Multitudes of people in our society have come to believe that they benefit from abortion.  They have been convinced by endless propaganda that the practice of unrestricted abortion is good and that it must be protected at all costs.  This extreme view comes from the radical feminists who argue foolishly that women should be free to choose to kill their unborn babies.  They fail to see that if a choice needs to be made, it should be made before the conception of a child.  After conception, it is too late.  A child who is an individual has been created.  One of the most important principles of traditional Western civilization is that one individual should not kill another for convenience.  The feminists have cast this principle aside by allowing women to kill their unborn babies.  There is no real difference between killing a child before or after it is born.

In the minds of radical feminists, men and women are engaged in one big power struggle.  This notion originates from their Marxist heritage.  Karl Marx, whose writings led to the disaster of communism, believed that society was dominated by a struggle between the bourgeoisie (owners of production) and the proletariat (workers). Although Marx says nothing about a struggle between men and women, the feminists adapted his revolutionary rhetoric to their own cause.  Feminists believe that for women to win their struggle, they must have total control over child bearing and be able to kill their unborn babies on demand.  Actually, there is no big power struggle between men and women.  If an independent observer from Mars were to come to Earth to study the interactions between men and women, he would not find a state of ongoing war.  He would not find roving bands of men forcing women to produce babies, they do not want.  He would instead find that, in most cases, men and women get along very well together.  The feminists have created this struggle myth to advance their political power.  Unfortunately, they also created our American holocaust.

The pro-life movement seems to exist to maximize the consequences of having sex. It is like they can’t stand the idea that people might hve fun and not have to pay for it in some way.
I wonder what happened to guys like Douthat that they hate so much.

“I wonder what happened to guys like Douthat that they hate so much.”

I see where you went wrong there. You meant to say “Robert”, but typed “Douthat” instead.

“There is no real difference between killing a child before or after it is born. “

Robert, if you can’t see the absolute idiocy in that statement… but, OK, I guess you must be that trollish - staying out on Rugged’s ranch, huh?

Couple that statement with your anti-Marx rant and your post gets really hysterical.  One of the main supports of capitalism is John Locke’s theory of private property - which takes as a given the right to do with one’s own body as one wishes.

Well, the curve may be U-shaped. That is, if you partially de-funded PP in, say Massachusetts, the number of abortions would probably go up (if, say, you don’t want to drive from Worcester to Boston every month for your birth control, but in a pinch you’re sure as heck going to make it to the city for an abortion). But if you reduce contraception access in a place with few abortion providers while simultaneously eliminating some of the abortion providers, say, in Kansas, you might end up with fewer abortions.

either way, effectively de-funding contraception is a terrible idea.

It’s funny that lies <strike>of omission</strike> get you a gold star for honesty amongst the <strike>anti-choice set</strike> entire community of conservative Christians.

There, fixed that for you. But seriously, see also the Prop 8 campaign. Dishonesty isn’t just a commonality, it’s their entire raison d’etra.

One should ask themselves that why are feminists not exposing the Planned Parenthood for covering up child rape of girls. 

http://www.childpredators.com/

http://ianessling.com/blog/index.php/2008/12/05/disgusting-planned-parenthood-cover-up/

abortion rules a feminists thinking, nothing trumps abortion, not even child rape.

It is ok to lie if you are saving souls.

The creepy thing about what karl said is that he could be either an anti-choicer speaking sincerely, or someone snarking on anti-choicers who say lying is fine if they believe they’re working for Jesus.

Problem is that the theocrats driving the anti-abortion are just as opposed to birth control as to abortion.  Note that they pushed through the Bush administration rule allowing pharmacists to refuse to dispense contraceptives if it violated their religious beliefs.

Robert, did you cut and paste your post from the Knights of Columbus website all by yourself? What a big boy you are! Also, thank you for your helpful parentheticals defining the terms ‘proletariat’ and ‘bourgeoisie’ because heaven knows that feeble-brained girls like us have never been exposed to Marxist terminology before.

All kidding aside, hon, I’m real sorry that you can’t get a woman to stay with you without trapping her into it with an unplanned pregnancy, but it’s a real bore to us here to have to listen to you work your issues over that out on a feminist blog.

