Lisa Benson for January 10, 2013

Are you going to raise the 300,000 tossed lives yourself, Lisa? Abortion is no easy decision to make, but it is the right of every woman to make her own decision about it. You don’t like abortion? DON’T HAVE ONE.

Panel 1: 2012. Panel 2: many, many years. Figures lie. Liars figure.

Restrictive law just increases death rate of mothers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion#Incidence

I guess it’s fortunate that I’m older and mellower. I realized some time ago that getting too spun up by these issues left little room for reason and compromise to find solutions for the problems. I’m a Libertarian, abortion to me is a non-issue. Like same sex marriage and many other “issues” that rile the social conservatives, I believe that whatever people choose to do that doesn’t impact others negatively they should be free to do. In my mind that is a lot of where the 9th Amendment to the Constitution applies.

Gun violence? In spite of the daily inflammatory rhetoric, intelligent regulation is practical, prohibition isn’t. It won’t solve the problem we have because there will always be a market for guns for those that really want to obtain them. Violent behavior is a systemic problem inherent in our population and needs to be addressed on many different levels. If you don’t like violent movies, don’t go see them. Same with video games. If we don’t want mentally ill people to be able to so easily commit violent acts, build up the treatment system and address the problem directly.

If you are dissatisfied with our system, change it. We have accepted the status quo of our government structure to the point that it is like herding chickens to get them to focus on the needs of the people. The attitude that they know what we need better than we do is ridiculous. That is one of the principal reasons this republic was founded to begin with. We have gotten too comfortable and now it is coming back to slap us in the face.

300,000 less people on welfare.

dear indieme there is log waiting list at adoption agencies that why you have couples going oversea [my cousin went to eritrea]

I am pro-choice, but I’ve seriously been debating in my interior monologue the past month whether this societal and gov’t-approved/funded concept of easily throwing away human life that’s inconvenient in some part, big or small, brings about the thoughts that inspired Newtown, Columbine, etc….

Equally tragic, totally unrelated. Abortion is an impossible issue and keeps Americans from fixing things that can be much more easily addressed.Gun violence can be greatly reduced with improved background checks, limiting rounds a gun can fire before reloading, limiting the amount of ammo one can buy per month, etc, etc.None of these would stop a legitimate hunter or a skeet shooter, or even a collector with proper licenses.The easy things we should do today. We can start limiting gun violence today. The difficult things we should do over the next weeks and months. The impossible things we should do when everything else is fixed. If we make this a safer, healthier, happier country, abortions will fall simply because people will be mentally, physically, and financially able to have a wanted child.Respectfully,C.

Planned Parenthood did 329,445 abortions in 2010;PP did 333,964 abortions in 2011.PP received $542.4 Million in government grants & reimbursements which includes payments from Medicaid managed care plans.PP stated in the annual report that their total assets are $1,244.7 Billion.and the USA has 663,409 less potential taxpayers and citizens in 2 years time.-On gun violence, the annual FBI crime statistics covering years 2005 thru 2011….more people are killed by blunt objects than by rifles….and more are killed by hammers and clubs than by non-categorized types of guns….and NEARLY TWICE AS MANY ARE KILLED BY HANDS AND FISTS.so liberals to be fair on new laws to BAN GUNS need also to BAN HAMMERS, CLUBS, HANDS AND FISTS. But liberals are not fair.-And God is keeping count. God is Pro-Life.

Including those who get pregnant because of Rape (which is usually started by the male half of that process), or those who wouldn’t make a very good mother?.…and you wonder why this woman keeps flagging you. Why don’t you listen to @C Downs? He’s right on this issue. Let’s use the energy to preventing the need for abortions by protecting the women who are scared & see no way out of their situation!

HERE’S the biggest no-brainer: Don’t want to have a baby? Don’t have sex! We would get rid of a whole host of issues if people took seriously the fact that sex is supposed to cause pregnancy! (I’m thinking abortion, unwanted pregnancy, STDs, unwanted, abused, & neglected children, overpopulation,etc.etc etc.)

I deserved that. I apologize.

As a male, I first believe that only women can know what has to go through their minds while trying to decide whether to have an abortion. So, as a male, I believe males should just shut up and let women decide for themselves.

As an observer of society, I agree that safe sex would certainly be preferred, and I think most women, even the ones who have chosen abortion, would have been happier if there was never an embryo in the first place. Many problems with this:

Even a birth control method that is 99% effective is going to fail 1% of the time.

Many unplanned pregnancies are not from consensual sex. Some rapes are unreported. Some occur when the female has had too much to drink or is otherwise impaired.

Many of the same people who don’t want abortion also don’t want women to have easy access to birth control. This is counterproductive, yet pervasive.

Abstinence-only “sex education” is, in the words of Bristol Palin, “unrealistic”. I agree. Sex is an instinct, sex is fun, and sex is going to happen. Well, Ms. Palin said that until someone gave her a quarter million to say otherwise.

