Ross Douthat tells us, as a friend of course, that anti-choice whackjobs will stop killing doctors just as soon as we bow to their demands. But if you call it “common ground”, then it’s not caving to terrorists.
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It’s worth remembering that the abortions that he’s referring to, the ones that anti-chiocers amassed “evidence” for (disproven repeatedly in court) were largely ones on extremely young girls who hid or weren’t aware of their pregnancy, mostly rape victims and often mentally disabled. The international anti-choice movement has made it clear that girls in the 8-14 year old region are especially required to have babies, because otherwise, they’d have to admit that there are evil men who rape children because they get a kick out of it. And some of them are priests.
If we give up the right to our own bodies in the second trimester then maybe the anti-choicers will be cool with us getting abortions in the third? What? That isn’t common ground for anyone, its just random nonsense that allows Douchehat to dig at women who’ve had more than one abortion. Way to go for the hard target there Ross.
People who argue against the mental health of the mother are people who have mental health pathologies themselves: they are so unable to empathize</em (yes, I went there!) with the woman who is told that her wanted baby is slowly dying inside of her, and that if it survives at all outside of the womb it would only have a few short days (or maybe a year) of unimaginable pain. They haven’t taken two minutes to imagine what that would feel like. No, her life is not in danger, nor is her physical health. But this stuff can be determined even in the 2nd trimester if you have the right insurance coverage, and they can’t take two seconds to think about what it must be like to have four or five months ahead of you knowing that you’re carrying a child whose only future to look forward to is incredible pain and a merciful death.
...Not to mention the tens (hundreds?) of thousands of children who are abused and neglected every year because their parents didn’t want them and/or have mental health problems. We get so upset whenever a high-profile case pops up where a woman kills her children, but there are children out there whose lives are living hell: removing the mental health exception is going to make that problem a lot worse, not a lot better.
I agree with Amanda—the anti-choice movement has managed to turn the <em>most sympathetic of abortions—those done in the late term into the big bad boogeyman of abortions. Douchehat is arguing his Superior NiceGuy Intellect… that if we just, you know democratized the abortion laws (instead of having it “enshrined in the constitution” ... pesky constitution!) we would have “saner” abortion laws ... read, everyone would get so whipped into a frenzy about the almost-born baybeez that we’d make sure that you couldn’t get an abortion after the 6th week of your pregnancy, that those silly women carrying around fetuses developing nerve endings specifically so that they can feel the unimaginable pain of the chromosonal disorders will have to suffer right along with their fetuses, Oh! and sluts!!
But these represent a tiny fraction of the million-plus abortions that take place in this country every year. (Almost half of that number are repeat abortions; around a quarter are third or fourth procedures.)
Seriously, this guy can’t take half a minute to get off his privilege high-horse and think about what it would be like to watch his wife or his sister or his daughter suffer because she can’t get a late-term abortion and waking up every day knowing what her fetus is going through is putting her emotional health through a shredder. Probably because he doesn’t know any real women.
But hey, I bet that Times Column keeps him company on those cold winter nights.
What the “common ground” people are doing when talking about further restricting access in the 2nd trimester is refusing to look at realities. If they want to reduce abortions in the 2nd trimester, there is a simple way to do it—-remove 100% of restrictions in the 1st. No more waiting periods, TARP laws, parental notification, etc. Mandate that all medical students learn the procedure. Ban any protesting of clinics within a mile of them. If women can get abortions as soon as they’d like, elective abortion in the 2nd trimester would dwindle down to nothing.
Ms Kate, I had to delete that comment, I’m sorry. I’m angry, too, but we cannot even fantasize out loud about using their tactics. Got to be better than them.
I love how anti-choicers think the mental health exception is a shut and dry case of “abusing” therapeutic abortion. Is there any better evidence that they are skeptical that women have minds worth caring about at all? Isn’t the hierarchy men then animals then cunt/baby machines?
