Bafflement

51 thoughts on “Bafflement”

1. My thoughts? There is no truce possible with the progressive left. There is no honest dialogue possible. They operate off the destructive kneejerk impulse that anything that upsets or horrifies us red-state Neanderthals must be good. I am all for force-feeding them their own medicine. Sanctuary cities for the Second Amendment? Outlawing in-womb infanticide? Crackdowns on state-sanctioned pot mills? Federalizing the National Guard and performing sweeps of majority-Hispanic neighborhoods? Good. It’s all good. Box them in. Make them hurt. Make them scream. Make *their* lives as big a moral and legal hazard as possible.

   Or we could settle it with guns down the way, as we almost certainly will when the next Democrat President wins with the assistance of the electoral votes granted by 10+ millions of illegal aliens and/or an unConstitutional interstate pact and/or voter harvesting, and we refuse to recognize the fraudulent SOB, and they try and make us. Whichever.

2. Don’t hold back, Phil – tell us how you really feel. ;-)

   I’ve always been ambivalent about abortion … yes, it is about snuffing out a potential human life, beating heart and all, and on that basis, I think that it is wrong … but the situation for a woman or girl who is pregnant and doesn’t want to be? Situations are specific to the individual. Usually, it’s horrific, and challenging. I’ve known women who opted for that solution to their problem, did my best to talk them out of it, offered them all the support that I could … but in the end, the decision was theirs. Not the one that I made for myself, but as much as three or four decades ago, their situation was still a challenge, and one that they would have to live with, for better or worse.

   The fanatics are making it impossible for us to live with tolerant ambiguity.

3. “tolerant ambiguity”…indeed. Barring a (very improbable) mass religious or ideological conversion of the American populace to one pole or the other, then either:

   –there is going to have to be a compromise solution on this issue,

   or

   –this society is going to be destroyed

4. Mother of two adopted children here – both contributing members of society and a joy to parents, grandparents and assorted others that their lives have touched. We went to DJT’s Inauguration and I was infuriated to see little stickers on the lampposts saying – if the aborted fetus’s had a choice they would choose abortion. How can people delude themselves this way? Just because the people who engendered them found them inconvenient they think everybody should? This is beyond sick.

5. Sgt. Mom,

   It first started as a reliable money thing for the Feminist movement and it has since become a religious catechism.

6. “tolerant ambiguity” – wonderful phrase.

7. the phenomenon is called mind arson, like malware for the brain,

   http://invisibleserfscollar.com/radio-silence-and-the-dog-that-did-not-bark-positioning-positive-education-globally/

8. There are so many strands in the abortion issue — from Margaret Sanger’s desire to abort black babies, to Congress sitting back while the Supreme Court unconstitutionally legislated from the bench, to 1960s Free Love women realizing they needed a plan to deal with the consequences.

   But part of the reason for Capital F Feminists making such a big deal of abortion is that their leaders tend to be closely aligned with anti-human environmental extremists. Any society in which the average woman does not have at least 2.1 children is on its way out. The process will take several generations, but the consequences of a baby shortage are entirely predictable. Mainstreaming abortion and promoting the concept that women should be in the workforce rather than raising families are good changes if seen from a particular point of view.

   Today, most Western and advanced Asian societies have succeeded in denigrating motherhood to the point that population declines are inevitable. That is a win for the anti-human environmentalists hiding behind Capital F Feminism.

9. I am prochoice up to viability. I saw women die from illegal abortions. One from her medical student boyfriend (UCLA).

   I did a few abortions in 1969 when I was a surgery resident rotating on GYN. The GYN residents did them on the admitting ward and everybody hated it. So, I did my share.

   Note that 1969 was three or four years before Roe v Wade, It was legal in California but with restrictions. The women had to have a Psych consult.

   That should have been the national policy: legal where voters choose and illegal where voters don’t want it. We would have missed a lot of agitation and even violence if we had left it at that. I’m not quite old enough to remember the the Nevada divorces but that is how the country dealt with divisive issues when it was still sane.

10. My take on it is that the Capital-F feminists really don’t want to be women, don’t want anything to do with the role of mother, and that’s why they’re doing their best to destroy everything about traditional female roles and motherhood.

    It’s a weird, weird deal–I defy anyone to actually point out anything like a patriarchy that actually exists outside the minds of the people that claim it exists. Even if you go back to the so-called dark ages, before the turn of the 19th Century, there really wasn’t any such thing, at least as they conceived it. Yes, the roles were different for the sexes, and stovepiped like you wouldn’t believe, but the facts were that the lives of males weren’t much better than those of women–They were just different. And, women thought that the males were having all this fun, quite forgetting all the crap they put them through themselves.

