The Horrible Legacy of 'Roe v. Wade'

Thank you paganplace, that is exactly what I was saying. And I still stand by that- if women are expected to give up "body" rights, so must men. I can't see any other way to make people understand that the life of a woman is just as much and even more valuable as a fetus. A fetus is not yet a person, a woman already is.

"I AM a woman. Sterilizing every man or boy who commits "oops" makes about as much political sense as involuntarily tying the tubes of every woman who becomes pregnant while on welfare."

I think the point there of Sparrow's was exactly how unacceptable the things 'pro-lifers' demand end up playing out, all too quickly.

Of course, thanks to Reagan's *utter fabrication* of 'welfare-fraud tycoon single mothers' there *are* no 'Welfare mothers.' Unless they can get motherhood done in whatever remaining five years of 'welfare' they might have had access to.

Course, we can't feed the kids that are born into bad circumstances cause someone decided moralistic absolutism will somehow magically-not-be-the-pre-Roe-v-Wade nightmare-that-was...

Instead, pay fifty times as much to the predatory lenders who inflated real estate prices beyond the reach of working families, ...so the value of the homes they took away from said families they profiteered off doesn't go down too much.

Sparrow:

I AM a woman. Sterilizing every man or boy who commits "oops" makes about as much political sense as involuntarily tying the tubes of every woman who becomes pregnant while on welfare.

As I was trying to point out, we must always take into account political reality and work with it to achieve any goal.

Unless the majority of public opinion were to embrace the idea, exemption to any abortion law must take into account rape and incest. There may actually come a time when any pregnancy is considered inviolate unless it threatens the life of the mother, but that time is not now, nor in the forseeable future.

This is another of those areas where people of faith must bend to the political will. We must absolutely not let "perfect" become the enemy of "good."

"Promoting abstinace is not going to work with someone who is totally secular and sexually active. "

Didn't seem to work for Bristol Palin either.

You made a number of very good points but there is still something missing. You've completely ignored the woman in all of this. It's as though women do not exist or they don't count. I'll make a pact with you. I'll accept a pro-life position the day it becomes a mandatory law that every man who gets a woman pregnant accidentally or against her will must be sterilized. It isn't just the woman who needs to take responsibility, biologically speaking.

Let me assure you I am solidly pro-life, but I am a pro-life realist. Before we have a snowball's chance in Baghdad or overturning Roe v Wade, there are certain incremental steps we must take to bring the majority of voters to a pro-life position. None of these steps have anything to do with religion because, frankly, a faith-based line of reasoning is not going to persuade anyone who is not deeply religious to start with to carry an unwanted baby to term.

First: We must assure voters that every unplanned or unwanted child who is born will become a well educated, highly functional and emotionally stable contributing member of society. This will not be inexpensive.

Second: We must determine what kind of sex education actually prevents unplanned pregnancy. What works in Olanta, South Carolina probably won't in Los Angeles, California.

Third: We must focus on an education system which prepares each and every student for a successful life based on their individual skills and talents. The higher the level of education the lower the incidence of unplanned pregnancy. Eliminating the ability for a student to ever "drop out" would be a good start.

Fourth: As distasteful as this may be to social conservatives, methods of contraception for anyone, whatever their age may be, who is sexually active must be highly inexpensive and easily obtainable. Promoting abstinace is not going to work with someone who is totally secular and sexually active.

I agree except with one statement. The judicial rulings are not "usurpations" of the political process; they are a part of the political process.

Having said that, when I found out I was having my son, I was completely surprised. The doctor asked the nurse if I was "happy." So when I saw her, she said, "So we're dealing with a blob." I was shocked to hear her say that. That's when I told her that I had no intention of having an abortion. Then she started to discuss the due date of the "baby." I found out after developing a relationship with her throughout the pregnancy that she was a devout woman, but I suppose that she sees many woman who decide to have abortions and feels it's just better to not refer to the baby as a baby. Still I was shocked to hear her call my son a blob.

There is a great 'psychological danger' in making the joy of pregnancy and childbirth a 'government mandate'.
How about a law regarding free-speech that states 'once you start taking you are not allowed to stop'(?). Would that work?

According to Albert Mohler, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam ... are "demonstrations of satanic power".

If you do not embrace our constitutional principles (i.e., freedom of religion and privacy) then may I suggest that you consider leaving the country.

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The culture of life is a lot more than obsession with abortion.

To call Roe "a compact with the Culture of Death" is specious reasonong. Roe is a judicial decision reflecting the implicit principle of our foundation as a nation that we can only achieve liberty by limiting the reach of the state.

Basing a decision on the Constitution and its implicit principles is maintaining the rule of law and the framework we, the people, adopted at the founding of our nation. The Constitution was intended to put limits on the power of our elected representatives. I am disappointed that the president of an American university doesn't understand that; Mohler himself should be embarrassed.

The "Culture of Death" is more easily found in the doctorine that the way to deal with opposition is through war, imprisonment, and execution.

The "Culture of Death" is more easily found among those who are looking forward not to the continued unfolding of God's creation on earth, but hoping for the arrival of the Apolcalypse and its destruction.

Doctor, heal thyself.

You cannot selectively apply the culture of death to abortion. There are natural processes that cause a significant number of fertilized ovi to be aborted.

Also, you must be against the death penalty if coherently holding such a view. Especially, if you claim to be a Christian is this true, because forgiveness and compassion must guide all your actions on this world.