Of course it’s possible that he isn’t being misogynistic here and instead just doesn’t believe in mental illness. He could be one of those idiots that thinks all mental health problems are caused by not “manning up” enough.
Has Douthat never heard of motherfucking Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder? Jesus fucking Christ.
Oh, wait, that’s why all the conservatives don’t much care for treating our fucking VETERANS who come back with mental health issues caused by the stupid ass war they sent them on to fight.
Mental health problems are for sissies. They aren’t real, guys. Duh.
I doubt it. The evidence points strongly to a firm disbelief that women have minds.
I firmly support Ross Douthat’s right to not have an abortion.
If they want to reduce abortions in the 2nd trimester, there is a simple way to do it—-remove 100% of restrictions in the 1st. No more waiting periods, TARP laws, parental notification, etc. Mandate that all medical students learn the procedure. Ban any protesting of clinics within a mile of them.
Now this is the kind of compromise I like! (As long as second-trimester abortions are still legal when necessary, including mental health allowances.)
I just finished reading Leslie J. Reagan’s When Abortion Was a Crime, and it’s amazing to see so many of the attacks that she described happening decades ago, still going on today.
In the 50’s and 60’s, the “mental health” exemption was attacked with just the same disregard for the lives, intellect, and autonomy of women that Douthat displays here. There was a huge uproar that women were “pretending” to be upset about pregnancy in order to cheat their way out of the social shaming they so richly deserved for being sluts. This was for earlier abortions, of course, although the byzantine process women had to endure to obtain a medically sanctioned abortion probably pushed the procedure (if they could obtain it) into the second trimester.
I’m curious what Ross thinks this “democratic” method of obtaining (read “restricting”) abortions would look like? Who would decide which women really deserved abortions? Because Reagen covers that extremely well in her book. The answer is hospital boards. Arbitrary, misogynist hospital boards who based a lot of their decision making on who deserved to be punished (turns out: nearly everyone). It was the arbitrary nature of these boards (differences between what cases were allowed at different hospitals, as well as seemingly random rulings from within the same board) that was one of the major impetuses for doctors joining with the women’s movements to fight for the repeal of abortion restrictions.
It’s not a world any sane person (or any person who thinks women are human) would want to go back to.
Is there any better evidence that they are skeptical that women have minds worth caring about at all? Isn’t the hierarchy men then animals then cunt/baby machines?
Well, there’s Andrea Yates, but she’s a specific case of this general rule.
And I know Our Ross has to write a certain amount, but this column (like so many of his columns) could’ve been so much shorter: “Some abortions may theoretically be justifiable BUT NOT YOURS YOU LYING SLUT.”
He wants to “democratize” the contents of my uterus.
I say we democratize some of his organs. Let’s start with his gastrointestinal system.
Every time he wants to take a shit he is gonna need to take a few weeks to think about it. After all, once that poo is out he will never be able to put it back in again and we all know that every poo is special and unique from every other dump in the history of the world. He should have to be read a statement to this effect at least 24 hours before he is granted acces to a toilet and also shown and ultrasound image of his special little snowflake that he wants to just flush away.
I am sure that he could depend on his friend Mr Saletan to pretend to support his desision to evacuate, but only if he made a proper show of weeping and gnashing his teeth and feeling REEELY bad about it.
I, for one, will sit here and tut tut about how he should have thought about the possible consequences BEFORE he opened his loose, slutty mouth for those two grande burritos.
He might argue that it is his body and he knows how it feels and he is the one who has to live in it so why should anyone else get a say in what comes out of it just because we desapprove of the choices he makes about what goes into it? Especially when eating is such a natural part of human existence. But really, if we as a whole society can decide that this is how it should be handled, then he has no reason to complain that his most basic freedom and autonomy are being shamelessly trod upon by people ho don’t even know him. If he even thought about that argument, society as a whole would judge him as terribly selfish. The process has been “democratized” and he has no reason to object just cause the consequences of these policies take place in his own lower abdomen.
