See ya Planned Parenthood. Disgusting practices.

D Rock, only the first paragraph was addressed to you. Sorry if I was unclear.

What do you mean by "owning up to the responsibility"? Is that ONLY carrying to term? I would say a woman who makes an appointment with a clinic, goes through counseling, and undergoes a surgical procedure, even an out-patient one, is taking responsibility. And that's in states like California. In many others she has to be forced to undergo and pay for medically unnecessary ultrasound, hear a medically inaccurate lecture prepared by anti-abortion groups, see pictures of fetuses, hold funeral services for fetus, wait 24, 48, or 72 hours, which involves making two appointments with a clinic that may be hundreds of miles away, since the majority of women seeking abortions already have at least one child, arrange childcare, transportation, time off work she may not be paid for, may lose her job by taking time off ... how much pain is owning up to responsibility?

I have an adopted niece, she just got accepted at Mills College with a $32K scholarship (yes, bragging). Adoption can be a loving alternative but ONLY when freely chosen. Women are not breeding animals and must never be forced to bear a child so that someone else can have him/her.

As far as a man making a woman sign a legal document or somesuch that he would not be responsible for accidental pregnancy - well, aside from the fact that, as has been pointed out, child support is for the child, I can't imagine even the horniest hetero woman going with a man like that! I mean, I know some women have shitty taste in men, but that is pretty extreme even for straight ladies.

 

I understand that your response is somewhat hyperbole, but with all the government support available, a child is not going to starve without child support. As an anecdote, I had friends in graduate school that got $900 a month just in food stamps for the mom and three kids under the age of 5. The dad was there and involved. He just wasn't counted as a mouth to feed on that money because he was expected to fend for himself on his student loans.

I'm talking about the ability to choose the consequences of our actions here. In WarriorFan's scenario, the mom just has to deal with the reality that she'll need to get help from family or friends or the government if she decides to go through with the pregnancy. It's her choice. I get that public policy is to avoid making the state responsible for the welfare of the child, and I completely agree. And, again, for the record, I think fathers should be responsible. I just don't see how it's a remotely equitable policy when the father has no say in the existence or non-existence of the child. Isn't one of the big arguments for abortion that it makes women more equal to men in the bedroom because they are now able to have a similar (obviously not exactly the same) lack of responsibility for the resulting pregnancy?

Don't get me wrong, if we allowed men to walk away from the responsibility, we'd undoubtedly have a lot more deadbeat dads. It's just interesting to me that society places so much emphasis on the woman's desire to choice whether to keep the baby or not, but virtually no regard for the fetus, high concern for the welfare of a child, and very little regard for the father's desire for or ability to care for the fetus or the child, and this is what has been deemed as the best course of action in these situations. I suppose it's just one of those things where we live in an imperfect world and we have to do the best we can. I think we can do better though.

 

Can't you see a double standard in that? 2 people create a pregnancy. If the woman says she wants and abortion or says that she wants to keep it, fine, I hope she keeps it but it is completely her choice. The man, however, gets no choice. I know he could have used protection; same could be said for her. I know child support is for the child, though that is an odd response considering that abortion is most certainly not for the child. It is so the mother doesn't have her life upended (in most cases). What if the father wants to continue with his life as though nothing happened (just like we allow the mother to choose).

 

For the penis to be efficient enough to vacuum up the women’s egg 83.7% of the time, the average length of the male penis would need to increase by 258% to reach the egg.

 

I completely agree with this. Education is what is needed the most. Ideally, it should come from parents, but sadly, that doesn't happen all the time, and seems to be happening less and less. I do, however, firmly believe that abstinence until you think you can handle the responsibility is a viable policy. Maybe if that was taught as the primary way to address the problem of unwanted pregnancies and protection as a secondary option, we'd be better off. I guess I value human life (even in the form of a fetus) to the degree that I feel that there are VERY few circumstances that justify it's ending. I don't consider inconvenience or the financial or emotional trauma the comes with pregnancy as one of those circumstances. I don't say that to imply that pro-choice people don't value life, I just define life differently. And I consider the "choice" to be the decision to have sex. As I've said before, I'm not against abortion in the case of rape, incest, or health of the mother (I struggle with the idea of aborting a fetus because it will likely have a birth defect), I just think society is looking for the easy way out in a lot of instances. I don't mean to imply that the process of an abortion is easy. Crandc has pointed out that it certainly isn't, but clearly, someone who chooses to have an abortion feels that it's the easier of the two paths, no?

