They call themselves Feminists for Life, but the life involved isn’t the woman’s. I’m all for more research into and subsidization of hormonal birth control – they’re against it all. I’d have an easier time believing anything they said about wanting to take the burden of contraception off of women if they were advocating more research for male birth control.
Huh, I was trying to find information on their site about that, and I couldn’t. That’s certainly annoying.
Whether or not someone considers non-barrier forms of birth control to be abortifacients is going to depend on whether follow the medical definition of abortion or if they consider anything that prevents the zygote from implanting to be abortion. Hormonal contraceptives and IUDs all prevent implantation, so if someone considers the moment of conception to be what defines personhood, they would logically consider those methods of birth control to be abortifacients.
People who don’t support any forms of birth control, including barrier methods, are trying to control women. People who sincerely believe that personhood begins at the moment of conception, and therefore support barrior methods but not birth control that prevents implantation, are just giving the “child” (quotes because personhood of a single cell is up for debate) the same rights as the mother.
WTF? Where the hell did you hear this? :dubious:
So basically, only sluts and trash get abortions? :rolleyes:
And you’re saying what – that poor parents put their kids up for adoption? Then how does that mean said kids are raised poorly? Or am I completely misreading what you’re saying?
Probably nothing major. Very few so-called “doomsday theories” ever really pan out. Society has some variance for a few decades, then everybody adapts.
I think more people would opt for sterilization. Being child-free would become more common.
I went to go find the stats on this - because as I said before, the numbers are off on this one (as I recall), but there is truth - adoptees are far more likely to be violent criminals. Particularly domestic adoptees. But there are confusing variables - kids adopted by a step parent or grandparent are considered adopted. Kids adopted out of foster care situations - that have often had a history of abuse before they even reach foster care. It isn’t ADOPTION that is necessarily the root cause, but there IS correlation. Unfortunately, my adoption books are almost always out on loan to someone, and are currently out on loan to a friend. And I can’t remember the name of the book, or the author.
(They are also far more likely to commit suicide, far more likely to seek mental health help, far more likely to get divorced.)
(I think its Patricia Irwin Johnston’s Launching a Baby’s Adoption that has the stats in it. Its dated - 1997)
Yeah, like my exgirlfriend’s mom. She was about 30 minutes from dying from an eutopic(sp?) pregnancy. The first doctor wouldn’t do the abortion on moral grounds, even through the zygote or fetus or whatever wouldn’t have been viable, and she was 30 minutes or so from dying according to the same doctor. Another surgeon ran down the hall and took her for a hysterectomy, where as she was still wanting to have children later. That killed that.
Oh sorry,
/soapbox
Translucent Daydream – it’s ectopic. (Was this in the US? I hope she sued, or at least threatened to! WTF?)
The reason it concerns me, is that if I want to have children someday, there’s a chance I’d have to adopt, (a lot of anti-convulsants cause birth defects). 
Not necessarily, but it’s always in the back of my mind.
sorry
hijack
I tried to convince them to do something about it. This happened in 1992. She told me the story about it in 2000, I don’t know how long the statute of limitations would be on it, but I tried to get her to at least report it to the AMA. She and her husband are now very paranoid of anyone in the medical profession so it was impossible to convince her to go the AMA with it.
/hijack
No, the theory is that women get abortions who don’t want to raise the children (regardless of the reason), so these unwanted kids are the ones least likely to be raised in such a way as to prevent them from becoming criminals as teens and adults. Here’s a Wikipedia article discussing the link between legalized abortion and crime.
WTF? Even the “no abortion, even to save the mother’s life” Catholic Church allows the removal of the fallopian tube in the case of an ectopic pregnancy.
More people wouldn’t be able to walk away from the consequences of their actions.
Do your research. Most adopted kids turn out great. But there ARE risk factors. And it isn’t unreasonable to believe that if we outlaw abortion, the things that contribute to adoption being a contributing factor toward “challenging” kids will grow. Fetal alcohol syndrome. Babies born to mothers doing drugs. Children conceived in situations of domestic violence. Birth mothers who decide to give raising kids a go, but who are really ill equipped for it and end up having parental rights terminated. Less than ideal placement situations (as the need for homes grow, adoption agencies may need to be less picky - yeah for gay couples, boo for less than stable home situation). Birth parents whose mental health state would have had them terminate - and who pass on a genetic predisposition to mental health issues.
Some of these stats, and I’m not sure when the ones I remember were compiled, are based on people born (and then adopted) pre-1973.