Thanks to better health care, and thanks to hormones fed to animals to get them to market faster, boys as young as 12 or 13 can grow full beards. 8-year-old girls are now fertile.

I remember my hormones raging in my mid-to-late teens. It was bad enough then, and I knew better how to control it. I can’t imagine trying to abstain for 3 – 5 years longer now.

I recognize the difficulties in adoption, but I also recognize that many people who adopt are interested in only adopting people of their own color. There are babies and young children in our own country who will be passed over for kids from other countries.

Our population is over 7 billion now. We are polluting the seas and the air, and the more demand for manufacturing, fossil fuels, etc. will be greater with more people. While I do not suggest that we should use abortion for population control, Mr. Taxpayer noted we’d have 663,000+ more taxpayers in 2 years. I submit that with 8% (or more) unemployment, it’s hard to imagine that those additional people would not increase the demand for unemployment/welfare/medicaid/etc. There is a practical side.

Keep in mind that we also are working diligently to find ways to make infertile couples have their own children. Octomom, anyone?

Women WILL get abortions, whether we want them to or not. It’s only a question of whether we want them to find a “guy who wants to go to medical school” in a back alley with a knitting needle, or in a medical facility. Those who pretend that their anti-abortion laws are “for the health of the mother”, like Virginia’s forced ultrasound law, are doing the exact opposite.

I propose that we stop infertility treatments, work to provide better and easier adoptions, and teach real sex education, making birth control methods easily available. This would truly make abortions more rare.

As far as adoptions go, I remember a family who was paraded around Pat Robertson’s 700 Club as a model to all. The parents adopted something like 13 or 15 of them, and it was such a heartwarming story. Until one of them turned up dead. Turns out they were living in a converted school bus, and he had been chained to the floor for days as punishment for poor bladder control. After his death, the other children came forward with similar tales of their own. Both parents are now in prison. Pat has remained mum…

Again, a multifaceted subject with no simple answers.

@Theophilous Joinerwhat you posted is an outright lie. why don’t you post what you found on the CDC website. It does not say that any CHILDREN were killed by abortions.most people do not consider sperm, eggs, zygotes, embryo’s and fetuses, CHILDREN, black or not.

@Theophilous Joinerthe anti-abortionists do essentially kidnap women looking for healthcare. I was a mole and actually joined a women to uncover their tactics.they promised all kinds and support and care if the woman doesn’t have an abortion. then they leave (just like the father), once the fetus is full term.isn’t that what a good christian does? the right to life begins at the urethra and ends at birth?

Poor, demented pro-choicers. You STILL don’t get it …

Right! But the pro-choice crowd has there head stuck so far in the sand, they cannot see anything but their prejudices.

Cartoonist threatens to lynch the President:http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2013/01/10/

As indicated by many others, many times, it truly is amazing how many “pro-life” folks only worry about eggs or less than viable “life forms”, once they’re actually breathing, and especially if they’re “Muslim”, or “Them”, of any form, they have no right to life. War is not good for children, or other living things. But of course, the vast majority of those “pro-life” folks, like well, those Catholics for decades in Northern Ireland, or now still calling for wars, along with their evangelical brethren, don’t consider bombs, napalm, or bullets as “violent” as a “D & C”. (or a pill that accomplishes the same thing as a perfectly natural “period”.

@radish — really? Considering the vast majority of gun death suicides are male. Females tend to use overdose, cutting, asphyxiation & other “less violent” means to kill themselves. CDC has lots of stats on this point.

Rightisright, that was kind of the rationale behind the film “Idiocracy”, in which intelligent people (many of them women in the professions) delayed having children for so long that their biological clocks ran out, whereas morons and trailertrash reproduced ad libitum. Your conclusion is correct, though the reasoning is wrong — ALL women should be able to choose how many children to have. To say otherwise is to merely mimic the Taliban and other religious fundamentalists (what’s next on your agenda, no education for girls?).

Planned Parenthood does considerably more good in this country than the anti abortion crowd. Abortion is a very minor part of what they do…..The anti crowd is just more bible thumpers trying to force their will on the public.

Last I checked, abortion is legal in the USA…

@exoticdoc<,BR>you want to talk about nephish, then let’s look at the book in context:“the LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.”you’ll find this translation, or something god damn close, in genesis in most bibles. i think it’s pretty clear.you, and your ilk’s assertion that zygotes are “children”, show either a complete misunderstanding of the english language, or is a lie, intended to be inflamatory.furthermore, your assertion that athiests can not have morality is bigtime wacko.plenty of religious and non-religious people (and animals) show morality. but i guess it’s news to most of the world (who isn’t bible thumping) that they are immoral.

It’s hard to tell “satire” from “seriousness” when it’s in print, boy. A lot of “satire” requires a tonal inflection to be obvious (which isn’t present in print).

