"This Is News from WORLD Magazine": Afghan war end date set, NAACP comes out for gay marriage - black pastors push back 
Click to Print
Include Comments
Komen foundation resumes funding of Planned Parenthood
On Tuesday, Marvin Olasky reported that the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation decided to discontinue its funding of Planned Parenthood. In the days since, LifeNews.com reported that donations to Komen had increased by 100 percent, but there was also news yesterday that a top Komen official had resigned over the decision.
This morning, the Susan G. Komen board of directors and founder and CEO Nancy G. Brinker released the following statement:
We want to apologize to the American public for recent decisions that cast doubt upon our commitment to our mission of saving women’s lives.
The events of this week have been deeply unsettling for our supporters, partners and friends and all of us at Susan G. Komen. We have been distressed at the presumption that the changes made to our funding criteria were done for political reasons or to specifically penalize Planned Parenthood. They were not.
Our original desire was to fulfill our fiduciary duty to our donors by not funding grant applications made by organizations under investigation. We will amend the criteria to make clear that disqualifying investigations must be criminal and conclusive in nature and not political. That is what is right and fair.
Our only goal for our granting process is to support women and families in the fight against breast cancer. Amending our criteria will ensure that politics has no place in our grant process. We will continue to fund existing grants, including those of Planned Parenthood, and preserve their eligibility to apply for future grants, while maintaining the ability of our affiliates to make funding decisions that meet the needs of their communities.
It is our hope and we believe it is time for everyone involved to pause, slow down and reflect on how grants can most effectively and directly be administered without controversies that hurt the cause of women. We urge everyone who has participated in this conversation across the country over the last few days to help us move past this issue. We do not want our mission marred or affected by politics—anyone’s politics.
Starting this afternoon, we will have calls with our network and key supporters to refocus our attention on our mission and get back to doing our work. We ask for the public’s understanding and patience as we gather our Komen affiliates from around the country to determine how to move forward in the best interests of the women and people we serve.
We extend our deepest thanks for the outpouring of support we have received from so many in the past few days and we sincerely hope that these changes will be welcomed by those who have expressed their concern.
Listen to a report on the Komen foundation’s decision on WORLD’s radio news magazine The World and Everything in It.
back to top253 Comments to “Komen foundation resumes funding of Planned Parenthood”
That doesn’t sound like a reversal.
It sounds like they’re just reassuring people that they’re not suddenly yanking already-promised monies, and that they’re not going to discriminate against PP in the future funding process, but go by policy.
And according to policy, PP is currently not eligible for future grants because of their practices and the cloud hanging over them.
I don’t see a change here.
Report comment to moderator
The change is this: “We will amend the criteria to make clear that disqualifying investigations must be criminal and conclusive in nature and not political.”
That means Planned Parenthood is no longer on the list of excluded organizations, given that the investigation it’s under is not criminal, has not reached any conclusion, and is political.
Report comment to moderator
Too bad it took this reaction to snap the Komen people out of it, but cheers to them for once again putting women’s health above political agendas.
Report comment to moderator
“cheers to them for once again putting women’s health above political agendas.”
And what positive effect does this have on the health of the millions of girl babies killed before they had an opportunity to grow into women?
Report comment to moderator
Wow, it is sad that a group trying to save lives would surrender to a group the funds the killing of lives.
Report comment to moderator
Ken – the left do not care about children, unless they can use them to promote their views.
What has happen to Komen foundation is they have been presurred into fundigng death over life.
Report comment to moderator
Surely if they cared primarily about breast cancer they could give grants to thousands of other places that don’t kill millions of babies.
Report comment to moderator
Yes, you’re right, Conan.
I wonder, though — if they reacted to backlash once, what will happen when they get the back-back lash that’s on its way as we speak?
And it would only take one prosecutor in one of the jurisdictions where there’s been evidence of abetting sex crimes to start a “real” investigation. The evidence doesn’t even have to be that great…
Not saying it will happen, or it should, but it’s a possibility.
“Too bad it took this reaction to snap the Komen people out of it, but cheers to them for once again putting women’s health above political agendas.”
Please. Defunding one of the zillions of places that do manual exams and refer for mammograms at low or no cost doesn’t affect “women’s health” in any way comparable to what Planned Parenthood does to half their victims every single day.
Report comment to moderator
pentamom1 – I guess Conana and Komen foundation have pay not attention to the charges against Planned Parenthood in KS.
Report comment to moderator
Wait….so they’re not even holding being under investigation as a criterion in any way, because an investigation can only be criminal AND “conclusive” if there’s a conviction, right? So they’re now holding their partners to the incredibly high standard that they can’t have been convicted of criminal activity?
Okay, this is pretty blatant, then — “We tried to have a standard of only dealing with organizations that had a clean record, but we didn’t realize it might affect some of our friends and/or make our donors mad. So lets just forget that credible partners thing.”
Report comment to moderator
Yeah, Pentamom, Conan is right about the change to policy. PP will once again get funding from Komen. Which is unquestionably a good thing.
I was surprised by the numbers that Komen of Denver reported in their announcement that they would not comply with the Komen National’s defunding directive. Apparently PP Rocky Mountains gets just 4.5% of the grant money Komen of Denver distributes for breast cancer screenings, but PP finds 20% of breast cancer cases from all Komen grant recipients taken as a whole!
That makes it clear grants to PP are a good investment for Komen and their mission to promote early detection of breast cancer. And it was the seeming willingness to sacrifice that dollars-to-impact advantage for political reasons that did such immediate harm to Komen’s brand.
They have even still probably lost a significant portion of their donor base and it will take years to attract those donors back. Especially since so many of them gave immediate money to PP and might feel “donation tapped” for a while. A lot of Komen’s former donors are also now in communication with PP where they might not have been before, and Komen will have to compete with PP for them instead of having more exclusive access.
Ironically, those donors are probably making private, general contribution gifts to PP, i.e. money that PP can spend on abortion services. So its doubly clear that if Komen’s anti-choice leadership wanted to sting an abortion provider, they are completely failed to do so.
I personally like Komen. I always have, and not just because they give me an excuse to buy Pepperidge Farm cookies. So I hope this quick reversal is enough to minimize the negative effect such a big blunder is going to have on their mission. It’s my wife, however, who is in charge of our giving to women’s organizations. I’m not sure she is going to be as satisfied. She’s was research ways to give directly to cancer research–and not through Komen–yesterday, and having lost an aunt we were very close to to breast cancer it’s a touchy subject around the house.
But probably everyone has lost someone to cancer…which just means Komen stepped on a lot of toes.
Report comment to moderator
When one labels concern for the lives of human babies merely a “political agenda,” you have to wonder if something is wrong with one.
Report comment to moderator
“but PP finds 20% of breast cancer cases from all Komen grant recipients taken as a whole!”
PP doesn’t find any breast cancer cases — they have no mammography, no oncologists on staff, and no pathology labs.
They do pre-exams and refer elsewhere for mammograms and followup. That is not something that is not commonly provided elsewhere.
Report comment to moderator
That is the problem Macrutabaga under one breath the Komen foundation talk about wanting to save women lives, but then turn around and give money to a company that is killing babies. It makes no sense to me.
Report comment to moderator
Unlike others I do NOT want to arbitrarily make abortion illegal. I DO however want to make it safer and I want it to be treated like any other outpatient surgery. Currently you sign more disclosure forms to have a tooth pulled or a wart frozen off than you do to have your body invaded and a “growth” removed.
Therefore Komen NOR Planned Parenthood will get a dime from me that I know of.
Report comment to moderator
To leftist child-murder enablers (see Conan the ‘Librarian’s post), those who try to stop the state-sanctioned brutal slaughter of one million children a year (500,000 girls) in this country merely have a ‘political’ agenda.
And those who celebrate this butchery, and feed financially and politically on the torn and acid-eaten flesh of these children, including the current abominations in Washington D.C. and the prostituted media, are to be ‘cheered’.
All roads to Hell are low, but some are lower and more contemptible than others.
But the lowest of all is to ride the particular cultural rails that are built upon the butchered bodies of children – getting a ticket on that train requires no brains, no morality, no humanity.
Just slack-jawed compliance with the culture and politics of death, and the requirement for robotic and controlled defamation and slander of those who dare to resist.
Report comment to moderator
Kim,
I got my wisdom teeth removed when I was 24 without signing anything except the agreement that I would pay for the operation. You’re pulling examples out of thin air, and they’re wrong.
Report comment to moderator
They caved because of pressure from anti-abortion people.
No pressure from the left to reverse their decision.
Report comment to moderator
This is unabashed caving in to the thuggery tactics of PP…plain and simple…as are the minds who cannot see that it is so
Report comment to moderator
I guess Komen is going to have a lot caanceled checks on their hands.
Report comment to moderator
@17….Nope…my daughter had her wisdom teeth pulled last summer…that paper work to be filled out by ME…her MOM…consisted of many forms….just sayin’ you are incorrect….Kim’s statement stands correct……
Report comment to moderator
Komen has been stepping on toes for years by their support of the country’s most notorious abortion provider. Making that political statement has been more important to them than actual cancer research. And apparently it still is. That’s their choice of course, but it’s the primary reason people like me don’t and won’t support them.
Report comment to moderator
Jillanne – It is sad that people still do not believe that abotion is the killing of a child.
Report comment to moderator
@Roy….they are blinded and I pray they will one day soon, they will see…
It amazes me when paperwork to be signed is brought into the conversation, that those in favour of a “woman’s right to choose” will overlook the fact that some “women” are minors and their parents do not have to sign papers, nor have knowledge their child is having out patient surgery. For Hannah to have her wisdom teeth extracted, I had to give permission. I also must give permission for her school to allow her to take ibuprofen when she is at school….it is all beyond all sensible thinking…and all for the destruction of a child….and her baby.
Report comment to moderator
Jillanne – They do not have to give their real name either… That is to protect PP from any type of Medical Lawsuite.
Report comment to moderator
Unquestionbly? Really? Are you blind, and illiterate, as well as ignorant? Most of the people here do MORE than question it, they abhor the fact that monies go toward the killing of the unborn…
It can’t be “unquestionably” a good thing if at least half the population abhors the practice of abortion.
Report comment to moderator
Make it Man – with have to take into account who is making that statement..
Report comment to moderator
I think Eric Metaxas’ statement yesterday at the National Prayer Breakfast is appropriate here: “Apart from God we cannot see that [the unborn] are persons. … So those of us who know the unborn as human beings are commanded by God to love those who do not yet see that.”
Report comment to moderator
thank you sir for bring that out.
Report comment to moderator
REDWAL @ 17 You are correct. When I was 18 all I had to have to get my wisdom teeth pulled was a check from my dad and someone to drive me home. When my now 14 year old had to have some baby teeth pulled to make room for permanent teeth I had to sign every document known to man.
Same thing this past summer when they cut her gum open to put a bracket on a tooth to pull it down.
I stand by what I say. Treat it like every OTHER outpatient “procedure” and have a follow up treatment plan.
Report comment to moderator
God raises nations up, and he brings them down. The spilling of innocent blood brings God’s judgment on a nation, especially when it is done in such quantities as with abortion in America. The righteous will suffer along with the wicked, but will have the Spirit to sustain them.
Report comment to moderator
Pentamom: They do pre-exams and refer elsewhere for mammograms and followup. That is not something that is not commonly provided elsewhere.
They also PAY for the mammograms, using the funds donated by Komen and others. For poor women, that can be lifesaving.
And that IS something not commonly provided elsewhere.
Report comment to moderator
It’s good that this whole thing came out because a lot of people (me included)didn’t know Komen money was going to Planned Parenthood.
Komen is a group that I can quietly & purposely not support.
I would not want one penny going to PP.
Report comment to moderator
I live somewhere around Pensacola, Florida, Mobile, Alabama, and New Orleans, Lousiana. There are several groups that provide free or low cost mammograms in my area. All you have to do is ask your doctor, call the cancer society, or be around when one of the groups sets up a screening site.
There is also a church near me that funds a low cost or free health clinic, dental clinic, and mental health facility. It is on the same campus as their church but has a separate access.
A lot of former drug addicts aren’t able to get jobs because they have bad teeth.
Report comment to moderator
“It is sad that people still do not believe that abotion is the killing of a child.”
Oh, it’s worse than that Roy. I think that many people who support abortion rights acknowledge that it does kill the unborn. They’ve gotten past that, and shrug and say “so what, there’s lots of injustice in the world”.
Seeing such callous hard hearts is discouraging, to say the least.
Report comment to moderator
“So those of us who know the unborn as human beings are commanded by God to love those who do not yet see that.”
Thank you Mickey, for the timely reminder. I so quickly revert to my sinful old ways… sigh…
Report comment to moderator
But Conan, couldn’t Komen, donate those funds to the other places who actually do the work? There does seem to be a desire to support Planned Parenthood, not just the refering work they do.
Report comment to moderator
Neil: I think in many cases, there could not, in fact, be a way to donate directly to the people doing the work. Doctors who are not incorporated as a non-profit corporation are not legally able to accept donations in advance of providing services.
Report comment to moderator
MIM – I think that many people who support abortion rights acknowledge that it does kill the unborn. They’ve gotten past that, and shrug and say “so what, there’s lots of injustice in the world.”
This brings to mind something I witnessed a number of years ago. In the city where I lived, a pro-life group proposed that the city council designate a particular day as “Respect for Human Life Day.” The proposal was not adopted; at the hearing, a large group of pro-abortion supporters showed up to oppose it. Their main argument against such a measure was that they had no respect for human life.
Additionally, several people I have known in my life have been serious environmentalists and/or animal rights activists. Each one has said to me, at one point or another, that humans are their least favorite species. This is, of course, a consistent position on their part since they see humans as primarily responsible for harm to the environment and animal habitats. These people view abortion as a positive good precisely because it aborts a human being.
Report comment to moderator
Make It Man: “Oh, it’s worse than that Roy”
I would say it is even worse than merely callous hard hearts.
You have many these days (some who post on WMB) who claim to be Christians and yet who support and enable (via their votes and their voices) the wholesale genocidal murder of children via abortion.
Such people purposely attempt to make Christ and Molech (i.e. Satan) one, the same.
Except, of course, Molech never dreamed nearly so big in terms of such monstrous brutalities and numbers, in the days of Moab.
I suspect that such people are coming very close, if not arriving at, the unforgivable sin, which is the blaspheming of the Holy Spirit.
Report comment to moderator
Drill, don’t think I’m not anti-abortion. I was pro-choice until I watched my child on a sonogram monitor while and amniocentises was being done.
I am just willing to meet the other side half way. Keep it legal, but treat it like other medical procedures. If a tooth extraction has to warn you of the risk of infection and blook clots shouldn’t an abortion?
If chemo-therapy carries the risk of sterilization, shouldn’t an abortion?
Report comment to moderator
“So those of us who know the unborn as human beings are commanded by God to love those who do not yet see that.”
Aye, but as a very wise old Scotsman once said, Love cedes no truth to the wicked.”