    Here’s a thought experiment: Consider the well-known story from that era, The Four Feathers. Gist of that was that a man was given four white feathers by his friends and fiance, simply because he didn’t want to go of and risk his life for a false “glory” in some Godforsaken colonial war. That’s framed as cowardice, and the audience basically approves of everyone doing what they did to him, including his lover who abandoned him because he “dishonored” himself.

    Cast that over into feminine form: Can you imagine handing a woman a white feather, for refusing to “do her duty” by becoming pregnant? How do you think that little story would go over?

    See, it was just fine, back in the “bad old days of the patriarchy” for men to be coerced into getting themselves killed for the “good of society”, but did anyone ever apply that sort of pressure to the women of the day, for similar social benefits…? Would a woman have been “cut out of society”, for not having a baby? Sure, she’d be lionized as a saint for becoming a mother, just like a war hero might be, but… Where’s the stick applied to the young woman’s ass, the way they did to a young man’s? There were none.

    And, yet… We hear endless tales of the patriarchy. Which are mostly bullshit. Life sucked, for everyone–Just in different ways, divided by the sex line. There was no patriarchy, there was just the reality of trying to make lives in a social milieu that we barely comprehend, and the values and mores that made it all work back then are essentially invisible to us today, where the young women look back at those times and think that the men of those days could do as they pleased whenever they pleased, like some Olympian gods walking the earth. Reality? They lived lives just as tightly constrained as any of the women did, it’s just that they were constrained in different ways than the women’s were.

11. I suspect the fanaticism is about the power of the Supreme Court to make nation-wide decisions that Leftist seek.

    Roe v Wade is wrong to my mind because this is a “police” matter reserved for each state. As noted, the arguments pro and con, and the details of the state law are complex and deeply embedded in the local subcultures within our big country.

    I’m like Sgt Mom – it will take a lot of hard thinking and serious discussion to arrive at the practical wording of a law. Each state will decide through its own political process the will of the people with restrictions balanced against rights.

    Roe v Wade showed that Feminists and Leftists could bypass and nullify state-level decisions based on only 5 votes. This is about the power of the central government verses the rights of the sovereign states.

12. My first choice, and I believe the correct Constitutional choice, is that abortion should be a state level matter.

    If we have to have a national standard, as bad as Roe is as law, it’s a reasonable policy compromise: early abortion is permitted generally, there is a grey area in the middle, and late term abortion is not permitted except in rare cases.

13. I understand that sexual techniques may have changed a bit since I started in the late 18th century, but I’m puzzling over trust the guy they are having sex with.

    Do a lot of guys falsely claim to have had vasectomies ? Do gals not notice whether a guy puts on a condom ? Is this another disadvantage of shortsightedness ? Or another cruel disadvantage of being overweight – you just can’t see what’s going on down there, because of the folds of fat in the way ? Or guys put one on, but secretly whip it off before getting down to work – and the gal doesn’t notice ?

    Or guys use psychological tricks like “don’t worry, you can’t get pregnant if we do it standing up ?” Or “don’t worry, it’s not my time of the month ?”

    Which kinda leaves us with “I promise I won’t come inside you” – and if your plan is to rely on that, you’re waaaay too drunk to be having sex. And so is he.

    Besides which some sperm get transferred before ejaculation anyway, so even if yu could trust the guy not to come inside you, you’d still be rolling the dice.

14. I think the reason they are so up in arms over abortion is that this is part of the way in which Feminism is (mal)adapted to the status struggles of upper-middle-class women.

    Social status struggle is the driver for much of our behaviour, and for this lot they are caught in an auction like the Soviet factory workers’ meetings where they had to show keen for the Party by bidding up their targets. Most are normal humans, and would be revolted by the idea of a 39.9 week abortion, but they have to protect themselves from being purged and that means fighting the patriarchy, despising Christianity and pro-life views, and it has to be in public so they don’t fall out the back of the status race.

15. Like many beliefs borne of lunacy, abortion on whim is integral, not just to the Feminist point of view, but to Feminists’ self-image. To them, any threat to the unconstrained availability of abortion is not a threat to freedom, as such, but is, in a very tangible way, a threat upon their very lives.

    Less existential but equally unacceptable: any statement that abortion is bad or, God help us, evil, is a statement that _they_ are evil.