P.S. I’m not actually sorry.

P.S.S. Fuck off.

You know what would happen if Planned Parenthood suddenly disappeared and literallly millions of women would find that their source of contraception has disappeared?

Saran Wrap™ is available at all grocery stores for only pennies per use.

After conception, it is too late.

No it’s not.  There are plenty of medical and surgical techniques available.

Robert, are you prepared to donate a kidney or part of your liver b/c the government forces you to?  It will save someone’s life, so you should be quite happy to do so, since, you know, living breathing people need your body to survive.

What?  You think that you should be allowed to decide if someone else is allowed to use your body for life support?  Well fuck you, you pro-abortionist!  It’s murder to withhold your kidney from someone who needs it to survive.  You have an extra!  It’s just a minor inconvenience, and it will save a life!

The government should totally take over live organ donation and force people who are under the Marxist delusions that their bodies aren’t the property of the bourgeoise.

Ass.

There is no real difference between killing a child before or after it is born.

OK, Robert, sure, fine.  Get it out of me—-now, I mean, not months later at the end of a pregnancy term, but at the eight-weeks-or-so point that I’d be seeking out the abortion—-and I’ll make no effort whatsoever to have it killed.

Are we good now?  Everybody’s happy?

“After conception, it is too late.  A child who is an individual has been created BY MY COCK”

Some guys cannot cope with the notion that women make babies.

I was snarking

Yeah, kuz dem blastocysts gots ritez!

http://rossdouthat.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/12/middle_ground.php

Robert, you’d be remiss not to mention the daily murder of trillions of spermazoatoids, which happens every day on a daily basis at the hands of millions of male abortionists abusing themselves and murdering their children.

From the article presented by “Link,” courtesy of the same jackhole that wrote the feature link for this post:

My idea of a plausible middle ground on the issue requires the overturning of Roe v. Wade, followed by a move toward a system in which abortion is legal but discouraged in, say, the first ten weeks of pregnancy, and basically illegal thereafter.

Does he honestly think that any of the “pro-life” lobby will, if Roe v. Wade is overturned, settle for any legal abortion in the spirit of compromise?  Or does he just not care, since it’s women, not him, who will pay the price when they don’t?

And that “compromise” is laughable.  “Oh, we’ll allow you your freedoms some of the time (except not) and accept that you have them (except not) if you’ll give up your right to them.”

Seriously, how does anyone seriously suggest that our rights should be surrendered as part of a compromise?  He certainly doesn’t mention a replacement for Roe v. Wade, neither a future court case in which the right to bodily autonomy replaces Roe’s interpretation of privacy rights, nor an amendment or other legislation granting the right to bodily autonomy, nothing to acknowledge that our bodies are our own and we have legitimate interest (to say nothing of rights) in preserving that concept.  And what does he mean by “discouraged?”  Price? Distance? Roadblocks? Physician-read guilt trips? Making them fight their way past a battalion of protesters? Is it an acceptable level of “discouraged but legal” to him if nobody makes it past those discouragements?

And woo, illegal after ten weeks—-I don’t suppose it matters to him that it’s Roe v. Wade that provides for the mother’s-health-and-life exemptions?  Bet he doesn’t care if that is sacrificed in the name of “compromise,” either.

I wonder how many of these same anti-choicers are the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” type of conservatives.  I wonder if they realize how completely contradictory those two worldviews are in actual practice. 

I bet that a huge proportion of the people who go to planned parenthood for contraception are people like me who are staying afloat financially by the skin of their teeth and for whom adding a baby to the mix (let alone a new baby every year) would completely sink them.  The cost of a week of daycare in my city (Minneapois, highest childcare costs in the nation! whee!) is roughly equivalent to what I make in a week.  Losing access to contraception and abortion would be a one way ticket to life on welfare for a hell of a lot of people.

I’m sorry, but there is no compromise on my right not to allow a parasitic entity to take up residence in my body and to suck the life from my body in order to sustain its own life against my will.  I don’t think that’s an unreasonable position.  I don’t think that any person should be required to provide life support for another person (or in this case, non-person) against their will. I’m pretty consistent about bodily autonomy.

