On Pro-Choice

[desertvixen]

http://www.forbes.com/business/businesstech/feeds/ap/2006/02/28/ap2559931.html

President Bush, asked about the South Dakota measure in an interview with ABC News' Elizabeth Vargas, said Tuesday he hadn't "paid attention to that, to this particular issue you're talking about" but "I am not going to prejudge how the Supreme Court is going to judge a particular issue."
However, he said, "My position has always been three exceptions: rape, incests and the life of the mother." Asked if he would include the broader category of health of the mother, Bush said: "No. I said life of the mother, and health is a very vague term, but my position has been clear on that ever since I started running for office."

I know some of the discussion about the bills in South Dakota and Mississippi have included women wondering about how the distinction between a woman's life and a woman's health. I guess now we know (I hadn't seen this particular quote previously) what the President thinks.

As a woman, I'm scared, very scared. Considering that GWB thought they should keep Terry Schiavo alive as well, I guess anything up to just short of a woman hemorraging to death in the middle of delivering a baby won't count as endangering the woman's life.

So would he support forcing a woman to continue a doomed pregnancy? (Anacephaly comes to mind.) Forcing a woman to carry a child that has no chance of life - which by the way, you're now financially responsible for. Personally, I think it would either make me crazy or drive me to doing something harmful to myself.

Call me selfish, but I'm one of those people who doesn't want to live if I'm not *alive*. The quality of life is a big factor, and I think some people are starting to blur that one out.

I'm pro-choice, because it affords women the right, the basic right, to make decisions about their lives. Our reproductive life impacts on every single area of our lives, and we should be able to control it.

I think we should have access to abortion, if needed, without having to jump through flaming hoops. I think we should have access to birth control, at an affordable cost, and access to a method that works for us. I think we should be able to walk into any pharmacy and have our prescriptions filled, without worrying about if the pharmacist is "okay" with it. (BTW, if they're so concerned about our sex lives, stop selling Viagra while you're at it.) And I think we should have the right to these choices without being hounded and harrassed and disrespected.

DV

Comments

[desert-vixen.livejournal.com]

Unless, of course, you're simply making a plea for good manners, rather than of gummint intervention in same. In which case "Hear! Hear!"

Yes, more an issue of "good manners". I don't like how the states have been able to chip away at access, but that is the right of a state. I didn't so much mean the protests at clinics, so much as I meant the simple fact that all these people are trying to have a say in my reproductive life. To be perfectly blunt, the only man who has any semblance of say in what I do with my uterus is Brian, and that's because he's contributing to the production of any life therein.

You and I can have this reasoned discussion, and agree to disagree (like this is the only topic that occurs on, NOT!). Everytime I see anti-abortion propaganda that portrays women as essentially too stupid to make their own decision, that makes me mad. Luckily, because we live in the free and diverse society, I'm allowed to say so.

It's really the imposing of one's views on others that bothers me. I support choice - choice and right to have an abortion, choice and right to birth control (and I wouldn't mind if they mandated insurers to cover it, that much government influence I support), choice and right to bear children if and when (approximately) you wish. I do not support forced abortions (China comes to mind). The problem with overturning Roe v. Wade is it forces the pro-life viewpoint on those of us who are pro-choice.

There's also the worry of if it's okay to attack abortion, can birth control REALLY be that far down the road?

I will freely admit though, that the idea that it is a woman's life, and not her health, that they will make an exception for squicks me the hell out. But then, with the man currently in charge, that's not the only thing that does.

DV

[rockahulababy.livejournal.com]

Don't forget the outright lies that some do spread. Have you seen the "talking fetus" story that's passed around the internet? Full of inaccurate information.

The term "partial birth abortion" was also created as a scare tactic and is a medically inaccurate term.