Here we go

Well, you have to admit, they're pretty smart. We all know why they're declaring the fetus a "person" - so they can criminalize women who have abortions.

But, true to the direction the pro-life lobby has turned, they're starting out by saying they're doing it "for women". Oh, we're kind and compassionate, we LOVE women, we want their babies to have the best - oh, that is, unless they're on welfare or poor. Then screw them and their "babies" - unless, of course, they "murder" them - then their "babies" will be the country's most precious resource and we'll charge them with murder - oh, btw, didn't we mention that we're going to consider it murder now when a woman aborts a "person"?

Trinitty, if we just limit this for the moment to the debate, and to the members of the two (?) debating teams, can you see the pro-choice problem with that last statement of yours?

After all, no one on the pro-choice team is threatening to [b]do[/b] anything to you and your team -- whereas pro-lifers feel fully justified in doing a whole lot to pro-choicers.

Trinitty, I didn't think you were being nasty. But you've missed my point. No pro-choicer wants to do anything to your body. The pro-lifers wish to take control over other women's bodies -- if they're seeking legislation, they do.

Do you think this will affect [i]our[/i] abortion laws (or lack thereof) here in Canada?

Would pro-lifers consider using the available technology to solve the problem? It would be like this:
The aborted fetus placed in an incubator.
Properly looked after, it will mature and become a baby.
The baby will then be placed with an adoptive parent(s).

Presto, both sides win!

[Warning: It does cost money. (Who pays? Would pro-lifers be willing to pick up the tab?)]

I am pro choice. However, there is something profoundly disturbing about the thought of medical doctors who, drive their Mercedes' from their Rosedale homes to abortion clinics, spend the day alternating from one O.R. to the second, vacuming burdgeoning life from women's wombs and tossing out the remains like it was a piece of grisle on their steak.

I guess somebodies got to do it. But, I wonder, do they ever feel pangs of guilt or remorse - or does the $250,000 a year income sufficiently dull their consciences?

Are they even human? Certainly only a machine could perform dozens of abortions a day and then go home and play with their kids.

(As objectively as I can) I wonder what the benefits to (whatever you would like to call a pre-born) and if it were extended to all equally?

My feelings are that more needs to be done to promote awareness of any and all alternatives as I feel abortion is and should be the absolute last resort a woman has in the choices available. And to that end, care and upbringing of those children brought into the world should be placed in a higher standard of living then is present now.

I think it would be an easier choice if the mother knew that the baby should it become a baby, would have all the opportunity and caring and if not love then atleast compasion and understanding that is possible.

But after taking the time to examine all the alternatives, should a woman find that abortion is still the only solution then this should be respected and the procedure carried out with as much campasion and understanding as possible.

At the end of the day I will never know what it feels like to give up something of this magnitude. I am a man and though I hope to offer my best advice it remains only something to consider as it is down to the woman's own sense of herself and her life.

Relogged,

I disagree with you, as I explained before, to me, it's not just the woman's body, it's the OTHER body that is developing at a rapid rate inside of hers that I'm talking about. It is a human life, and therefore has a right to live.

Of course it's none of my business if she gets a hysterectomy, but that's JUST her body then, not another unique human life. That's the big difference.

I'm not in any way a fan of George Bush, let me be perfectly clear on that. He's the type of "prolife" (HHAHHAHAHAHA) person that paints the entire movement a horrid shade. He's a war monger. He's signed death warrants for thousands of people and will keep this war going for as long as he can to line his own pockets. He's ... oh, don't get me started, I printed his State of the Union address just so I could have proof in case aliens ever come visit that someone that dense and scary once led the US... if I live to tell aliens about him. [img]wink.gif" border="0[/img] [img]biggrin.gif" border="0[/img]

Can you please point me in the direction of this technology? I have never, ever heard of it and I read about this subject everyday, and I'd love to know more about it.

[ February 01, 2002: Message edited by: Trinitty ]

I did read an article about artificial wombs not long ago and it suggested they weren't actually so far off, perhaps twenty years. And I actually managed to find it again!

