Pro-Life counselors do this? You do know that your hyperbole doesn’t scare anyone with critical thinking skills, right?
Not all of it; they specialize in lying. They are just a small part of a larger movement I consider fundamentally evil. Not wrong, misguided, or even fanatical but evil. Given a chance they will do what they can to hurt the women in question, because that’s the point.
Cite?
Der Trihs, I must say—after reading a few dozen of your posts------ they are most, prejudical, hyperbolic and inane posts I’ve ever read here. They are so overblown, overgeneralized and bigoted you’d make a Nazi blanch.
I’m amazed that you haven’t been called out earlier. And it’s not about this topic. You don’t seem to have the intellectual capacity to understand that the counter-argument can be equally compelling. The sign of an intelligent debate is to assume your “opponent” (for lack of a better word) has a valid POV. By that, I mean if the other person has a valid, thoughtful view—and can atriculate it cojently—than you discuss it in substance-----on the merits.
You seem to default to “they’re all murderers, nuts, blah blah blah.”
That’s nonsense. Pure rubbish. Yet you do it consistently. Eric Rudolph doesn’t represent any more than a lunatic fringe of the pro-life group. You don’t seem to get that.
You, sir, are simply a bigot.
Your passion (on most subjects!) is palpable. But I would suggest you slow down, read more, and think things through before launching the nukes post after post.
The first of your two links goes to a Google resutls page for the string “mother kills children”.
The first link at the time I followed it (November 1, 2005, @9:00PM PST) leads to a story about a Palestinian Arab woman who killed her raped daughter in order to protect her family’s honor, after the daughter refused to commit suicide. A bit more research on my part turned up sources that claim the impetus for these “honor crimes” often stem from extremist misinterpretations of Islamic scripture. An example
The second link is unrelated to the topic at hand, and the third is an inaccessible AOL journal.
The fourth is a Columbia College message board entry that refers to a mother in the state of Orissa in India who killed her children so that they would not die slowly from hunger due to their poverty. Orissa, from what i can gather, has experienced extreme political disarray for some time, which perhaps contributed to her desperation. The entry does not mention if the woman was a member of Orissa’s oppressed Muslim minority, or if her decision was in any way based on her Islamic beliefs. Probably just hopelessness. Very sad.
Link #5 is unrelated.
Link 6 is a blog entry about an unnamed woman who threw her children off a pier. It makes reference to the Andrea Yates case. It takes the fathers of these families to task for allowing their religious notions of family duty to leave their children in the care of unstable mothers.
Link 7 is an early news article about the Andrea Yates case. The Yates’ were devout Christians.
Link 8 is unrelated. You do realize that a Google search string merely returns pages with any or all of the words anywhere on them, right?
Link 9 is inaccessible Craig’s List entry that has expired.
Link 10 is unrelated.
But thanks for all the links that demonstrate how religion fucks up the normal parent-child relationship! Useful stuff!
Your second link in your post is another Google list resulting from “woman suicide after abortion”, mostly religious blogs longon opinion, short on cited facts. The only reputable study referenced by any of the pages refers to a study done in Finland showing how many women who had undergone abortions committed suicide within a year. This grabs the attention at first, until you remember that seasonal variations of daylight have rendered suicide practially a national pasttime in Finland. Cite
One can certainly not take suicide studies in Finland as like to represent the general case.
What was your point in this post, exactly?
Godwin alert ! Not to mention silly; if you think I even distantly resemble a Nazi, you know nothing about them.
When the opposite position is vile enough, I don’t consider it a valid POV.
That’s what I always hear when some group does bad things; the military, Catholic priests, “pro-lifers”; it’s alway “just a small minority”. I don’t buy it. Whenever you look closer, there’s always a small group that gets it’s hands dirty, and a much larger one that ignores them and/or helps them. Do you have any evidence the antiabortion movement is different ?
I am not a moderator, but I do know that personal insults are not allowed in this forum.
Most of that was my opinion; that’s what “I consider” means. As far as my accusation of lying goes, I’m still trying to find a neutral site; I doubt you would accept Planned Parenthood’s word on it.
Der Trihs spews:
This is pure nonsense and just juvenile. You are too old however, to get the “Aw he’s just am impassioned high school/college kid” pass.
There’s simply no way around that. Your posts are bereft of any intellectual currency. They’re just senseless. And I’m sure you don’t, and won’t, get it.
There was no intent to insult you. Nor did I call you any [derisive] name like idiot etc.
I think this failry represents you as manifested by the content and style of your posts. Would you not agree?
Well, to be honest … parents force children to do alot of things and if a parent strongly believes that it is in the best interest of their child to carry the pregnancy to term and put the baby up for adoption, then they should, at the very least, be allowed to make that argument if not force that option.