I sat we all call our conrgesspeople and propose the “Ross Douthat Bowel Movement Reduction Act.” The only thing that could stand in its way would be a runaway activist court thwarting the will of the people!
Here’s my suggestion for a compromise:
Every time someone has sex, their name is put into a lottery for blood and kidney donation (possibly lung and liver too). Because sex is inherently evil, if their name is picked, then they must donate that body part to save an actual life. Of course there would be exceptions for people who might die from this. However, things like a risk of fainting, nausea, and dizziness would not be enough to get out of it, since they want to force women to risk all of those symptoms for nine months. If they agree to take this punishment for their naughty sex, then maybe we can agree to ban all abortions past the point of viability. Of course, they would never agree to this because it affects men too.
“Under current law, if you want to restrict abortion, post-viability procedures are the only kind you’re allowed to even regulate.”
Dammit! And we can’t even regulate people’s choices of marriage partner, we can’t regulate access to birth control, we can’t regulate how many children you have (5 or more if you’re white, 1 or less if not). Why, there are whole areas of human behavior that remain unregulated!...
“If abortion were returned to the democratic process, this landscape would change dramatically.”
...well, for one thing we’d have to build more cemeteries in our landscape…
“Arguments about whether and how to restrict abortions in the second trimester — as many advanced democracies already do – would replace protests over the scope of third-trimester medical exemptions.”
‘Cause it would be so much nicer to shoot doctors who do second-trimester abortions, and shame those dirty sluts who get them…
“The result would be laws with more respect for human life…”
...um sure they would. Somehow. As long as we pretend the lives of those dirty sluts are less important than some tiny lumps of cells…
”...a culture less inflamed by a small number of tragic cases…”
I could be wrong here, but I’m guessing that a group of loons who’ve convinced themselves that all forms of birth control are “abortion” will figure out how to stay just as inflamed as possible, no matter what happens…
”...and a political debate, God willing, unmarred by crimes like George Tiller’s murder.”
...and I’m also guessing that until we create that Gilead you nuts want so badly, where you get to kill people like Dr. Tiller and it isn’t a crime, some of you will continue to kill and maim people who provide services that are still legal in this country and justify it with claims that it’s “Pro Life”. After all, “War is Peace”, “Freedom is Slavery”, and your personal favorite, Mr. Douchehat (and the favorite of the whole anti-choice nut squad): “Ignorance is Strength”...
Why, exactly, should Americans be debating the extent of a right implicating individual women’s deepest privacy and family concerns, as Douthat suggests they should be? Because, then, we won’t have “crimes like George Tiller’s murder,” according to Douthat, in a particularly ugly variation on the Heckler’s Veto.
The virtue and effectiveness of democratic deliberation presupposes everyone enters the bargaining with equal bargaining power, which is why some protections are reserved as rights for the participants, at the outset before negotiation even begins. What I see from Douthat and conservatives who fetishize majority rule, and want to put everyone else’s privacy and bodily autonomy up for a vote, is a lot of preoccupation with democratic decisionmaking and not a lot of concern about preserving the integrity of democratic decisionmaking.
How about putting Douthat’s right to publish his column (an act that affects public life in the USA far more than, horror of horrors, contraception, gay sex and other fundamental due process rights) up for a vote? Would Douthat argue that, so long as an opponent of his is sufficiently infuriated by his column that s/he would murder to prevent its publication, his right to free speech should be negotiated democratically?
If their debate actually involved using the word “condom” then maybe we could find some common ground. But their debate always involves total control over female bodies. If I weren’t completely convinced that anti-choicers wouldn’t stop with an overthrow of Roe v. Wade but would make damn certain they got rid of Griswold v. Connecticut too, maybe we’d have some common ground. If they weren’t dancing on Tiller’s grave, we’d have something to talk about. But until they get their self-righteous heads out of their asses and realize that human beings (and that includes women) have sex and MUST have safe, reliable birth control what is there to talk about with an anti-choicer?