    And many of them already know that to be true, and must remain in the Feminist fold, defending it to their last spittle-drenched tirade, to evade that knowledge.

16. There is someone, somewhere, walking around today who was born premature at 21 weeks. This tells me that abortion is horribly, horribly wrong after that point — or close enough to that point to be another healthy, happy little girl. As technology advances and viability is established earlier and earlier, the period during which there might be reasonable debate over abortion will become smaller and smaller. Laws regarding abortion should be based on the most recent technology available.

17. “…remember where they left the toilet seat.” So it’s the male’s responsibility to put the toilet seat where you wish it be? Are you so flaming weak that you find it impossible to move a toilet seat down from an up position? Y’all wanted equal rights, you need to take equal responsibility. Otherwise you will continue to be a bunch of sorry female dogs.

    Paul L. Quandt

18. I’m gonna go out on a limb here, and say that the fierceness of the pro-abortion side is primarily due to their inability to admit they made a horrible mistake. They chose abortion, because they could always get pregnant later – but, then could not. Rather than live with the consequences of that choice, and accept that they made a bad decision, they justified their lives by promoting abortion as the ONLY logical move.

    Parenthood was exaggerated as horrible, career-destroying, and chaining them to an inferior man. Children were called parasites, rather than blessings.

    The entire fight over abortion-related stem cells was because women wanted to use them to justify their decision – at least the sacrifice of their kid contributed positively to keeping someone else healthy.

    They CANNOT admit the truth that is obvious to anyone who looks at reality. To do so is to reveal that their entire life was based on a lie.

    They have to persuade younger women to make the same choices they did, to keep their delusions. Otherwise, they would be seen as the monsters they are.

19. any sensible woman should run screaming, or at least murmuring a polite excuse and expeditiously leaving the room
    Or quietly drawing your carry piece…..

20. why is late-term abortion even such a polarizing matter for debate?
    Because …
    1) Sex. Sex, sex, sex, SEX! The dividing line between men and women is huge in that men can have sex and walk away. If precautions aren’t taken, women cannot. If the sex results in a pregnancy, the woman (barring abortion) has to carry it for 9 months, then take care of it for the rest of its life.

    Some women see this as the ultimate patriarchal ball and chain. The one thing that keeps them down. They have to be virginal if they want to get ahead and achieve all those dreams and visions, while other women are having FUN (a euphemism for SEX).*

    So, you must have the ability to kill eliminate whatever ‘mistakes’ happen along the way, so you can be a happy and fulfilled woman.

    2) Power. Any accommodation, any negotiation, ANY compromise means they have not achieved the total and absolute power they see as their birthright after suffering under the patriarchy for so long. Just the fact that pro-lifers still exist is anathema to them. It means they have not achieved their victory. (Third-wave feminism is a cult, a religion, NOT a philosophy or ideology.)

    So, sex and power. Pretty much the same reasons men have done a lot of crazy things throughout history. Just with the added craziness of bitter resentment and addle-pated misunderstanding of human nature and history.

    (* This is also why there is such a fanatical obsession with their lady parts – hats, costumes, demanding to go topless, etc.)

21. but in the end, the decision was theirs
    That’s the place where we differ. If they’re truly snuffing out a life, how is that a choice they ever get to make?
    (And I do see your qualifier: “potential”. I don’t see it as “potential”, but an actual, living person. So, I guess that’s where we actually differ.)

22. Whitehall Says:
    Roe v Wade is wrong because
    Yes there is a huge jurisdictional issue. But Roe is also wrong because it’s a giant lie, written to achieve the desired end. The science is wrong. The Constitutional exercise is wrong. And the history is wrong. There’s hardly a bit of the decision that isn’t a lie or an error.

    This is about the power of the central government verses the rights of the sovereign states.
    But, yes, this too.

    Cato Renasci Says:
    early abortion is permitted generally
    In reality, Doe v Bolton (companion to Roe) said there basically wasn’t any check on abortion.

    Linda Fox Says:
    They CANNOT admit the truth that is obvious to anyone who looks at reality. To do so is to reveal that their entire life was based on a lie.
    I think this is also a factor. More so for some followers than for the fanatical leaders, imo.

23. Begin with abortion, end with cutting up viable infants to sell the parts for profit.

    Ban abortion, end with women dying because the social and personal consequences of child birth and rearing are too much to bear.

    And along the way, always the children suffer.

    My mother chose to have me and to give me up for adoption. Widespread DNA testing let me discover my true parentage. And none of my blood relatives will speak to me because of the circumstances of my conception””which are unknown to me.