I don’t think I would counsel that myself … but I would like to know who impregnated my daughter and have the obligation if not right to deal with that issue.
According to a pro-life web site ( gee I couldn’t find it on a pro-choice web site):
“According to a 1996 Gallup survey, 74 percent of Americans were in favor of requiring that parents be given the opportunity to intervene before an abortion is performed on a minor. Since then, the level of support has gone even higher. In a 1998 CBS/New York Times poll, 78 percent favored parental intervention. In a Los Angeles Times survey conducted in 2000, the figure was 82 percent.”
What are you folks so afraid of?
Possibly from the hisotry of the anti-choice crowd’s actions, from the fake women’s health clinics they set up to frighten women out of abortions, to the people who hang out outside women’s health centers threatening the women who visit with all sorts of horrors if they have an abortion (whether they’re there for an abortion or not) to the people who shoot people in women’s health centers and plant bombs in them.
Y’know. That history.
Good god. Why not let them force their children to work in a sweatshop or sell their organs while you’re at it?
Where exactly did he say that, and in what context?
Y’see, not long ago, a bunch of pro-choicers jumped on us for quoting a journal article by Planned Parenthood medical director Mary Calderone. In this article, she attested that the overwhelming majority of abortions prior to Roe v. Wade were performed by licensed physicians, rather than back alley butchers. Various pro-choicers were incensed, and demanded proof that Calderone actually said such a thing. Of course, since this quote appeared in a well-known medical journal, and since none of the pro-choice groups had ever contested its veracity, there was no reason to doubt its accuracy.
Now it’s your turn. I’d like to ask where Randall Terry proclaimed “Every woman who dies is a victory for morality.” I’m no fan of Randall Terry, but so far, I have yet to produce any evidence that he uttered such a thing.
I used to think of participants in the right-to-life movement as undifferentiated clones of Randall Terry, myself. Chalk one up for this board’s ignorance-fighting function: I will concede that a great many of the folks on this board who hold pro-life positions are earnest and sincere in their concern, and are not just trying to restrict sexual freedom or express contempt & hatred for dem slutty hussies that sleeps around & oughta pay the piper & wear an A.
It’s probably true of pro-life folk in general (albeit perhaps to a lesser extent; this board tends to attract the better sort of thinking folk and therefore probably attracts the better sort of thinking pro-lifers).
I don’t know about pro-life counselors. It’s the kind of position that might be highly attractive to ideologically driven people. Not that one cannot be ideologically driven without harboring Terryesque sentiments, but that that’s where I’d expect to see them settling out, and perhaps a bit more so in leadership positions in orgs providing such services.
There really are people in the movement who, if they were to succeed in making abortion illegal, would turn their attention to truncating and restricting contraceptive availability in the US.
Because the airfare to China is too high and because you can’t work long hours in sweatshops without all of your organs, of course!!!
Anybody else? Why do 18-24% of you fear parental notification?
No, it’s actually not, or at least as the Constitution has been interpreted. By your logic, the Constitution should also protect the right for people to take whatever drugs they want, sell their bodies as prostitutes, and generally engage in a variety of what have been termed “victimless crimes.” Now, as a libertarian, I’m all in favor of this, but I don’t think that’s what the Constitution says.
This is a fundamental flaw of the pro-choice movement. They continually talk about the right of privacy and the right of the woman to choose, as if the state has no say in how a person treats his or her body. If a person is a libertarian and making this argument, then I have no room to quibble with the person. But when any politician makes this argument, it seems clear he or she is being disingenuous, because that politician almost always supports the war on drugs and other laws that certainly do not recognize the right to privacy.
If there is a general right to privacy in the Constitution as the pro-choice side argues, then that right should logically extend to more areas than just abortion. If this right does not so extend, then please explain why one medical procedure gets protected by the Constitution while self-medication with cocaine or heroin does not.
The fear is not of parental notification, per se, but of legislative attempts to shoehorn the real world into some nonsensical ideal one.
I know it’s not fashionable these days to oppose government attempts to restrict our freedoms, but I’m still against it. Call me old-fashioned.
What would be the point of such legislation? It would only control legitimate medical establishments, to which the pregnant teen would then not go, that is if she knew they actually devoted the resources to hunting down her parents. Why would anyone imagine any other outcome? And why should we spend state funds on the enforcement and litigation that would then become necessary? What remotely useful end could it possibly serve?
Sure, it would be nice if every teen who experienced an unwanted pregnancy felt comfortable talking to her parents about what to do. But it isn’t realistic to expect that some law is going to magically bring that world about. And I refuse to dedicate vital state resources to the fantasy that it will.
It should. The International Foundation for Internal Freedom is right.