[url=http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,634776,00.html]http://www...

I realize that this topic is a real mine-field, especially since we have both pro-and-anti choicers in the room, but Rabid Gerbil, I am having a very hard time with your obtuse, inflammatory comment about "medical doctors who, drive their Mercedes' from their Rosedale homes to abortion clinics, spend the day alternating from one O.R. to the second, vacuming burdgeoning life from women's wombs and tossing out the remains like it was a piece of grisle on their steak."

My friend, these people are heroes. They are working under a very real and ongoing threat of physical violence. Here in Vancouver, the same abortion doctor has been both shot and knifed on two seperate occassions. Countless other doctors and clinic workers have to put on flak jackets before they leave their houses--in Rosedale or otherwise--and work behind bullet proof glass. How many Doctors do you know who are willing to risk their **lives** for women's reproductive rights? And now there is this little anthrax scare that's going around. If anything, these people should be paid ten times as much as their colleques--particularly since they are taking on a responsibility that by all rights is that of the entire medical community-- not just a handful of commited, unthinkably brave individuals. Mercedes, Rosedale homes--I don't begrudge them any of this. These people deserve medals.

[ February 02, 2002: Message edited by: Relyc ]

I couldn't do it. Could you? I think I'd have nightmares.

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Doug wrote -

"I did read an article about artificial wombs not long ago and it suggested they weren't actually so far off, perhaps twenty years. And I actually managed to find it again!"

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Thank you very much for the reference, Doug.

To be honest, however, the article really provides nothing of substance to back up it's basic claim. It's a very long ways from keeping a goat fetus alive for a max of ten days to keeping a human fetus alive and developing properly for nine months - the two are several orders of magnitude apart at the very least.

I had to laugh at the author's use towards the end of human cloning and producing organs from stem cells as examples of things we didn't think would be here five years ago but are. In fact neither is here today and may indeed not be for quite some time. Mammalian cloning is turning out to be far more problematic than they thought - note the problems with "Dolly", similar genetic defects exist in every mammalian clone created to date. Not a single practical application, let alone working organ, has come out of stem cell research to date. In fact there have been some rather notable horrors with the early human experiments gone awry. Both cloning and stem cells will no doubt yield real-world applications someday, but we're not there yet and may not be for quite some time.

We may have the level of knowledge required to construct artificial wombs in twenty years, who knows? But it's going to be a very bumpy road. If people are having fits over stem cells, imagine the ethical debates over the experiments and failures that will be required to create an artificial womb - you don't just throw something like that together, toss a fertilized human egg in, and have it work perfectly the first time. It's certainly a much more complicated problem than "pumping in blood, oxygen and nutrients and disposing of waste products", as the article describes the goat womb - which is how people typically think of the problem. Among many other things, a mother's body provides a whole host of interdependent endocrinological feedback loops that will have to be reproduced with exactitude and in some cases we don't even known how to produce endogenous-identical substitutes let alone regulate them. To date we only barely understand how most of those feedback loops work - it's mostly black box and there are a lot of arguments about some of the interdependencies.

There are just so many unknowns. And so much room for disaster.

DES (Diethylstilbestrol), an artificial estrogen, was first synthesized in the UK by Sir Charles Dodds in 1938. It was used widely in pregnant women through the early seventies (in Europe until '83, some countries even later) as a way to try and stop spontaneous miscarriages - in fact it turns out it wasn't even good for that, which is more than a tad sadly ironic. At the time nobody knew that, of course, and they really didn't think there was much to worry about from its use. After all, it was just an estrogen, what's to worry about? Lots, it turns out. A study in the United States, little noticed at first, showed an increase in a particularly rare cancer (clear cell adenocarcinoma, or CCAC) in the daughters of women who had been given DES during pregnancy. Subsequent studies have shown that its use had widespread, if generally not easily detectable, effects on both sons and daughters (including what is euphemistically referred to as "psycho-social", which I frankly find personally insulting). Worse yet, subsequent animal model studies indicate a third-generational effect, something no one would have dreamed of in a million years because it means there was genetic damage - what's sometimes being referred to as "estrogenic imprinting".