    We must balance
    Symbolic (abortion is OK with rape?!? Why””what did the baby do to deserve death?)
    Practical (I can’t afford another child!)
    Social (I’m ashamed of my circumstances)
    Petty (This child will ruin my summer””and I’ll look fat in my wedding dress)
    Greedy (How can we use these aborted tissues for medical research?)

    Extremists””It’s a child at conception! It’s a parasitic lump of tissue like cancer!””have so poisoned discussion that it’ll be a century before a reasonable-but-shameful compromise can be reached.

24. All this makes sense if you know a bit of our cultural history that’s been covered up. To understand modern big-F feminists you need to go back to the late nineteenth century when large numbers of women from the higher social strata, particularly on the East Coast, were getting professional degrees and having careers. One consequence was that few of them were getting married and even fewer of them were having children. That created alarm in that social strata, particularly given the high birthrates of recent immigrants such as Jews and Italians.

    One response was an alarm about ‘race suicide’ best represented by Theodore Roosevelt. Those women were to be pressured to have more children. When present day feminists talk about “forced motherhood,” that’s what they echoing a century later. And note too that most of the woman claiming to be threatened by ‘forced motherhood’ are those no sane person wants to see become a mothe

    The counter to TR was Margaret Sanger and her birth control movement. It was heavily eugenic, but only in the negative sense. The solution to the “menace of the feebleminded,” which was the early twentieth century equivalent of Hillary “deplorables,” wasn’t for the “fit” to be forced to have more children. It was the “unfit” to be pressured and manipulated in various ways to have fewer children. That’s the rationale behind Sanger’s clinics and why today’s Planned Parenthood clinics places its clinics close to predominately black neighborhoods. I detail all that from source documents in my book, The Pivot of Civilization in Historical Perspective. Civilization, Sanger and her supporters believed, depended (pivoted) on keeping the birthrate of the ‘unfit’ (deplorables) below that of the ‘fit,’ with the ‘fit’ freely allowed to set their own birthrates.

    It’s why the most visible champion of legalized abortion in the late 1960s was Dr. Alan Guttmacher, who was not only president of Planned Parenthood-World Population, but the former VP of the American Eugenics Association. The new fear wasn’t those Jewish and Italian immigrants. It was that the advent of the birth control pill about 1960 had sent white middle-class birthrates plummeting, while that of the black poor remained high. That is why, with birthrates plunging (among whites) we had this contrived hysteria about a “population bomb.” And, needless to say, scare talk like that is not talk that’s intended to lead to genuine freedom of choice about child-bearing.

    That and the urge of older professional women not to have children with Downs explains why the first paragraph of Roe refers to the “eugenic” and “racial overtones” of the decision. If you want to know the primary reason abortion was legalized, it was to get rid of as many poor black babies as possible. I once had a liberal English professor and Planned Parenthood supporter point to a young black man nearby and whisper conspiratorially, “That’s why we need abortion.” It also explains why, unlike European abortion laws, which tend to cut off around 10-12 weeks, America’s laws, as per Roe, set no legally enforceable limits. Second trimester abortions were to accommodate black women, who might be late at doing something about a pregnancy. Third trimester abortions were to accommodate tests schemes that at the time could not detect Down’s syndrome until late in the pregnancy. Dred Scot is not the most racist decision the Supreme Court has ever issued. It did little to change the laws. Roe is.

    One final remark. The key fact to be realized here goes beyond what I’ve described above. Those are undeniable historical facts that need to be more widely known. It is that these facts so rarely surface in our political debates. The behavior of liberals, in particular, is revealing. They go (or pretend to go) ballistic on those odd occasions when a white cop shoots a young black male, but they purr with contentment at a nearby Planned Parenthood clinic that aborts black babies by the hundreds. Sheer eugenic efficiency is why. If you want to get rid of ‘deplorables,’ then death by abortion is vastly more efficient than death by cop.

25. The solution is simple, though it won’t satisfy everyone. States decide (based on voters) what makes sense for their state. People are free to go to the place that represents their principles – to live or to obtain services. Gradually the country will start to actually look (laws-wise) like people’s beliefs. My guess is that (like the county map that showed how various locations voted in the last election) it will be surprising how many people support the protection – to whatever extent – of human life. The good news is that states are increasingly taking matters into their own hands, rather than waiting on the SCOTUS to give them the green light to do so.

26. I am prochoice up to viability.
    ”” Mike K.

    What is the point of viability? I’ve heard that most European countries have a a limit of 12 weeks but with higher limit in the case of rape or minors or fetal abnormalities.

