Recent Comments

1. about 12 years ago on Doonesbury

   I’m pro-abortion in the same way that I’m pro-open-heart-surgery. It should never be the first choice and I don’t think anyone gets one lightly – prevention is much much better – but I do think that if someone wants one and can’t get it that’s tragic. And I think the people who provide them are heroes who are helping people through an awful time.

2. about 12 years ago on [Deleted]

   Yeah, I do think that not forcing women to have unwanted children is a demographic good, but the Freakonomics guys just aren’t any good at most of the social sciences.

3. about 12 years ago on [Deleted]

   The pro-choice side doesn’t, actually. Findings are, again and again, that where women have the tools they need to make good reproductive choices the birthrate tends to start falling towards the replacement rate. The demographic data says that the best thing to do is educate women, make reproductive healthcare available, and then get out of their way…

4. about 12 years ago on Doonesbury

   I just can’t believe the scorn these rules show for pregnancy and motherhood. Is it really so trivial a job, is it really so lightly undertaken, that you think it’s a positive outcome if someone who doesn’t want to continue a pregnancy and have a child does because she’s forced to? I think most women who have abortions think hard about their circumstances – but if they don’t, if they really are so morally shallow that twenty-four hours of reflection changes their mind after two months of saving and planning and making arrangements, are you really in favor of leaving them in charge of a human being for eighteen years?

5. about 12 years ago on [Deleted]

   The sources you are drawing this information from are not good ones. They are lying to you because of an ideological belief that supercedes facts. They are bearing false witness to you, and they are causing you to bear false witness to other people in a cause that hurts young women in desperate situations. The Guttmacher Institutes’ research on the safety of abortion is very trustworthy and well-reviewed; you might also refer to peer-reviewed public health journals like the Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology.

   I don’t think you’re going to do this, because you have a will not to because of a belief that’s not based in a fact but rather in a moral conviction. I don’t have a problem with moral convictions that I don’t share, but I do have a problem with perpetuating lies.

6. about 12 years ago on Doonesbury

   Women are informed of the risk of an abortion during standard pre-procedural paperwork. These risks include an allergic reaction to medication and a very small risk of puncture to the uterine wall and resultant complications. The biggest medical risk an abortion poses to a woman is that it will be incomplete and tissue will be retained. This is what led to the deaths from septic abortions before Roe V. Wade.

   The fact that you think women who have spent two months thinking through their choices, called an abortion clinic to make an appointment, gotten the money together, made babysitting arrangements for their children, driven for eight hours to get to an abortion clinic (this being Texas), and are sitting in a waiting room filling out paperwork to get an abortion need to be intensely and specifically warned that they’re about to get a miniature! wee! baby! taken out of their tum-tum! shows an intense contempt for my (and possibly your) sex.

7. about 12 years ago on [Deleted]

   rmleon, if that nutrition and protection could be provided somewhere else then inside my abdomen, I would be so pro-life. But the majority of pregnancy is not a question of blood supply to the fetus, it’s a question of a woman’s body radically readjusting itself to do the hard and life-threatening work of growing a fetus into a baby and then getting it out into the world. If it were just “nutrition and protection” we could do some sort of laproscopic c-section and then grow fetuses in large petri dishes. Your understanding of pregnancy needs work.

8. about 12 years ago on Doonesbury

   Pregnancy is not a neutral thing. In the most ideal case for a completed pregnancy six to nine pounds of squalling human being rips through your genitals with its head. Hormones soften your bones and shove them outward from the inside. Women can range from being perfectly healthy and able to work to being incapacitated by actual nonstop vomiting. Pregnancy can KILL you dead. The fact that women choose to go through this all the time shows how strong the parenting instinct is in humans. But the idea that the hard work of growing an unimplanted blastocyst into nine pounds of human for almost a year is “just leaving it alone” is ridiculous. 61% of women who have abortions already have had a child and are still making this choice. I don’t know how much more informed you can get than that.