Not that any court decisions have held that to be true. I have to agree with you about the pro-choice movement’s clumsy tactics. Saying “It’s legal because it’s legal, and that makes it legal, so don’t make it illegal” … <sigh>
It’s a moral imperative; it gets its authority from the fact that it’s how things oughta be, not from jurisprudence and the Constitution.
I know they’re doing it this way because of Roe — if abortion rights had been secured in this country by legislation instead of court decision, it would probably be different. But I don’t see why arguing that abortion rights are a moral imperative detracts from arguing that Roe needs to remain intact.
There are also, of course, people who feel it should not remain intact, because they don’t like the judicial logic and/or view it as “legislating from the bench”. If we’ve historically done the morally right things but embodied them in the wrong legal tools, the first priority in fixing the problem needs to be retaining the morally right situation.
It was years ago, in a Time magazine article; I can’t find an online cite. It was reference to the women who were dying due to Reagan’s Mexico City Policy which forbids American aid to organizations that provide or mention abortion as an option. The article mentioned many hospitals were refusing medical aid to pregnant women, for fear of being accused of abortion if she had a miscarriage; sometimes resulting in her dying on the hospital steps. That quote was his response. Coming from a guy who talks like Emporer Palpatine from Star Wars, I believe it.
It’s called “hypocrisy”. I’m pro-choice, and I support the elimination of most anti-drug laws.
Because :
I don’t think children are parent’s property.
I don’t want anti abortion parents terrorizing children into having kids they can’t support, dying in childbirth, or just killing the kid themselves.
I don’t want kids to be forced to tell their child-molester father that they got pregnant, especially if we’re talking about parental permission and not just notification. I recall a case where this happened ( I can’t find a cite; combining the words “abortion” and “molester” produces a lot of results, not surprisingly ); the daughter went to a judge for a waiver from notifying her molester. She was refused, asked, and was beaten to death.
Me? I’m afraid of a world where women- even young women- lose control of their body. Doesn’t that seem a little freaky to you? Imagine having a child growing in your belly. Picture it kicking around in there. Imagine going through the permanent bodily changes and hormonal hell of pregnancy. Now imagine that someone has decided that for as long as you are pregnant, your body isn’t yours. It’s the fetus’s. You are simply a vessel, unable to make the most basic medical decisions, until it is born.
If, for example, you suffer from extreme depression and the changes from pregnancy would push you over the top or you know from previous experience that you may enter postpartum psychosis, this wouldn’t be a matter for a doctor. You would have to convince a judge. If you need to take medication that can’t be taken during pregnancy at the risk of deforming the child- talk to a judge. If you are a physically addicted drug addict who can’t afford drug treatment to safely get off and know you are harming that fetus growing inside you- well, drag it all out before a judge. Otherwise- welcome to your new crack baby. Have fun taking care of it. Of course, you can always put it up for adoption. I hear deformed and drug-affected babies get snatched up first and live great lives.
There are a million reasonable reasons to object to carrying a child. And I don’t think you should have to publicly display them to a judge if that is the decision you have to make. It’s your body. You and your doctor know it better than anyone. This isn’t a place for a judge.
And yeah, I think that goes for minors, too.
In reality, teenagers have ultimate control of all their medical decisions and it’s standard procedure to keep medical treatment confidential from around age fourteen. And the ramifications of pregnancy don’t go away once you give birth. A child is a lifetime obligation, and it’s ridiculous for someone to force you to bear a child that you’ll have to take care of forever just because of their opinion when you happen to be sixteen. Imagine the outrage if a parent, say, forced their teen to get a big Jesus tattoo. Well, a tattoo is a lot easier to get rid of than a kid.
Sure, you say, but this is just notification, right? Wrong. It is entirely legal to hire a company to pick up your kid on her way to school, put her in handcuffs and shove her on a plane to an off-shore “center” where she can have her movement restricted, be beaten, be tortured and otherwise be treated poorly. It’s totally legal to make sure your child never leaves the house unescorted. Making sure your kid doesn’t get that abortion is a legal and practical piece of cake. Don’t worry, she’ll thank you when she’s eighteen years old and suddenly left to raise and support a three year old on nothing more than a high school education! Of course, the people that forced her to have that kid have no financial or legal obligations any more. Have a nice life with your kid!
Same reason I don’t like counseling, and because I’m concerned it would lead to young people being forced to have children.
Actually, Mr2001 makes a sound point by implication. Forcing one’s child to bear a child against her will is REALLY giving parents power over their kids. We agree that parents should not be allowed to impregnate their kids, torture their kids or maim them, so there ARE limits on what powers we think a parent should have over their children. Isn’t CHILDBIRTH extreme enough to raise legitimate concerns over whether or not it falls under the rubric of parental power?