In any event, DES has been heavily studied since the seventies. A lot has been learned, some of it rather surprising - like the aforementioned third-generational effect or the fact that those exposed children have a higher progesterone receptor density in breast tissue. But, 64 years after it was first synthesized, we still have no real idea why it does what it does to a developing fetus, we just know that it does.

Until we can answer questions like that we're still a long ways away from an artificial womb, at least as far as I can see.

Myria

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If I was a doctor, I would feel obligated to do it. Either you believe in extending comprehensive health care to women, or you don't. Anything else is hypocrisy.

What would give me nightmares would be knowing I had the power to assist a woman in exercising her own rights over her body, and had withheld it.

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Here, let me set you straight.

Doctors are obligated to do no harm and to care for the physical health of their patients. "Assisting women to exercising their rights over their own bodies" is NOT a professional dillemma, it is a moral one. And even Doctors are permitted to have morals.

If there is reason to believe that a pregnancy
will harm the health of a woman, a Doctor has a right to do someting. If it is a normal pregnancy, brought about by consentual sex by a mentally stable woman, well, NOONE has the right to tell that Doctor that he/she is a hypocrite if he/she refuses to abort the fetus at the mother's whim.

I repeat, even Doctors are permitted to have morals. And abortion is as much a moral issue as a medical one.

Some people have concerns about the validity of a fetus as a human life. Some people have no problem with dehumanizing a fetus and sanctioning its termination at the will of the mother.

Both sides should treat the other with empathy and respect. Those who do not, are fanatics, unworthy of consideration. (And don't doubt it, there are as many pro-choice fanatics as there are pro-life.)

Tell me, do you approve of partial birth abortions? How about abortions in the last week of gestation? I bet you do. For you, abortion is a black and white issue. AnyTHING in a woman's body must be subject to the whims of the woman.

Right?

[ February 02, 2002: Message edited by: Rabid Gerbil ]

[ February 02, 2002: Message edited by: Rabid Gerbil ]

Can't blame ya. Justifying your position is a mite more difficult whan the CBC isn't there to stack the panel or ensure a predetermined outcome. [img]wink.gif" border="0[/img]

Thank you.

I regret using the term "whim". It is obviously a very difficult decision for a woman to decide to have an abortion. I think that is a good thing. The choice to have children is not a casual thing. Nor should the decision to terminate a pregnancy be a casual decision.

By the way, for the record, I also think that those who perpetrate violence on abortion doctors are scum, no better than those who abort 9 month old fetuses/babies. Both are narrow-minded ideologues.

I honestly believe that abortion is a procedure that is unlike any other. It is, for the most part, not a matter of life or death for the woman involved. It is, on many occasions, a means for a woman to absolve herself of a mistake. A reproductive mistake.

To insist that Doctors have a legal or professional right to participate in that absolution is wrong - just as wrong as insisting that a doctor has no moral right to perform the abortion.

Look, I am looking for a reasonable dialogue on this issue. I have difficult accepting that abortion should be sold as a "right" in all cases. Neither can I accept the idea that a woman should not have some level of control over what happens within her own body.

I am exceptionally conflicted on this matter. One thing I do know, however, is that abortion is as much a moral issue as it is a medical issue.

To expect a doctor, whose religious morals are against abortion, to perform them because he/she is a licensed doctor is to ignore their religious freedom. And I am talking about Muslims and other religions here as well as Christians.

Anyway, here at babble, I have come to expect a very cloistered, single minded approach from most of the posters. Agree with the house or be vilified.

For some of us, however, clarity on such complicated issues is something we are seeking. Thank you for sharing your views and helping me find my clarity. I don't have the answers yet, but I'm working on it.

RG: I do appreciate the thoughful nature of your response and I'm happy to continue the debate if you're genuinely interested.