Losing access to contraception and abortion would be a one way ticket to life on welfare for a hell of a lot of people.

Oh, but don’cha know then you’re supposed to give the baby up for adoption!  Because obviously you’re not good enough to give the precious baybee the two-opposite-sex-parent married middle-class parents it deserves, you’re supposed to say goodbye forever to a person you spent nine months creating, as immediately after it’s born as possible so some more-deserving Christian childless couple can pretend they did it all by themselves, with no way for you to ensure the kid doesn’t grow up wondering why their birth mother didn’t want them (even if you did).  And of course all the babies that don’t get adopted quickly because they’re not white or otherwise not in demand, well, the mother should still give it up for adoption because if she doesn’t then she’s a lazy welfare queen hoovering up the tax dollars of good working Americans; it doesn’t matter if that baby winds up in foster care all its life because hey look ocelots!

I feel like I need to bleach my keyboard and my hands after typing that.

The phenomenon of an institution that does good with one hand and evil with another is a familiar one in human history - even Hezbollah does a lot of impressive humanitarian work, I believe - and it does not by any means follow that those who oppose the evil are morally obligated to support the institution anyway just because it does other, less morally problematic things besides.

Oh, boo hoo. Since we’re organized into a society to which we all contribute and from which we all benefit, some of the contributions and benefits aren’t going to please everyone. For instance, there are those wars I find morally reprehensible. Maybe Ross could review the record on hundreds of thousands of dead people and get back to us on his idea of the Common Good.

What other basic fundamental rights to self-ownership could we have compromised on?  Hmm, let me think…

Black People: “We won’t be slaves anymore!”

Slave Owners: “But it would be an economic loss to us to free you, plus the idea of free blacks just makes us uncomfortable.  How about you just work for us for free and let us whip and rape you three days out of the week, and then you can do what you want for the rest of the time?  Of course, during your ‘free’ days you should make sure to hang your head in shame the audacity of you presuming to own yourself.  Plus, we will berate and shame, heckle and obstruct you at every turn when you are not doing exactly as we say, even on your ‘free’ days.”

BP: “Boy, you sure are generous to offer to meet us halfway!  In the spirit of compromise, we’ll agree to be part-time slaves!  We would hate to have an ugly argument over it, after all.”

SO: “Well, it certainly is more than you pseudo-humans deserve!  And we will obviously keep trying to erode your few freedoms on technicalities at every chance we get!  And remember, it is all for your own good because we know best.”

... perhaps I am being ober-dramatic here, but how do you compromise when the argumant is “I Own Myself” vs. “Oh No, You Don’t”

The answer can never be, “ok, let’s vote on it,” or “I’ll meet you halfway,” only “who the hell do you think you are?”

My body is not a democracy.

They are so enamored of the false dichotomy, aren’t they?  It isn’t as if Sam Harris is faced with a choice of “support the Catholic School System or NO SCHOOLS AT ALL!”  There are, after all, public schools AND non-ecclesiastical private schools. 

Naturally, Douhat fails to note the BILLIONS of tax dollars devoted to fundie abstinence-only programs in the US and abroad.  Those of us who are disturbed by fistulas and women being deprived of their autonomy are enjoined to support the Bush “family planning” doctrine because they claim HIV has been reduced in Africa, despite the high likelihood that the reduction is mostly due to people dying from things that kill them long before AIDS will.

The phenomenon of an institution that does good with one hand and evil with another is a familiar one in human history - even Hezbollah does a lot of impressive humanitarian work, I believe - and it does not by any means follow that those who oppose the evil are morally obligated to support the institution anyway just because it does other, less morally problematic things besides.

This concept does not work when the good accomplished is of such magnitude that it outdoes the best efforts of those in opposition to its “evil” by leaps and bounds, not to mention far outweighing the “evil” it does itself.

If Hezbollah was actively preventing half a dozen Sept-11th-scale attacks on civilian population centers every year from Al Quaeda, I’d bet a lot of people would be quite happy to support it in that part of its endeavors.

