Tuesday, April 24

Abort This

Or

Not Strictly Because I Watched "Jesus Camp" This Weekend, But That Sure Didn't Help Matters



Doing my best not to get on my soapbox and rant about how the religious nutballs are quietly taking over this country and impeding your personal rights to think for yourself, but if you've been at all following what's been going on with the Supreme Court's abortion ban (including but not limited to how, for the first time ever, language protecting the safety of the mother has been EXCLUDED, even in rape and incest situations) and you can find the time to make a phone call tomorrow, your children and their children might one day thank you.

Thank you. End soapbox.


15 comments:

DaGince said...

WTF is your problem lady?!? I have no clue what is going on in the supreme court and I have absolutely no leg to stand on! I've not followed the situation whatsoever and am really only posting a comment to be the first one to have posted! GOOOOOO TEAM!!

(seriously I agree with you, rape induced pregnancies should be eliminated)

Brunch Bird said...

I watched Jesus Camp a couple weeks ago and found myself thinking, "Wow, that's great that they're so concerned about the unborn children. Pity they're emotionally abusing the living ones."

Anonymous said...

I think that camp closed down since that movie, hasn't it? There only seem like there are more crazies because people keep putting them on TV.

Anonymous said...

I have called both of my senators. They are on-board (although I had nothing to do with that). I am not going to bother calling Rep. Bartlett (R-MD 6). I would have a better chance of getting Satan to build a Catholic Church.

Ashburnite said...

petition [x] signed
phone call [x] made

mineIsay said...

Gee, who would have voted for such a schmuck to begin with? New York all cleared, Representative
Jerrold Nadler is behind the law, and both Clinton and Schumer are cosponsered. I love my state.

HomeImprovementNinja said...

I saw Jesus Camp too recently. Freaky! When they had that Dubya lifesize cardboard cutout and they were all praying around it...W.T.F???

Scottie said...

Jesus would probably hate half of those "christians" these days.

Anonymous said...

Eeehhhh, I'm going to show up on what doubtless will be viewed as the wrong side of this fence. What the Supreme Court upheld was the idea that a woman couldn't wait 5 months to get an abortion. Theoretically, if you're a victim of rape or incest, you know that pretty early on, and those abortions are still legal. And the language does allow for late-term abortions when the LIFE of the mother is in danger -- what is different is that is a stricter criterion than just the "health" of the mother.

The other thing is, it is still possible to get a late-term abortion -- just not the kind where the baby is still alive when 3/4 of it is out of the birth canal. Instead, the mother is injected with saline or something and the fetus dies in utero, before delivery. Sorry to be icky, but I can't think of a more delicate way to put it.

Is this ban the start of a slippery slope to outlawing abortions entirely? Maybe. But the opposite argument could easily be made that if a baby can be 3/4 delivered and then terminated, that is a slippery slope toward killing full-term babies because they are somehow flawed -- and frankly, history is trending more in that direction than the other. When abortions were first declared legal, I don't think you would have found a majority of people OK with this particular procedure, I think you would have found a majority saying, "Oh, come on. That wouldn't happen, quit being so dramatic."

Obviously, I don't particularly like the idea of abortions in general, and sadly I think the general view of getting one is a tad too cavalier in today's society, but I actually do see a problem with this ban, and that is the fact that while the law does allow for the procedure when the mother's life is in danger, it does not in any way factor in anything about the fetus. The one person I know who has had this procedure did so after she discovered the baby was developing with severe heart problems and that other kids born with this defect generally didn't make it past the age of three, even with several surgeries. Now, yes, there are those who would say three years are better than none, but it's awfully hard to be sure. For one thing, three years is not the average, it is the exceptional. For another, what kind of life are you guaranteeing, when most of the time alive is spent in pain, surgery, recovery, etc.? I think laws made to protect unborn children ought to factor in the quality of the lives they are supposedly protecting.

Abortion in general is a tough topic. I'm libertarian. I'm for people making their own decisions. I think the procedures should be legal, but honestly, I can't for the life of me find any particularly good arguments in favor of me, personally, getting one. My friend made a decision based on her baby's expected quality of life. I respect that, and I respect her immensely for the grace she showed going through the one of the most horrible situations I can imagine. But I'm not sure I would have made the same decision.

