I actually feel much more sympathtic towards the woman who makes the very difficult decision to give a child up for adoption. That requires a supreme act of love and charity and I would favor a huge amount of services offered free of charge to help support that tough, but selfless choice. You see, despite your claims to the contrary, conservatives DO have a heart.

This causes many pro-choicers to be increasingly uncomfortable with abortions as the pregnancy advances, and is why the pro-choice movement is rather willing to compromise on third trimester abortions and the like. In short, many people feel bad about abortions while being pro-choice because they think that there’s something morally ambiguous about a fetus.

Gotchaye, i agree with you completely on those points. I DO realize that for some pro-choicers their difficulty in determining when to assign life makes the abortion choice tough. I’m sure many wonder if they could be wrong, they wonder if what they are asking for IS murder. I guess I would say the safest choice in that moment is to err on the side of caution. The problem is that over a million women a year decide to throw their concerns aside in favor of preserving their current lifestyle or the potential of lifestyles to come. I find that very hard to accept.

i am not content, however, with revealing my very personal, very deeply felt beliefs or betraying intimacies for assessment by anyone whose position is one of arrogant presumption and draconian myopia.

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by the way, you throw around adoption with the same cut-and-dried perspective with which you deal with abortion. guess what? women also have an incredibly difficult time deciding whether to give their children up for adoption. i don’t want to bore you with psycho babble, of course, but news flash: adoption has its own set of lifelong consequences for both the birth mother and child. although i am pro-murder, i’m certainly not anti-adoption; i do think it important, though futile, to point out one more place where i find your thinking to be cartoonishly oversimplified.

PC, it’s true that a fetus at any point must either be a person or not, but many pro-choicers believe that they can have only imperfect knowledge of its status. It seems just a little bit silly to say that a fetus is unambiguously not a person one second and unambiguously a person the next. Many start from the premises that a just-conceived zygote is not a person while an eight-month-and-twenty-nine-days fetus is. It obviously became a person at some point in between, but there’s a great deal of uncertainty in determining where that point is. This means that, for every day that passes after conception, the likelihood that the fetus is a person grows. This causes many pro-choicers to be increasingly uncomfortable with abortions as the pregnancy advances, and is why the pro-choice movement is rather willing to compromise on third trimester abortions and the like. In short, many people feel bad about abortions while being pro-choice because they think that there’s something morally ambiguous about a fetus.

At least, that’s a rationalist take on what’s almost certainly driven entirely by empathy and instinct. Many of us feel bad watching a cow get slaughtered, but that doesn’t stop us from eating beef.

because it’s not true, pc. your characterization is ludicrously simple. i, and the vast majority of pro-choicers i know (and i am going to throw ames in the pot), care very much about abortions, whenever they happen. i am sorry that abortions take place. i am sorry for every woman who has to make such a decision for herself, for her partner, for her family … it is a mind-blowingly difficult position to be in, and i am sorry that our society does not provide the necessary supports to minimize the incidence of abortion …

and if you read ames’ post carefully, you will note that that is what obama is looking for: societal tools to reduce the number of abortions that take place every year by reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies. you are exceptionally dismissive of everything obama has proposed, summarily writing it off as lip service to programs you say “most liberals don’t even really believe is all that effective.”

i think you are wrong. i also think you are absolutely out of turn invalidating what a woman goes through in making the decision to continue or end a pregnancy as just so much “psycho babble.” you have also said in a previous thread that the 150 or so women who would die in pregnancy is a small price to pay for 0ne-million babies. (are you suddenly an actuary?)

your characterizations effectively reduce women to stupid, slutty cows.

the time has come to discuss abortion and birth control and family planning … and marriage and divorce … as the complex human issues they are rather than in the dogmatic terms you, pc, throw around. (by the way pc, smart money is on you knowing at least one woman who has had an abortion. you might work with her; you might sit next to her in church; she might be a distant relative. you probably enjoy her as a human being. considering the tone and substance of your comments, would your friendship with her survive your finding out she had an abortion?)

the abortion discussions on your site, ames, often drive me nuts because so few women participate in them and because no matter how pro-choice or pro-life any of you men are, you are still men. women, unfortunately, in this society have to look to men to protect our interests and our health (not just on the abortion front, but on all health fronts). it is a frightening and terribly insecure position to be in.