This is a situation where the status quo would be far worse, in terms of the abortion rate from a pro-life perspective, without Planned Parenthood’s work than with its work.

“My idea of a plausible middle ground on the issue requires the overturning of Roe v. Wade, followed by a move toward a system in which abortion is legal but discouraged in, say, the first ten weeks of pregnancy, and basically illegal thereafter.”

Could somebody close the Overton window* a bit? - there’s one hell of a draft.

Although arguably it’s time for some (metaphorical!) defenstration . . .

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

And while it doesn’t really affect the moral issues - numerical might doesn’t make right - it’s still worth noting that given the way people think, Douthat’s idea of a “plausible middle ground” suggests an even balance between equal opposing forces; in reality, survey after survey after survey seems to show that hardcore anti-choice fanatics - the abortion-should-always-be-illegal fringe - hovering between 10% - 20% (with one 25% outlier).  Additionally, polls consistently show 60%+ support for keeping Roe (which, granted, ends up giving some odd results, but you know what they say . . . )  His supposed “plausible middle ground” is in fact nowhere near the middle, but far to the right.

Feminists believe that for women to win their struggle, they must have total control over child bearing…

I love it when these yabbos tip their hand.  Dude isn’t even TRYING to hide it!  Thank you, Robert, for (inadvertently) being honest. 

But seriously, if Robert really thinks that relations between men and women are so good that an independent observer from Mars would approve of them, then why does he think depriving women of autonomy is necessary?

Funny that Ross hasn’t really read the literature from even the Catholics for Common Good.  A conservative group that is against gay marriage and abortion but who did a study which showed that wow there is no correlation between how many abortion providers there are in Kansas of all places and the number of abortions.

http://www.catholics-united.org/files/Reducing-Abortion-in-Kansas.pdf

Feminists believe that for women to win their struggle, they must have total control over child bearing…

Well, that’s part of the struggle.  What’s the problem with that?  My body, in my control.  It’s only fair and reasonable. 

Is there any part of a man’s body that he doesn’t have complete autonomy over?  (Still recovering from an early afternoon root canal and resultant painkillers and may not be thinking clearly, so if there is - let me know).  Would they give up any of that autonomy at the demand of religion, society or the woman in their life?  I don’t think so.  This guy is just very angry that this is one thing he can’t control.  In my estimation, it seems like most of these forced birth men are terribly upset that this is something about their wimmins they cannot control.  Usually.

And who are all of these modern, radical and raging feminists they keep squeeking about?  Any woman that opens her mouth to stand up for her rights?

If an independent observer from Mars were to come to Earth to study the interactions between men and women, he would not find a state of ongoing war.  He would not find roving bands of men forcing women to produce babies, they do not want.  He would instead find that, in most cases, men and women get along very well together.

I think Robert is trying to tell us something . . . .

Anyway, anti-choicers don’t just try to make sure that women have as many unplanned pregnancies as possible. They lobby to produce and pass legislation that targets our nations most vulnerable women. Parental notification and consent laws target minors, who already have limited rights and resources to take care of a pregnancy and raise a child. Banning abortion except in cases of rape and incest targets victims of violent sex crimes, and these women are forced to report and relive their rapes so that they can get an abortion. Not making a health exception for D&E;abortions target women with unhealthy pregnancies, who are both physically ill and mentally fragile for needing to abort a pregnancy they initially wanted but now can’t support. And the Hyde Amendment, which anti-choicers apparently don’t think exists with the way they downright lie about federal funding and abortion, targets poor women who can’t afford a $300 abortion, let alone the tens of thousands of dollars (probably more like hundreds) it takes to raise a child to 18.

Look, get off of Robert’s back, ok?  The poor guy is at his wit’s end trying to deal with the hundreds of snowflake babies he’s adopted.

Fine, you’re not pro-herpes.*

*Except, of course, that they are

These are the people who didn’t want the papilloma virus vaccine distributed.  Repeat:  they flatly opposed giving out a vaccine against a dissease.

Feminists believe that for women to win their struggle, they must have total control over child bearing…

Wow!  It’s as if we think women DO all the childbearing or something!

Oh wait . . .