Admittedly, I probably have a slanted view on this. I was raised in a loving home with my mom able to stay at home (and wanting to do so) and if I ever found myself in this situation, I would have a support system. Most aren't that fortunate. I guess I'd just like to see abortions viewed as something that is acceptable, both legally and socially, but in certain very limited circumstances (more limited than they are) instead of the staggering volume and relatively casual way they're viewed currently.

And, yes, Crandc, women are not incubators, but the lives they can carry inside of them are not things that should be discarded simply because they are inconvenient or even life altering. I'm pretty certain it's a commonly accepted view that once you have a child, your life truly ins't your own anymore. You owe a duty to that child. I just feel that duty begins well before it's born, and in some respects, well before it's conceived.

 

Sign me up?

 

That's what I thought. No harm, no foul.

In the context of my comment, "owning up to the responsibility" meant carrying the child. I don't question that going through an abortion can be and often is a traumatic and life altering experience. In fact, there are many women that never fully recover from it physically and/or emotionally. But I don't see it as the same thing as owning the responsibility of carrying a human life (in whatever form it comes in). In making the choice to have an abortion, they're removing the responsibility of carrying the child and raising it and instead taking on the burden that is the abortion and the resulting aftermath. I guess I could be splitting hairs. Either situation would be awful to be in.

 

FTFY

 

Having an abortion is not necessarily the "easier" path. It is what the woman in a given situation thinks is the correct path for her at that time. It strikes me as supremely arrogant for some other person who does not know her or frankly care about her to say I KNOW BETTER and try to forcibly prevent her choice.

Not just arrogant, vicious.

You are wrong also about "women never recover from abortion". This has been studied and is simply not true. For the vast majority, there are no physical effects and few long term emotional. Since women do not have abortions because they hate children, regardless of what woman-haters say, they may feel that had circumstances been different they would have wanted a child but in the circumstances they were in made the best choice. The ones who do suffer are those whose wanted pregnancies went horribly wrong, especially when discovered late, as tends to happen in such cases. These women (and men) have by this time thought of names, prepared a nursery, etc. It is not the abortion that devastates them but the realization the pregnancy was not viable.

Unfortunately, stigmatizing abortion, telling women they have committed murder, shaming them, does cause trauma. Not the abortion but the censure. This is especially true in certain religious communities, where women are told they have committed a terrible sin.

What has been shown to be traumatic and life altering is forcing women to have children against their will. Many show self-destructive behavior for years, even decades, afterwards.

So D-Rock I would very seriously suggest you amass a few facts before mansplaining to me how abortion makes women suffer.

 

WOW! You keep pointing the finger at everyone else, and ignore the woman’s part in the problem, and the solution.

Only 4% of abortions are the result of rape or incest. There are a whole lot of mistakes being made by women.

How hard is it for women to carry a condom in their purse, and to make wearing it a condition of having unplanned sex?

 

Wow, ok. That was a fairly antagonistic response to comments that had zero malice in them whatsoever. Please enlighten me on how I was "mansplaining."

I never said abortion was an easy choice, in fact I said it's an awful situation to be in to have that kind of decision to make, but how can you honestly say that having an abortion isn't the easier path in the long run than having a life that you're responsible for for a minimum of 18 years and then some? One is a procedure and a process that lasts a maybe a month or so, and the other is a lifetime of responsibility. I'd argue that there's potentially long lasting effects that make having an abortion less of the easier choice, but you claim that's false too (although you then turn around and admit that SOME women experience some degree of permanent physical and/or emotional damage from having had an abortion). It's the path the woman wants to take because it's not the right moment for her to have gotten pregnant. She's not compelled or forced to do it. I haven't said anything about forcibly preventing women's choice. My comments haven't been questioning an individual women's situation, but society's widespread acceptance of this practice as a natural normal and even encouraged thing when I strongly feel it should be more of a last resort. I haven't even suggested legislating my personal views.