“post-viability procedures are the only kind you’re allowed to even regulate.”
Reallly?
Tell that to a woman looking for an abortion at 5 weeks in South Dakota who is told that she will be “terminating a whole, unique life” then legally required to go home and think about that for 24 hours.
Or the minors all over the country who are forced to get a signature from a parent at any stage.
Or people in the more remote parts of Texas who have to travel hours the the nearest clinic for the very earliest procedures. There would be more clinics in less densely populated areas, except that to provide abortions in Texas you quite literally have to have a certain carpet, a certain wallpaper, a certain floorplan. These requirements drive up the cost of opening a clinic and make it financially impossible to operate one unless you have a large number of patients and that keeps clinics in the cities.
Tell these patients that their abortions are not being “regulated.” Unless by “regulated” you mean “completely outlawed.”
And one more thing, Norma McCorvey (Ms. Roe herself) is mentally ill, yet the anti-choicers parade her and her “guilt” over having an abortion around all the time. Never mind the three other kids who were taken by the state of Texas because she was too mentally ill to properly care for them. They don’t bring that up. Just her alleged “remorse” over having an abortion, while conveniently ignoring her lengthy history of mental illness.
“However, things like a risk of fainting, nausea, and dizziness would not be enough to get out of it”
Or things like not having sick time at work, not having health insurance, not having enough family support to even get basic help like a ride to the hospital or watching your kids and cleaning your house while you recover. If you don’t have the resources to go through a traumatic forced organ donation then you just shouldn’t have sex!
read, everyone would get so whipped into a frenzy about the almost-born baybeez that we’d make sure that you couldn’t get an abortion after the 6th week of your pregnancy,
“Well, now that we think about it, there’s not much difference between a baby at 7 weeks, safe from the murdering abortionists, and a baby at 6 weeks, vulnerable to this legal homicide. I think we have to reconsider this arbitrary line and compromise a bit more…”
Which is why I have more respect for those pro-lifers who don’t make exceptions for children of rape or incest. At least they’re working from a coherent set of beliefs.
Yeah, yeah… they’ve made it clear what they expect, and if we’d just do it, they wouldn’t be forced to hit us.
I sat here and read Douthat’s column while feeding a banana to my baby girl. And I thought to myself, “Has this man ever held a job? One where he’s held accountable?” Because he’s classic Young Conservative material: entitled, jejune, prematurely balding, probably couldn’t lift a case of beer off the ground, obsessed therefore with manliness and the control of women, probably because real women look the other way when he walks in a room. He’s never worked a day in his life, so he’s never had his theories challenged. I totally want to kick his ass.
It makes me think that maybe a draft wouldn’t be such a bad idea. If everyone had to carry a rifle and march around together, depend on each other not to get slagged by the sergeant, people like Douthat would have had their preconceptions and their illusions of superiority shattered, all for the better. Because I would have totally had to carry that wanker’s backpack if we were to make the 20-mile march in the required time.
It then occurs to me that hothouse flowers like Douthat are the only way conservatives can maintain any outreach to the younger cohorts. Pretty much anyone who’s had to work for a living ultimately comes to see that life is too complicated for theoretical Lord Saletan-type judgments from atop the mountain. It brings me back to the draft again (and I loathe the military): it’s no coincidence that the Dem ranks of elected officials are full of veterans and the Republicans all wanked out of the draft or didn’t serve.
Didn’t Ms. McCorvey end up giving birth in the pregnancy that resulted in Roe? It took too long to get to the supreme court and she had the baby in the meantime. That person is up and walking around as we speak. If there is one person I could forgive for wringing their hands and saying “Oh, I could have been aborted!” it is that guy (I have it in my head that it was a boy, don’t know where i got that). I wonder if he is pro-choice.
I guess ... but that’s why I referenced the fictional Ellen James Society ...
In any case, Douchescat’s bleatings are more like “start being a good wife and the beatings will stop”.