So it would seem that this is where we're stuck: You believe the decision to have an abortion has a moral component. I don't dispute that, necessarily--I just think it's no one's business but the pregnant woman's. That said, she needs the freedom to be able to make that decision, and that's where the notion of abortion as a 'right' comes in. But it's not so much abortion itself that's a right as the option to abort. It has to
be there. It can't just be there in name only (as it is in much of the country) or arbitrarily available in one place and not the next. Does our society accept that women are full human beings capable of making an informed choice or not? If it does, then comprehensive reproductive health care must be a reality--and somebody's got the obligation to provide it--again, not in the haphazard, byzantine and frequently dangerous manner it's provided now, but comprehensively. So if not the medical profession, then who? Right now nobody's taking responsibility except for a handful of overworked but committed health care professionals. Considering the scope of the demand for this service, that's just not acceptable.

What really needs to happen is for the government to take a stand on this. But my breath remains unheld.

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I honestly believe that abortion is a procedure that is unlike any other. It is, for the most part, not a matter of life or death for the woman involved. It is, on many occasions, a means for a woman to absolve herself of a mistake.

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I think your language here is telling. You "absolve" a person who has committed a sin--isn't that what you really mean when you say "mistake?" If I understand you correctly, you think abortion is wrong because it enables women to get away with
careless sexual behavior--ie. "sinning." This is a very old school of thought, and in my opinion, what the anti-choice lobby is actually all about.

RG, I just don't know where to begin. It's clear we're coming at this question from wildly divergent perspectives, but perhaps it's a good thing there's a place for peoplelike us to exchange ideas.

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Abortion just seems to be a way to allow women to compete with men in the sexual playground without being held to account by those pesky reproductive repercussions.

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But why on earth should women be "held to account" for having sex? Exactly what's the problem here--is sex bad, dirty, evil in your mind? Or just women having sex? If not, then--again--why should pregnacy be weilded as a consequence to keep women from having it?

You seem to be suggesting that there's some 'natural' imperative at work here--that if
it was 'natural' for women to go around having sex all the time, they wouldn't become pregnant as a result. Therefore, the ability of women to avoid this naturally-imposed "punishment" (for that's what you're implying pregnancy is), is somehow vaguely immoral to your way of thinking.

But there are, and always have been, lots of ways to have sex without getting pregnant--natural and unnatural alike, and women have utilized them since the dawn of time. Abortion is just another option, and it needs to be there when all of the
other ones fail.

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The ability to bring forth life is not something that should be taken lightly. And yet, abortion allows this noble, wonderful capability to be taken as lightly as the woman desires.

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It isn't women who belittle this ability and take it for granted--it's people who would force it upon them whether it's wanted or not. The very idea is an insult to women's minds and their bodies alike. You said above that you understand what a difficult decision it is to terminate a pregnancy, but your rhetoric makes it clear that at the end of the day you simply don't trust women to make responsible decisions about their
own reproductive capacities. This is an enormously condescending and--sorry to
say it--paternalistic attitude.

I appreciate that you don't align yourself with anti-choice factions, but you must realize it's equivicol notions like these that can be the most damaging on a fundemental, societal level. The reason women have to travel through a laboratory-maze of bureaucracy and red-tape to secure basic family planning information, and can't just go to any given doctor's office and recieve RU-486 on demand is not because of anti-choice crazies waving picket signs. It's because of these fuzzy and ambivilent moralistic notions about women and sex that are, sadly,
still floating around even in the 21st century.

As a believer in "choice" I implore you to re-examine them.

This has to be one of the saddest examples of irony in human history

Wwestern women, a group that has overcome so many obstacles, a group that has experienced so much oppression and marginalization throughout history, finds itself with total legislated power and control over a small burgeoning life inside them. And what do they do? Why, they turn around and do what's best for them. They put their own needs first. THey roll up their sleeves and do a little oppressing of their own - just like those violent brutish males have been doing all these years.

[ February 04, 2002: Message edited by: Rabid Gerbil ]

[ February 04, 2002: Message edited by: Rabid Gerbil ]

I can totally understand your concern earthmom, and I'd be just as vigilant on that aspect of this issue.