    Could Americans concede to such a law?

27. As I see it, the Feminists are ALL FOR white women getting abortions, but not for Muslims or illegal aliens.

28. I’m of the opinion that our first duty as adults is to love the children. I don’t know how you square that with abortion, but I’m willing to listen.

    Our maid in Egypt was forced by her brothers to remarry her ex-husband (otherwise they would take her daughter away). The wedding took place with too little notice for birth control pills to take effect, so when she found herself pregnant she went to the local version of Planned Parenthood, a UN organization as I recall, and aborted the child. It was revenge – she aborted his child out of hatred. She didn’t tell her husband at the time. I wonder if she ever did.

29. Sgt. Mom,

    That’s a good heart you have there, as anyone can see. The observations you make re: unwanted pregnancies being a bad situation are products of that good heart.

    But ideas have consequences, I’m afraid: Bad philosophical principles, as they become widespread, tend to come back and bite us decades down the road. Alasdair MacIntyre’s book “After Virtue” documents how a purely-faddish, intellectually unjustified rejection of Aristotelian Virtue Ethics in Western academic philosophy has infected the whole culture of thought in the West so badly that moral disagreements are reduced to disagreements about feelings — and thus rendered unsolvable.

    I think that mistake — now more than 400 years old — needs to be reversed, and an important first step is to acknowledge that if we’re raised (as you and I were) in a morally backward culture, often our feelings will be unreliable guides to moral reasoning, just as they are to other kinds of reasoning. A person raised among kindly saints, educated by kindly saints, who only ever had friendships with kindly saints, would be so accustomed to the sound of right moral thinking that they could intuitively feel their way through every moral quandary. But that ain’t us!

    So, on the topic of outlawing abortion, there’s just no getting around it:
    – we feel for the unwed mother, the rape victim, the girl who was little foolish just once;
    – we can see her face and the expression in her eyes: she is a person to us;
    – the unborn child is also alive and growing into a cute baby, but we can’t see her in any normal way;
    – thus our compassionate instincts are triggered by the one, but not the other;
    – plus our culture is pretty sick and irrational these days, on matters of human sexuality (if anybody doubts this, I refer them to Matt Walsh’s famous tweet “explaining” the Left’s gender ideology)
    – consequently, our compassionate instincts aren’t reliable on sexual topics, and require a stiff dose of rational guidance when deciding about the legality of abortion

    Here, I think, is what rational guidance looks like, then:
    Stage 1:
    P1. It is always-and-everywhere wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human being;
    P2. Direct abortion is the intentional killing of an innocent human being;
    C. Direct abortion is always wrong. (This does not apply to lifesaving surgery in case of ectopic pregnancy; in that case an indirect abortion occurs as an undesired-if-foreseeable side-effect of a lifesaving organ-repair surgery.)

    Stage 2:
    P1. Certain wrongs are forcible (either physically, as in rape; or intellectually, as in fraud) and thus properly subject to forcible opposition for the defense of the innocent, whereas other wrongs (e.g. preferring Britney Spears’ music over that of JS Bach) can be equally outrageous but of a non-forcible nature and unable to warrant armed response;
    P2. The intentional killing of an innocent human being — including direct abortion — is a forcible kind of wrong;
    C. Direct abortion is the kind of moral wrong which warrants forcible response.

    Stage 3:
    P1. The government exists, among other things, for the purpose of defending the unalienable rights of the innocent, by force, against forcible violations of those rights;
    P2. There is a priority-order or hierarchy to rights. All things being equal, when faced with a mutually-exclusive choice between preserving one right or preserving another, it is better to defend a person against violations of his/her right-to-life, than another person against temporary violations of her liberty.
    C. A government which fails to defend the right-to-life of an unborn human being, by force, against its forcible violation fails of its purpose, and the competing liberties of the mother are no sufficient counterargument.

    Stage 4:
    P1. The government is representative of the people, and only has authority to use force because that authority is delegated to it by the people;
    P2. If the people (through elections or activism) guide the government to use force to defend the innocent, they thereby exercise their own moral obligation to defend the innocent through the actions of their employees, the government. If, however, the people opt instead to prevent the government from using force to defend the innocent, they prevent government from achieving its highest-priority function and neglect their own moral obligation, as individuals, to defend the innocent.
    C. We the people are morally obligated to act to guide the government to forcibly oppose the forcible wrong of direct abortion: Direct abortion should be outlawed, and we as individuals should act to ensure that it is.