A big part of the problem is that we have, over the decades, too often ceded (out of misguided deference) far too much to the pro-death culture.
Specifically we forgo too often descriptions of the reality of what abortion is and we have watered down the language and terms used to describe it, and its consequences, and the brutal depravity of those who support it.
In an open forum, or a court of justice, you don’t allow a serial murderer to set the terms and terminology used by others to describe his monstrous killings.
Report comment to moderator
Kim: Not sure how you can keep the murder of a child legal, except perhaps in a sort of society that worships death. Since it is legal now, here, go figure.
But Kim: Killing a child is not a medical procedure, nor should we (and I KNOW you are pro-life) call it that, ever.
At least, not unless one called what Nazi or Soviet ‘doctor’s’ did to the people in their labs mere ‘medical procedures’.
Over one out of two abortions performed in America are ‘repeat’ abortion; i.e. women are using abortion as a form of birth control – i.e. treating the butchering of their child as (as you say) a ‘medical procedure’.
Report comment to moderator
They’ve gotten past that, and shrug and say “so what, there’s lots of injustice in the world”.
0—
Sounds like what the Germany’s did when they walked past the death camps. “shrug and say “so what, there’s lots of injustice in the world”.
Report comment to moderator
And let me say that there are many who are simply ignorant, who simply follow the dictates of the culture without thinking, who enthusiastically consider themselves ‘pro-choice’, simply because they are told to do so.
Most people of all types, Christian or non-Christian, however, when confronted with the reality of what abortion is – and (as you say) what a child in the womb is (viewed in an ultrasound, for instance), recoil and change their ‘views’ dramatically.
It is a credit to the pro-life movement that hearts and minds are really changing on this issue, among the young and even among the majority, the all-American heathens.
This is due to a break in the wall of silence and censorship that the tightly controlled left-wing pro-abort media carefully built before the rise of the Internet and alternative media.
This is why the Establishment Media and Political Machine is so desperate to shut down PRCs, which have ultrasounds, etc., which actually show women their living child.
Planned Parenthood – the abortion industry – and their pro-death goons in Washington D.C. and the media are scared to death of this.
But I am GLAD you are pro-life!
Report comment to moderator
I agree with Drill. Killing a baby is not okay under any circumstances.
The closest I could come to a temporary “compromise” would be to make abortion illegal after the heart starts beating (8 weeks). That would save millions.
But, honestly, I want it illegal all the way back to conception.
I cannot understand why anyone would be for it, especially in this day and age with the medical science we now have.
Back when my MIL had one (we suspect), they didn’t really see the baby as a “baby” until “life” (i.e. quickening), simply because they didn’t know better. And, since she is still relatively ignorant of realities (and is trying to protect herself from guilt), I can sort-of understand her support for it (enough that we just don’t talk about it.)
But, now, when we have the window on the womb and can see the baby moving, sucking its thumb, and even trying to get away from the abortionist’s instruments … well, you’d have to be a callous, hardened, inhuman sort of “person” to accept or support that once you’ve been educated.
Report comment to moderator
If and if an abortion must take place.. It should be at an hostipal not at a butcher office.
Report comment to moderator
And, since Planned Parenthood simply REFERS people to mammograms (in just about all their clinics, although I’ve heard that maybe one or two exceptions exist?) and since there are MANY other free clinics that DON’T kill babies, there is simply no reason for Komen to donate to them under the guise of “breast cancer prevention.”
Also, I have to wonder about the ethics of one 501c3 donating to another 501c3 (Is PP a 501c3?) Basically, when I donate to a charity, shouldn’t I have the reasonable expectation that the money I gave to that charity actually GOES TO THAT CHARITY?
I don’t want a single penny of mine to go to Planned Parenthood EVER. So, is it fair that Komen take my money and then give it to Planned Parenthood?
Isn’t that unethical??
Report comment to moderator
Does anyone know of good NON-BABY-KILLING charities that do mammograms and breast screenings?
I would like to donate to a charity that is doing good work and that I can believe in.
Report comment to moderator
…there are many who are simply ignorant, who simply follow the dictates of the culture without thinking.
This is true. Few people these days are trained to think critically. This is, to some extent, a result of having switched, during the 20th century, from classical education to progressive education based on the philosophy of John Dewey.
With classical education (which was dominant in Western Civilization for about 1,000 years before the 20th century), students were given the tools of learning any subject, which included training in skillful thinking (logic) and skillful or persuasive communication of ideas (rhetoric). By contrast, progressive education focuses on teaching specific subject, which leads to “Excellence without a Soul” (the name of a book on the topic by Harvard comuter scientist Harry Lewis. Not only does this impoverish the souls of students as they receive superb technical training, it leaves them without the ability to identify logical flaws and generally think critically about the issues of life. I believe that is one reason why so many heads of tech companies and so many actors are liberal; they just go along with the crowd, never really critically examining the liberal politics they embrace.
Report comment to moderator
#50
Amen!
Report comment to moderator
My position on keeping it “legal” is so the other side cannot accuse us of killing women by forcing them to “back alley butchers”. If a woman thinks she is in need of an abortion she should go to an ob/gyn who is associated with a hospital. She should be examined, cleared for surgery, sign off on all the medical information provided, and be checked in to the hospital’s out-patient surgery department. She should be kept for a set number of hours after surgery and have the same follow-up I received for a laporoscopy. My doctor’s nurse called that evening to check on me. Surgery was on Friday and I had a follow-up appointment on Tuesday, but I went on with instructions to go to the nearest emergency room if I started experiencing any symptoms that were spelled out in my post surgery instructions.
Report comment to moderator
Tammy @ 49 Let me make a few phone calls and I will get back to you.
Report comment to moderator
Tammy
I refuse to give to the United Way because they have a nasty habbit of promise a group a certain amount of money. An when they meet that amount, they take what is left over an use it as they seem fit. Example of this is if they promise the Boy Scouts $200,000.00 and people give them $300,000.00 for the Boy Scouts. United Way will only give the Boy Scouts the $200,000.00 only and will use the rest for what ever Untied Way wants
Report comment to moderator
Kim – My position on keeping it “legal” is so the other side cannot accuse us of killing women by forcing them to “back alley butchers”.
How is that not fear of man?
Report comment to moderator
The “back alley abortions” scare is largely a myth invented by Bernard Nathanson when he was an abortionist. He later became pro-life and wrote a book called Aborting America in which he recounts how he invented the number of back alley abortions out of thin air, and the media went along with it and reported it uncritically as if it was fact.
Report comment to moderator
#55 It keeps the lines of communcation open. It takes the wind out of their sails on their argument that we would be denying women a legal, SAFE, and RARE access to abortion. It is a way to push THEIR backs to the wall.
Report comment to moderator
Tammy and anyone else
victoryhealth.org
Located in Mobile, Alabama serves blue collar and uninsured patients in Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi.
One of the services they provide is mammograms.
I am sure there is something like this in other areas. You may want to contact them and see if they know of anything in your area or I am sure if you wanted to donate to them they would not turn down your money.
If nothing else, take a look at their site. Perhaps you could help start something like this in your area. My contact for this is herself a breast cancer survivor.
Report comment to moderator
You all DO know don’t you that one of the ways a woman can cut her breast cancer risk is to breast feed her children????
Report comment to moderator
I don’t know … wouldn’t that be the same argument if we said:
A) Underage drinking is wrong, but, since you’re going to do it anyway, I’d rather you did it with all your friends at our home so that we can keep an eye on you.
B) Murder is terrible, but since some of you are going to kill people anyway, we’ll simply regulate it. Come in. We’ll make sure that your method is safe and okay and that it won’t put anyone else in danger. We’ll monitor you, but not report you.
I guess as a step toward making it illegal, abortion ought to be better regulated and follow the same rules as other medical procedures (it’s certain that the same rules are not applied to it now), but as a solution? No, I don’t think so.
Murder is murder. Crime is crime. PERHAPS in the old days, when contraception was so poor, there might be an excuse for the “back alley abortion.” But, couldn’t we make the same argument for any crime? Aren’t there always a few people who commit a crime because they feel desperate, have no where to turn, or aren’t thinking clearly?
Why would the crime of abortion be any different?
And, yes, I can see some small loopholes where the woman and her doctor ought to have a say. There are OCCASIONALLY (very, very occasionally) exceptions where the life of the mother really is in jeopardy, or where the baby is growing without a brain or with some other beyond serious malady. But, in general, why are different arguments being used with abortion than with any other crime?
Report comment to moderator
I guess as a step toward making it illegal, abortion ought to be better regulated and follow the same rules as other medical procedures (it’s certain that the same rules are not applied to it now
TAMMY THAT IS MY POINT. Let’s start the dialogue with the other side. Right now there is a line in the sand and one side won’t listen to the other.
I think if a woman is given ALL the facts of what abortion entails and sees that beating heart on a sonogram, and knows all the risks involved: her death, sterility, infections, blood clots, etc. She just might make some other “choices”.
And yeah, back when I was in high school there were some parents who would let the kids drink alcohol at their houses, but when you got there you turned over your keys or your parents were picking you up. You didn’t get to hide at their house and drink–your parents knew. Very few of us got to college and discovered binge drinking. As a matter of fact a few years ago there was a movement among colleges to lower the drinking age again so young adults could learn to drink responsibly under their parents roofs not the colleges.
Report comment to moderator
abortion ought to be better regulated and follow the same rules as other medical procedures
—
Kim, the problem is the left is going to fight aginst such regulations…
Report comment to moderator
Pastor Roy, I KNOW they are, but we have to start somewhere!!!!
Report comment to moderator
I agree Kim an some States are doing just that. Take a look at what KS is doing/
Report comment to moderator
Yes Pastor and Kim, abortion is unique among all “medical procedures”. No other surgical intervention can be done to a minor without the consent of the parents.
I think the Komen policy made sense. No grants from SKG should go to any “charity” being investigated. But being investigated for what? By whom? Under what motive?
I think the abortion industry hides behind Roe and Roe shields a multitude of patient safety and infection control violations. The Philadelphia clinic was proof enough of that. Komen was right to back away from PPFA. What if any financial accountability standards are imposed on PPFA? I’m thinking some of the PPFA big bosses probably have lavish homes which would put Joyce Meyer or Jim Bakker to shame.
Report comment to moderator
SAWGUNNER 65, PP is being investigated by a Congressional oversight committee regarding its use of the federal funding it receives. If that’s all it took for Komen to become skittish over its donations, then I’m sure other charitable donations other than my tax $$ will more than make up for other monies.
Report comment to moderator
Kim – your motivation to start dialogue may be commendable, but unfortunately the “other side” is not in the least interested in dialogue. Their only interest is in victory, which they define as abortion on demand without apology (and at public expense, in some instances). I wonder if you have had any experience in actually dealing with folks on the other side? I’ve had lots of it and I have not seen any willingness for such dialogue. Simply advocating for a policy of legalized abortion is not going to change their minds in the direction of making it illegal.
Report comment to moderator
Far from taking the wind out of their sails, it will only put more wind into their sails.
Report comment to moderator
Buzzy, for the most part I stay out of any discussion on abortion, even rarely posting about it here.
I do have a very liberal friend with whom I discuss it and she and I can almost agree.
Maybe I have been in sales too long…
Report comment to moderator
It may not be support she would like, but I can say pretty definitively that of all the “pro-life” supporters posting on this site today, the only one I could have a convsersation and feel that it would be worthwhile would be Kim. She understands that to have a real conversation and to get somewhere it helps not to demonize the other side.
I have a very conservative friend with whom I discuss abortion from time to time and she is passionate but we can find issues we agree on and ways that would make abortion rarer — a good thing all the way around. I wish there more Kims.
Report comment to moderator
This article, written by Noami Wolf, is insightful of what feminists’ are really about.
http://www.epm.org/resources/2010/Apr/15/our-bodies-our-souls-rethinking-pro-choice-rhetori/
She says we ought not to demean women in saying that they don’t know they aren’t carrying a baby. She wants honesty from the pro-abortionists. She acknowledges that the choice to kill one’s baby is selfishness, but is a right nevertheless.
I agree with the author that the argument isn’t about whether it’s a baby or not. It’s always been whether a woman has the right to kill her baby. Noami Wolf says of course she does. We need to make abortion illegal to help those whose depravity makes them chose murder over life.
A woman has always been able to choose whether to have her baby or not. No law forbids her from giving her baby up for adoption. She can even drop off the baby at the fire station and walk away forever. But to keep abortion legal is to affirm that certain babies do not have the protection of this country. Like Planned Parenthood’s slogan, Every Baby a Wanted Baby. They aren’t afraid of being honest, are they? They freely acknowledge that it’s a woman’s right to kill a baby they don’t want. As long as abortion is legal, many women will believe that they have the right to murder their child. We, who have the truth, need to help those who do not. If we go along with their agenda of making evil good, we will have failed those women who need us to protect their unborn.
Let’s not be hypocritical and say we’re about women’s welfare when we want to keep abortion legal. There are too many testimonies of agonizing despair and regret to insist that abortion should be legal so these poor women can safely kill their unborn child. The guilt in killing one’s own child is infinitely worse than allowing the child to be born.
Comparisons between abortions and other surgeries are not helpful. Abortion is the means in which a child is murdered. Making abortion safe and rare will always be nonsensical. If it’s legal, it will not be rare. Even if abortion can be totally safe (one only need to do a little reading to know this to be false) it will still always be murder. And murder must not be condoned by people of God.
Report comment to moderator
Coyoteblue: I absolutely agree – we should not ‘demonize‘ pro-aborts – a side that supports, enables, rejoices, facilitates, and profits financially and politically from butchering squirming, straining children by variously sawing them into pieces, vacuuming them into a pulp, delivering them, then driving sharp spikes up into their brains through their necks, sealing them into bags of bleach until their struggles cease, etc.
No need to give demons worse reputations than they already have.
Great point.
Report comment to moderator
Here is another article by Albert Mohler that shows what feminists are saying about abortion.
http://www.albertmohler.com/2012/01/20/abortion-is-as-american-as-apple-pie-the-culture-of-death-finds-a-voice/
The feminist in Mohler’s article laments that there is shame in getting an abortion. She really shouldnt be too bothered. There isn’t much shame in killing unborn babies these days. Even Chrisitians don’t want there to be shame in this most horrific of murders. But we do want dialogue.
Dialogue will not take away the God given shame that will always come with godlessness.
Report comment to moderator
Drill:
You have many these days (some who post on WMB) who claim to be Christians and yet who support and enable (via their votes and their voices) the wholesale genocidal murder of children via abortion.
Such people purposely attempt to make Christ and Molech (i.e. Satan) one, the same.
Except, of course, Molech never dreamed nearly so big in terms of such monstrous brutalities and numbers, in the days of Moab.
I suspect that such people are coming very close, if not arriving at, the unforgivable sin, which is the blaspheming of the Holy Spirit.
Now THAT’S what I call a litmus test.