She did have the baby. I’m not sure she’s ever had an abortion . She just feels as all sexually active women should feel—-like terrible, terrible people who are grateful to our patriarchal overlords that they’ll mostly permit us to live.
But these represent a tiny fraction of the million-plus abortions that take place in this country every year. (Almost half of that number are repeat abortions; around a quarter are third or fourth procedures.)
Because these sluts just keep having sex! and we TRIED lying to them about the effectiveness of birth control and we TRIED reducing access to it, but they just keep on having sex!
What else are we supposed to do??!!
The fact that McCorvey was forced to bear a child she didn’t want ended up messing with her head as a parent - something her daughter made much of in her teen years and seems to have exploited mercilessly.
The whole “you never wanted me - you wanted to KILL me” thing. I don’t think that Norma McCorvey is terribly psychologically strong to begin with, and she’s been inflicted with horrible guilt from without as well as within.
Is there any way we could get somebody, somewhere, to use the language of these losers to draft a bill declaring that any medical procedure on a male that could affect fertility (such as prostate cancer surgery or chemotherapy) would be banned unless they got a special court order permitting it? It would never pass and that wouldn’t be the point - the point is that you don’t mess with people’s medical choices.
Ross is like the One Note Samba, except for the samba part.
Ms Kate, add it as an amendment on any bill trying to restrict reproductive choices involving ovaries.
Doughface saysYes, many pregnancies are terminated in dire medical circumstances., then quotes a 1997 Slate article which discusses data from 1995.
How many late term abortions are performed today? I thought the news said that Dr. Tiller was one of two physicians performing them—in the USA. Is Doughyjowl obsessing about 0.001% of all abortions? If so, why?
I’m prepared to believe that abortions after 26 weeks are performed only in the most dire of circumstances, where the woman literally has no choice. Catholic moral theology has always permitted the lesser of two evils.
Does anyone want their private medical decisions second-guessed by a random cross-section of the electorate who will never be affected, either way?
Hector, off the top of my head, over 90% of abortions are done in the first trimester, and about 0.08% are done in the last trimester. That comes out to about 1,000 per year. These are only done in cases that where the fetus couldn’t survive after birth (or was already dead), or where the woman’s health or life was at risk. I’d really appreciate it if someone could find the references to back up my numbers, so it doesn’t sound like I’m just making stuff up.
These guys seem to take the old Soviet style of negotiating: What’s ours is ours; what’s yours is open to negotiation.
Is Doughyjowl obsessing about 0.001% of all abortions? If so, why?
Yes. Because it’s more effective propaganda. An embryo that looks a lot like a shrimp is not very compelling as a victim. A third-term fetus is much more recognisably human, except in the cases which prompt these very-late-term abortions, when it doesn’t. Douthat and his ilk want you to think zygote=blastocyst=embryo=fetus=innocent chubby-cheeked infant with tiny perfect fingernails. Why would you support MURDERING innocent chubby-cheeked infants with tiny perfect fingernails? Are you not human?
Who would decide which women really deserved abortions? Because Reagen covers that extremely well in her book. The answer is hospital boards. Arbitrary, misogynist hospital boards who based a lot of their decision making on who deserved to be punished (turns out: nearly everyone).
There was an infamous case in Louisiana about 10 years ago that I don’t have time to look up now where a woman with a very serious heart condition (as in, she was in her mid-thirties and already had a pacemaker) needed to get an abortion. Because of her health, it was going to have to be done in a hospital, because for her, even minor surgery like a first-trimester abortion was potentially dangerous.
So the board of doctors at the hospital took a look at her case and decided that since there was a 50/50 chance that the pregnancy would kill her and leave her two living children orphans before she came to term, they wouldn’t allow her abortion. After all, a 50/50 chance that you might not die outright is pretty good odds, and the probability that she would die within a few years of giving birth if she survived the process at all wasn’t their problem.
