Matt Bors for January 09, 2012

Here it is: Rick Santorum’s world in, appropriately, a nutshell.We have just under eleven months, friends. We must educate the Regressives among us. We have much good news: a recovering economy, lower middle-class taxes, health-care for all children up to the age of 26, the death of Osama bin Laden, the overthrow of tyrants in Egypt & Libya, the end of the war in Iraq, equal pay for women, equal rights for all, &c.We must also remind our Regressive neighbors that closing corporate loopholes; regulating the banking, coal, & oil industries; and taxing millionaires’ bonuses will lead to a better, safer, cleaner, more prosperous nation.We were on that path fifty years ago, and we can regain that path again.

Sputter, but that would require sanity from the right.

What life-saving abortion are you blabbering about???? In my three years in the hospital I have not seen one life-saving abortion. You are nothing but BS.

Adam plus Eve produced Cain and Abel, exactly why did Cain REALLY kill Abel? And, if the family were the only people in the world, exactly where did all those folks in Nod, east of Eden, come from? Mars? Well, that makes more sense than the bible twisters answers.

The narrow thinking of prolife groups is disappointing. All I ever hear is “YOU MUST GIVE BIRTH!”. Care to guess how often I hear prolife supports talk about what do with the kid after birth?

Almost never. Almost never any talk about building up the adoption system, regulating adoption facilitators, oversight of foster families, supporting wards of the state past 18, getting more trained people involved, better support for single parents, meaningful fixes to the school system. The list goes on and on.

I’m not saying I support abortion. I’m saying I don’t think most of you have given this topic any real thought. Most of you seem to be their because you only see a baby or your religion. The prolife title seems to be misleading. It should be probirth.

Please take the time to reseach this topic. There are more meaningful ways to help babies than some law that will require someone else to do the real work. That’s assuming to actually care and aren’t using kids to force others to live by your ideals.

If you want to decrease abortion, you must improve sex education — beyond abstinence “education,” which simply does not work — and enable people to obtain safe birth control. Santorum wants none of these things. He doesn’t approve of non-procreative sex WITHIN a marriage.

Eddie, go to Seattle and visit the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance or Baltimore to Johns Hopkins and talk to the doctors and patients in the cancer and leukemia wards. While my wife was there, I knew 2 women who died because they refused abortions. When you are going through chemotherapy your body cannot support a child growing inside of you. Even the miscarriage can be fatal if the woman is not in the hospital when it happens because of an elevated white blood cell count that prevents blood clotting. If abortions are made illegal, then any woman who happens to be pregnant before knowing she has cancer/leukemia/lymphoma et al will be given a de facto death sentence because the doctors’ hands will be tied trying to get a court exemption for an abortion, which means it goes public and any yahoo preacher can challenge the proceedings until it is too late. Even Alan Simpson, the old conservative senator from Wyoming, said on Fareed Zakaria this weekend that abortion was strictly a medical issue and a personal issue, not a political issue and the republicans should stop campaigning with it.

Eddie, I’m not sure what part of my post makes me a liar. It is true the catholic church does allow for termination of pregnancy to save the mother, I have had that conversation with a few priests, but I was not referring to the catholic church. There are many sects out there who do oppose ANY termination of pregnancy, no matter the cost to the mother. My point is that any termination of pregnancy by a physician is considered an abortion, and if abortion is made illegal across the board, a court order will be required to terminate a pregnancy, which will make it subject to a public hearing, which these people will use as an opportunity to make their point. The Westboro Baptists are not known for rational thinking, and they are not unique in this country. You were the one who said there were no life saving abortions, I provided medical evidence that there are, and you turned around and changed the definition.

No, it does not work. I’m a psychologist with a degree in education, Eddie, with two daughters in Catholic schools. I have been following the research into this quite closely. There might be effective abstinence education programs, but the vast majority of them out there do not work. Here’s why: It doesn’t explain anything about how sexuality works, it merely uses either scare tactics or tells people “don’t do anything.”When you are talking about teenagers, they WILL do something. In the absence of good information, they will instead use whatever they’ve heard — e.g., “take a hot bath,” or “standing up means you won’t get pregnant,” etc. Programs that explain clearly and openly how sexuality works — in terms of how people get pregnant and how diseases can get spread — decrease teenage pregnancy rates.Check out the states that have insisted on abstinence programs. It’s pretty much the same list as “states with highest teenage pregnancy rates,” and “most children in poverty” rates.

Forgot to add that abstinence is higher in teenagers who have better sex education. It’s not just using condoms.And by the way, Planned Parenthood is the only source for pregnancy assistance for many women in many areas — I wouldn’t be so quick to call them “murderers.”

Good to see this debate still going on. Eddie, you actually hit the nail on the head with your point about semantics. When I lived in Pennsylvania and had my experiences with my wife’s illness, I attended 3 public town hall debates on abortion, and the semantics were the entire issue. The “religious” leaders (not the Catholic priests, who came across as quite liberal in this crowd) argued that no termination of pregnancy should be legal because too much leeway could be given by a doctor just to perform the abortion. Who was really “at risk”? A cancer patient? A diabetic? A 14 year old? They insisted that one exemption would be liberally applied to almost anybody with a doctor’s note, and we would be back to unlimited abortions. The other side was that making any abortions illegal would en up overriding a doctor’s recommendation and interfering with a life saving procedure. This is the nature of the debate. You understand the semantics, but many people do not, and some of them are politicians.