Report comment to moderator
Ditto 72. And then there is my good friend who had two abortions before deciding she was “ready” to give birth to her live baby girl when it was too late. Now she and hubby struggle to take in a foster child or two after losing thou$and$ on a failed adoption from Guatemala. My heart aches and prays for her, but only God can soothe her agony and heal her heart. So far, it is a very sad latter half of a life that could have nurtured others or given another childless couple the opportunity.
Report comment to moderator
…and this is why we will never get anywhere, our all or nothing criteria…
Instead of working towards a goal, compromising a little and putting the systems in place to save the lives of the women who die from abortions and to save most of the babies who die from abortions we will hold to our line in the sand. THAT breaks my heart. Don’t you think a lot of women once they saw that beating heart would change their minds about an abortion? Don’t you think a woman might think twice if she knew killing THIS baby might prevent her from having one when it was “convenient”?
I am out of the discussion. It just is too painful for me. I was pro-choice until sometime in April of 1997. Then I was pro-life. I watched my baby bit a needle that was invading her space during an amnio. I have to think other women would change their minds too.
Report comment to moderator
I was gone such a long time.
Louise I know 3 women who have confided in me about their abortions.
1. Suffered years of infertility
2. Is now the mother of two and a missionary
3. Is a recovering alcoholic
None of them knew the risks or had to get parental permission.
Report comment to moderator
Yeah, Arcadia.
Butchering children by the millions, for profit and politics, in various brutal ways, is a sort of litmus test for determining evil intent.
Sort of a radical and unauthorized concept, these days, when you let the Culture do all your thinking for you, huh?
Report comment to moderator
CoyoteBlue,
I consider myself a reasonable person who will dialog on most issues.
But, the fact that you can’t understand how absolutely horrific this is to me (and others like me) shows just how far away we are in being able to dialog.
It’s as if you and I were discussing torturing a child to death, or ripping someone’s guts out and watching them die, or suggesting that we come to some sort of agreement on spiking someone on a stick and watching them die a slow horrible death.
That’s how I see abortion, with your side arguing for the torture, disembowelment, and such.
You really want me to sit down and tell you how it’s okay? Or how you can do it sometimes and not others? Or to some people (if they’re not “wanted”) and not others?
Try as I might, it is very hard for me to have a reasonable conversation about that and find instances where I might actually APPROVE it.
Report comment to moderator
Sonograms, Kim, I think are part of the reality in impressing upon women in denial about life. When they are mandated in the interest of “full disclosure” they can- and do – make a difference in saving lives from the abortionists.
Report comment to moderator
Coyoteblue, you would like to see more Kims because you want to make sure that it is still possible for people to kill babies.
I still do not understand how killing babies is fighting breast cancer. Is it because you kill the women before they can grow up and get breast cancer?
Report comment to moderator
Tammy (#79), right on.
It’s like our society has gone mad when people want to have a reasonable discussion about a barbaric practice!
Report comment to moderator
I know Kim, cross-posting here. That is why we have to be sure and speak the truth in Love. Big hug.
Report comment to moderator
I do not blame someone who had an abortion before they understood. I have a friend who did so, and now regrets it with all her heart. I do not wish to make her feel horrible over something she cannot change.
But, that is also part of what pro-choice groups do. They fight any all education which might show young women what they are actually doing. No ultrasounds. No photos. No information.
The lie that it’s “just a clump of cells.”
Very sad.
Someday, should the Earth continue, people will look back on this holocaust and shake their heads in bewilderment that such a supposedly “civilized” society could do something so unutterably evil.
Report comment to moderator
Gee Kyle, Drill, Tammy, et al — if you have a goal and that goal is eliminating abortion and I say not quite there but I would like to make it much more rare.
And you then say you murdering, demonic scum.
My reaction just may be to say to you that you are an overly emotional, reactionary wingnut who spends too much time worrying about other people’s sex lives and not enough time worrying about your own shortcomings.
Once we’d had that wonderful exchange, we could then go back to hating each other and reflexively opposing each other’s positions, which I suppose is more comfortable and certianly so much more pure than trying to find common ground on areas where there is agreement.
Report comment to moderator
CoyoteBlue,
You’ll notice that I didn’t call you names.
However, again, you show ZERO understanding — absolutely zero — for why your viewpoint might be very, very, very difficult for my side to understand.
And, since we’re getting the youth (as the other side is for other social issues), I do believe that abortion will become illegal at some point. Science makes the humanity of the baby way too obvious.
And, since you’re no more willing to see our side, than you claim that we are to see yours, when that time comes, I won’t be surprised if there’s a bigger backlash against the “pro-choice” movement than even I would want.
Report comment to moderator
Kim: Thank God for sonograms, and especially for the one that changed your understanding of what the phrase ‘abort my child’ would really have meant.
It is imperative that PRC’s and other pro-life organizations that deal with pregnant women have that technology, as much as possible and at as many PRCs as possible.
Because just seeing that child, as you eloquently testify, DOES make a tremendous difference.
This is, in fact, why the abortion industry and its political, media, and cultural hacks and goons in and out of the government are desperately trying to shut down and disrupt the operation of PRCs, and especially attacking those with this technology.
Satan hates the mother-child relationship, just as he hates every healthy God-breathed relationship, and he and his kept creatures are busily engaged in attempting to destroy this relationship, in every way they can.
And that makes the availability of sonic imaging of children in the womb very, very high on their hit list.
Report comment to moderator
I’m with Kim on this one. Neither will get my money.
It’s strange that they claim they want to cure breast cancer but they fund something that causes it.
Report comment to moderator
Apart from women’s individual choices to kill their babies before they are born, Planned Parenthood still makes excuses for Sanger’s philosophy of eugenics and makes no excuses for its decimation of today’s population of Blacks.
NOW and other feminazi-groups are happy to keep women ignorant of the medical considerations involved in their health. The unbalanced focus on breast cancer overshadows the greater numbers of deaths from heart attacks and lung cancer.
Talk about “super pacs,” one charitablel organization outdoes all the advertising science of other medical hazards by dominating the propaganda.
Report comment to moderator
Coyoteblue: Well, you lost me there.
What does the morality of killing children have to do with rightwing nut worrying about other people’s ’sex life’?
What a crock.
I give you a clinical description of what an abortion does to a living child, and you start the standard left-wing dodge about ‘infringements on other people’s sex life’, even though it has absolutely nothing to do with the horrid and very real topic at hand.
Is that ALL the ammunition that the culture can give you on this particular topic?
When confronted with the reality of what abortion is, start the mandatory, completely irrelevant mumbling about ‘infringements on other people’s sex life.’
Huh?
Squids eject clouds of obscuring ink in order to try to conceal themselves, when they perceive that they are threatened by some reality that they would rather not directly face.
That technique works much better for squid than it does for you, Coyoteblue.
Report comment to moderator
I just don’t understand what education, or the lack of, has to do with whether something is evil and should not be legalized. Women will die in abortions. Women will die in childbirth. Neither of these 2 statements make legalizing abortion justifiable. It’s heart-wrenchingly sad that there are women who just will not allow their child to be born. Whether it’s legal or not. Keeping abortion legal to insure mothers from dying is the same thing as saying that the state has the duty to allow mothers to kill their babies, as long as the state makes it convenient for her.
While some may choose not to murder their unborn when given the truth, those who still choose to murder their child should not be allowed to by the state. Let’s pray, let’s educate, above all else, let’s love mothers and the unborn by not capitulating to the culture of death. Abortion is an evil that must be resisted. I am trying to understand how any mother can say a woman should be allowed to choose whether to kill her child or not? I fail.
Report comment to moderator
CB, Odd that you object to “murdering demonic scum” but have no problem with “overly emotional wingnut who spends way too much time worrying abbout other peoples sex lives.” If you want the name calling to stop you could start with youself.
Report comment to moderator
KBells: Way to miss the point.
CB was pointing out that each side calling the other names like that just perpetuates the existing refusal to budge or even talk.
And there is a point there. An early stage abortion is nothing more than the quick removal of a cluster of cells that no more resembles a complete human being than does a pencil eraser. Yet Drill (to name just one example) insists on always using lurid, gruesome descriptions such as “butchering squirming, straining children by variously sawing them into pieces, vacuuming them into a pulp, delivering them, then driving sharp spikes up into their brains through their necks, sealing them into bags of bleach until their struggles cease, etc.”
Now, whether the removal of the cluster of cells that exists a few weeks into pregnancy is moral or not is a worthy topic to debate; but it categorically IS not the medieval battlefield evoked by Drill’s deliberately inflammatory rhetoric. And such rhetoric is a clear indicator of someone who fears his case lacks any logical power and so must resort to attempting to stoke emotion.
Drill is attempting to conflate early-term abortion, which under Roe v. Wade states cannot restrict, and late-term abortion, which states can restrict and most do.
The only procedure that comes close to what Drill describes is intact dilation and extraction, the so-called “partial-birth” abortion. This is a procedure that is used in less than two-tenths of 1 percent of all abortions … about 2,200 procedures out of 1.3 million in 2000, according to the Guttmacher Institute. And even at that, the fetus is killed by an injection in the womb, not by the suctioning of the brain.
Intact D&X is certainly a gruesome and disturbing thing, and if people want to ban it in most cases — and 29 or 30 states do — it doesn’t find many defenders. But to describe “abortion” as being like that, as if that is the norm, is dishonest.
This is the sort of thing where there could be some dialogue, because even many of us who don’t object to abortion in the first few weeks of pregnancy can agree that a late-term abortion for a non-therapeutic reason is much more problematic.
But mo, the pro-life side would prefer to call all on the the choice side demonic scum, and the choice side prefer to think of all on the other side as anti-sex busybodies, and there we remain divided.
Report comment to moderator
Not we Conan – there you divided yourself from the truth of God-given life.
Report comment to moderator
Conan,
The VAST majority of abortions take place around or after 8 weeks, when the child is most definitely a CHILD and whose heart is beating.
In fact, the baby stops being a “cluster of cells” pretty much by the time of implantation.
So, are you will to ban abortion after implantation? What about the minute the heart starts beating at 8 weeks? That okay with you?
Report comment to moderator
the choice side prefer to think of all on the other side as anti-sex busybodies, and there we remain divided.
******I can’t even imagine why. Unless it is the idea that sex without consequences is some sort of God-given right?
It doesn’t even begin to be logical. I care about LIFE and a BABY, not about your sex life.
Truly, a complete obfuscation and disconnect from reality here.
Report comment to moderator
And even at that, the fetus is killed by an injection in the womb, not by the suctioning of the brain.
*****I call bull. That is simply factually incorrect.
Report comment to moderator
Truly, a complete obfuscation and disconnect from reality here.
Yes, but it’s two-sided. People who are pro-choice are no more evil than anybody else. They define and value personhood differently than you do, and don’t consider a fetus to be a person yet.
This is a difference of opinion, one that COULD be debated and minds changed. But as long as the two sides are content to think the worst of each other and rarely elevate any dialogue above name-callingm that won’t happen.
Report comment to moderator
Conan,
You obviously have bought into the lies. Have you actually watched or seen the pictures from abortion? You do realize that they most assuredly do use a saline solution that burns the babies? You realize that the “clump of cells” nonsense is just that … nonsense, almost from the very moment of implantation, and certainly within a week of it?
You do realize that abortionists pull babies apart limb from limb … alive … and suction them out and that they count the pieces afterward to make sure that they got it all?
And, that these babies LOOK JUST LIKE BABIES?
Have you been paying attention at all? Because you still seem to live pre-ultrasound and pre-science on this issue.
I don’t like posting the links or looking at the photos myself, but a minimum of research would show you that you are completely wrong on this.
Report comment to moderator
I call bull. That is simply factually incorrect.
That was what I remembered, but having now looked it up, it looks like I was probably mistaken on that point. Since I wasn’t defending the practice anyway, I’m happy to stand corrected.
Report comment to moderator
It is not a “difference of opinion” when I can see a miniature, but fully formed baby, pulled into pieces, struggling in a bucket, sealed into a bag to suffocate it, and pierced in the head to kill it, because it was delivered feet first to keep it from being “actually human” by being born.
I don’t necessarily agree with Drill’s depictions, because they are horrible. However, HE IS NOT WRONG about what happens … you are.
Do a little research and get back to us, okay?
Report comment to moderator
Seriously, Conan. I say this as someone who has respected your opinions on some topics in the past and know that you at least think about things.
You’ve been taught a LIE. Plain and simply, what you think abortion is, it isn’t, except in maybe about half the cases, and then only if you really don’t think a beating heart counts. (About half are killed from 1-12 weeks, and half are killed after according the best statistics out there. And, honestly, everyone admits the statistics are poor, but they’re the best we’ve got — either side.)
Babies stop being “cells” early. They look more-or-less like babies and have beating hearts at 8 weeks. By 12 weeks, they are a perfect, miniature baby. Every part that they will have, they have.
And, half are killed after that 12 week mark. That’s have of something like 1.3 million, you realize.
So, please, stop arguing until you’ve researched. You’ll be horrified, but you’ll also be educated. Stop listening to the lies. They don’t hold up under science anymore.
Report comment to moderator
*That’s HALF not have
Report comment to moderator
This is about as graphic as I can get, since it really bothers me.
When I read Ron Paul’s book about a month ago, he described the incident that made him staunchly pro-life. It still bothers me thinking about it, but here you go:
“On one occasion in the 1960s when abortion was still illegal, I witnessed, while visiting a surgical suite as an OB/GYN resident, the abortion of a fetus that weighted approximately two pounds. It was placed in a bucket, crying and struggling to breathe, and the medical personnel pretended not to notice. Soon the crying stopped. This harrowing event forced me to think more seriously about this important issue.
That same day in the OB suite, an early delivery occurred and the infant born was only slightly larger than the one that was just aborted. But in this room everybody did everything conceivable to save this child’s life. My conclusion that day was that we were overstepping the bounds of morality by picking and choosing who should live and who should die. These were human lives. There was no consistent moral basis to the value of life under these circumstances.” -Ron Paul, Liberty Defined page 1
Report comment to moderator
Obviously, I must be overly-emotional, as CoyoteBlue would say, because just those two paragraphs were horrific to me.
This explains why I can’t send you to the photos, and the websites. The best I can do is tell you to go to the pregnancy websites, because they will show you photos of the gestational ages of *WANTED* babies, so they probably lived.
But, 2 lb. babies are aborted every day in the U.S. And, there are plenty of places out there to see a real abortion (of the various types) and their aftermaths.
Report comment to moderator
Conan,
Would you please read the article I linked to above by Noami Wolf ?
She says to stop saying that women don’t know they’re killing a baby. She believes that it’s actually bad for women and for the pro-abortion people to treat women like they aren’t taking the life of another. She knows there are emotional tolls that are a result of a woman’s choice to kill their child and we need to acknowledge how tragic it is for the woman. She is really honest. I admire that. She says when it comes to abortion, the woman gets to choose between herself and her baby. And it’ll course, the woman wins.