Eventually, they found a doctor in Texas who was willing to do a second-trimester abortion because the other doctors had dicked around so long, but those doctors in Louisiana were willing to let a woman waiting for a heart transplant die rather than have a literally life-saving first trimester abortion.
Catgirl: With that attitude of wanting to verify facts, you’ll never make it as a top-flight editorial writer at the NYT or Washington Post.
He wants to “democratize” the contents of my uterus.
I say we democratize some of his organs. Let’s start with his gastrointestinal system.
....GumbyAnne
GumbyAnne FTW!!! Now I have to clean coffee off my keyboard.
This needs to be put out there. May I post it to Facebook?
A good question might also be; why is this douchebag always writing columns about women?
WTF is that about?
Because they need to be told what to do, Caton, so he puts a great deal of effort into it!
DMS
I have a modest proposal that I’ve been working on, that would allow for compromise on the subject of abortion.
I say we remove the testicles of all post-pubescent males, and put them in cold storage. Only when they are legally committed in the bonds of marriage will they be permitted to get their testicles back.
It is less invasive than abortion, since the testicles are located on the outside of the body. Testicle free men will not be able to rape women, so fewer unwanted pregnancies from rape. It will ensure proper moral behavior on the part of young unmarried men, so they won’t be slutting it up all over the place.
I sincerely hope the pro-life community will embrace this modest proposal.
I say we remove the testicles of all post-pubescent males, and put them in cold storage. Only when they are legally committed in the bonds of marriage will they be permitted to get their testicles back.
this time I laughed out loud.
Canton, I’d never even realized that, all of his columns do center around castigating women…wow, I need to do some reflecting, it didn’t even occur to me that it was weird.
I say we fix the childcare system, particularly in terms of adoption and foster care. There are many qualified and loving people out there who want to give their love to a child and help them live a normal life (as normal as possible given the circumstances). Unfortunately they are frequently thwarted by a social services system that holds them to higher standards than families who gave birth to their own kids. If more children were adopted and raised with love, devotion and respect, maybe giving a child up for adoption would be a more viable option.
from the article: “[IDX] turned out to be used primarily for purely elective abortions.” and is referenced to an article that states “the Ohio doctor who developed the procedure, asserted in one paper that 80 percent of his patients choose it because it is safer and more convenient than the alternatives. There was no medical necessity.”
Because you see, safety for women is not a medical necessity. Just like washing hands before surgery is not a medical necessity. It’s “purely elective.”
Look, let me tell you what I know about “purely elective.” My sister had to give birth to an anencephalic baby because she had no access to abortion services. She found out about the deformity at approx. 24-week ultrasound. She was given the “choice” to go through induced labor at approx 26 weeks gestation (approx. two weeks later) or “wait the whole 9 months.” What’s the goddamned purpose of waiting? So the fetus can continue to grow, making the induced labor that much more risky and that much more painful? For what purpose? Makes no sense to me. I digress.
This is what I know about what happened to my sister. Labor was induced with pitocin and I don’t know what else. I talked to my sister on the phone about an hour after she went into labor. She was in a lot of pain and crying. She yelped in pain and said she couldn’t talk after a few moments of conversation and hung up. She was in agony for the better part of two days. We thought she was going to die. Her temperature shot to 105 degrees at one point; the doctor/nurses told her several times they were checking to see if her uterus had ruptured. She retched, and contorted her body, and screamed in pain.
This was to “avoid convenience,” and avoiding this sort of suffering is “not medically necessary.” There was no “physical harm” to my sister. Avoiding this suffering is “elective.”
I hate everyone at this point. But I digress.
Finally, after this “glorious miracle,” she expelled the fetus-with-most-of-its-head-missing and we had our sacred “birth.” There were no heroic measures to “save” the newborn-with-jellied,-bloodied-mess-hanging-out-the-back-of-its-head, so ratfuckers like Jill Stanek and Rush Limbaugh will call her a “baby killer” who had a “post-birth abortion.” The family all sat in somewhat horrified silence as the newborn was passed around and then just stopped breathing after about an hour. Upon discharge, my sister was handed a non-descript cardboard box with her dead baby in it. You would think the Catholic hospital would have wrapped it with a crucified Jesus bow, but alas, no.