Also, you have not explained why eliminating practical sex education and widespread access to contraception does not make one even more complicit in promoting abortion, since we know that teaching abstinence promotes more abortions.

The fact is that we are all in the same boat, and we have to live with actions of others that we may not agree with or condone in a pluralistic democratic society. And we must accept that our religious beliefs do NOT give us the right to impose those beliefs on others nor do they provide a basis for using those beliefs in law.

Just because we provide abortion on demand, does not mean that we cannot work together to mitigate the necessity of abortion. Hard religious viewpoints, absent reason or regard for the consequences, are simply destructive for any society, and represent the true evil in this world.

Those wishing to criminalize abortion want to jettison us back to the stone age and willfully ignore scientific evidence. They want control over women's bodies. If this ever happens they should be prepared for a backlash so severe that their own congregations will bring them down.

Extreme religious beliefs that want to call contraception tantamount to murder have no place in state *or* Federal government. This is a religious belief, not a factual one, for one.

Roe v Wade isn't just about abortion, it's in fact where the courts had to solidify the Constitutional right to privacy: to overturn that also overturns a lot of legal precedent that in an age of biotech could turn out to be extremely important. Your right to genetic privacy, for instance. To not be cloned, to even have your genes used against your will for various purposes.

This was never about 'Stats' Rights.' Conservative Christians are only for states' rights when it suits them. When a state regognizes gay marriages, they try to ban them Federally or even exempt the people they want to control from the'Full Faith And Credit' clause of the Constitution.

When they didn't like the way a state ruled on Terry Schiavo, they agitated for both the state and the family's wishes to be overruled by Federal power. When a state doesn't want to allow corporations to pollute their soil, the conservatives come in and try to override that state's wishes with Federal power.

The right to choose is, however, a Federally-guaranteed right. Not being allowed to *abridge* individual rights is part of being in the Union. The Constitution, however, does *not* provide for people from Red States to use the Federal government to impose *restrictions* over states. See the difference? You can outlaw slavery Federally, cause the states aren't empowered to override individual liberty. You couldn't, though, get a bunch of Catholic states together and prohibit red meat on Friday, however awful a 'sin' those Catholic states thought it was.

Life does not begin at conception.
Life began, depending on your beliefs, millions of years ago or 4000 years ago.
Whether by chemical coincidence, or intelligent design, life began.
Life continues.

Humans are not created like Frankenstein's unfortunate creature from non-living parts, but from the merging of two living cells, an ovum and a sperm.
In the genetic chemistry of those cells, we may trace our ancestry back to that first life, no matter the age of your universe.
We may induce a new bud on the tree of life, but we have not planted a new tree. Humans allow new buds to grow and pinch off others.

The true argument of the "pro-life" is for control of women. A punitive judgement by those who cast the first stones.

As a society we already sanction the arbitrary ending of lives grown beyond the womb. Wars, with God's blessing of course are the most obvious. Each side kills the enemy with equal fervor. When innocent families are killed in their sleep, by missiles launched in our name; we cluck about collateral damage. And then pay the generous sum of $1500 for each of the dead. We accept the arbitrary ruling of a for-profit insurance company denying treatment to the ill, and the unfortunate death, as an accepted risk of the free market. When a corporation poisons entire communities, we are told, actuarially, there is an acceptable death rate for economic progress. When a maimed veteran in despair, for lack of treatment, commits suicide; we accept this as the fault of government bureaucrats, who of course, also act in our name to save our money from being spent on malingerers. If a mother is ill-nourished through ignorance, or lack of family or financial resources, and the fetus is harmed, and grows into perfect cannon fodder; we approve because this is upward mobility, toward heaven no doubt.

First oppose the many large and horrific ways societies kill and mutely condone and accept the essentially arbitrary deaths of unsung and unseen millions. Intercede to preserve those lives, with the same violent passion you reserve for your neighbor, of whom you know even less.

The lady with the baby makes the choice.

Where would we be with an extra 300 million Chinese over the last 35 years?

America must rid itself of this horrific sin. Since 1973 almost 50,000,000 unborn children have been killed. That number is 12 times the population of the state in which I live.

I see myself Pro Life and Pro Choice-- that is under most conditions I would not condone abortion, but it's easy to think of some very hard circumstances when terminating a pregnancy is the best answer. And I think the person that should answer what "best" means is a woman, not the federal government. By the way, most pro choice candidates implicitly acknowledge this same point of view, even somone like Sarah Palin, who credits her daughter with making the right choice rather than being morally obligated to take her pregnancy to term regardless of the circumstances. One final thought: If every fetus is deserving of human rights, how do we handle the many thousand of spontaneous abortions? Do we investigate each of these as a possible murder? I think not, and so does 99 percent of the population if they would consider the implications of their stated beliefs.

If you want a "culture of life", you have to vote against war and the death penalty too.

and you refuse to do that.

How about teaching people how NOT to get pregnant?

You're afraid of that too.

NOBODY is PRO-abortion

There is no such thing as the "culture of death"

YOU are now complicit in the deaths of 4,000 American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis.

I have not heard you say how wrong was the "Republican War for Oil in Iraq".

Your man from God, Mr. Bush, signed the most death sentences of ANY state in the U.S. while governor of Texas and you remained silent.

"Reversing Roe would not end the abortion debate, but it would send it back to the 50 states, where the people can have their say."

The people can already have their say. They can choose whether or not to terminate a pregnancy.