lady_kishiria: (Lady Liberty)
ancientjaguar ([personal profile] lady_kishiria) wrote2007-01-22 09:11 pm

Blog for Choice Day!

I didn't know there was such a thing, but there is, so I'll get this done before midnight.

You often hear women say, "Well, I'd never have an abortion, but I support the right of any other woman to do it." That's not me. I can think of any number of reasons why I might have an abortion, and so I am pro-choice.

I want to see RU-486 brought into this country. It seems to me that pro-liars don't want it because they won't be able to wave their bloody fetus photos around since it induces abortions at a stage where the embryo is microscopic. You have to realize, I support legal abortion even MORE than I support it because I can't stand the pro-life crowd.

I've said that I do yearn for a day when abortion is no more. Seriously, I do. That would mean all contraception worked, that there was no rape and that all women were prosperous enough so that an unplanned pregnancy wouldn't be a big deal. That sounds good, doesn't it? When I pray for an end to abortion, that's what I mean. I don't think pro-liars mean the same thing.

[identity profile] shadowcell.livejournal.com 2007-01-23 07:04 am (UTC)(link)
I still think this whole "pro-life" position is a construct of the evangelicals, rather than a genuine argument. I fail to see how a microscopic blob of cells in a petri dish is as much a human being as you and me, and how killing it is as much of a sin as killing a grown person. It's illogical, and while your rank-and-file fundamentalist will believe it, surely the James Dobsons of the world can't be so stupid as to believe it themselves. They have to sell this message to people. There has to be enough of a level of detachment in them to realize that they have to spin this so that it looks like a legitimate argument and not the bullshit it really is.

[identity profile] youngfreud.livejournal.com 2007-01-23 07:15 am (UTC)(link)
You do have a point. I recall that even before RvW, church leaders would quietly steer women with unplanned pregancies to an abortionist, much like a doctor would. It was after the societal changes in the '70s, such as the rise of the women's liberation and free love movement, the reaction to the fall of the conservative movement in the failure of Barry Goldwater's attempt at the presidency and later, the wake of Watergate, and Jimmy Carter's reach out to the evangelicals, whom Reagan would later steal from him in the '80 election, did this ever really become an issue.

After all, the abortion issue is very much a control issue, not only over women, who've gained in power in the past 30-40 years, but also minorities: one doesn't have to go far to hear a pundit like Bill Bennett mouth off saying that crime would go down if more blacks had abortions or some Fox News tool say that white women need to breed more white babies.

[identity profile] zare-k.livejournal.com 2007-01-23 08:51 am (UTC)(link)
Some in the anti-choice camp are now taking the position that abortion should be banned because it is profoundly harmful to women-- specifically, because it causes deep, lasting psychological trauma. Trouble is, scientific studies on the topic don't support that conclusion at all.

See this Sunday's NY Times magazine for a profile on one of these activists. It's pretty interesting.

[identity profile] desert-vixen.livejournal.com 2007-01-23 01:35 pm (UTC)(link)

As opposed to the potential harm caused by having to carry a pregnancy you didn't want to term and then having to either go through the adoption process or raise the child.

Right.

I call BS on this one.

DV

[identity profile] shadowcell.livejournal.com 2007-01-23 07:46 pm (UTC)(link)
Plus there's the immeasurable trauma the child will go through, being forced into the world in the care of a parent who didn't want them. Nobody has yet tried to justify to me that it's worth saving fetuses from being aborted, only to bring those children into a world where they are not loved.