And "Yay for Choices"? I think we women here take some of our basic rights a bit more seriously than choices in nail polish color.

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that's effed up, man.

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As long as women are the ones who have to bear the brunt of pregnancy, we should have the final say. Are you aware that there is still maternal risk in pregnancy and childbirth?

Gah, I'm not going to start feeding trolls. Sorry I even began to get worked up. Not worth it.

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BTW PT II, we TOTES should give out birth control to everyone who wants it, for free, and really we need to come up with the male pill at this point.

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I'm aware that there is risk in pregnancy and childbirth. The solution to this is "don't get pregnant". If you don't like risk, don't engage in risky behavior that leads to risky circumstances. Call it unfair if you want to; I'll likely agree with you. Doesn't change reality.

And ... to be perfectly honest, no, I don't see anything callous about someone bemoaning abortion in America because it means fewer workers. It's true. It's not the reason I rally around the pro-life flag, but it's a point. Although I guess it depends on how much negative connotation you attach to the word "workers". Generally speaking, productive activity is good. This isn't some evil capitalist bemoaning the lack of cogs in the great wheel of industry, as far as I can tell.

Sorry that you see me as a troll, portia. Sometimes it seems that Jez is stuck in a myopic positive-feedback loop, so I figured a contrarian viewpoint wouldn't go amiss. Maybe I was wrong.

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And yay for both of PT II, although the "free" part bugs me only because nothing is free. Someone pays for it. But call it a public health issue and I'll most likely agree and watch another little bit of my paycheck disappear.

My comments about callousness were directed more at the "44 million dead! Awesome, that r0x0rz!" sentiments I feel were expressed in the first two pages. I didn't think one of the pro-choice arguments was, "Yeah, it's murder. So?".

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Second, I generally don't agree that sex, in a loving, monogamous relationship in particular, is a risky behavior and someone needs to suffer the consequences for engaging in it. I don't think it is fair to categorize a fetus as a consequence or punishment that must be suffered. That seems to me honestly to devalue life.

Abortion is not a black and white thing in my view. There is plenty of gray between taking a birth control pill and disposing of your newborn in a dumpster. Where I generally draw the line is when a delivered baby would be able to survive outside of the womb. I that point, it is immoral to kill it, since someone else could realistically support it if they wanted to. If it is a three-month old fetus, yes it is "alive" like many cells in my body are alive, but it is not capable of existing as a separate being and thus is dependent of taking its nutrients from my body, and since I don't think I am an incubator, I do believe that is should be a basic human right for a woman to decide whether she wants to go through with a pregnancy.

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Calling a fetus a "consequence or punishment that must be suffered" devalues life, yet killing it doesn't? Which devalues marriage more, me calling my wife "the ol' ball and chain" or divorcing her?

The glib answer to your last paragraph would be "If that were the case, we'd have never heard of Terri Schiavo". I'm not really clear on why human life is only valuable so long as someone else has a vested interest in it. And it's not alive like many other cells in your body because the other cells, if left alone inside your body, won't spontaneously create another human being (unless you're on an episode of "House"). Saying "it's not a human being but I want to stop it before it becomes one" smacks of hypocricy, which is at the root of my problem with this particular issue.

Didn't mean to turn this thread into a referendum on abortion, though, although I guess I'm not sure how I expected it not to. :)

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I'd also like to point out what a few other commentors have and that is that many Americans wouldn't dare perform the jobs that illegal immigrants do. Including Rep. Emery himself. The problem isn't that we need illegal immigrants to fill in jobs, its's that we need them because no one else will do them.

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I guess there's a pro-choice school of thought that says "yes, we're killing the unborn, but it's not murder"? I don't know; It's been ages since I've actually argued the abortion issue. But at any rate, yeah, if generic you doesn't think that abortion is murder, there's no holocaust in generic your mind.

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Seriously, need to borrow mine? He blames all my problems on his being fat.

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What's bad is Mike Huckabee has made a similar statement, though I believe he put the number at 30 million. What's even worse is my dad agreed with him, saying "There have been a lot of people murdered."

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There are a lot of pro-life people who vote that way, but are still okay with exceptions in the case of rape and incest. That doesn't make any sense. Either it's a life or it's not.

And on the pro-choice side, people bring up the rapist and incest cases because they know that it's the Achilles heal for many pro-lifers, which helps us in the short run, but in the long run undermines everything. It should always be my choice. Not just when something traumatic happened to me, but always.

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