I think we can all agree that when Robert prepares to give birth, we will all let him have control over the process of the child exiting his birth canal.

But telling people who are against abortion that they’re “pro-herpes” because they don’t support channeling three hundred million public dollars a year to America’s largest abortion provider is the equivalent of me accusing a fierce and moralizing anti-theist like Sam Harris of being “anti-education” because he doesn’t want his tax dollars being used to, say, fund the Catholic school system.

Would it also be the equivalent of the anti-choice crowd accusing me of being a baby killer because I support Planned Parenthood?  Not that I’ve ever given them money, come close to one of their clinics, or even helped someone get there - but, because I think that they’re doing the right thing, and because I think that women should be allowed to choose for themselves, I’m a baby killer.

Others have pointed out how selective hypocrisy and deliberate and malicious lies are acceptable to christians when it suits their purposes.  Funny how the supposedly moral and ethical christian types have no problem bearing false witness against their neighbors when they stand to gain advantage by it…

They have been convinced by endless propaganda that the practice of unrestricted abortion is good and that it must be protected at all costs.

Uh, what place in the United States has unrestricted abortion?  Every state I know of follows the Roe construction where restrictions ramp up with each trimester so that it’s far more difficult to get an abortion in your third trimester than it is in your first.

Oh, wait, “unrestricted” probably means “legal.”  Gotcha.  I guess it makes sense to people who think that an embryo the size of a dime is the moral equivalent of an infant.

Hands off my homunculus!

If you can’t control the means of production, that’s your loss.  Make your own baby factory.

You know what would happen if Planned Parenthood suddenly disappeared and literallly millions of women would find that their source of contraception has disappeared?  We can easily guess that the number of abortions that would result would be at least thousands more, and honestly, it might even be closer to hundreds of thousands more.  Because Planned Parenthood’s clientele is mostly lower income women and students, who are exactly the same groups that have problems handling interruptions in contraception access and end up getting pregnant.

It’s a feature, not a bug, Amanda.

If you talk, really talk, to the sort of authoritarian, right-wing conservative who wants abortion to be outlawed, it doesn’t take much for them to start pining for the days of yore, when every household had a live-in servant, and labor was incredibly cheap because there was so much supply of it. The authoritarian mindset requires people to be subjugated to it, whether that’s a wife, or children, or impoverished laborers willing to bend themselves to your whims in order to scrape by.

When family planning started coming about, and poor people had the ability to control the number of children they had, it wrecked that whole setup. As the poor person only had a few kids instead of a few dozen, the pool or cheap labor dried up. After a generation, you couldn’t have a housemaid to lord over and abuse any way you liked because dismissal from your service would mean prostitution and death. Suddenly, you couldn’t pay your workers pennies in deathtrap conditions and tell them to suck it up because they were easily replaced. Laborers suddenly started demanding their rights, despite the fact that they didn’t have money, and what the hell was up with that?

This is why we see antichoice groups against contraception. It’s not that they feel abortion is evil, it’s that they want to increase the number of poverty-wage workers in the country. If we had any indication that they valued the person beyond simply being another warm body—whether it was subsidized child care, head start programs, increase in WIC and CHIP funding, or better public housing—then I would be willing to say that I was just entertaining crazy conspiracy theories and this really was about saving babies. But it isn’t. It’s about saving future domestic servants.

But seriously, ask an anti-choicer about big old houses sometime. It’s really illuminating.

It’s fun when the “more labor” argument intersects with racism. Illegal immigrants magically weren’t a major talking point in the last election, but I certainly recall a few years back when the talking point was “If we had those 40 million children murdered by abortion, we wouldn’t have all these Mexicans!”

You know, herpes isn’t a very good example here, cause if you have sex, you’re exposed to it no matter how many condoms you use, or how clean and pretty your genitals look.  You can have it and not know, and pass it on and not know, all the while using condoms every time.  You can have it all your life and never have a sore, therefore think you never had it and don’t have it.  It’s the real-life cooties. 

I get tested a lot, and one of the first times, I insisted on a herpes test (which was super expensive and not included in the usual battery of tests) for me and my husband.  The doctor recommended that I don’t waste my money, because unless I had a sore at the moment of the test, the results of the test were likely to not be accurate. 