So there’s your “elective” procedure. Not sure what other’s experiences are like, but if my sister could have been anesthetized and treated humanely throughout this process, that would have been “convenient,” I suppose.
Norma McCorvey hits all the notes of fucked-up-ness. She’s paraded around as the most famous abortion regretter, but she’s never had an abortion. She’s also an “ex-gay” and a Ron Paul supporter.
I’ve no doubt that it would have nicer to have someone less nutty for the abortion test case, but the problem with that is that non-nutty women were understandably afraid of being outed as sexual beings in 1973, particularly in the conservative states that had strong bans. In the blue areas dominated by the famous radical feminist movement, the strategy was abortion speak-outs and petitioning the legislature. With those options cut off in Texas and Georgia, suing was all they had. And they needed plantiffs who were willing to sue but weren’t going to run off to have illegal abortions, which narrows the field to pretty much no one, except a couple of nutty women it turns out.
As stated numerous times on this blog and elsewhere, Gray Train, adoption and better services for existing children are great for people that find themselves pregnant (the ones that can be physically pregnant) and can go through the 9 months necessary to turn a single cell into a person. There will still be those that, no matter how great our social safety net becomes, are not able to go through the condition called pregnancy. Even with adoption at the end, forced childbirth is still forced. Our society has the means to prevent most unwanted pregnancies in the first place, and no amount of promotion of adoption is going to reduce abortions like access to contraceptives will.
The issue is the cultural reaction to the ability for women to have sex a)without the risk of pregnancy and b)actually enjoy the sex and seek it out. You know, just like men. What, exactly, are the consequences of women enjoying sex like men if said sex does not spread disease or end up creating additional people on our overpopulated planet? Is it really just because a book written by nomadic patriarchs two or three thousand years ago says it is bad?
I never knew that Norma McCorvey from Roe v Wade never actually had the abortion. I always thought she had it and regretted it and wanted to take that choice away from other women to make herself feel better.
That’s a fucking shameful column.
He could have written a 1950s version after Loving vs. Virginia about the need to re-open interracial marriage to the “democratic process”, in order to distance himself from lynchmobs and segregationists.
My friend got pregnant with a genetically defective baby. She didn’t want to give up on the fetus, if there was a chance it would be somewhat healthy. But there are no tests for a lot of problems, and the few tests that are available were showing up an abnormal baby at 3 months. The baby died and was expelled naturally on the fourth month. That month was filled with almost unbearable painful anguish and hurt for all who knew about it.
I can’t imagine having a sick late term baby, going through the pain of knowing about it and taking a very painful decision, just to be told “no, you don’t get to decide, my religion decides for you”. It is almost criminal to do so. As a matter of fact, it is a crime still, thank the goddess!
Douchehat and others have no empathy and should be told to STFU and mind their own lives!
If they want to reduce abortions in the 2nd trimester, there is a simple way to do it—-remove 100% of restrictions in the 1st. No more waiting periods, TARP laws, parental notification, etc.
And subsidized by the state, thank you. Oh, the fights that the wingnuts will have about that in any public plan. Or rather, the non-fights, because the Dems will cave on it.
And to repeat it: fundamental rights are powerful because they allow people to do things that other people would not do or like.
And just to add to what Ursula said, Gray Train, adoption is not always “great” even for those who physically and financially can undergo pregnancy. There was a powerful essay about it over at Shakesville recently talking about how the emotional implications are widely underreported and misunderstood (http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2009/03/breaking-silence-on-living-pro-lifers.html)
Yes, it’s an option we should support, but it’s by no means a comprehensive solution to the abortion issue.
“If more children were adopted and raised with love, devotion and respect, maybe giving a child up for adoption would be a more viable option.”
