So, the question was ‘Do you think abortion should be illegal for unmarried women who don’t want a baby?’
That implies that there was a question ‘Do you think abortion should be illegal for married women who don’t want a baby?’ What was the percentage on that one?
Badtz, whatever else your opinions are, I do agree there.
I cannot reconcile “punishing” a fetus with murder, just because his/her mother was assailed that way.
Also, how are we to determine that the child is product of rape? It is not impossible for a newly impregnated woman to be raped after-all.
No doubt, it is a difficult situation at best, but to murder an innocent while the perpetrator will, at worst, be sentenced to a few years in the jug, if they are apprehended at all (I do deal with a sickening amount of potentially “Slam-dunk” cases where the victim will back out when she realises she will have to testify at some level.)
Also, I for one see no reason whether or not the woman is married should have any bearing on other types of abortion cases.
To clarify, I am a “Lifer” that truly believes medically induced abortion should be used only in cases of extreme danger to the mother, and really don’t see how making exceptions like rape does anything other than pontificate our case needlessly.
Cheers then.
PS…
Also I found this interesting…
I found it interesting, because, logically, the best “punnishment” for promiscuity, is ironically, more promiscuity. Think about it. After a while, there are much worse things than pregnancy that can occur from that. AIDS, ghonorrea [sp], syphillis, and many other nasty t hings I am sure.
Anyway, just a minor hijack there, not a Strawman, as you have made it clear you do not neccessarily hold the same beliefs currently. In fact, I point out the STD thing simply because my beliefs with regard to being pro-life are much more inline with saving lives than punnishing them. Hence my pointing out more logical “punnishments” for being fast there.
Hope that made sense…
Yep, it sure does.
Damn those evil birth control takin’ women for trusting in science!
Damn them for not being able to talk their healthcare providers into doing hysterectomies on them at age 16!
It’s really pretty simple. If you allow for an exception for rape, you are saying that pregnancy is not a 100% Good Thing that everyone wants and can tolerate.
I assure you, if there is a rape exception, you’ll be amazed how often rapes occur.
Julie
As already discussed above, there could be a requirement that the sexual assault has been duly reported to police within a certain time period, to prevent just such an abuse of the exception.
What happened to “innocent until proven guilty.” You’re saying that she will be presumed to be lying. Prove that the woman wasn’t raped. She says she was. Her word isn’t good enough?
And listen to yourself. Just listen to yourself. You want to take a woman who has been put through the most trauma of her life (likely) and you want to force her to get naked and have strangers “examine” her genitals so that she will be able to have recourse if her body decides to betray her–recourse that can only be considered hypocritical if the fetus is so all-fired precious that it absolutely must be protected.
Explain how this can be viewed as anything less than a punishment.
Julie
Not quite true. Many of the things we label “contraceptives” are actually abortifacients, or haver abortifacient aspects. These include Depo-Provera, The Pill, and IUDs (how can anyone be against abortion and promote the use of IUDS??).
Julie
Not quite true. Many of the things we label “contraceptives” are actually abortifacients, or haver abortifacient aspects. These include Depo-Provera, The Pill, and IUDs (how can anyone be against abortion and promote the use of IUDS??).
Julie
Hold on here. You are the one who implied above that wholesale lying will take place if rape is made an exception: “I assure you, if there is a rape exception, you’ll be amazed how often rapes occur.”
Sheesh! :mad:
I have to say how much I appreciate the fact that ‘Eat’ and Yeticus have started to give us a glimpse into the world that the anti-choice movement wish to create for women.
Not quite yet ‘Gilead’ of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, of course, but the mechanistic, almost robotic, pedantry of how traumatized women would be treated is certainly an interesting entrée.
I’d really like to see the answer to that one, myself. The higher the difference in the responses, the more of a fuzzy moral issue this becomes. My personal experience with this topic has shown me that you don’t often have to scrape a pro-lifer very hard to find some one who really just wants to “punish the sluts!” with a baby. I’m glad to see in this debate, at least, the doesn’t seem to be the common case.
Abortion can be an intensly personal issue for young women my age, just the right time in our lives when having a baby would derail everything, and we’d be unable to properly provide for a child. So it is really really hard to listen to the moralizing of mature, “you’ll-know-better-when-you’re-older” men and women ( especially men, sorry) about how wrong we are, when they couldn’t possibly be faced with an unwanted pregnancy as a 20 something girl. It just looks far too easy to stand on the outside and wax poetic about the sanctity of a bundle of cells when that bundle of cells can never and will never be in your body.
It isn’t fair. I’ll likely never face the death penalty, and I still have opinions about the issue. I have opinions about lots of issues that don’t effect me personally. And yet there’s still a part of me that can’t take seriously the opinion of some one on the abortion issue who clearly will never need to have one.
Responsibility is an issue. Sometimes the responsible thing to do is not to bring a child into a a family (or lack thereof) that cannot support it. It feels, too often, like comments about how women need to be “responsible” are actually demanding that they adhere to a certain moral or religious code. Abstinance or motherhood. Less concern for the life of the unborn as there is for the behavior of the mother. Unless some one has an argument that doesn’t smack of such shady moralizing (I note that IEatFood! actaully does stick to his guns about the life of the child not having it’s worth detirmined by the behavior of the mother. Bravo, you’re a rare one, even if I don’t agree with your opinions on abortion), I stick with “my body, my choice”.
