jack said:
I think the whole idea of men legislating the rights of women based on the idea of sexual responsibility is pretty ironic.
Right always come with responsibilities. It's part of adulthood to acknowledge this fact. Actions also come with responsibilities.
To engage in sexual activity is to open oneself to the potential of offspring. That's why people shouldn't become sexually active until they are willing to take responsibility for the possible consequences of their actions.
I'm pro-choice myself, to a point. That point ends pretty early on in the pregnancy, when it's clear to anyone but the most vehement pro-abortionists that what you're doing is taking a life.
Not cutting out a part of a woman's body, but destroying something that is a life of its own, regardless of how undeveloped and how fragile that life is.
I grow tired of N.O.W. and N.A.R.A.L. and all of these other groups who parade Roe around like a fucking flag, and contest any restrictions on the "right" to abortion. These people are unethical fucks, who need to be put in their place by a society that recaptures its sense of ethics and says "No, you can't have a late-term abortion, you selfish little bitch. You should have made your decision sooner. You should have taken a morning-after pill. Your lack of responsibility is not going to result in the loss of life."
But we're not going to get to this point without overturning a bad law, which deliberately misinterprets two Constitutional amendments in order to legislate from the bench.
And we
need to get to this point. We need to have a serious discussion of the ethics of abortion--the ethics of the morning-after pill, the ethics of first-trimester abortions, the ethics of second-trimester abortions, and the ethics of third-trimester abortions.
The discussions we have right now are anything but. Instead, you have one group of fanatics protecting a bad law with everything they can muster, to make sure it's never really scrutinized too much. One the other side, a group of fanatics who want to eliminate even the possibility of destroying a cluster of cells, and are willing to blow up clinics in order to force society to adopt their values as a matter of law.
That's the legacy of Roe.
Roe needs to be overturned. Then we as a society need to come to the table and hammer out
good law, law that makes sense and that gives a woman a degree of reproductive freedom (which she has, of course, through birth control and just not fucking until she's ready to procreate), but without allowing her to commit an act which is, if we're really honest with ourselves, is nothing more than murder, if the abortion is performed late enough in the pregnancy.
We need to discuss exactly what "the health of the mother" means. Physical health, I think, is undebatable. It isn't fair to require one person to give their life for another. Mental health, on the other hand, I'm not so sure about, and can too easily be used as a cop-out by someone who's made up their mind too late.
But this would need to be discussed.
All of our rights are subject to some curtailment. That's part of living in a civil society. One group cannot just claim the irrevokable right to an abortion without taking into consideration the ethical implications of said right. The fact of the existence of other people necessarily curtails some of our rights. At some point, well before the nine month period is up, abortion is curtailing the right of another person to live. When is that point? Perhaps if there really were something at stake for both parties in this debate, we'd do some serious work towards figuring out when that is, and draw a firm line in the sand.
But, again, none of this is going to happen when we have a bad law like Roe.