You may not want to believe that women know that babies grow inside their uteri, but there are actual pro-abortion women who do believe it and have problems with you position that a person is not really a person when they are starting out life.
Report comment to moderator
I have waited to post.
Two things bother me.
Why doesn’t the other side figure out another word besides “marriage?”
Why doesn’t the other side use the correct term “human fetus?”
It couldn’t be so they can attack my side, could it?
Was it only yesterday that there was some discussion on WMB about demons and whether they are around like they have been in the past?
Report comment to moderator
Tammy, #104, thanks for posting that difficult clinical description. As I have remarked, Ron Paul is, I believe, a decent and honorable man.
People like Conan the Librarian and Coyoteblue, like ‘good’ Germans in the 1930’s, know enough to be complicit in the horror, by their acquiescence to the horror – and yet they are troubled (see their own words and equivocations and smoke screens) – and yet again rail against those who dare to simply describe what they, at least by the proxy of their vote, support and enable.
Strangely, I would have some faith that both of these posters (Coyoteblue and Conan) would change their views, if they were actually exposed to the real horrors of the murder of children, which goes on, with State sanction, behind the steel doors of the abortion slaughter-houses.
I would like to think so, anyway.
Most people, I have noticed, will dance and equivocate and make excuses for all kinds of things in the abstract, but sober up pretty quickly when brought face to face with the cold reality.
Report comment to moderator
Coyoteblue, I did not call you names.
Are you suggesting that if we wingnuts would just calm down a bit, pro-choice people would suddenly agree with us, en masse?
If you do come back, please take a moment to ponder this, please.
If abortion is not wrong, then why would you want it to be rare?
If it is wrong, then why would not not want to stop it?
Report comment to moderator
I didn’t realize that one could advocate for the legalization of abortion and still maintain a pro-life position. And be a Christian.
I guess I could just be dogmatic about labels, but being pro-life means a mother doesn’t get to choose whether she wants to murder her unborn child.
Women shouldn’t have to go to back alley abortionists. But if they did, they are not innocent. They are complicit in the crime of murdering a child. Having abortion legalized so women no longer have to seek less than sanitary ways of killing their children is illogical at best.
Report comment to moderator
Freida, I’m puzzled by that, too.
The fundamental problem is that so many people have rejected the idea that each person is responsible for his or her actions. Some people reject that idea because it is convenient for them. Others reject it becuase of a warped philosophy. Either way, it is one mark of a sick culture.
Report comment to moderator
Tammy, Kyle, KBells
On name calling do see Drill’s reply to me at 72 and then at 108 — first a demon and then a nazi. Please also note that my post was phrased in the subjunctive tense — if.
And it’s punctuated with Frieda’s observation. It’s funny in its way — I have left-wing Christian friends who don’t understand how one can hold laissez-faire capitalist/Randian views and call one’s self a Christian. I always thought a Christian was a person who believed on the name of Christ and his atoning death on the cross. I had to go to 4 years of a conservative religious university to understand that there was a whole political and theological belief system to qualify as a Christian.
I do understand your point of view that you believe abortion is murder. My point of view is that the issue is complicated. However I do think abortion is a procedure that should be rare. I supported the partial birth abortion ban, for example. I support full and informed consent laws, for example.
So I would actually work with people and support those who wanted to make the procedure rare — that doesn’t meet your goal of one hundred percent banned. I do understand that.
The point of my post is that there is some common ground. That’s what I was responding to with the post to Kim. Rather than address the point that we could work together to decrease what you all term as murder, you respond by saying “Coyoteblue, you would like to see more Kims because you want to make sure that it is still possible for people to kill babies.” And you have missed the point entirely.
If your belief is that abortion is murder and that babies are being killed and you have folks like me who would be willing to work with you to decrease the number of abortions and you refuse then you are passing on an opportunity to save lives. From my perspective that is a sad thing as it appears that ideological purity has trumped accomplishing a goal that should be a good thing. Achieving that goal — decreasing the number of abortions is possible.
Report comment to moderator
Coyoteblue, why decrease the number of abortions? Why make it rare? Why do you have scruples about late-term abortions?
The answers to those questions are very important.
Report comment to moderator
CB: The point of my post is that there is some common ground. That’s what I was responding to with the post to Kim. Rather than address the point that we could work together to decrease what you all term as murder, you respond by saying “Coyoteblue, you would like to see more Kims because you want to make sure that it is still possible for people to kill babies.” And you have missed the point entirely.
Right. And then I tried to explain the same principle in different terms and got a long string of emotional responses about how horrible abortion is, which I had not actually disagreed with.
I suggested that if you want to change the minds of pro-choice people, it’s probably more effective if you don’t start from the premise that the person is an evil, demonic murderer who just wants to kill babies.
I stand by that recommendation.
Report comment to moderator
KIM 52
That is exactly why abortion is so prevalent these days–the back alley butcher claims. My mother was convinced of this very same thing because my sister is said to have had an abortion. I think my sister regrets that abortion because she has not since been able to conceive, and now is too old.
So we took the BACK-ALLEY BUTCHER and made him legitimate. And the gov’t protects him from all responsibility of murdering mothers in the name of freedom of “choice”.
Report comment to moderator
The media is ramming home the message of drugs are bad.
How about ramming home the message that SEX can cause pregnancy. And if you don’t want to be pregnant, don’t have sex. DER!
We watch a detective series on TV and one of the players is having sex with his girlfriend. (You know, it’s what everyone who dates does.) He finds out she is pregnant. The look on his face tells us he is wondering how that happened.
If sex only made children, that would b the least of your worries. It is all the other creepy stuff women can get from a man who has had multiple partners–not just AIDS.
Report comment to moderator
Absolutely amazing. Coyoteblue and Conan are suddenly all wrapped up in name-calling – desperately trying to avoid the central issue of what abortion actual is, and what they support and enable when they vote for a pro-abort.
Clinical descriptions are a bit too unsettling for them.
Typical.
A couple of things to clarify: As most know who read my posts, I never called Coyoteblue, who on this issue unfortunately typifies a very wide swath of Americans who let the culture call their moral shots for them, either a Nazi or a demon.
Insomuch as 1930’s era Germans knew that bad things were going on – they could hear the rumbling lorries taking away their neighbors in the middle of the night – and yet continued to support (with whatever reservations and caveats and equivocations) the infrastructure and the people that made the bad things happen, comparing people who vote by proxy for pro-aborts to those Germans is completely valid.
Most Germans were not Nazis – and most Germans did not directly participate in the machinery of death. But they did choose to ignore it, and hence enable it.
And certainly I did not compare Coyoteblue to a demon.
That abortion is a demonic enterprise is, however, a fact.
Pro-aborts, a group which comprise the set of actual serial killers who perform the abortions, the politicos and financial organizations who protect and profit from it, and the leftwing media that shields it from scrutiny, are therefore actively and willingly engaged in a demonic activity.
I do not, however, equate a person with a wishy-washy, culturally determined ‘morality’, who accepts abortion in the abstract (and wishes to make it ‘rare’ – like a tricky medical procedure or something), and squirms in revulsion and dodges and equivocates when confronted with the reality of what they, by proxy and by parroted arguments, support, with a demon.
Fools, perhaps, but we are all fools in one way or the other, on one topic or another.
But killing children is not just ’some topic’, a sort of thorny civic issue like how much the national debt can safely be raised, or how many street lights should be installed on Main Street.
Report comment to moderator
The phony ‘making abortion rare’ dodge and the hand-wringing over how pro-lifers are not really interested in working with people who want to make abortion ‘rare but legal’ is pretty stale, Coyoteblue.
I remember Bill Clinton with his ’safe, legal, and rare’ crap. Some people actually bought into it. His earnest voice and his Arkansas twang and his bulbous red nose made more than just interns do stupid things.
He and his successors, and the leftwing machinery that controlled and still controls this country, were never interested in making abortion either safe or rare. It is their bread and butter, their warp and woof, a reflection of the cesspool their souls paddle around in.
Let’s look at the record of the ‘make abortion rare’ crowd: Every move made to lessen the horror – blocked. Every opportunity to restrict and censor information about abortion – taken. Every federal court appointment handed to a rabid pro-abort – done.
Etc.
The phrase ‘I want to make killing children rare, but legal’ is both sterile and nonsensical – morally and historically and functionally.
And the constant retreat of those who support this meaningless phrase to the vanishingly small percentages of rape-incest cases and cases where the mother’s life is REALLY at stake, is a crass statistical dodge.
Like (here we go again), 1930 era Germans who justified ’some concentration camp activity’ since there were, after all, some actual criminals incarcerated in those camps.
Report comment to moderator
“They also PAY for the mammograms, using the funds donated by Komen and others. For poor women, that can be lifesaving.
And that IS something not commonly provided elsewhere. ”
But if the funds from Komen go elsewhere, then the payment can be provided elsewhere. I feel almost silly having to point that out.
Or are you now suggesting there is a dearth of agencies with sufficient infrastructure to handle *the paperwork of disbursing funds?*
Report comment to moderator
Hey, just give the ladies a voucher.
Report comment to moderator
It may end up in PP, but not because of Komen. I’m disappointed in them, and I am disappointed in people who are unwilling to face even an investigation of the unethical behavior of PP employees.
Report comment to moderator
What Drill ignores in his reams of purple prose is, as long as Roe v. Wade is the law of the land, abortion will remain legal.
Therefore, as Coyote Blue and I have argued, it is foolish to refuse to join hands on an effort to make abortion rare because it won’t make abortion go away.
You know the caution against making perfection into the enemy of good. Making abortion rare would be good. Making abortion entirely illegal would be impossible under the current law.
Refusing to help make abortion rare because the effort falls short of making it impossible may give you the moral high ground, but it does nobody any good, least of all the unborn babies who would have been saved had abortion been rare.
Report comment to moderator
Why should abortion be rare?
Report comment to moderator
I’ve never donated to the Komen Foundation even though bresast cancer ultimately did my mother in. Lung cancer kills more women than breast cancer. Maybe that should be more politicized.
As Kay pointed out yesterday, the #1 killer of women is heart disease.
Report comment to moderator
Freida 123, we need to keep asking that question every chance we get.
Report comment to moderator
The language of eugenics changes a little, but not the philosophy. This was the topic of the first 45 min. of phone calls on c-span’s Washington Journal today.
One 86-year-old woman was very eloquent in her support for the abortion services of PP, because she felt so sorry for Black mothers who couldn’t possibly take care of all those little black babies.
A man said he wanted abortions to be kept legal because so many poor families can’t give all their children the proper health care they need.
Report comment to moderator
That 86 year old’s argument sounds just ignorant when I consider that I made less than $10,000 a year the first 10 years of raising my 4 kids in the 80’s and 90’s.
Those arguments of supposed sympathy for the children are easily counteracted by asking ‘So your solution is to kill the babies?’
Report comment to moderator
Overturning Roe v Wade is sure the goal in saving babies lives, but Conan and CoyoteBlue are correct that in the meantime we need to partner with those who are really willing to do things that will minimize the amount of abortions.
I have a question for Conan and coyoteBlue: Do you also go on liberal blog sites and suggest moderation with them? (I’m assuming there are liberal sites that a real discussion is possible. When I tried a couple of years ago to find one all I saw was real nasty name calling and swearing with no real discourse.)
Report comment to moderator
Kyle, Frieda et. al.
Abortion is a medical procedure and a serious one and pregnancy is mostly preventable in this modern era — so abortion should be rare, in my view. On the underlying issue of whether it is murder if the foetus is not viable (and that’s not trying to use a clinical term but it is the medical term for an unborn person who may or may not be born — a close friend of mine lost her unborn child in the 9th month, many, actually most, pregnancies terminate within the first 3 months via natural causes), I do not know. And so for me, in what is a personal and possibly devastating choice for another person I am not going to substitute my judgment for theirs. Past 3 months, I do think there is a change in character if the potential human, and so yes I supported the partial birth abortion ban.
Drill
And there you go again with the Nazi enablers riff. I can guarantee you that if a U.S. government targeted a group of living breathing, people for genocide that I would oppose the government quite vocally and actively. Your comparison is not apt and is offensive. And it is just this kind of talk that causes me to usually not even try to talk about common ground.
Report comment to moderator
Conan and Coyote Blue, How would you suggest we join hands with those who support abortion to try to make abortion rare?
Report comment to moderator
Fuzzy
I have been known to argue with liberal friends of mine and post on this topic. As you can imagine, the ones who are hardest to the left and in their own realm of wingnuttery also make maximalist arguments about the oppression of women, facists who want to control others, etc. I find that line of argumentation to be equally offensive as the Nazi enabler line.
Report comment to moderator
Ricky
Start with the proposition that abortion is a terrible choice for anyone to have to make — liberals will agree with you on that point. And then work backwards — try to avoid comparisons to Nazi enablers, try to avoid calling your opponents murdering holocaust causing baby killers. You may have to keep at it and employ Jesus’ admonition to forgive seven times seven.
It may be necessary to discuss the availability of contraception. I’ve also found that to be a tricky topic with social conservatives some of whom seem to think that making contraception available is tantamount to approving of another’s sexual sin.
It may be necessary to bolster support – charitable, public-private or government — for adoption services or neo-natal services or education — a host of social issues that contribute to abortion occurring. One liberal refrain is that social conservatives care a lot about the unborn but not so much about the living. I know this to be inaccurate, but ya’ll don’t tell that part of the story well.
Report comment to moderator
Abortion IS genocide.
Black babies, Down Syndrome babies, female babies, babies from young mothers and on and on… have been killed just because.
They may be little and in the uteri, but they are living. Defend these defenseless people like you would defend older people.
Report comment to moderator
Coyote Blue, I appreciate the”y’all”. I think you’ve set forth a good plan to make liberals like you.
Our church has programs to provide pre-natal care, promote adoption and provide education both before and after pregnancy. However, these are not things where we can join with pro-abortion folks because we could never agree with them on the content of the education or certain elements of the adoption program.
This Komen case has revealed that the right to an abortion is one of the strongest held beliefs of liberals. With our nation so divided, probably the best that can be hoped for is a revival of federalism. Some states would allow abortion and gay marriage and others would not.
Report comment to moderator
Ok. Let’s start out by agreeing that abortion is a terrible choice. I don’t think I can agree with the “HAVE to make part” though. Is it terrible because a living being cannot be allowed to live? Or is it terrible of the unfavorable circumstances that the mother finds herself to be in? If it’s the latter, it really isn’t that terrible because that mother does not have to raise the child. It’s not the end of the world to give birth to a child and drop off the baby at the fire station. A very happy couple will get to be adoptive parents! Win, win situation.
I don’t agree that the lack of access to contraceptives is why there are abortions. Many in the public school system are taught about contraceptives. Even if it’s moral to encourage young people to use contraceptive, they are not 100% effective. And then what? Then it’s ok to have that “rare” abortion because the contraceptive failed?