Which I suppose is why there is more than one flavor of ice cream. :)

mineIsay said...

nice comment. well thought out and not too extreme - two thngs that rarely get acheived at the mere mention of abortion. However, the thing that gets me, is that all laws up for consideration in regards to abortions are presented with some positive spin. Do you remember the "unborn victims of violence law"? That proposed that a personw ho murderes a pregnant woman gets charged for two crimes, since he ended two lives. At first, even I (the biggest tree hugging hippy on the block" thought, "wow, that's a good law - why shouldn't they be doubly punished" and then I realized, what they were tryng to establish was that a fetus was a life. My point, is that a change against Roe v Wade is a change. And every change made, makes it a little easier to make the next one. No one should be deliberating anything when it comes to the concept of a woman's health.

Anonymous said...

"No one should be deliberating anything when it comes to the concept of a woman's health."

Well, except doctors and science type people, who should really be the only ones having any say on what is or is not medically sound. Not Scalito.

honeykbee said...

First of all, I would be remiss if I did not thank you, averageblogger, first and foremost, for what is decidedly the longest comment this b(ee)log has ever seen. In fact, it might also warrant being called the longest email (not regarding domestic battles over what qualifies as "too much porn") that I have ever received, and certainly the most thought out and eloquent thus far this year. Both for that, and for posting what you suspected to be an adversarial opinion for all the internets to see, I applaud you. Hardcore.

While I, too, consider myself a member of the Movimiento Libertario, perhaps moreso objectivist (at least according to Wikipedia, where I get all of my political definitions because I'm really mostly into bitching and not so much into definitions), but where I believe you and I differ in opinion is somewhere between conception and diaper rash. Please do correct me if I'm wrong, as I do not intend to put words in your mouth... but if it were up to me, late term abortions would be safe, legal, and widely available, so should I (or anyone) find out that the child they are carrying will have certain needs that I am not able or willing to provide (or for any reason for that matter), rather than inflicting another life upon this world (for who to take care of... god?) that I could choose to safely restore my fallopian tubes to their pre-embryonic condition, as quickly, safely and as much as possible, that I would have this option to exercise. In addition, I believe that terminating children who scream in the movies or other public areas should also be encouraged up through at least 36 months of age. But, I digress.

Debate over the "health" vs. the "life" of the mother being in jeopardy is disturbing not only because, as you stated, it opens the door to a slippery slope of vague definitions and a landslide of personal freedoms being shat upon but also what I'd like to know is when exactly judges began being awarded doctorates along with their curly white wigs and long, flowy black gowns? Why do they get to decide what is best practice for "the mother"? I don't even listen to my doctor when he tells me to take cholesterol pills because thanks to the magic of Google, I know that my cholesterol isn't really as high as his furrowed brow would have me believe and that in fact I'm likely better off eating a bowl of Quaker oats every day for a month then taking a lifetime of questionable meds for which Dr.Asshat gets serious kickback buckaroos.

Seems clear that the only one in this scenario who gives a flying Pelosi about my quality of life, and/or that of my children, is me.

Oh and by the way? The details of the procedure (dubbed "partial birth" by pro-lifers strictly to assault the senses, when it's really an infrequently performed dilation and extraction) may not be pretty, but the truth lies within; abortion stops a beating heart. And I'm okay with that.

Anonymous said...

Aw, it's nice of you to act like me running off at the mouth is a good thing. :) You're a gracious hostess. And jeez, if there are porn arguments to be had ... what am I doing on this topic?? :)

I don't actually know where I stand on the question of "when is a human not a human?" I mean, human women don't gestate puppies, right? They're growing baby humans. But women miscarry all the time without even realizing anything untoward has happened. Is that considered "human death"? Sources say not so much.

When did judges get MD status? Probably around the same time all the congressmen who wrote the bill did. And that is absolutely where my libertarian streak kicks in -- there are things I like the government regulating, like interstate commerce and our national defense -- and then there are things that they should just leave the hell alone. Abortion. Education. Gay marriage. All perfectly valid things to leave alone and let individuals, or local governments, or even state governments, work out for themselves.

