There are many places in this country where without a car and a couple days off it’s literally impossible to get an abortion, because the clinics have been driven out entirely. Mississippi, for example, which surely does not need more children born into poverty than necessary.
Just to get it out of the way, I don’t think the episode was so much of a barometer as an attempt to grab headlines (rather than rip them) by a show whose ratings have been slipping. Also, forget those two simpering helpers – every faithful viewer knows McCoy’s word is God.
I’m not sure if this gets reflected in polling numbers, but it does strike me that people are more vigilant when they fear their rights are at risk of being lost. I wonder if Americans feel complacent about their ability to procure an abortion. Or so sure they would never need one (unless they do) – maybe a more accurate poll could be taken at abortion clinics?
Here is a statistics page that should offer a view of what might happens should it become completely illegal (if we’re going to pretend that women with money won’t be fleeing for Canada while poorer women get mired even deeper in poverty).
About half of all pregnancies are unintended, and about 40% of those end in abortion.
50% of women obtaining abortions are younger than 25 (bye bye college education!)
2/3 of abortions are procured by women who have never married (hello shotgun wedding!)
Forty-three percent of women obtaining abortions identify themselves as Protestant, and 27% as Catholic. (religion didn’t sway them, but a ban will really get that message across that God couldn’t)
The abortion rate among women living below the federal poverty level ($9,570 for a single woman with no children) is more than four times that of women above 300% of the poverty level (44 vs. 10 abortions per 1,000 women). This is partly because the rate of unintended pregnancies among poor women (below 100% of poverty) is nearly four times that of women above 200% of poverty* (112 vs. 29 per 1,000 women (yes, I’m sure once abortion is illegal they’ll all suddenly make major life changes and become incredibly picky about who they choose to sleep with, including their boyfriends or spouses)
One would assume that if it were banned there’d be free birth control for all, billions in funding for research into male birth control and improving the efficacy and safety of female BC, Planned Parenthoods on every corner, condoms at every candy store, enforced paid parental leave, free daycare, etc. But then, if people were truly serious about wanting women not to choose abortion and caring about poor innocent babies’ welfare, one would assume this would already be the case.
Cat Fight, did you reply to the wrong thread? It sure is a good one for my poll asking if girls would change their sexual habits if abortion were made illegal.
Oops, that didn’t exist yet when I wrote the above. Three abortion threads, wheee! Thank goodness I have no friends or family dealing with an actual pregnancy scare or abortion at the moment – immediate reality always kills these sorts of debates for me.
To the OP, as I think others have said, I don’t think the show is an accurate protrayal of abortion in this country. In fact, it really seems to me like abortion is one of those sorts of issues that people take sides on and mention specifically because they’re trying to win over a specific demographic and not because they actually intend to do anything about the issue. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who will vote on abortion as a single issue even if they largely disagree with the rest of the politician’s platform.
And this is the sort of attitude that has galvanized the debate. As I see it, the argument is about how the rights of the woman over her body compare to the right to life of the fetus. Obviously, if you don’t classify the fetus as having any right to life, you’re on the extreme end of pro-choice, and if you classify the fetus as human and having full right to life, then you’re on the extreme end of pro-life; the vast majority of people are somewhere in between for varying reasons. For instance, I’ve met a number of people who are not Christian but are still pro-life because they consider the fetus to have some right to life for reasons other than because they’re woman-hating Christians. Similarly, I’ve met Christians who are pro-choice, even though they believe the fetus is a child and that abortion is wrong, because they don’t want to force their beliefs on others.
I think reasonable people can look at the balance of those rights and come to different conclusions. For instance, someone might overwhelming favor the rights of the woman to choose, but if she waits until a week before she’s due, when the child is likely viable if she were to go into labor prematurely, I don’t think it would be terribly unreasonable for that same person to say that she had her chance to make a choice in the 9 months leading up to that point and she waited too long; meanwhile, someone else will say she still has that choice all the way up to the point that the child is actually born.
The point is, it’s not a clear-cut issue and cutting into black-and-white, pro-life vs. pro-choice, woman-haters vs. child-haters is doing a huge disservice to everyone who feels strongly about the issue.
Personally, I’m just sick of the whole thing and I just wish it would go away for the very reason I already stated, that most of the time politicians just use the abortion issue to win points with a particular demographic. And, beyond that, I think the whole thing is disingenuous to begin too, since neither side seems to have any interest in considering what their opponents value and, instead, paint them as monsters. I just don’t think the issue deserves the amount of attention it gets because, as the current resolution stands, it just doesn’t affect very many people at all because women who want them can get them, and people who are morally opposed to them probably don’t even know if they know anyone who’s had one (I think I’ve met one person who may have had one, otherwise they either haven’t had them or haven’t brought it up). I’d much rather see politicians running on issues that actually affect people and actually have a chance of being changed.
Yes. IIRC, SD (my example in that post) doesn’t have any abortion doctors. Someone from Minnesota flies in once a week to fulfill that function. I could be wrong about Mississippi, but I believe they have only 1 abortion clinic in the state.
It might be worth nothing that there’s no such thing as an ‘abortion doctor.’
And that’s a bad thing? You know, it’s not illegal to enjoy sex. I see too many unhappy married people trapped in misery because they married the first person they were attracted to in order to “save sex for marriage.” Maybe if they had a few affairs and matured their personalities they would have made better choices.