I was reading on the planned parenthood website and it clearly encourages abortion, rather than discouraging it. What is a woman’s best choice when she finds herself with child? (That’s what pregnant means.) In a society that values life, abortion would be illegal and she would not “HAVE” to make that acceptable choice of giving birth. She would give birh and either love her child and raise that baby or she could love that child and allow other parents to raise that baby. Abortion makes her love only herself but in the end, she will hate herself because she refused to allow a living child to be born. It’s not about choice. It’s not about contraception. It’s not about having enough money. It’s about having the right to kill the unborn. That is why comparisons to the holocaust is very fitting because that is just what is happening to the unborn in this country.
Report comment to moderator
Ricky
I spent part of my youth in Louisiana, ya’ll comes naturally to me. And liberals like me — the liberals I know don’t claim me as part of their cause. I am pro-death penalty, hawkish on defense and support things like the partial-birth abortion ban. I only get called liberal on sites like this. Regardless, my aim is not to make liberals or conservatives like me, what I would like to do is get practical things done.
Frieda,
I can definitely agree to delete the “have”. It is a terrible choice.
On contraceptives — I do agree education is not that much of the issue. Access, that’s a different story. Insurance covers viagra in most cases, but not contraception. Strange world we live in.
Report comment to moderator
Well, certainly, no access to someone to pay for contraceptives and nine months of terrible inconvenience is a perfectly good reason to abort a baby instead of giving it life for adoption.
It’s that kind of cold and crass illogic that even more raises the hackles of people who want to protect life from its beginning.
Report comment to moderator
And, I spent a small part of my youth under Quisling’s rules that sent Nazi’s Libens barn “love-children” on trains to concentration camps. But I was accidentally favored by the “Master Race.”
Report comment to moderator
That’s what happens when men play God by picking the rules for “selection.” Some of us luck out – others end up as waste products.
Check out the million$ that Planned Parenthood spends on lobbyists for its non-profitable cause.
Report comment to moderator
Louise,
How much does decent neo-natal care cost? For vitamins, medical check-ups, delivery? If insurance can cover viagra, why does it not also cover contraceptives or the cost of actually delivering a child? And why don’t social conservatives fight for insurance that covers costs to deliver a child? Or do you just not think about stuff like that?
Report comment to moderator
Have to agree with you there, Coyoteblue. I was horrified to learn how much it cost parents to have a child in the States (I’m Canadian). If all goes well, it is ‘only’ $5000, if there are complications it may be up to $20,000+. To deliver at home is the cheapest, just $2500 – for my low income family, even that would be prohibitively expensive. If there is one service that should be free in healthcare, it is perinatal care. It is an excellent idea for a pro-life campaign, ‘Every woman has the right to free perinatal care!’
Report comment to moderator
Blue, why presume I don’t think about “stuff like that.” PP covers all of that when a “client” cannot. You must know that there are more than enough other compassionate AND nonjudgmental sources of care for women who are pregnant outside of marriage. PP lobbies million$ against them on the basis of cold, hard selfish choice.
I don’t want the uncompromising advocates against innocent life to use my taxe$ pushing their Godless agenda.
Report comment to moderator
Well, then, Phos, let’s all move to Canada where life and health care are so much cheaper. That’s definitely how I value my children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. We don’t all depend on the government to subsidize our lives.
Report comment to moderator
Regrets. I do not mean it personally when I defend all of ours right to life. I just think God wants all of us to live and honor His choice as He did for each of us still living – hopefully for HIm.
Report comment to moderator
Louise, it isn’t about subsidizing anything, nor was my comment trying to make Canada out to be better than the States. It is about the fact that without medical care, which our countries are wealthy enough to provide, childbirth is the most dangerous experience a woman can go through. Why should it be the government who subsidizes it, why couldn’t churches? If we say that we value the lives of infants, then we need to put our money where our mouth is.
Report comment to moderator
But I will add that pharmaceutical companies and the availability of pro-life charities are out-advertised and out-lobbied by the million$$ of abortion advocates. Why is that?
Report comment to moderator
Phos, we do! I’ve been through it and we have countless thousands of women who love life enough who want their babies to live. What is so hard about honoring God-given life?
Report comment to moderator
There are many prolife centers and churches that offer every kind of assistance for a mother that needs it. I know this from personal experience. If Planned Parenthood would just refer their clients to other resources dedicated to helping women care for their babies, they would be out of business.
I think we are mixing up 2 different topics.
Abortion and the morality of keeping it legal.
Versus the hardships women and families face with unplanned and unwanted pregnancies. It seems that this is the topic that many liberals would say that the pro-life side is not interested in. The number of PRCs show that there is care and relief for mothers in need. Adoption agencies have very long lists of adoptive parents. Let’s keep talking about ways to help each other but let’s not pretend that women have no choice but to kill their babies because of unmet needs.
The hardships are definitely there. Healthcare will always be expensive. I disagree that the state must pay for individual health concerns. Churches and even caring people outside of the Church have stepped forward to help those in need. I may pray for wisdom in helping my daughters pursue midwifery. There is definitely a need for midwives who are willing to help mothers who desire to birth at home. Let’s settle on the fact that abortion is not the solution for a people that respect life. Then we can find ways to help those who need it.
Report comment to moderator
Louise
I clumped you with all social conservatives, I apologize for generalizing. PP deals in harsh reality, including selfish interest. Does that make them horrible or realistic? For me, it makes them realistic. I don’t want my tax dollars used for anyone’s agenda — those who think themselves Godly or those who don’t give two shakes about God. What I would like is for my tax dollars to help solve real problems — including neo-natal care for folks less fortunate than I am.
Frieda,
There are 2 topics being mixed. I give money to PP because I know that the bulk of their work is not for abortion. They provide that service but it is not all they do. You would likely not give money to PP because of abortion and that is wholly honorable.
In encouraging any of you to work with folks like me to decrease abortion, I have not and am not arguing that you should change your bottom line position.
Report comment to moderator
#148
Amen, Freida! Exactly.
This idea that PP is the only alternative for poor women is simply nonsense.
And, in fact, if all the money that the government steals from me to give to PP were given to non-contaminated, non-political groups to actually help women (and who do not do abortions), then even more groups could help even more women.
The average salary of the 8 top women at PP is $270,000!!!!
Exactly why a “charity” helping poor women needs to pay its executives $270,000 of charity money a year needs to be considered.
PP puts its top people right into the Top 1% that Liberals all decry!!
They walk all over poor women (and get far more money from them from abortions than from anything else) all the way to the bank.
Report comment to moderator
#142
Totally in agreement with you here, Louise.
Report comment to moderator
“Some people believe that being pro-choice is being on the side of freedom. I’ve never understood how an act of violence, killing a human being, albeit a small one in a special place, is portrayed as a precious right. To speak only of the mother’s cost in carrying a baby to term ignores all thought of any legal rights of the unborn. I believe that the moral consequence of cavalierly accepting abortion diminishes the value of all life.” -Ron Paul, On Liberty
Report comment to moderator
“But, if you’re that eager to run over poor women on the way to the bank, I’d recommend a gig with Planned Parenthood: The average salary of the top eight executives is $270,000, which makes them officially part of what the Obama administration calls ‘the 1 percent.’”
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/290134/liberal-enforcers-mark-steyn
Report comment to moderator
CoyoteBlue,
The reason (as others have stated) that many of us have problems with the idea of reducing abortions and making them “rare” is that it’s been tried.
Many times.
And, over and over and over, even the LEAST of restrictions on it gets met with the full power of the Left wing machine.
We can’t: require a woman to wait; ask her to see her baby on an ultrasound; restrict her access below the age of 18; require notification to her parents, or, if abusive, to a judge; require abortion clinics to follow the same rules as medical clinics for ANY other condition; limit the gestation age when an abortion is permitted (the closest we’ve come is a general ban on partial birth abortion, which was HEAVILY fought against, and still doesn’t deal with all the viable babies after 20 weeks, or all the babies who look just like babies after 12 weeks).
It goes on and on. There really is no “compromise.” It isn’t as if it hasn’t been tried. It’s been tried repeatedly, and ANY assault on abortion and on its complete freedom is viciously attacked.
Report comment to moderator
PP regularly lets assaults go unreported (especially older, much older men and young girls). It allows pressure from others to push a girl who doesn’t want it into an abortion. It refuses to offer full education and options. It has regularly APPROVED of pimps using their services for their girls/slaves, and workers have even given suggestions to these pimps on how not to get caught.
THIS is “helping women?”
You must have a very different view of “helping” than I do.
Report comment to moderator
http://www.lifenews.com/2011/11/28/abortion-nearly-triples-breast-cancer-risk-new-study-finds/
And in other news, Alcoholics Anonymous is paying for a Bud Light commercial during the Super Bowl and the NAACP is buying robes and hoods for all new KKK members.
Report comment to moderator
@149: I would not support PP, in large part due to their association with eugenics. Since the turn of last century, North American society has toyed with the idea of genetic purity. When the full horror of Nazism was exposed, we eventually turned from the idea of superior races with loathing. But the idea of purging genetic defects did not go away. Two Canadian provinces required mentally retarded persons to be sterilized until the 1970’s and several states also held such policies.
This idea of undesirable anomalies still persists on our continent, with 90% of unborn infants diagnosed with Trisomy 21 being aborted. My history books told me that the gassing of the mentally disabled by the Nazia was totally immoral, but I grew up to discover that the abortion of the mentally disabled is condoned in our society. Since PP is so strongly associated with that viewpoint, I cannot support them.
Report comment to moderator
Phos,
Is your field of study in healthcare?
I ask because of the statement you made concerning childbirth being the most dangerous experience a woman would go through. I would disagree with your viewpoint.
Report comment to moderator
I am doing my best to find pro-life groups that I can donate to with clean conscience. It is not easy! So many people seem to subscribe to the “if it helps me, it’s okay. Sorry if it hurts anyone else” philosophy. MANY charitable groups support embryonic stem cell experimentation, despite the fact that there have been ZERO advances in this area (all advances have been made in adult stem cell use), and that someone else had to die in order to get the material for experimentation.
Can you imagine what will happen if they ever are actually successful in treating something with embryonic stem cells? The “me first” attitude will promote abortion (possibly even for money) like there’s no tomorrow.
Report comment to moderator
Freida – It is a historical fact that the most common cause of death for women was childbirth in the early part of last century and previous. The reason that it is no longer, is because of medical advances, primarily in nutrition, basic sterility and rapid response to emergencies. It is a natural, healthy process, but things go wrong – I often think of Eve’s curse as the reason why such a beautiful process should be so often dangerous (Genesis 3:16).
Report comment to moderator
Tammy – It isn’t abortion that would take off with successful embryonic stem cell treatments, but sperm and ovum donation and the sale of residual zygotes from IVF treatments. Embryonic stem cells are formed from the first few cell divisions after conception, until they become too specialized. – That is a whole other field of ethical dilemna, though related.
Report comment to moderator
So far, the following charities seem okay by pro-life standards. Some seem to have ratings on their financial transparency. Those that I found with good ratings have a * by them:
*Food For The Poor 6401 Lyons Road Coconut Creek, FL 33073
*Habitat for Humanity 121 Habitat Street Americus, GA 31709-3498
John Paul II Stem Cell Research Institute Iowa City, IA 52245
MaterCare International 8 Riverview Avenue St John’s, NL A1C 2S5
Canada
Sound Choice Pharmaceutical Institute Eklind Hall 1102 Columbia St, Ste 316 Seattle, WA 98104
The Iacocca Foundation Boston, MA 02116
*The Salvation Army — The life site (American Life League) that I was checking with doesn’t like them because of a statement made by their international office awhile back that made possible exceptions on abortion for rape, incest, or life of the mother — which were suggested very cautiously and were not necessarily wrong.) However, I remember reading that the U.S. office disagreed with the international statement and definitely disagrees with abortion.)
Report comment to moderator
Phos,
Is there a clinic/charity that helps women that does not coerce their decision making process you would recommend? If there is such an organization I would redirect my charitable cash.
Tammy
PP lets assaults go unreported — uhm, like so many institutions? Catholics, anyone? This makes PP so much worse than reputedly Godly groups? At least PP does not purport to be the one and only way. That may seem unfair, but if a group of people is going to set itself apart as morally superior than it has to be so, as much as humanely possible.
The USG is held to a different standard than the rest of the world on human rights — but that is because the USG states its support for human rights and condemnation of abuses of human rights unequivocally. It is right, in my view, that the USG is judged by a higher standard as we have set ourselves as an example.
Ricky,
LOL, I do get the skewering. It may not be wholly deserved.
Report comment to moderator
BTW, it doesn’t mean that the other organizations DON’T have good ratings. It simply means that I was only researching on one site, and didn’t continue my present research right now.
Report comment to moderator
CoyoteBlue,
I guess I don’t understand your point. It is okay for PP to do illegal and immoral things — regularly — and be excused for them, because other groups do bad things too?
So, you’re trying to tell me that my mother was wrong? Two wrongs DO make a right?
Report comment to moderator
And, CoyoteBlue, it’s one thing to state your preference and argue for it (which, I suppose, especially in the case of a young mother might be construed as coersion).
However, it is quite another to not report illegal activity, cover for the illegal activity, force the mother physically (crying and complaining) because some man is paying for it or her family wants it, and not give her full information.
And, the results, of course are much different due to a mistake.
In the first instance, a baby lives and the mother suffers 3 months of discomfort or so, including — possibly — an uncomfortable birth.
In the second case, a baby dies, horrible people (like abusive boyfriends, fathers, or pimps) go free to do it again, and the girl lives with a great deal of guilt.
I think it is preferable to err on the side of the Catholic charity that might make a girl feel uncomfortable about abortion. ESPECIALLY since, at the very least, she OUGHT to feel uncomfortable about it. That “rare” thing … right??
Report comment to moderator
Coyoteblue – Since I have only donated to local groups, I’m afraid I can’t help you. A donation to a hospital or clinic that specializes in perinatal care might be one way to go.
Report comment to moderator
Coyote Blue,
Enjoyed the discussion. I have to respect anyone that has a sense of humor and puts, “y’all” in a post.
Report comment to moderator
“Start with the proposition that abortion is a terrible choice. . .”
But you still didn’t say why it is a terrible choice. Having a mole removed is not regarded as a terrible choice, so why is having a fetus removed a terrible choice?
You still haven’t exaplained why it should be rare.
“Abortion is a medical procedure and a serious one and pregnancy is mostly preventable in this modern era — so abortion should be rare, in my view.”
That explains why it could be rare–not why it should be. If there is nothing morally wrong with it, why should it be rare?
You mention viability. Unfortunately the definition of that word has changed. Fetal viability used to mean that the fetus was properly implanted and was developing properly–not that it could survive outside the womb.
As for pregnancies terminating naturally, that is a sad fact of life. The point is that it is sad when it happens. Why do it on purpose? Why use it as an excuse for destroying a baby? People are killed in car accidents, but that doesn’t mean that people should run their cars into other people’s cars head on.
“. . .in what is a personal and possibly devastating choice for another person I am not going to substitute my judgment for theirs.”
