestly believe it really begins at either conception OR birth. It’s probably somewhere in between, in a process that is obviously and demonstrably gradual, and there are no certain answers.

I really don’t know. My opinion, though, is that both sides are so accustomed to the line of argument that has been handed down to them that they’re not really thinking about what “debating” is supposed to accomplish. It seems that each side thinks that giving up anything, even giving up the things they really don’t believe in, would be the first step down a very slippery slope.

I do know THIS, though (waterfowler, mostly): All this talk of “legislating from the bench,” and how that’s a new, modern, pernicious force… well, that’s a load of crap. Read the history of the Supreme Court, read the Constitution itself, and you’ll see that there IS a thin line between the interpretation of laws and the de facto making of laws. There’s supposed to be. From a philosophical standpoint, there HAS to be. Anything that is not explicitly covered in the Constitution, any law made or unmade, is by definition fodder for the courts to decide upon (if asked). Their interpretations are necessarily things that go beyond the Constitution, and these decisions necessarily have immediate consequences as far as the law is concerned.

That’s how the system works. Whether the case is Roe v. Wade or Brown v. Board of Education or Bush v. Gore, the courts are simply doing their job. We don’t raise an almighty ruckus when the President pushes for legislation [indeed, not even when he INTRODUCES legislation], and that’s a far more explicit crossing of the boundaries between our three branches. If you fall for the recent rhetoric about these Infernal Judges, you’re just being suckered.

The alternative to legal abortions is illegal abortions. How is that better?

Abortions are up substantially under W. vs. Clinton. How is that possible? (Women are nervous about having children when the future is uncertain).

Question. Would you rather have fewer abortions under an immoral president Clinton or more abortions under God’s chosen and beloved child, George W Bush?