What’s a “certain” time period? The woman might not even suspect she is pregnant until a month after the rape (depending on when in her menstrual cycle the assault occured). She may even wait an additional week (while waiting to see how “late” she is) and, of course, the trauma of the rape might put her in denial, delaying an abortion even more. This is an innocent woman, the victim of a rape and by your version, the one type of woman eligible for an elective abortion, and her “certain time period” could easily be two months.
I don’t see that your “requirement” will do anything but increase the suffering of women who have been raped, and it will not stop “abuses”. All a woman has to say is “I was raped twomonths ago while drunk/drugged, and I can’t remember who the rapist was.” How are you going to prove that she is lying?
It’s a terrible idea to create a legal requirement that doesn’t stop liars, but ends up turning honest people into liars.
Quite the opposite, the time period would be something like 72 hours to a week after the sexual assault.
That statement was made after others in this thread about how women are going to have to prove they were raped before they show signs of being pregnant. Your statement wasn’t the first to spell that out.
Frankly, if someone is going to believe I’m a liar no matter what, then I’ll lie if it’s to my advantage.
Julie
Hey, I implied it (actually, I flat out said it) first.
Your law (with its exception) simply forces women to say “I was raped” if they want an abortion. If this is a meaningless check-the-box gesture, I don’t doubt that many women will go through the motions while their doctors will accept the declaration with a wink and a nod.
If it is not a meaningless gesture, and you want the police to become automatically involved, you haven’t explained:
[ul][li]How are the police supposed to conduct an investigation if the rape happened a month or more earlier;[/li][li]How much personal information does the woman have to give the police, especially if she makes it clear that she is not interested in pressing charges (and thus going public, getting embroiled in a long trial, etc);[/li][li]How long should such a police investigation last? If it takes the police two months or more to investiage a complicated rape case, doesn’t that put the woman into her riskier second (or even third) trimester;[/li][li]What happens when women who desperately want an abortion begin accusing any man in sight;[/li][li]Is the accusation enough, or can the abortion only occur upon an indictment or conviction (also delaying the abortion); and[/li][li]Whose going to pay for all this extra law enforcement you’re demanding?[/li][/ul]
You don’t really know anything about the trauma of rape, do you? A woman can easily spend that first week in denial about what has been done to her. You’re talking as though all a rape victim needs is someone to give them a good smack and say “snap out of it!” and then they’ll be able to act with cold rational logic.
A period of three months would be more reasonable, though your overall position is not.
Yes! We wouldn’t want those women to get too comfortable in their attempts to recover from their trauma!
Julie
[QUOTE]
Originally posted by WaryEri *
** Abortion can be an intensly personal issue for young women my age, just the right time in our lives when having a baby would derail everything*
[QUOTE]
Having a baby does not derail everything. I know this from personal experience. Women can and do, every day and every place, continue to work and go to school only days, even hours, before they deliver. And within 72 hours, they can be back at work or school. If they don’t want to raise the child, they can place it up for adoption. There are many, many childless couples who would gladly accept the child you do not want. And there are hundreds of crisis pregnancy agencies that can help you out with free health care and counseling during your pregnancy, if you need it. I know, I did that volunteer work for years.
Men and women need to be more responsible! That is why the federal government and every state have strict paternity and child support laws. I applaud all of the reforms that have been done in recent years that make men take responsibility for their actions. For too long they haven’t!
OK, you’re damned if you don’t make an exception for rape.
And you’re damned if you do make an exception for rape.
You’re damned if you require the rape be reported.
And you’re damned if you don’t require the rape to be reported.
You’re damned if the time to report the sexual assault is short (when evidence can still be taken and use to prosectue the rapist), because the woman is in trauma.
And you’re damned if the time to report the sexual assault is long, because then women (as jsgoddess and Bryan Ekers said above) will lie and invent rapes.
OK, I see how this game works.
How the game works is that to prevent being unconscionably cruel to women who have been raped, you have to accept that women who haven’t been raped will get to have abortions too. You just can’t make it a qualifier, or ask the question when a woman wants and abortion. The only way to make abortions workable for rape victims is to make them available to all women. No hoops to jump through.
The greater good being served by allowing something you don’t agree with to happen, and all. Like, oh, say, protecting the Iraqis from Saddam Hussein by killing some of them?
Not quite, because I don’t want an “exception” to be necessary.
Damned by your own incredible hypocrisy, yes. If the fetus means more than the woman’s “feelings” (as her desires not to be pregnant are so often called), then it means more no matter what. If there are exceptions, then yes, I do expect you to explain precisely why the exceptions are being made, and precisely how those exceptions will be allowed.
Yes, because forcing women to report a rape can be as traumatic as the rape itself.
Damned by whom? Oh, that’s right. You lose some control over women’s lives if you don’t require them to report it. An interesting pair of factoids from http://www.hopeforhealing.org/myths.html:
So, you want to force that 84% who had their own reasons for not reporting the crime into reporting the crime so that they will not face additional consequences that are a result of you enforcing your morality on them.
Yup. If you don’t believe in said trauma, do some research.
Yes. You will cause a swing from incredible underreportage to incredible overreportage. People whose lives are being tampered with have no real need to obey draconian standards of other people’s morality.
Oh, it’s not a game. If you think it is, then you really do need to do some research.
Julie