Ah, but you are inconsistent, I’m sure. You would not say that in regard to many other things. For example, you have tried to substitute your judgement for people’s here by advocating same-sex marriage. Anytime anybody advocates for anything–pro or con–that is what they are doing, no?
You are willing to substitute your judgment for the judgment of those who deem abortion as equivalent to murder. No?
“Past 3 months, I do think there is a change in character if the potential human, and so yes I supported the partial birth abortion ban.”
What is the difference, as far as you can tell, between the fetus on the day that you would prohibit an abortion and on the day before that? Do you believe that a soul suddenly inhabits the baby on that exact day? Do you think it suddenly has brain wave activity or a beating heart or the abitlity to smile? Do you think that on a certain day–poof–now it looks like a “real” baby?
And are you actually saying that you would outlaw abortions after the first trimester? You only mention banning partial birth abortion which can happen on the due date. Even then, are you saying that as long as the baby does not have to be partially delivered, it is okay to tear off their limbs? That’s what happens at a certain stage. Is it okay just to fry it with saline solution on some arbitrary day before it would have to be partially delievered so that its brains can be sucked out?
If you do not like my graphic language, that should tell you something.
“. . .liberals will agree with you on that point.”
Actually there is a website full of testimonails from women who say that it is a good choice and one that they are proud of making. There are liberals who say that it is a good choice because it gets rid of babies who are defective. There are liberals who say it is a good choice because pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood are a form of slavery imposed on women.
“. . .try to avoid comparisons to Nazi enablers. . .”
Except that Nazis got rid of the “unwanted” in gruesome ways. It is a very accurate comparison. And it is not name-calling, since it is based on actual similarity.
“. . .employ Jesus’ admonition to forgive seven times seven.”
I think that all of us can forgive those who perform abortions or procure them, especially the young ladies who are practically forced into doing it. That is not the same as condoning it.
Besides, if it is not wrong, what is there to forgive. You woul d not need to ask for forgiveness, if it were not wrong. Just say that your view is right and ours is wrong. In fact, if pro-life people are wrong, then we are the ones who need to be forgiven.
“. . the availability of contraception.”
I am not against contraception. However, if you mean passing out pills or condoms to children, I think there is a lot to talk about there. For example, why were there more unwanted pregnancies and, therefore, more abortions AFTER contraception became more widely understood and more widely available?
As for adoption, there are lots and lots of people ready, willing, and able to adopt. That is a straw man. When my wife and I first wanted to adopt, there were long waiting lists and some agencies told us that we might as well give up. I echo Mother Teresa: “I’ll take the babies. Give the babies to me.”
As for neo-natal care, it is available and so is the funding. One thing we need to do is make the man (or boy) responsible for paying for those things.
As for our not telling the story well, it would help if the media report it accurately. That is THEIR job.
Report comment to moderator
KEN: And what positive effect does this have on the health of the millions of girl babies killed before they had an opportunity to grow into women?
Fetuses don’t have souls, of course. The souls are waiting with God in heaven for babies to draw in the breath of life. Lovely thought, isn’t it? The abortion of unwanted fetuses gives these souls the opportunity to incarnate into babies that are wanted.
Report comment to moderator
Tammy,
No, survey says !@#$$TYYJH try again. I did not say it was ok to do immoral things. I said I disagreed with your view on abortion in the 0-3 month period of inception (I confess I did not say that literally). And I implied that I do not know when the human person is ensouled and that I do not feel that I have the knowledge to make decisions for other people on this issue and so (I did not say this part, but I did imply it) since I do not know, I believe the answer is for each individual and their relationship with their family and God. I do believe in a karmic sense that whatever decision is made will be revisited. I know what I would do or would advise a daughter or person in my ambit, but that was not the question.
Do you understand or is that just to grey, just too nuanced, just too real?
Report comment to moderator
Kyle
I do start with the proposition that abortion is a terrible choice, which is why it should be rare.
If a person is thinking about abortion that person thinks that there are no options. Their life is over. There is no other way. Contrary to what you seem to think, even the most promiscuous among us actually doesn’t want to abort prospective life. Everything in human DNA tells us to survive (oh, wait, that might be Darwinistic, scratch that bit of sense and replace it with whatever sinful impulse you would like to place in the blank.)
Kyle
If you cannot say straight up that original sin causes unborn humans to be naturally aborted, well then, you need to learn to pretzel better. And stop judging me for not pretzeling that well myself.
Report comment to moderator
The question is this:
Say you have an organization that provides pregnancy testing, pre-natal care, adoption help, day care for infants, job training for the pregnant women and other services, and also abortions. Its goal is reduce the number of abortions by 30 percent by making other options easier for pregnant women, and for the sake of argument let’s say there’s no doubt of their sincerity.
Do you support it with your donations on the grounds that reducing abortion by one-third would be a big accomplishment and save many babies? Or do you refuse on the grounds that they do perform some abortions?
Report comment to moderator
#171
I can’t answer you, because I don’t really think #171 made much sense.
Also, you have never answered Kyle’s questions.
His #169 was really excellent, and you didn’t engage with it at all.
Report comment to moderator
#173
Let’s say there’s a delicious cake and you’re offered a slice, but the batter had a turd in it. Do you take the slice?
What if it had half a turd? A quarter of a turd?
Wouldn’t you prefer to eat the cake with NO turd contamination?
So would I. My money and support go to the organization that does all of the good you mentioned AND no abortions.
Report comment to moderator
You didn’t engage any of my points either, CoyoteBlue.
Report comment to moderator
#175: Analogy fail. A cake free of sewage is a possibility. A world without abortion is not.
So the organization aggressively tries to help women make other choices.
You would sacrifice the 30% of pregnancies they could save, because it’s not 100%? If so, then how are you not complicit in the death of those 30%? You could have helped save them and didn’t.
Report comment to moderator
Tammy
I do not expect nor ask you to change your view that abortion is murder.
Got that part?
I think we might agree that it would be better of lots of abortions didn’t happen.
Got that part?
I think we could agree on that part above that less abortion is a good thing.
Still getting it?
I don’t agree with you that abortion is always murder and should be illegal. But I do think it is a serious medical procedure and a serious decision that individuals need to make and bear the consequences for good or ill.
Still following me Tammy or was that just too much?
Report comment to moderator
#175
No analogy is perfect, but that is FAR from a fail, because there are many groups that are helping women, reducing abortion, and yet do not perform any abortions themselves.
And, I do believe that, with a world more educated, we can approach very, very few abortions.
We don’t make murder legal because some people will still kill if it is. We don’t make robbery legal because some people will still steal.
We don’t keep abortion legal because some people will still abort. But, making it illegal (with some minor concessions for true medical purposes) WOULD most definitely cut down on the number of abortions. A lot more than 30%.
Report comment to moderator
CoyoteBlue,
You still didn’t engage my points, and now you’re being condescending and rude to boot.
Report comment to moderator
I need to rephrase.
Even though murder is illegal, some people still kill.
Even though robbery is illegal, some people still steal.
Therefore, it is ridiculous to argue that we shouldn’t make abortion illegal because some people will still abort.
The numbers would go WAY down.
Report comment to moderator
Coyoteblue,
You wrote,
“, even the most promiscuous among us actually doesn’t want to abort prospective life.”
I’d like to believe that,too. Let’s do what it takes to reverse Roe v Wade. With abortion being illegal, those women who didn’t want to be pregnant may decide to do what’s lawful and give birth. Since they actually never wanted to abort anyway.
Abortion is complicated, like you said. Let’s uncomplicate things by making abortion less attractive and I am sure that the children born will rise up and bless their mothers.
Report comment to moderator
Tammy
What would you like me to answer? At 166 it sounds alot like you are talking about rape. And would I want to tell a woman what to do in that circumstance? No. Nor would I want anyone to tell me what to do in that circumstance. I think that is the hard case and why I would not seek to replace my judgement for the person in the circumstance. I would not arrogate to myself knowledge of who they are and what happened. That is between the woman, God and her family. Others who choose to peer in should mind their own business.
As to your cake analogy, you know what, if biting the turd meant I would save life, I’d bite it. If you would not, well, that crap is on you.
Report comment to moderator
Frieda
Ok. Let’s also fund those new lives with education, child care, health care — all the stuff a kid needs to have to prosper, about a million a kid I believe. You think charities will be able to cover that?
Report comment to moderator
Oh Tammy, I have not been close to rude and am sorry to think that you think I have been. Trust me when I say, if I were rude to you, you would really know it. I have been gentle in this thread. If you would like rude, I can happily comply, as I am not in the best of all moods.
Report comment to moderator
Wow! Are you really on board? Now we’re talking!
I know you’re just being facetious because it sounds like it’s only a matter of money that is the deal breaker.
Seriously, though, if the money is there to raise a child, then it would make sense to stop women from killing their children, right? I do believe the money is there. We just have to make the ones who don’t believe the money is there to do what’s right and then help them. I’m willing. Are you?
Report comment to moderator
Murder and Robbery of living, breathing persons is pretty hard to misconstrue.
Hi, my name is CB, I am one week old and am a blastocyte. Someday, if I multiple and divide a whole lot, I will show up on your sonogram – picto thingy as a possible human.
Please, please don’t abort me.
HINT to Tammy and everyone else, Now I am mocking you.
BUT I am not mocking God.
You and your beliefs are not God.
God will judge me and you.
Your judgement, well see above. If you are a pharisee or a Sadducee then you will yelp as if the world had said you were a bad person.
If you are not either category and God did not strike you with lightening for having read thus far well maybe just maybe you can make a real difference.
Report comment to moderator
Yes, Frieda, what can we do. Really do? I do have some skills in the real world.
Report comment to moderator
Have you watched Schindler’s List? He bought the lives of many.
We can buy lives too. We can support organizations that offer women options other than killing their unborn. We can offer our home, as someone once did for me. We can buy food and give clothes, as was done for me. We can say, no, we MUST say, do not kill your baby. There is a way to get through this. I got through it. I don’t regret having any of my children. I was very poor and alone once. The lack of money wasn’t the deal breaker for me. I believe if enough people say loudly enough that killing the unborn is wrong and give money and help those organizations equipping women to give birth, there would be less abortions. Until then, or until Roe v Wade is overturned, abortions will not be rare. And it will not be because there is not enough money.
Report comment to moderator
“Three truths, in particular, should be obvious to everyone reporting on the Komen-Planned Parenthood controversy. First, that the fight against breast cancer is unifying and completely uncontroversial, while the provision of abortion may be the most polarizing issue in the United States today. Second, that it’s no more “political” to disassociate oneself from the nation’s largest abortion provider than it is to associate with it in the first place. Third, that for every American who greeted Komen’s shift with “anger and outrage” (as Andrea Mitchell put it), there was probably an American who was relieved and gratified.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/opinion/sunday/douthat-the-medias-blinders-on-abortion.html
Report comment to moderator
http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2012/02/nyts-douthat-media-biased-on-komen-113493.html
“According to the most recent Gallup poll, from July 2011, the country is evenly split on the abortion issue, with 47 percent identifying themselves as pro-life and 47 percent identifying themselves as pro-choice. Douthat also points out that 58 percent of those surveyed believe abortion should either be “illegal in all circumstances” or “legal in only a few circumstances” (versus 39 percent who believe abortion should either be “legal under any circumstances” or “legal under most circumstances.”)”
Report comment to moderator
The above statistics are a HUGE change from 1996. Pro-life is growing as science shows people what is really happening.
Notice how no one who is pro-choice seems even ABLE to acknowledge babies between 12 weeks and 35 or so (when partial birth abortion happens).
What about all the babies pulled apart limb from limb, or tortured to death with chemicals, that are older than 12 weeks and younger than the full-term “partial birth” baby?????
Report comment to moderator
Hi, my name is CB, I am one week old and am a blastocyte. Someday, if I multiple and divide a whole lot, I will show up on your sonogram – picto thingy as a possible human.
******What about the HALF of abortions that take place after the baby is FULLY FORMED at 12 weeks?
What about the 3/4 or so that take place after the baby looks like a baby and has a beating heart?
What about the vast majority of abortions that take place LONG after the baby is no longer “just a clump of cells” or a “blastocyst?” (which, btw, is the proper word).
You pro-choice people never seem to talk of them. In fact, you seem to be unable to even note them. Even when asked point blank about them, you never talk about them or respond to questions about them.
It’s all about those first 3 weeks or so, or — possibly — the full-term baby who is subjected to partial birth abortion.
The hundreds of thousands of those in-between? The ones that are burned and torn apart alive? What about THOSE???
Report comment to moderator
A fetus past the 13th week or so cannot simply be “vacuumed out” (as if that wouldn’t be horrible in and of itself as it tears the baby apart). It must be dismembered (alive) and pulled out in pieces, or chemically burned to death and then “delivered.”
This latter process is still used, but less often, because, sometimes, the chemical process doesn’t work, and the aborted baby lives for awhile, gasping for air — crying sometimes. At some abortion clinics, these babies are dropped into buckets and left, or put into plastic bags where they suffocate. In the worst of abortion clinics, even though it is illegal, the abortionist actively kills the baby who was born alive. (Obama didn’t even want to make that illegal. :-p )
What about them?
Report comment to moderator
Tammy
I was adopted when I was 8 months old. I do understand the options for unwanted ones like me.
Your histrionics are just that. Wasted on me.
You would do much better to try something practical with me. If you can.
Report comment to moderator
My mother told me that the reason I was conceived was that the sterilization that was meant to be done on her didn’t work. They told her they had fixed her. Oops. That was in 1962 and she lived in America and she was an American Indian. Her bad.
I am a lucky one, I lived anyway.
You social conservatives are so self-righteous. It is sickening.
Report comment to moderator
Again, no comments on the question of those who are not “just clumps of cells” i.e. the vast majority of abortions.
It’s almost like they don’t see it, can’t hear it, can’t read it — it might even make a good sci-fi thriller. Why is it that pro-choice people can’t even notice the child that exists between their proverbial “clump of cells” and the child ready to be born but also subject to partial birth abortion?
Was I wrong about my description? (No, because I went to a medical website to get it.)
Was I wrong about the gestational age and what happens? (No, I got it from a reputable website.)
But, no comments on the facts. No answers to the questions.
All I get is ad hominem attack calling me “histrionic.”
Amazing.
Report comment to moderator
The facts are the facts.
But, I guess when the facts are really uncomfortable, we just ignore them and call the other side names. Seems to work for Planned Parenthood too.
Report comment to moderator
#196 CoyoteBlue
“My mother told me that the reason I was conceived was that the sterilization that was meant to be done on her didn’t work.”
I am sorry government did that to your mother. Government was wrong.
“You social conservatives are so self-righteous. It is sickening.”
I apologize for being self-righteous. Jesus condemned that attitude and so should we.
You have tried to be kind to those who disagree with you on this thread. Thank you for being a good example.
I am the father of three adopted children, all older. I can’t imagine the pain and hurt you have gone through because of things done to you. I hope you have decided to let the past be done. I pray for my children to not let the decisions of their birth parents and government be an anchor holding them back. I will add you to that list of people to pray for if I may.