Oh, come now. There totally is. They might ALSO do other things, but in this context it is entirely appropriate to call somebody an abortion doctor, as without a doctor who provides abortions you can’t get one. They might spend the whole rest of the week giving out birth control pills and doing HIV testing, but what matters to you in Mississippi or in South Dakota is: do they do abortions?
ETA - that was a response to Cat Fight.
Fair enough. I guess I’m not used to the term being used such a sympathetic context.
Maybe this goes without saying, but this quote smacks of sexism
One, it’s got that snide tone that’s often used when people think abortion access lets women ‘get away with’ having sex. Two, it doesn’t seem to assume (perhaps rightly) that the boyfriends will stop wanting their girlfriends to go to bed with them.
No, you’re right, you didn’t. I totally made that up out of the knight-in-shining-armor vibe I always catch off of you when you discuss the subject.
In other news, Lighten up, Francis. 
There are so many nuances in most people’s opinions on abortion that it is very difficult to pigeonhole the views into distinct categories.
I agree with 7 of the 9 Justices in Planned Parenthood v. Casey that Roe was wrongly decided and it is a joke of a constitutional dictate.
If states were left to decide this issue, it would be like many others. New York and California would have fully legal abortions for all, and Mississippi and Georgia could punish abortion by death with most other states having some middle ground. That middle ground would reflect where most Americans feel on the subject while women in Alabama could buy a greyhound bus ticket to a state where it was legal, preachers in Georgia could decry the evil going on in the liberal enclaves of America, while northern elites could continue to look down on the south as being backward.
Then an entire generation could focus on a different issue and our Supreme Court could go back to being selected based on qualifications instead of the beliefs on this one issue.
I’m not sure it’s an accurate portrayal of anything.
“Your Honor, weren’t you a longshoreman like, two weeks ago?”
Garbage. The anti-abortionists notoriously don’t care about the welfare of the children they want to force women to have, or about the health of the mother. They don’t care about the fetus, except as a weapon to beat women down with. You might as well try to defend the Ku Klux Klan by saying that they only want to defend white people. They don’t; they are a hate group. Just as the “pro-life” movement is a movement about the hatred of women.
No; it’s a disservice to pretend that the anti-abortion movement is anything but a movement overwhelmingly driven and controlled by bigotry against women. You say you know some people who don’t fit that pattern? So what? They are of no consequence; they are not the ones in control.
I think that what they value IS monstrous. I think that forcing women to serve as brood mares, that abusing and raping and enslaving them is disgusting - and that is exactly the sort of thing anti-abortionists the world over do when they can get away with it. These are NOT well meaning people, and I have no intention of doing the politically correct thing and pretending that they are.
However much it offends your sensibilities, there ARE malignant people and political movements in the world; and the anti-abortion movement is one such movement. Not everyone in the world is well meaning.
What makes you think that women who want them always can get them? The antis have put up roadblock after roadblock to make it as hard as they can, along with the occasional assassination. Terrorizing, killing and harassing doctors until whole states have no legal way to get an abortion; imposing “waiting periods” forcing women to make multiple trips, “counseling” where women are force fed anti-abortion propaganda. Poor women can’t necessarily manage to make multiple out of state trips days apart.
What have you been smoking? It sounds to me more that you have a chip on your shoulder against Christians. Don’t let a few whack jobs blowing up abortion clinics convince you that all pro-life people are anti woman. Need I remind you that many are female. In fact 50% of Christians are female. Do you think THEY support the oppression of their gender?
I am pro life. Does that mean I want to oppress women? Of course not. I adore women! It means I want women to not oppress their children. I want women (and men of course) to recognize that sex DOES have consequenses. Abortion is not supposed to be used as a regular method of birth control. Even planned parenthood says that. But it is precisely how abortion is being used, especially over large population groups.
Not “supposed” to be? Who decides that? And just out of curiosity, what else do you take Planned Parenthood’s word for?
Considering that I regard Christianity to be one of history’s greatest evils, yes.
Yes, I think they do. People are often self destructive and self hating. Christianity is BIG on self hatred. Besides; most of them would simply get an abortion anyway, it’s all those other women they’ll try to forbid having one. The “the only moral abortion is my abortion” effect. And it’s much more than a “few whack jobs”, or even Christianity. The anti-abortion movement worldwide is anti-woman, Christian or not.
Yes. “Pro-life” IS the oppression of women. You can’t force women to have children without oppressing them; that IS oppressing them.
More and more people are pro-life, yes, but at the same time pro-life has changed in meaning to vacuity. You get lots of positions like “I’m pro-life so I believe after the first trimester abortions are wrong.”
Also, as to whether being pro-life is equivalent to being anti-women: no, not at all. It’s obvious that you can easily think the fetus has a moral claim without also thinking women are inferior.
At the same time, it’s obtuse to pretend that being pro-life isn’t a correlate of being anti-woman. Just to avoid personal anecdotes, simply consider the voting records of our Senators. The pro-life ones line up pretty strongly with the pro-discrimination (see the LL Act) and pro-rape (the recent Franken amendment fracas). Nor can you simply say it’s a relic of Republicans simply being dicks on all issues, without being specifically anti-woman: in all of the above cases, you have Republicans coming out against rape and discrimination. They are also the most pro-choice ones (and, unsurprisingly, the most female ones).
Then too bad for them! Not all women who abort were raped, not even a majority I bet. Not all would be ‘forced into poverty’ either. There are many couples wanting to adopt.