Just to be serious for a moment, perhaps: I’m not sure that I’m as confident as you are that evolution (including social evolution) provides a completely adequate basis for morality. Perhaps I’ve misunderstood your position, however. Here’s a thought or two. In general I’m not all that interested in universals and absolutes. Mostly I don’t need them, and I don’t look for things I don’t need. For instance, I’m aware that that philosophic foundations of mathematics are controversial, but I don’t worry about that when I’m working out my tax return. I also think that the philosophic foundations of some (or all?) moral questions are controversial, but I don’t worry about that when I can deal adequately with moral questions that are my immediate concern. Most of my life I’ve been quite concerned about moral questions, and I would even say (for reasons that don’t need to be specified in this forum) that my life has been massively influenced by particular moral decisions I made when I was young. For instance, when I was youngish, I came to believe that racial segregation was morally wrong (not a controversial stand now, but when I was making that judgment segregation was the law where I lived), and I also believed that I shouldn’t just have that opinion, I should do something about it. Likewise, a little later, I came to believe that the US War in Vietnam was immoral, and again I believed that I shouldn’t just have that opinion, I should do something about it. I didn’t and don’t need a universal and absolute justification for these positions, any more than I need a universal and absolute justification for adding and subtracting on my tax return. I suspect there is a kind of hierarchy of needs for justification — sometimes a moral problem can’t be solved at one level, and so we move up a level, perhaps up another, until we are satisfied. For me, the morality of abortion is not solved at the lowest or day to day level; I had to go up a level to consider what I think about the status of a foetus. That took some research and some thought, and the decision could have gone either way. As it happens, I came up with a somewhat complex position on the subject, but for most purposes it boils down to leaving the question to a woman and her doctor. Another complicated question is the extent to which we (whoever we happen to be) should intervene in other cultures when we see that they are doing things we find deeply abhorrent. I’ve decided that there is no simple answer here — each situation has to be decided individually. Genocide should be stopped, and intervention is justifiable. But some practices are better left to be worked out by the society in question, because outside interference won’t work. Well, that’s enough and more than enough for now.

Have you got some?

Not on the surface of a sphere. (The square of the ….)

OMG. You’re beyond me here. But:

http://people.usd.edu/~schieber/psyc770/resistors/ohms4beginner.html

“The important factor here is the temperature. If calculations based on Ohms law are to produce accurate results this must remain constant. In the ‘real’ world it hardly ever does, and from a beginners point of view, you need not concern yourself with it any further, since the circuits you are likely to encounter at the moment – and about 95% of all those you will come across in the future – will work perfectly ok whether they’re hot or cold!”95% is good, but hardly universal and absolute.

I’m sure someone is going to get me — maybe on the law of the excluded middle, though I’m not sure that counts either. But none of these has much to do with moral questions.

I think the voice of God is so loud in his ears that he can’t hear anything else.

A humane and insightful post.

One reason I don’t feel the need for absolute and universal moral truths that would cover every possible situation is that I don’t ever expect to be in every possible situation. That’s God’s job, not mine. My job is to try to do my best when and where I am. Most of the time I can see pretty clearly what’s right and wrong, but sometimes it takes some work. To return to examples I used above, it didn’t take any research to realize that racial segregation was wrong. But it did take research to figure out that the War in Vietnam was wrong. It could have been the right thing to do. I’m no fan of communism, and I thought that Soviet control of Eastern Europe was a very bad thing. I vividly remember my father writing out a check to support Hungarian refugees. So I didn’t automatically oppose the War in Vietnam. I spent about a year reading extensively and debating with various of my friends until I was able to make a decision, based on my research and thinking, that the War was wrong. And of course many people thought (and will think) that I was wrong. I don’t know of any magic formula that will solve these problems, except honest research and dialogue.

@exoticdocyou say that ‘abortion is the murder of children’.no it isn’t. unless you equate a ‘child’ with a zygote or embryo. of course a zygote has no nephish.now that we’ve dispensed with that little subterfuge, on your part;FAILURE to abort, in many cases IS tantamount to murder of the mother. Childbirth is one of the most dangerous things a woman can do. certainly ectopic pregnancies, just to name one type would lead to the death of the mother AND the embryo.is that what you would like to see? Is that your morality?

@exoticdoc, and i quoted verse from the bible that supports my position. you seem incapable of doing even that.

^you have answered nothing. If your morality is the hierarchy of the catholic church covering up for pedophilia, and moving it’s predators around to prey on unsuspecting ‘fresh meat’ at the next church, and paying off victims so they keep their mouth shut.

If your morality is the murder of doctors for some greater good, and forcing a woman with an ectopic pregnancy to die or seek out an illegal abortion, rather than safely and legally abort a misplaced fetus, the I have no room in my life for YOUR morality.

Thanks Lisa.. right on the mark!