ETA: A big risk factor is aslo attachment disorder. And attachment disorder can lead to all sorts of “less than socially acceptable” behavior as adults. Particularly with kids who spent some time institutionalized or who went from care situation to care situation.
Exactly. The same people banning abortions would have to face the poverty and crime they’d helped foster.
Beat me to it. 
Although I was going to go with something like, “You mean that the government would have to enforce better maternity leaves and provide better health care and child care, right?”
Even though it is an ectopic pregnancy that is mentioned the church is not going to forbid an abortion on grounds that a woman’s life is in danger for another cause. (For example, recently there was a case where an 8 year old girl was raped and became pregnant – and most certainly would have died without an abortion. While originally the bishop in her area – this was in Latin America – excommunicated those involved, the excommunication was revoked, due to the circumstances.)
If you just look at their website, the organization plainly states that they do not take an official stance on contraception or abstinence: Link to the FAQ page.
Even if you can find FFL members who are anti-contraception, that doesn’t make FFL as a group anti-contraception or mean that an anti-contraception stance inherently goes with being against abortion. I can easily find members of the Democratic party who are vegetarians, but that doesn’t mean all Democrats are vegetarians or that the Democratic Party has an official stance against meat.
On the website you link to, “Loserboy” (as he calls himself). needs a lesson in reading comprehension. He uses this quote from commentary in the FFL newsletter as “proof” that FFL is anti-contraception:
birth control counselling and abortion often indirectly contribute to the victim’s sense of shame, guilt, and blame for what is happening, since she is told to “take control” and “be responsible” for her “sexual activity,” implying that this situation is indeed within her power to control.
The FFL article the quote was lifted from is about a woman who was SEXUALLY ABUSED BY HER BROTHER. The article writer’s point was that when people assumed she was having sex voluntarily and just not being responsible about birth control it was hurtful to her since it wasn’t her choice to have sex, let alone to not use condoms. The point is not to say that birth control is bad but to make people think about jumping to conclusions that a woman with an unplanned pregnancy must have been irresponsible with birth control.
When someone can so grossly misunderstands something that’s written down, I do not have much faith that Katha Pollitt’s out of context report of Serrin Foster’s view of birth control is an accurate understanding of her viewpoint. Considering how you can make a snippet of a quote sound like it supports any side of things, it would be more useful if she actually did report Serrin’s comments in their entirety.
Don’t let Dailykos do your thinking for you. Think for yourself.
Not really. They’d just let the women and the children they forced upon those women sink or swim. At best. That after all is what we see in the real world; anti-abortion cultures are always also uncaring or outright hostile to women and children in general.
Assuming they exist at all, these compassionate anti-abortionists who always get brought up in these discussions are clearly insignificant in number and influence. In a nation that actually managed to forbid abortion and make it stick you’d be lucky if women kept the vote, much less got more maternity leave.
What I actually said was “poverty, poor education, being underaged, being unmarried, drug and alcohol use, poor health, family problems” exist in both groups at a significantly higher rate than these factors exist in a random group of people. These are facts. Saying that somebody is a slut or trash because they’re a high school drop-out, a drug addict, or a teenage mother is a matter of opinion and not one I would make.
And Leavitt does show that parents who put their children up for adoption at birth do still have a significant effect on their children’s lives.
It both amazes and disgusts me that 10% of the population would not allow an abortion even to save a woman’s life. “Well, the doctor could be wrong.”
For a real story of a case that the anti-abortion people should have kept their thoughts to themselves, read about Nancy Klein. Her husband (the baby’s daddy) and Ms. Klein’s parents agreed to the abortion that the doctors said would help her recover from a coma, but two absolute strangers went to court to stop it, one claiming to represent Ms. KLein and one claiming to represent 'the baby."
As far as I can tell, you just linked and quoted something that directly supports what I said. (I.e., the Catholic Church does not allow abortion, even to save the mother’s life, but does allow measures to save the mother’s life that would indirectly result in the death of the fetus, such as the removal of a fallopian tube in the case of an ectopic pregnancy.)
But we’re looking at a hypothetical situation here, not “what if this particular misogynistic culture outlawed abortion.”
:waves: Hi. You’ve met one now.
Note that I’m an anti-abortionist in the sense that I think that abortion is a terrible stopgap measure that hurts women’s rights, and I would like to see our government work towards actually addressing the issues that lead women to get abortions, **not **that I think making it illegal would solve anything. I would be perfectly happy for it to remain legal but unecessary.