So, I’d say the pro-forced pregnancy people are more of a pro-chlamydia or pro-gonorrhea group than pro-herpes.

@mighty ponygirl,
And it’s funny how it never occurs to them that they might end up being the labor, and not the boss, just like they never see themselves as the recipients of goverment help (even when they get student loans and scholarships and tax breaks).

when every household had a live-in servant, and labor was incredibly cheap because there was so much supply of it.

Take a look a couple of posts above where conservatives are once again whining about the horrors of the minimum wage.

Now, now. Let’s ease up on Robert a bit; he does make a few good points.

Multitudes of people in our society have come to believe that they benefit from abortion.

This is true.

Karl Marx, whose writings led to the disaster of communism, believed that society was dominated by a struggle between the bourgeoisie (owners of production) and the proletariat (workers).

Also true.

Feminists believe that for women to win their struggle, they must have total control over child bearing

Also true.

He would instead find that, in most cases, men and women get along very well together.

Also true. See? I mean, sure, all of those facts are completely unrelated and fail to support his point, but they’re not untrue. Robert isn’t completely full of bullshit. Just almost entirely full of bullshit.

Hezbollah has the distinction of being the organization that has killed more Americans (mainly US Marines) than any other except al-Qaeda, and the only one other than al-Q to set up extensive networks in the US.  (To be used, probably, as leverage against further American support for Israel, particularly in Lebanon, when the next Israel/Hezbollah conflict breaks out.)  Whatever one thinks of the organization’s genesis in the loony days of Israel’s intervention in Lebanon, a classic case of over-reach, it is more accurately classed with al-Qaeda in that it is a “caliphate” group seeking a revision of the geopolitical status quo in the Middle East rather than a Lebanese political party or solely an opponent of the State of Israel.  Unlike al-Qaeda, it is amenable to some political incentives and susceptible to deterrence, so the US can indeed “do a deal”, as long as we step aside enough to give them Lebanon, Sheba’a Farms, and possibly Israel.  Certainly the US has traded UN 425 and 1701 for the safety of its citizens and diplomats in Lebanon, so it already HAS done a deal for the protection of US interests, which everyone (at least in Israel and in Lebanon) knows are quite distinct from Israel’s.

My congregation has an exchange program with Hezbollah and they seem like perfectly decent Chr*stian folk, in spite of being colored people.

This “Robert” guy must have an IQ of below 36!

Whatever one thinks of the organization’s genesis in the loony days of Israel’s intervention in Lebanon, a classic case of over-reach, it is more accurately classed with al-Qaeda in that it is a “caliphate” group seeking a revision of the geopolitical status quo in the Middle East rather than a Lebanese political party or solely an opponent of the State of Israel.

This analysis is too biased. Like Hezbollah or hate it, there are good reasons why it remains so powerful in southern Lebannon, and they have nothing to do with its terrorist activities. It actively works to better people’s social welfare, repairing infrastructure in a country where infrastructure is periodically destroyed by Israel. It doesn’t make sense to equate Hezbollah with al Qaeda, which is nothing beyond a non-state terrorist organization.

Atheist:  They want it all, and one does not exclude the other.  OF COURSE they’re South Lebanon’s premier social services agency, they also dragged all the others into a war.  While their post-2000 steps have been incremental, towards becoming a harassing force vis-a-vis the IDF, lots of people argue that the AMIA bombing was their baby and their rhetoric, along with the habit of grabbing Israelis and returning corpses, means that they’re closer—with respect to their policy towards non-Lebanese, Jews in particular—to the nihilism of Fateh al-Islam and al-Qaeda than the mission of a social services agency, like, say, Lebanese Red Crescent Society.  The Israeli response of “bomb until they love [us]” doesn’t help either.  Depends whether you believe the Argentine prosecutor on AMIA, and whether you think patronage networks are a good enough reason for a militia to be allowed a foreign policy that has been so damaging to the country as a whole.  And yes, that from someone who agrees somewhat that Israeli Lebanon policy has been bonkers-crazy since 1969 and unproductive since ‘49.