    Sgt. Mom, I don’t see that there’s any escape.

    Our feelings rebel — naturally enough, and for the reasons I described above — at bringing yet more hardship upon a rape victim. And if she wants to abort, then no doubt opposing that desire does bring hardship upon her. (There are approaches which alleviate this; and it need not be done brutally.)

    But the logic is what it is.

    If we knowingly choose to follow an irrational path, what will come of it?

    What will become of a civilization where we hold that it is NOT morally beyond-the-pale to intentionally kill an innocent human being (provided they’re sufficiently defenseless and voiceless)? Or where we say that it is NOT necessarily the government’s first job to defend the unalienable rights of persons against wrongful forcible violations of those rights?

    In this case, I fear our compassionate instincts are wayward. We must toughen up, and use hard brains to govern our soft hearts.

30. Leftism is of Satan. All the rest is details.

31. A summary of the European laws on this topic can be found here:

    https://www.loc.gov/law/help/abortion-legislation/europe.php?fbclid=IwAR0fwfpDuVfU5QpNP3huwXLnNFOtBbC5Ql_ThuZd0R_WWJQ0M-eqYkGzcFc

32. R.C. Says:
    In this case, I fear our compassionate instincts are wayward. We must toughen up, and use hard brains to govern our soft hearts.
    I would rather say we must redirect our compassion into proper lanes. Our compassion must be *first* for the innocent, then for the others affected. (You actually say a form of this in Stage Three, P2.)

    This is because one of the two (most often) had a choice in the matter. In the cases where they did not, then they are both aggrieved, and should be treated that way – e.g., both taken care of, and treated with compassion, while the person who acted against them both takes the full force of the law.

    I might quibble with some of what you wrote, but that is an excellent comment.

33. You know how to “trust the guy you are having sex with”?? Marry him first!

34. There is someone, somewhere, walking around today who was born premature at 21 weeks.

    I know her, one of them. In 1969, I operated on a baby that weighed 1 pound 10 ounces. She had duodenal obstruction from annular pancreas. She was the smallest baby to survive surgery in the world at the time. We were busy in residency and never wrote her up. She survived in spite of the lack of any neonatal care like infant respirators. By the time she was 4 pounds, she could kick herself down the incubator into the tubes at the end of the little bunk.

    She went home soon after that. She was adopted and I do not know her fate but she must have done well with the desire to live she had.

    She must have been about 20 weeks.

    What is the point of viability? I’ve heard that most European countries have a a limit of 12 weeks but with higher limit in the case of rape or minors or fetal abnormalities.

    Viability keeps being pushed back with new neonatal methods that Baby Girl Dee did not have access to. Ben Carson was doing intrauterine surgery to prevent spina bifida. It has been shown that closing the skin over a spinal defect will prevent the anomaly that is a cause of abortion.

    Because of the conclusion of the MOMS trial, fMMC closure has become a standard of care option for pregnancies complicated by a prenatal diagnosis of spina bifida

    A lot of that work was done b y Ben Carson.

35. That brings up some other points made by the Left to justify it. We all saw AOC tell her supporters not to have children because the world was going to end in twelve years if they did. Another tactic is disturbing stories like this one about a mother who wishes she had aborted her disabled son rather than care for him. He apparently ruined her vacation plans once too often.

    There are some people we just aren’t going to compromise with, nor should we.

36. The comments ID keeps changing on me.

    Downs kids are a real concern as the parents may die and leave them with no support. Some Downs kids are more functional but it is a serious issue.

37. Remember The Revenge of Conscience? An abused conscience can drive us to worse crimes. “society must be transformed so that it no longer stands in awful judgment”

38. I forget who it was that said this, but it stayed with me. The problem with Roe v Wade was that it Federalized abortion law. They should have let each state decide on their own. There wouldn’t be the acrimony there has been since Roe.

    In the case of Alabama, I don’t believe most people would expect a woman who was the victim of rape or incest to carry the child (if she doesn’t want it).

    What started out by abortion proponents in the 70s was the “rape or incest” argument and we have New York today.

39. Down’s Syndrome has been eliminated in some European countries because they have a zero tolerance neonatal policy. Because of the harsh elements in Scandinavia, there was a long, lingering tradition of infanticide, and they seem to revive it now and again for various other reasons. It’s somewhat understandable, though far from justifiable, why this happened.

    Our responses to drastic situations are often bad solutions that cause worse results. Just like we see with the problems emerging in the developed world with sex-selective abortions.