I miss your reasoning here on WMB. It has been too long since you posted. I hope to see you here more regularly, and I am sure Conan wants to hear more from you.
PS I like your Nom de Plume. It is pretty and makes you seem that way.
Report comment to moderator
#200? Too good not to try for!
Report comment to moderator
http://180movie.com/
Interesting. When people are actually made to hear their own words back at them.
Report comment to moderator
Oh phoo! I think I should have gotten 200.
Are you enjoying all the balloons and prizes, Bob?
What?? No balloons or prizes??? Phooie!
Report comment to moderator
#202 Tammy
I have been updating my computer software. Downloading, trying to stay awake, failing, waking up. Well, to bed for me!
Report comment to moderator
CoyoteBlue,
Perhaps we are talking around one another. From my perspective, you are saying that abortion is not preferable, but the “baby” isn’t a baby anyway, it’s simply a potential baby … a blastocyst, a clump of cells.
Yet, you seem to be ignoring the science that shows that the baby is only a “clump of cells” for a few weeks, and is only called a “blastocyst” until the heart starts to beat at around 8 weeks.
After that, the baby is a fetus. This is not some special term. “Fetus” simply means an “unborn baby.” Because it isn’t in standard English, it seems to help people to use the term so that they don’t have to think about the humanity of the baby. But, the baby is fully formed, although very small.
So, I ask you the same thing I asked Conan earlier (and got no answer). Are you willing to concede that abortion after 8 weeks is not okay?
If so, pending my desire to see people educated and changing in their views, I would — for the sake of all the babies saved — also agree to make abortion illegal ONLY over 8 weeks or after the heart starts beating.
I still believe with my whole heart that it is morally wrong to abort a baby of ANY gestational age, but I’m trying to understand if you can see the science behind this, rather than the pro-choice rhetoric you’ve listened to. (Neither, you nor Conan seemed to understand that partial-birth abortion only applied to full-term babies, and that over half of abortions happen AFTER 8 weeks and well past the “clump of cells” stage.)
In other words, while I can see that, before the heart starts beating, it may be philosophically and morally wrong to kill the child, I cannot show with science that killing the baby at this point should be lawfully wrong (i.e. illegal.)
But, you have to concede that science makes it abundantly clear that the baby is most definitely a fully formed baby after 8 weeks, and certainly after 12 weeks, and that ripping apart or chemically burning a fully formed child with all its parts is a pretty horrific thing to do. I cannot think of ANY excuse (and money would be quite at the bottom of any list I even attempted) that would make that palatable. So, in my mind, doing so is not only philosophically and morally wrong, but should also be illegal.
Report comment to moderator
BTW, I’m very sorry that the government hurt your birth mother (and, through her, you). I was also saddened to read tonight that your father passed away recently after being in a lot of pain.
Thus, while I don’t necessarily agree with Bob that you’ve been “an example” in this thread, I can certainly understand and empathize with you feeling sad and/or irritable.
My condolences.
Report comment to moderator
Coyoteblue, I want to add my condolences to Tammy’s, if you will receive them. Regardless of how we view abortion, it is painful to lose a loved one, and my heart goes out to you.
I will tell my story, if you will indulge me. My mother got pregnant at age 17, before she was married. My great-grandmother urged her to get an abortion and was willing to take her to a state where it was legal. My mother would not do it, thankfully. She was not a Christian, but she knew that I was not just a clump of cells and her conscience would not allow her to destroy me. As you can see, this is a personal issue to me.
In addition, my wife and I lost two babies. One was a a fetus that did not develop properly. The other was an ectopic pregnancy–stuck in the fallopian tube. Having lost two of our future children, we cannot fathom how anybody could purposely destroy one. We understand the desperation that a woman, espeically a young woman, might feel, especially when put under pressure by a scoundrel of a lover or by inadequate parents. So we have only compassion for most of the women who get abortions. It is the people who exploit them for money or convenience that we find despicable. It is the cold, hard women who say that they are proud that they had abortions or who seem to revel in the death of the unborn that we find disgusting (in the literal sense of that word).
You wrote, “I do start with the proposition that abortion is a terrible choice, which is why it should be rare.”
You still do not say what makes it terrible. I believe that you know what makes it terrible, but you cannot bring yourself to articulate it. I’m going out on a limb here, but I believe that if you could actually admit–to yourself–why abortion is a terrible choice, you would have to become pro-choice. I could be wrong, however.
You wrote, “Contrary to what you seem to think, even the most promiscuous among us actually doesn’t want to abort prospective life.”
Why not? If it isn’t wrong, then why would somebody care one way or another? (Never mind the fallacy in saying that people do not want to do things that they do. Only young women who are forced to have an abortion by their boyfriends or parents can claim that they did not “want” to do it.)
“Everything in human DNA tells us to survive. . .”
Actually, a creationist could accept such an answer, since God created DNA with that impulse. Either way–evolution or creation–you now seem to be saying that it is the presence of DNA that makes abortion wrong. When does the new human being receive its complete sequence of DNA? I’m sure you know that it is at the moment that the sperm and ovum unite. Do you really want to go there?
Additionally. . .
You did not say what makes Day X different from Day Y in terms of why abortion is acceptable on X but not on Y. (I’m looking for something concrete, such as brain waves are detectable or the baby responds unmistakably to stimuli or something of that nature.)
You did not say if you would agree to a ban on abortion after the first trimester, even though you say that you believe it is bad after that point.
Report comment to moderator
Coyote Blue reminded me of a book by Edwin Black, WAR AGAINST THE WEAK: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race.
American Indians were not the only targets of forced sterilization. A lawsuit was recently decided in favor of compensating victims in NC.
Report comment to moderator
CoyoteBlue, I’m so glad you consider yourself lucky to have survived your mother’s failed sterilization. I would count God as having had a hand in that, too. That was quite a remarkable way to begin life. And it reminds me of those who have survived failed abortions.
Report comment to moderator
Interesting article about the leftwing State-controlled media bias on this particular story (Komen and Planned Parenthood) – from the NYT, no less – this, apparently, is their token ‘conservative’ op-ed, sort of like Pravda occasionally trotted out a vaguely underdone critical-of-the-status quo article, in order to keep the State censors from dying from sheer boredom.
Even in an intellectual garbage dump like the NYT, occasionally a usable item can be found, I guess.
http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2012/02/nyts-douthat-media-biased-on-komen-113493.html
Report comment to moderator
Tammy: So, I ask you the same thing I asked Conan earlier (and got no answer). Are you willing to concede that abortion after 8 weeks is not okay?
If so, pending my desire to see people educated and changing in their views, I would — for the sake of all the babies saved — also agree to make abortion illegal ONLY over 8 weeks or after the heart starts beating.
I thought I did say, and I apologize if I was not clear enough, that I think it’s perfectly appropriate for states to make laws significantly restricting abortion after the first trimester, as Roe allows. That’s slightly more than the first eight weeks you’re describing, but quite a bit less than the ‘on demand anytime’ that many pro-lifers seem to think is the case.
I still believe with my whole heart that it is morally wrong to abort a baby of ANY gestational age, but I’m trying to understand if you can see the science behind this, rather than the pro-choice rhetoric you’ve listened to. (Neither, you nor Conan seemed to understand that partial-birth abortion only applied to full-term babies, and that over half of abortions happen AFTER 8 weeks and well past the “clump of cells” stage.)
I think Coyote and I both understand what a partial-birth abortion is. She and I both support a ban on that; I would add the caveat that if the pregnancy endangers the mother, there might be allowance for an exception. But as a matter of pure discretion when not therapeutically necessary? No.
But again, while the pro-life side talks about this procedure in lurid detail at every opportunity, it is actually the case in well under 1 percent of all abortions. Stoking emotional reactions against abortion by citing something that almost never happens compared to more conventional procedures is a rhetorical trick, not a valid argument.
Report comment to moderator
Can’t imagine why a “rhetorical trick” would bother you Conan. Better you should just ignore it.
Report comment to moderator
Conan,
No, again you misunderstand. Partial birth abortion is already illegal (for the most part) in the United States.
We are talking about the HALF of abortions that occur, regularly, after the 12th week of gestation (or, over half, if you count from the 8th week when the heart starts beating.)
The chemical burning, limbs being pulled off, descriptions that you hear are NOT about partial birth abortion. They are about HALF or more of the abortions presently taking place — daily — in the United States.
Are we clear? These horrific descriptions are NOT about partial birth abortion. They are about HALF plus of the abortions that are happening RIGHT NOW, daily, and quite legally.
Report comment to moderator
I’m going out on a limb here, but I believe that if you could actually admit–to yourself–why abortion is a terrible choice, you would have to become pro-choice. I could be wrong, however.
******I think you meant that she’d have to become pro-life.
Report comment to moderator
What I notice is that, regularly, the actual arguments of the pro-life crowd are ignored. Rather, arguments in rebuttal don’t actually engage what we really said at all.
Then, when that doesn’t work, we get called names: “histrionic,” “self-righteous” etc. Now, that may be mild name-calling, but it is still ad hominem: intended to distract.
There is not one description or one thing I’ve said that cannot be proven with photos and even the most cursory of research.
But, if we see that Drill’s descriptions really are true, that babies really are torn apart alive, that they are dropped in buckets, etc. etc. then we’d have to admit that abortion is horrific.
So, instead, the conversation keeps heading right back to the first week or so when the baby is closest to being “just a clump of cells” or back to the full-term baby almost-delivered and killed.
The vast majority of babies between those ages are simply ignored. Again, it almost feels like the Twilight Zone. Why can’t we talk about the HALF of babies who are torn apart between 12 weeks and full term?
I’m far from “histrionic.” I’m simply stating facts. Verifiable. Irrefutable. FACTS.
Yet, whenever prolife people do this, the facts are ignored and we’re accused of all sorts of things, including “rhetorical tricks.”
How is stating facts a “rhetorical trick?” How is it “histrionic?”
What it actually is, more likely, is something that is truly so horrible that the pro-choice side doesn’t want to face it, and so they keep averting their attention from it.
Report comment to moderator
Coyoteblue,
At post 112,
You wrote,
“I had to go to 4 years of a conservative religious university to understand that there was a whole political and theological belief system to qualify as a Christian.”
I am not sure I am expressing myself adequately that you would think opposing the killing of the unborn is merely part of a political and theological belief system. While it’s certainly true that the whole duty of man(kind) is to fear God and keep his commandments, the reason I and maybe other Christians try to engage you in discussion on abortion is because we want to speak up for those who cannot defend themselves. The unborn are at the mercy of their mothers but God gives the state the authority to protect it’s people and since we are a republic, we can make a difference in who we elect into office. You seem like a caring and compassionate person. I appreciate the effort you put into these exchanges. It helps me to see that there’s still need for dialogue.
As a Christian, I follow the Bible. It doesn’t take 4 years of anything to show me that when God says Thou shalt not kill, I take His word for it and advocate for the lives of the unborn. So even if there are Christians who are for keeping abortion legal, the fundamentals of Christianity are loving God and loving one’s neighbor. It’s not love to keep the truth of abortion from those don’t have it.
Report comment to moderator
Tammy (#213), thanks. I had a bit of brain fog there.
Report comment to moderator
#215
Thanks, Freida. My reasons exactly.
Report comment to moderator
Kyle
Thank you for sharing part of your life’s story — I appreciate it. I tried to answer part of your question, albeit imperfectly. I don’t know when life begins — it is that simple. I am qualified to make a decision about abortion if it concerns me or people I am responsible for. I am not qualified to make the decision for any one else.
Bob
Very generous – thank you.
Tammy
We could talk about “indisputable fact” all day long and still get no where. Please tell me when a soul enters a body. That is a question no one knows the answer to.
Frieda
I’ve seen socially conservative Christians make their arguments about much more than abortion. Many folks here state that you can’t be a democrat and be a Christian, for example. In the 1980s Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and others made abortion THE litmus test issue for conservative evangelicals. That combined with the fight against godless communism and found purchase in the right wing of one political party. Evangelicals are viewed as the base of the Republican party — I’d think that should bother most Pastors.
Report comment to moderator
NOVEMBER 2, 2008 12:00 A.M.
When Life Begins
Will politics trump science?
When does the life of a human individual begin? Although the question is of obvious importance for our public policy debates over abortion and embryonic-stem-cell research, politicians have avoided it like the plague. Of late, though, things seem to be changing. Recently some of our nation’s most prominent political leaders, from the Speaker of the House to both contenders for the office of president, have weighed in on the question.
Faced with the complicated and not-very-widely-known facts of human embryology, most people are inclined to agree with the sentiment expressed by Speaker Pelosi, who has stated “I don’t think anybody can tell you when… human life begins.”
When does the life of a human individual begin? Although the question is of obvious importance for our public policy debates over abortion and embryonic-stem-cell research, politicians have avoided it like the plague. Of late, though, things seem to be changing. Recently some of our nation’s most prominent political leaders, from the Speaker of the House to both contenders for the office of president, have weighed in on the question.
Faced with the complicated and not-very-widely-known facts of human embryology, most people are inclined to agree with the sentiment expressed by Speaker Pelosi, who has stated “I don’t think anybody can tell you when… human life begins.”
Yet is Speaker Pelosi correct? Is it actually the case that no one can tell you with any degree of authority when the life of a human being actually begins?
No, it is not. Treating the question as some sort of grand mystery, or expressing or feigning uncertainty about it, may be politically expedient, but it is intellectually indefensible. Modern science long ago resolved the question. We actually know when the life of a new human individual begins.
A recently published white paper, “When does human life begin? A scientific perspective,” offers a thorough discussion of the facts of human embryogenesis and early development, and its conclusion is inescapable: From a purely biological perspective, scientists can identify the point at which a human life begins. The relevant studies are legion. The biological facts are uncontested. The method of analysis applied to the data is universally accepted.
Your life began, as did the life of every other human being, when the fusion of egg and sperm produced a new, complete, living organism — an embryonic human being. You were never an ovum or a sperm cell, those were both functionally and genetically parts of other human beings — your parents. But you were once an embryo, just as you were once an adolescent, a child, an infant, and a fetus. By an internally directed process, you developed from the embryonic stage into and through the fetal, infant, child, and adolescent stages of development and ultimately into adulthood with your determinateness, unity, and identity fully intact. You are the same being — the same human being — who once was an embryo.
It is true that each of us, in the embryonic and fetal stages of development, were dependent on our mothers, but we were not maternal body parts. Though dependent, we were distinct individual human beings. That is why physicians who treat pregnant women know that they are caring not for one patient, but for two. (Of course, in cases of twins and triplets physicians are caring for more than two!)
Why, then, do we seem so far from a consensus on questions of abortion and embryo-destructive research?