I'm guessing that you missed the word "many" when I said many women, not all women, (I didn't even say most) don't recover from it physically and/or emotionally. You just said that 1/3 of American women have abortions. I think that number is high, but who am I to question a woman on such a thing?. There were about 125.9 million adult women in the United States in 2014 (Wikipedia). 1/3 of that means 42 million women will have had an abortion at some point in their life. If only 10% of that number experience permanent physical or emotional trauma, that's 4.2 Million women. I'd say that's "many." Even 1% of 42 million is many to me. You can argue proportionality, but whatever, it's not like I was trying to write a dissertation on the OT forum of the a Blazers fan site. You even said yourself that women experience permanent effects. I wasn't addressing the reasons for the permanent trauma other than it stems from having had an abortion. Call it stigma, call it whatever. Argue that it's not the abortion, but people's response to the woman having had the abortion. But for the abortion, it wouldn't exist. It exists and that's all I was pointing out. I stated abortions should be legally and sociably acceptable under the right circumstances. What you think are the right circumstances and what I think are the right circumstances are unquestionably different, but I at least acknowledge the possibility of a view outside my own, but you seem intent on playing the "my way or the highway" card.

So, Crandc, I would very seriously suggest you stop reading negative and oppressive tones into my and other people's comments before claiming I'm "mansplaining" to you how abortion makes women suffer. Which, incidentally, hasn't even remotely been the point of my comments. You asked me to define "owning up." To me, "owning up" is accepting a problem and dealing with it. The problem here being the unwanted pregnancy. IMHO, having an abortion is not owning up, it's getting rid of it, whatever the reason may be. Do I disagree with the decision? Obviously, but I'm not berating or treating anyone different because they made a choice I think was wrong.

 

I have been intimately involved with this issue before most of you were born. So yes I do get irritated when dudes who were never pregnant and have no real knowledge mansplain abortion to me.

It is not always true that abortion is a hard, or least of many evils, choice. For some women it is hard, even wrenching. For others, matter of fact. Saying abortion is always a terrible choice implies sex role stereotyping, because she is a woman, she must really want children even under bad circumstances so it is terrible she has to have an abortion (even if it should be legal). I would not deny another woman's feelings. If she says she feels grief I would not tell her it's really no big deal. If she feels matter of fact I don't say she should be crying her eyes out. But if you ask the women (which I doubt many here have) you find very little despair among those who have had abortions, and a great deal more among those who had forced births.

There are, occasionally, women who don't own pregnancies. Mostly very young. You read about them, the 14 year old who hid her pregnancy and had a baby in the school bathroom, then tried to flush the newborn down the toilet. Terrible that she was so alone with no one to turn to. But those are exceptions. Most pregnant women absolutely do take ownership of their pregnancies because, frankly, it's pretty damn hard to ignore. Saying that unless a woman does what YOU DEMAND she do she is not "really" taking ownership is indeed arrogant.

The late Dr. George Tiller, murdered during church service by "right to life", said his motto was "trust women". He could give medical information and care, but ultimately the woman herself knew better than anyone else what her situation and needs were. And her choices needed to be trusted and respected. Sadly, there are too many (here, in Congress, in State legislatures, on the bench) who are convinced that THEY KNOW BETTER what the outcome of every pregnancy MUST be.

Incidentally I have still seen no response from the "abortion is murder" crowd to the ramifications of that statement. But I am very glad we are at least talking about real world issues and not blue's wet dreams about what Planned Parenthood never did.

 

To see more about actual Planned Parenthood:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politic...r-studded-planned-parenthood-mini-doc-w461374