What do you think about the glue-sniffing case and such though? Do we draw the line at damage without touching on nutrition? Nuritious diets should be consumed during pregnancy, but I doubt we'd see legislation forcing women to do so... I don't really know why they would have to be forced so-to-speak. Perhaps I'm not quite understanding where you're going with this. Are you looking way down the road in this line of thought to where the woman has no control at all from the moment of conception until birth? I agree that's pretty scary,.... but I can't really see it happening... you know, that phrase probably shouldn't come out of my mouth at this point. You're right it COULD happen, as anyting could, so this aspect of the issue of pregnancy and birth would have to be constantly monitored and assessed to ensure a balance for both parties.

In England in the 50's there was a great program for expectant mothers. They were given coupons and they received a free bottle of milk at every visit from the milkman, along with comprehensive healthcare, instruction and support, regardless of income level.... it's decreased somewhat now unfortunately.

[ February 04, 2002: Message edited by: Trinitty ]

Amen!

There are herbal remedies that prevent ovulation and thicken the lining of the cervix, so even if one draws the line at conception rather than implantation, they "work" for everyone. I forget what tree it is.. I think it was an ash, but I'd have to go back and check.

Have you read Spiritual Midwifery? - I haven't yet. "Homebirth"? -GREAT book, or "The American way of birth"? Jessica Midford looks at the history of midwives, and the industry that has swallowed the process of birth. For example, cesaerean rates as high as 30% in private American hospitals!!! And 80% of births taking place Monday to Friday. [img]mad.gif" border="0[/img] Facsinating read... almost as "shattering" as the "American way of Death", that I'm almost done.

Sorry for the thread drift.

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The abortion industry -and yes it certainly is that- doesn't want their profit margin compromised, so why would they counsel their clientele as to WHAT exactly they are doing, and advise them against it unless their health were in serious jeopardy? That's pretty antithetical to a legal capitalist pursuit.

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Again, I just want to object--strenuously--to this characterization of abortion providers as drooling capitalists jumping on the 'abortion' gravy train. There are far more lucrative avenues for medical practitioners to go down--avenues that won't get them killed for doing it. I don't care if you're Bill Gates or Rupert Murdoch--no matter how much someone loves money, no pure capitalist is going to put his or her life on the line to get it if there are easier, safer ways available. Abortion practicioners put their lives on the line every day they go to work--because they believe in abortion rights. Whether you do or not, it's appalling to suggest their primary motivation is to line their pockets. Garson Romalis is still performing abortions after being shot and stabbed on seperate occassions. Morgantaler has hemmoraged oceans of dollars sitting in jail cells and fighting legal battles to keep his clinics open. Don't you think these people would've become plastic surgeons long ago if they were doing it for any other reason than a commitment to reproductive rights?

Having spoken with people who work behind bullet proof glass and have to call the bomb squad whenever they recieve a suspicious-looking package, I just find these assertions infuriating.

Hey Relyc!

I guess I should have restated -I've posted in previous threads on this issue - I that I am totally against the killing of human beings, that includes shooting people at their breakfast tables and bombing clinics. I think those terrorists -and that's what they are - give a terrible name to the prolife movement, and I hope that people who are examining the issue realize they are in the extreme minority when it comes to people who are against abortion. Doesn't really fit the pro-LIFE part does it?

As far as the capitalist aspect goes. I'm at a loss to understand why anyone who had given an oath to protect the lives of his or her patients, studied the human body and who SEES what the result of an abortion is, would be ABLE to abort feotuses for a living... and to me, the large profits made by abortionists was the most obvious thing I could point to. I do think it's a factor, especially in the United States, but I'm sure -as you point out- that it's not the only motivation.

Perhaps they think they are freedom fighters of some sort? Convinced themselves they are providing a righteous and neccessary service? They have plenty of people on the pro-abortion side telling them that they are near heroes for "fighting the fight". Morgentaller is an example of this. If that's the case, then I obviously disagree and feel their passion for social change and civil rights is terribly misguided.