Since I don't count myself among the ranks of MD, judge or lawmaker, I confess I don't actually know that much about the procedure, factually speaking. I did read the congressional testimony from doctors and I did read the language of the law. I'm not saying the law is accurate or nonbiased, mind you, I'm just saying I read it, and what it said was that no controlled nor comparative studies been conducted that contrast this particular method to others, and that a slew of doctors and other outfits gave them a laundry list of unhealthy maternal consequences of the procedure (and man, are they ever gross to read,) so based on all the info Congress collected, the conclusion was that outlawing this one method does not create a hole in good health care, does create a bright line between abortion and infanticide, and . Another interesting tidbit in the law? No medical schools that provide instruction on abortions include this procedure in their curriculum.

Like I said, I think abortion should be legal. And just for my own ability to sleep at night, I have concluded that if I think they should be legal, then I have to stick with that assertion and think they should be legal all the way to full-term delivery. That maybe we shouldn't call the things "babies" until they have drawn their first lungful of oxygen. I dunno. I have nothing but emotion to base it on, but I do think find it less humane to have an abortion in the eighth month rather than the first. But again, that's just me, and I am on a first-name basis with a situation where early-term action was never a consideration.

It would be nice if the world were populated only with rational people, wouldn't it? I mean, we'd be done with the women who consider abortion a form of birth control, we'd be done with the men who think they know what it's like to be pregnant, and the fetus that's the focus of all this brouhaha would always be given the benefit of the doubt and would not need minority-status legal protection. Sigh.

I must admit, though -- yes, I know it's a woman's body, yes, I know she's the one inconvenienced, yes, I'm a discredit to my gender for even bringing it up, but .... why is it the impregnated get a month, three months, eight-nine months to decide if they want to have a baby, and the impregnators don't get a vote at all, other than the initial decision of whether or not to orgasm? Sure, most of the time this stuff gets reconciled between rational adults, but then you read a fair amount of news stories about how he is suing cos he wants the kid and she doesn't, or she said she'd raise the kid and he said he wanted no part but then she sued for support, or he said he didn't want to be involved, but now he does, blablabla.

(This one hits a bit close to home for me. The Mister has a daughter who came about as an unintended pregnancy. It's been brutal. The mom is a big cupful of malice who told him to get out of her life, and then told the daughter that he had no desire to stick around. My husband took some fatal missteps in all this stuff, and now he has a daughter who hates him, doesn't trust her mother, and thinks I am evil because I had the bad form to meet and marry her father -- when she was 17 years old, mind you. Frankly, I'm saving the whole sordid story to tell my now-4-year-old son as an object lesson in Why You Better Not Have Sex Until You Are At Least 30.)

Meh. If you read my blog this week, you already know I am in favor of all humans should be sterilized until they've passed a test, so don't you think that whole "screaming should be wiped from the gene pool" thing is off base. Clearly I'm the one on the crazy juice and you are the rational one!

Beakerz said...

Baba Booey

honeykbee said...

A little late-term followup. Thoughts on his use of "football" especially encouraged:


Dear Honeykbee:



Thank you for contacting me to express your support for the Freedom of Choice Act ( H.R. 1964 ). I appreciate your taking the time to share your views with me on this important matter.



I agree with you and am pleased to report that I am a co-sponsor of this legislation, which seeks to prohibit the government from interfering with a woman's fundamental right to set forth in the Supreme Court's landmark Roe v. Wade decision. I strongly support a woman's right to choose and am a member of the Congressional Pro-Choice Caucus to help advocate on behalf of women's reproductive rights. Neither the Congress nor the courts should tell a woman how to manage her health or reproductive care. Unfortunately, what should be a private matter between a woman and her doctor has become a political football.



Again, thank you for taking the time to contact me about this matter. Please let me know whenever I may be of service to you.

Sincerely,
Chris Van Hollen
Member of Congress


P.S. Please visit my website at www.house.gov/vanhollen. While there, you can sign up for my e-mail newsletter, view press releases and statements, see what legislation I have sponsored or co-sponsored and receive information on the various constituent services provided by my office.