Perhaps because the debate over when human life begins has never been about the biological facts. It has been about the value we ascribe to human beings at the dawn of their lives. When we debate questions of abortion, assisted reproductive technologies, human embryonic stem cell research and human cloning, we are not really disagreeing about whether human embryos are human beings. The scientific evidence is simply too overwhelming for there to be any real debate on this point. What is at issue in these debates is the question of whether we ought to respect and defend human beings in the earliest stages of their lives. In other words, the question is not about scientific facts; it is about the nature of human dignity and the equality of human beings.
On one side are those who believe that human beings have dignity and rights by virtue of their humanity. They believe that all human beings, irrespective not only of race, ethnicity, and sex, but also irrespective of age, size, and stage of development, are equal in fundamental worth and dignity. The right to life is a human right — therefore all human beings, from the point at which they come into being (conception) to the point at which they cease to be (death), possess it.
On the other side are those who believe that those human beings who have worth and dignity have them in virtue of having achieved a certain level of development. They deny that all human beings have worth and dignity and hold that a distinction should be drawn between those human beings who have achieved the status of “personhood” and those (such as embryos, fetuses, and, according to some, infants and severely retarded or demented individuals) whose status is that of human non-persons.
A common error these days is for people to convert the question of when a human life begins from a matter of biology to a matter of religious faith or personal belief. Senator Biden recently asserted that while he believes life begins at the moment of conception, this was a “personal and private” belief deriving from his religion that may not legitimately be imposed on others “in a pluralistic society.”
Biden is perfectly correct about when a life begins — at conception. But he is wrong to suppose that this is a mere matter of personal opinion or a position deriving only from religion. It is a matter of biological fact. Politics should not be permitted to trump it.
In view of the established facts of human embryogenesis and early intrauterine development, the real question is not whether human beings in the embryonic and fetal stages are human beings. Plainly they are. The question is whether we will honor or abandon our civilizational and national commitment to the equal worth and dignity of all human beings — even the smallest, youngest, weakest, and most vulnerable.
— Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University.
Report comment to moderator
Our souls are part of us at the moment of conception, along with everything else that makes us human. That’s how God knows us, even before the womb, as He tells us. Elizabeth’s baby leapt in her womb when Mary greeted her.
Mothers have long recognized the different personalities of their unborn children. How could one have a personality without a soul? Abortions kill human beings. Souls live on. That’s all I need to know for now and trust God for the rest.
I disagree with Pres. Obama that the punishment of pregnancy is a baby.
Report comment to moderator
In 2010 Planned Parenthood aborted 300,000 babies – human babies. That was a new stistic to me.
Also new to me is the statistic that more Black babies are being aborted than are being born in NY. That’s the Margaret Sanger school of compassion.
Report comment to moderator
Freida,
Good George post. He explains it well.
CoyoteBlue, says: ‘Please tell me when a soul enters a body. That is a question no one knows the answer to.’
This is usually not a question of abortionists since most are not Christian so the science is the only thing they believe in. I’ll not try to answer that question directly but ask two more questions assuming that this is a Christian theology question:
Is there any scriptural evidence that there is any point of time that a human does not have a soul?
If so, is there any scriptural evidence that said pre-soul human is not made in the image of God or otherwise not as worthy of life?
Report comment to moderator
Please scratch the term abortionists is #222 and replace it with something like ‘those who see abortion as sometimes permissible’
Report comment to moderator
When does the soul enter the body? If we are to believe the Word of God is true, this scripture would hold the answer to that question. The Lord God Himself is the Creator of ALL life…he numbers ALL of our days…from the moment He begins dividing cells, knitting us together in our Mother’s wombs….His Eyes saw our “unformed body”….
Psalm 139
13 For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.
15 My frame was not hidden from you
when I was made in the secret place,
when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.
16 Your eyes saw my unformed body;
all the days ordained for me were written in your book
before one of them came to be.
Report comment to moderator
Loved #219 Freida.
Where can I get a direct link?
Report comment to moderator
CoyoteBlue,
What about the babies between 8 weeks and full term that are aborted?
Please tell me about them.
Report comment to moderator
BTW, if one is not SURE when the soul enters the body, then why in Heaven’s name would you take the chance and kill the baby at ANY gestational age?
If you’re wrong, then you’re certainly committing murder.
Report comment to moderator
Tammy,
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/226168/when-life-begins/robert-p-george
Let’s not grow weary in well doing.
Report comment to moderator
In addition scripture, the question of determining when we have souls will be answered and confirmed by the Holy Spirit. Not by name-calling honest doubters. I apologize for any part I’ve had in that.
We all understand how easy it is to become emotionally carried away when we ache to save the lives of babies who could be adopted instead of aborted.
Report comment to moderator
Colson on this issue:
http://links.mkt3980.com/servlet/MailView?ms=MzI4MTQyOQS2&r=OTQ0MjI5MDk2S0&j=Mzc3OTgyNzUS1&mt=1&rt=0
Report comment to moderator
Thanks Tychicus. It’s also my udnerstanding that part of the Congressional investigation involves the question of PP not reporting statutory rapes among its clients. Sorry if this was already stated.
Report comment to moderator
“Is there any scriptural evidence that there is any point of time that a human does not have a soul?
If so, is there any scriptural evidence that said pre-soul human is not made in the image of God or otherwise not as worthy of life?”
None of this actually matters. Neither human rights, nor the Bible’s prohibition of murder, talk about whether or not we can figure out whether something/someone has a soul or not.
If it’s human, you don’t kill it without just cause. “Inconveniently conceived” is not just cause for execution.
Report comment to moderator
In fact, it is the very idea that it somehow matters whether a human is one kind of human or a different, lesser kind of human that gets you race-based slavery and holocausts. Me, I’m in favor of protecting humans.
Report comment to moderator
Pentamom’s right. I don’t think Christians spend, or need to spend, much time trying to figure out if and when a soul is part of the equation. That’s something that pro-choice people like to bring up because we cannot give them a verifiable answer. Meanwhile, most of them do not believe that a person ever has a soul, so it is just a red herring.
(I did ask Coyoteblue what changes in regard to the fetus on a certain day, and I did ask if she believes that the fetus acquires a soul on that day. I did it just to provoke more thought on the matter.)
Report comment to moderator
Kyle, that’s the first I’ve ever heard that most pro-choice people do not believe that people have souls. And it is not a rare topic for Christians to discuss and write about.
Report comment to moderator
Louise: Kyle, that’s the first I’ve ever heard that most pro-choice people do not believe that people have souls.
Probably because it’s not true.
The difference isn’t that you believe in souls and we don’t. (Because many of us do.) It’s more than we believe women can end up with unwanted pregnancy for any number of reasons, ranging from ignorance to stupid choices to coercion to birth control failure to medical issues, and we don’t think the government should be in the business to dictating to them what they can do about it. Nobody thinks that abortion is a trivial thing to be done easily.
Here’s a good example, though, of why this is hard to have a productive dialogue about. The satirical newspaper The Onion published an article saying Planned Parenthood is planning to build an “abortionplex” with shops and a food court to make having an abortion a fun, social experience.
Rep. John Fleming, a Louisiana Republican, believed the story was true and posted it to his Facebook page for a brief time before figuring out that it was satire.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/06/john-fleming-onion-planned-parenthood_n_1257763.html
But why did he think it was real to begin with? Because a lot of pro-life people actually believe this is how pro-choicers view abortion, as something so inconsequential that it could be part of a fun afternoon.
As long as both sides are believing the most ridiculous caricatures of each other, we’ll get nowhere toward finding any understanding.
Report comment to moderator
Conan, you really think sarcasm is a sincere, productive contribution to this discussion? That’s one reason your arguments fail, except in the sophomoric abstract. And I actually think you’re better than that. But we’re beyond that and it’s over.
Report comment to moderator
What sarcasm?
Report comment to moderator
Oops. See how hard it is to come across as real?
Faux science from the lefties masquerades as opinion anymore as a lie against the freedom of religion.
Report comment to moderator
Sorry, you lost me. I don’t know how that relates to what I said.
Report comment to moderator
Conan,
You wrote,
“we believe women can end up with unwanted pregnancy for any number of reasons, ranging from ignorance to stupid choices to coercion to birth control failure to medical issues, and we don’t think the government should be in the business to dictating to them what they can do about it”
Yes, exactly. That’s why we have these discussions. What is the one thing that isn’t different between a wanted pregnancy verses an unwanted one? The baby. We’re saying we’re sympathetic to the women with unwanted pregnancies. There really are lots of people desperately trying to adopt those unwanted babies. A baby is a baby no matter what the mother’s situation is. Because a mother doesn’t want her unborn baby doesn’t give her the right to do whatever she wants to with that child. If she procrastinated and didn’t make her appointment with planned parenthood and her baby was born prematurely at 22 months, there’s a strong possibility that her baby may live. Suppose she decides that the government has no right telling her she may not kill this baby. You and everyone else(well, not Peter Sanger) would say, no, she cannot kill the baby. The government has every right to interfere and protect that baby. Right now, the government is wrongfully allowing mothers to kill their unborn. It doesn’t matter that the law allows for these killings. The holocaust in Germany IS a good example in comparing the wrongful killing of people by the Nazis and the abortions taking place now. The law that allowed the killings in Germany didn’t make it any less atrocious and wrong. It is everyone’s business to not allow babies to be killed. To say otherwise is to be inhumane and eventually we would become a society that is doomed to self destruct.
Report comment to moderator
Peter Singer, not Sanger
Report comment to moderator
Freida: Good post, and I agree. This is where constructive dialogue can begin. If people could agree that both the pro-choice and pro-life sides understand what the woman with an unplanned pregnancy is going through, and not resort to caricature, then perhaps some minds could be changed and progress made toward at least reducing the number of abortions, if not ending it completely.
And with Roe as the law of the land, regardless of whether or not you think it should be outlawed, it isn’t going to be .. persuading larger and larger numbers of women to make other choices would save unborn lives even with it remaining legal, no?
If the pro-life side would understand that to be pro-choice doesn’t mean thinking abortion is trivial and inconsequential, and if the pro-choice side would understand that to be pro-life doesn’t mean to want to keep women barefoot and pregnant, we might get somewhere.
Sadly, that level of understanding remains elusive.
Report comment to moderator
Conan, we can talk. We can try to understand each other. At the end of the day, however, unborn babies are getting killed.
Louise, do you really believe that most pro-choice people believe in the existence of a human soul? What leads you to believe that? My assumption is that if a person believes that a fetus is a tiny human being with a human soul, that he or she could never advocate destroying it. Maybe my assumption is false, but I cannot wrap my mind around the alternative.
Our experience is obviously different. I haven’t heard too many Christians arguing about whether the soul enters at conception or after cell diffentiation or after the first trimester or at birth. I think that most Christians assume that it is at the moment of conception but don’t do much handwringing or soul-searching about whether or not that is correct.
Conan, why is abortion a decision that is not trivial or easily made? If there is nothing wrong with it, then I would think it very trivial and very easy to make, especially since, as you say, unwanted pregnancies can occur for a variety of reasons.
And are you saying that a fetus has a soul but that it is still acceptable to destroy it? In that case, you must agree with us that it is equivalent to murder.
Report comment to moderator
Kyle, I just don’t know that pro-choicers do not believe that babies have souls and I didn’t want to insult them with that presumption. Maybe women have more discussions about that than men do, especially volunteers at crisis pregnancy centers.
Report comment to moderator
It’s more than we believe women can end up with unwanted pregnancy for any number of reasons, ranging from ignorance to stupid choices to coercion to birth control failure to medical issues, and we don’t think the government should be in the business to dictating to them what they can do about it.
******At any moment, due to ignorance, stupid choices, coercion, or simply an act of God (or Fate, if you prefer) we could end up with a spouse or a child or a friend who is mentally or physically disabled and a HUGE burden on our finances, our lifestyle, our future plans, our careers, and even on our own personal health (when my grandmother got dementia, taking care of her almost killed my mother.)
At what point do those concerns permit us to kill the person causing them?
And, it it isn’t okay with a person already born, just what makes you think those arguments are sufficient for killing an unborn person (to whom you’ve already granted a soul?)
Report comment to moderator
*And, IF it isn’t okay ….
Report comment to moderator
And, if you chose to kill that spouse, child, or friend for becoming such a huge burden on you, would the government have the right to step in and stop you? Could it prosecute you for murder if you managed to follow through on your plans?
Well, then, we need to hear some better arguments on the pro-choice side.
And, we still haven’t heard any engagement for the HALF of all abortions that take place between 12 weeks and the full-term infant. At the very least, the pro-choice side’s inability to even engage in any sort of dialog about those babies makes a strangely loud statement.
Report comment to moderator
Conan, why is abortion a decision that is not trivial or easily made? If there is nothing wrong with it, then I would think it very trivial and very easy to make, especially since, as you say, unwanted pregnancies can occur for a variety of reasons.
And are you saying that a fetus has a soul but that it is still acceptable to destroy it? In that case, you must agree with us that it is equivalent to murder.
For the sake of argument, let’s say that we agree on all that.
What practical difference does it make? Roe is still the law of the land. Abortion remains legal. Our holding the opinion that it’s morally wrong doesn’t change that.
So again .. we can work to make abortion less common, even while it remains legal, or we can refuse to settle for anything less than a reversal of Roe, and have no impact on the number of abortions that takes place.
Which course does more good?
Report comment to moderator
Or you can accept and work towards progress in reducing abortions while arguing and expressing that wrong even though it is currently the law.
I assume by your non-answer to the question that you have no moral basis to say why abortion should be rare. One wonders why you hold those convictions so tightly if you have no basis to hold them – or are you trying to convince yourself that you are right.
And by the way, we are not here ‘for the sake of argument,’ we are here because people kill these little babies and they need to have someone come to their defense – every last one of them.
Report comment to moderator
FF: Or you can accept and work towards progress in reducing abortions while arguing and expressing that wrong even though it is currently the law.
Sure. That’s not an “or,” I assumed that part of it.
I assume by your non-answer to the question that you have no moral basis to say why abortion should be rare. One wonders why you hold those convictions so tightly if you have no basis to hold them – or are you trying to convince yourself that you are right.
I haven’t answered because it’s irrelevant. This is the point I’m making: That abortion is legal under the law and as long as that’s the case, people who don’t approve can and should work to encourage women to choose life.
My personal reasons for wishing to make it rare are immaterial, so I’ve tried to avoid getting sidetracked into that discussion. I’m actually kind of bemused by the people demanding I justify my position, or responding as if working within the legality of abortion and believing abortion is wrong are exclusive options.
Report comment to moderator
By the way, I’m about to be gone for six days and this thread will probably have faded off the board by the time I get back. So you will be spared any more of my pontificating on this one.
Report comment to moderator
That abortion is legal under the law and as long as that’s the case, people who don’t approve can and should work to encourage women to choose life.
Walking and chewing gum. You’re easily bemused. And don’t you even know that people who don’t approve already are working to encourage women to choose life? It’s in all the papers.
Report comment to moderator
back to topJoin The Conversation
You need to be a registered user of WORLDmag.com's Community section to "join the conversation."
If you are not a member yet, what are you waiting for? Register / Login Now!