Jerry, there are legitimate reasons for anyone to be hostile about lack-of-precision. While it
is a matter of precision to focus on the "letter" of a document, rather than its "spirit", in a larger sense to ignore precision is to invite disaster. Remember that Mars probe a few years back that failed because someone used English measurement units instead of Metric measurement units? There are all sorts of engineering disasters that resulted from some imprecise interpretation of the design drawings, and which had nothing to do with the initial design being faulty. And I think I've mentioned in more than one place that I'm a professional computer programmer, where it happens to be very helpful to thoroughly understand that the computer only does what you
tell it to do (literally, that is), and not necessarily what you actually want it to do.
Next, the first reference to Planned Parenthood does not occur in this Thread until the second paragraph of new text in Msg #8. Felicity divided Msg #9 into two sections, one reply to each paragraph of #8, of which the first part does
not reference P.P. And my Msg #12 only focussed on that first part of #9. So I made a legitimate reply to a specific question about abortion clinics, which was separate from other statements about P.P. There is no rationale to confuse the two, Jerry, other than to mis-lead the readers. I only accused you of not paying attention; would you rather I accuse you of deliberately trying to confuse the issue?
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Felicity said:
But FI...what makes a woman decide an abortion is the option she feels she must choose?
Heh, Felicity, that is, of course, a different question than what you asked in #9, that I answered half-humorously, in Msg #12. And this new question is half-silly. We have Free Will. Nothing can "make" anybody Decide anything. Meanwhile, we all know that there can be various inducements toward one decision or another, and that the average person tends to use those inducements to Decide things that favor their own personal situations. So, one way to answer your new question is to say that the pregnant woman perceives abortion to be the thing that most favors her personal situation. Note that since abortion is
technically equivalent to the removal of a tumor or some other parasitic organism, this can theoretically be acceptable so long as no other
person is harmed by abortion. However, since there exist various totally unsupported/invalid claims about unborn humans being persons, the result is that people like yourself, acting in ignorance instead of fact, want the pregnant woman to make some other decision.
GET OVER IT!
Felicity said:
As the pro-choice side is so often saying, "nobody wants an abortion,"
That depends on the pro-choicer, I'm sure. I definitely want abortions to be available as a backup plan, when ordinary birth control fails to work properly. We
need that backup plan, to help prevent a Malthusean Catastrophe.
Felicity said:
...so...what is it that takes them to THAT door rather than the door of a hospital delivery room.
That's a reiteration of the above new question. How many different ways can pregnancy/birth be things that a woman might see as a disfavor to her personal situation? Besides obvious things like probable permanent weight gain and stretch marks and sagging breasts and possible death during birth, what about things like loss-of-job (still possible though not common these days; depends on job) or kicked-out-of-house-by-parents, or divorced-for-having-a-lover, or other things? All it really takes is just ONE reason, that the woman sees as detrimental to her personal situation. And who are you, or any pro-lifer, to say that that reason is not good enough?
Felicity said:
Can't we help women believe they have another CHOICE.
They already have a choice. Otherwise EITHER no abortion clinic would be blatantly available (to close them is to limit one choice), OR all hospitals and midwives would be performing abortions instead of births (this would qualify as an elimination of the other choice, of course). What you are really trying to say is, "Can't we help women believe that only one particular decision is acceptable?" And therein lies both an outright lie about having choice, and a blatant attempt to eliminate choice.
Felicity said:
Abortion is most often the conclusion of a woman or girl who believes there is no other feasable option.
That's one way of putting it, not completely unlike what I wrote earlier about people making decisions that favor personal situations.
Felicity said:
Let's give her feasable, reasonable options.
Unfortunately, this is inherently impossible to always accomplish. For example, a woman who refuses to accept stretch marks will be one who seeks to terminate a pregnancy before streth marks happen. I admit this is an extreme example, but the point here is not so much to point out such examples as to indicate that it really is impossible to
always find a way to show that birth is more reasonable than abortion. There is no accounting for taste, and some women
will have, from the pro-life viewpoint, an unreasonable "taste", regarding pregnancy. And that's not even counting the mother-can-die medical reasons for abortion.
Felicity said:
Put our money where our mouths are. Pro-life does try to do this, but there are so many fronts to battle the effort is herculean.
Heh, that's because you are working from the fundamentaly false notion that abortion is some kind of "problem" that needs a "solution". It is ONLY a problem if you can show that unborn humans are persons. And you can't do that, since they demonstrably/measurably have no more person-characteristics than have ordinary animals. Not even one such characteristic. Your "herculean battle" disappears if you accept facts instead of unproved (and often provably invalid) claims.
Felicity said:
Pro choice has merely the legal front to maintain.
Which of course it must do, so long as pro-lifers continue to spout nonsense as fact -- to tell lies, that is.
Felicity said:
Abortion is a very LUCRATIVE field--NOT doing abortions and supporting that choice requires the outlay of money.
The abortion industry is nowhere near as lucrative as the long list of industries associated with births. What's the estimated cost these days for prenatal care through birth and followed by child-raising for 18 years -- a third of a million dollars? Compare THAT to the alternate total cost of an abortion, and tell me again about how "lucrative" the abortion industry is, compared to the pro-life industries that want pieces of that 6-figure pie, which will exist for each one of almost every pregnancy they can encourage to become a live birth. Lies, as I already said.
Felicity said:
If the pro-choice side where in fact backing what they say--that they want abortions to be rare--where are their women's shelters and educational facilities and Adoption services, and child-care centers that can HELP make it rare?
Where is the free access to all sorts of birth control, by, say, 11-year-olds? Where is the sex education that includes pragmatism? (Example: "Hey, kid, you're 11 years old. If pregnancy results, can you afford almost two decades of care-costs for it? Can you even afford an abortion? Don't you know that Murphy's Law says that if you don't think it will happen to you, then it will probably happen to you? Maybe you should think about avoiding intercourse until you can afford the consequences!")
Why should birth control, including offering valid/educated/informed reasons for abstinence, be neglected as a CHOICE? The antipathy of pro-lifers for such choices as the preceding only indicates to me that they realize that since knowledge is power (along with having choices), so trying to keep people ignorant (and restricting choices) means trying to maintain power over them.
GET OVER IT!!!
Felicity said:
It's a pro-choice public relations SHAM.
Au contraire. It is the pro-lifers who are being greedy unethical lying control freaks, while presenting the SHAM of portraying themselves otherwise.
Civility, folks. Can't we have just ONE abortion thread that doesn't turn into name calling? 