    I agree that what to do about vulnerable, low functioning individuals is a big concern, and it’s getting bigger every year. We will have to reorder society in order to deal with it. I think it can be done. More importantly, it has to be done. The basic responsibility of civilized people is to protect the weak. Those countries that don’t are dying. They are withdrawing from civilization.

40. That’s a whole ‘nother conundrum, Gurray – how to sort out what to do about Down’s Syndrome individuals. I had a summer job in college, as a camp counselor at a church camp, and one of the sessions we did was specifically for the mentally-disabled. It was an eye-opening experience; kind of stressful for us counselors (who were college-age students at the time) – because the campers at that one session covered the whole gamut of abilities. I think that the stratagem that most of us worked out was – what age are they in their mental development, never mind the age that they looked – and to pitch our approach to them on that basis. Most were from a Lutheran institution, and probably never capable of living outside an institution dedicated to their care. The man in the linked story a couple of comments up, sounds like a good few of them. Basically an adult-sized toddler. That would exhaust any caregiver and parent, over half a century. At the top end of the scale, some of the campers at that session were operating at about the level of a young teenager. One was an Eagle Scout, and on his HS wrestling team – we practically saw him as an assistant counselor. Those at the top end of the spectrum were cheerful, sunny-tempered, helpful, able to do stuff at about the level of a thirteen or fourteen-year old.

41. Mrs. Savita Halapanavar; allowed to die in Ireland a few years ago because the staff couldn’t be sure she wasn’t pregnant and they would not do anything “that might cause an abortion”.

    Only unrestricted access to abortion will allow women to survive. “Reasonable” restrictions on abortion, like those on the possession of firearms, are designed as undercover prohibition.

    Friends wanted a second child after several failed prergnancies accompanied by preclampsia (pregnancy related, and potentially lethal, high blood pressure). Her very Christian physician thought he could control the problems but would not, under any circumstances perform an abortion. Abortion is, by the way, the only absolutely reliable therapy for preclampsia. Maybe medications will be sufficient, maybe not. Since our friend wasn’t suicidal, they had to retain a second physician, out of pocket, in case things went sideways.

    My wife almost didn’t survive her third delivery. “Don’t ever get pregnant again! You will not survive”. She said, “OK. Tie my tubes.” “No, we can’t do that, you might want to have other children.” I tried to never leave her alone in the hospital ever again. [You know, doctors start to listen very well when you have them by the throat up on a wall. Only once.]

    The abortion fanatics don’t care if women die. They are obsessed by unmarried young people enjoying themselves.

    “Reasonable” restrictions like multiple signatures to allow an abortion is murder. When preclampsia blood pressure spikes at 2AM at the start of a 3 day holiday weekend, the woman will be dead before anyone is located.

    There may be “abuse” of abortion but unrestricted right to abortion is the only way to prevent religious murder. A woman who has repeated abortions is stupid. That is her problem.

    By the way, if you want to go religious, or moral; an unborn child who dies is without sin and heaven-bound. That is what the little yellow book said….

    Third Trimester. The development of an embryo often produces defective horors that used to be destined for eternity in a glass chamber on a shelf in a medical school laboratory when they were discovered at birth. Now, with ultrasound, a physician can see that an infant/fetus has no brain (anencephalic) . That infant/fetus may take a few breaths but now, or later, it is doomed. If an abortion will improve the mother’s medical outlook, DO IT NOW.

    Catholics are obsessed about the conditions of baptism. Their legalism goes to “conditional” baptism. The language of one version begins, “If you are human,….” . You really don’t want to see what is in those glass chambers, but that fetus/etc was doomed; there is no reason the mother should be also.

    It is simple. Always do what is best for the mother. Abortion restrictions kill.

42. You’re a monster, Mike. A cultivated, cultured monster.

43. Well, with that we have pretty much the full spectrum of views on this tough issue. My opinion is that we should treat the preborn as humans with full rights. Because they are. Scientifically, morally and logically.

    Death6

44. Most were from a Lutheran institution, and probably never capable of living outside an institution dedicated to their care.

    Institutionalization may have to be part of the answer, but it must be with as little government involvement as possible. With government we get solutions like eugenics, abortion, and anti-natalism.

    Speaking of which, you may have heard about some of the celebrity Feminists calling for a Lysistrata-style sex strike against men in protest for these new abortion restrictions. The obvious problem with that is, they would be doing men a favor if it really happened.