Because there are pregnant women out there right now who’d break an ankle tripping over themselves in their haste to give away their babies if only they could just be assured that they’d be raised in a good home? Are we really back to the “women have the sensibilities of livestock” and “pregnancy is a walk in the park” memes? Not to mention that, as much as people like to shout “adoption” in the reproductive rights version of marco polo, society has a very, very narrow idea of when it’s okay to give babies up for adoption—you better have a damn good excuse for not sacking up and accepting your motherhood-shackles. Because, you know, it’s not actually about the fucking babies, is it?
It then occurs to me that hothouse flowers like Douthat are the only way conservatives can maintain any outreach to the younger cohorts. Pretty much anyone who’s had to work for a living ultimately comes to see that life is too complicated for theoretical Lord Saletan-type judgments from atop the mountain.
felagund
I’ll agree with you there. My libertarian phase lasted about 18 months under real world conditions. Taking home that less than federal miminum wage because the company you’re working the summer for is local and needs only pay state minimum wage and not eating 3 days out of the week really dives a person’s Unique Snowflake / Captain of Industry illusions out of their head.
That being said, Let’s democratize Douchehat’s nuts.
Oh, I guess that won’t work since the female half of the population won’t touch them anyway.
One more comment,
The result would be laws with more respect for human life, a culture less inflamed by a small number of tragic cases
So… women aren’t human?
Testicle free men will not be able to rape women,
Actually, that’s not true; testicle-free men are perfectly capable of rape—either with their own penises (which can still achieve erections), or with foreign objects.
I know you were engaging in snark, but the meme “if we just castrated rapists, there would be no rape” is a pet peeve of mine.
Carry on.
Douchehat and others have no empathy and should be told to STFU and mind their own lives!
But then they’d have to go out and actually get a life.
Until this morning I’d managed not read a Douchehat column. But I’m very concerned about the continuing attacks on women’s health care and upset by Dr. Tiller’s murder. I will (charitably) assign his ideas to youth and willful ignorance and not to a hatred of women and a desire to control women completely.
I remember conditions before Roe v. Wade and we did have things like hospital panels to decide if an abortion was to allowed. It’s been noted elsewhere that there were hospital wards full of women maimed or killed by DIY abortions and back-alley procedures done by untrained people. And then there is the case of Sherri Finkbine. From the Wikipedia entry on Romper Room:
In 1962, the hostess of the Phoenix franchise of Romper Room linked her own name with that of the ongoing controversies over abortion. Sherri Finkbine, known to television viewers as “Miss Sherri”, sought hospital approval for abortion on the ground that she had been taking thalidomide and believed her child would be born deformed. Being a community-minded woman, Finkbine made a public announcement about the dangers of thalidomide.
The hospital refused to allow an abortion, apparently because of her announcement and its own fear of publicity. Finkbine traveled to Sweden for the abortion. Upon completion, it was confirmed that the fetus had no legs and only one arm.
The incident became a made-for-TV movie in 1992, A Private Matter, with Sissy Spacek as Finkbine.
Yeah, those panels really worked well. These were also the days before things like amniocentesis or ultrasound and other genetic tests. Why have these tests if you can’t use the results to guide health decisions and guide your life? We must have access to medical care for medical problems.
“Oh, I guess that won’t work since the female half of the population won’t touch them anyway.”
Er…I’m not so sure the male half are lining up for that experience either.
I cringe every time there is a Pandagon piece on Ross Douthat because it forces me to click over and see that arrogant mug of his, he reminds me of a blond Ricky Gervais channeling David Brent. I read the NYT, but I put his column print format to avoid having those beady eyes staring at me.
This is more of his, “Hey, I’m a reasonable guy” crap. My fear is that is appeals to some people who would otherwise not fall for it.
I love how anti-choicers think the mental health exception is a shut and dry case of “abusing” therapeutic abortion. Is there any better evidence that they are skeptical that women have minds worth caring about at all? Isn’t the hierarchy men then animals then cunt/baby machines?