    So the latest thing is a grandkids strike. They will threaten to withold the joys of storybook time, trips to the zoo, cookie baking sessions, etc unless the older generation liberates women’s uteruses. Again, there are some unexpected problems. These idiots shouldn’t be having children anyway, and I suspect their parents would probably agree. I think we can all agree that hopefully anti-natalism does take hold among the Left. We will solve this debate in a generation or two.

45. If nothing else, the number of comments here is a clear demonstration that Roe and Casey have been complete and abject failures at their aim to end the abortion “debate” by judicial decree.

46. Abortion is, by the way, the only absolutely reliable therapy for preclampsia.

    Preeclampsia is usually a third trimester condition and treated by c section or induced labor.

    Read about it.

47. Why are we having this conversation in the 21st century? How long have morning-after pills been available and effective? A few years ago, Senate Republicans floated the idea of OTC morning after pills and were furiously opposed by Democrats – I think we know why. Aside from the saleability of body parts, that is.
    Maybe Planned Parenthood could hand the pills out for free in black inner city neighborhoods, although it might cut into their “donations”.

48. Here’s a “Science Fiction” hypothesis to ask Pro-Choice people:

    If a fetus could be safely removed as ANY time during a pregnancy, placed in an artificial womb, allowed to reach full term, “born” at the appropriate point, and then placed with a family for adoption would that be an acceptable option for ending the practice of routine abortions?

    How would they respond?

    Abortion is about responsibility, shame and guilt.

49. Angle that doesn’t seem to have been mentioned here.

    Hollywood.

    A lot of the activism on this issue seems to be Hollywood actresses. The feeling one gets is that they assume that abortion is necessary for successful careers, as if rape is a condition of employment.

    My guess is that rape is a condition of employment in Hollywood, and has been since well before Roe. And that Hollywood actresses are effectively selected for qualities that make it difficult to understand that many American women would avoid such conditions of employment, and that abortion access is more a local than a national correction to the working environment.

50. My starting points are Ms. Savita Halapanavar, murderered in an Irish “Hospital” by the “Cult of the Magic Belly Faiiry” since they refused to treat a uterine infection with heavy bleeding since they “couldn’t be sure that she wasn’t also pregnant and any relevant therapy would be a de facto abortion and the yellow booklet from long ago Sudnday School where it was taught that an un-born child/infant/fetus was without sin and destined for Heaven.

    Treat the patient, the Mother. Most legal formulations have medical excemptions only for obvious conditions, e.g. ectopic pregnancy, and leave a physician risking his career when 20 years of experience clearly indicate that the patient (the Mother) was about to “go south” due to blood pressure, blood type incompatabilities, diabetes, etc. Maybe he couldn’t “prove” what his gut saiid, and, fo course, this thing “always” happens between midnight and dawn when there is no one to call.

    I don’t want my (or her) physician hesitating when his “gut”, trained during many bedside nights, screams to act. Only fools and ideologues think that medicine is a black and white decision tree. Patient is “shocky”. They see it before they can document it.

    I don’t want the doc factoring in his ability to explain his action to a jury of the dregs.

    ‘Sides, it is a growth inside the Mother. The mother is the only “patient”.

    Unrestricted abortion is the only way to protect the Mother from the ideologues and cultists who think that death during pregnancy is “God’s Will”, or the fate of women.

    If you kill mine, or allow her to die, I will lay waste to your world.

    Just saying. The “theoretical” individual at the center of this is “Heaven-bound”. I am not, and I am old, so I have nothing to loose.

    “I REPENT!” I am “safe” and the woman I care about gets a new physician. What is not to like? But I cannot replace the 20+ years of experience that an un-encumbered physician brings.

    No restrictions! Treat the mother. Or I’ll deal with the jury if I have to.

    There will be abuse any way you play it. Birth Control pills, morning-after are all “ABORTION” to the “believers” in the “Magic Belly Fairy”. There is no “out”. But if you kill mine………

51. P.S.

    In Saint Louis County, MO (not the City of Saint Louis) there is a new “Prosecuting Attorney”, Wesley Bell (as I recall) who will not pursue men for child support since that has a “disparate impact” on “minorities”.

    Missou-RAH has new restrictions on abortion but no mandate to enforce “child support”. Apparantly, that wonderful human being, that came from the “Magic Belly Fairy”, is of no interest once it leaves the mother’s body.

    Hypocrisy flourishes while the “human being” struggles with neglect. My disgust is over-whelmig.

    Please, in the mean time, remember, “Don’t kill mine” in order to feed your fantasies.

    BYBY.

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