response 57 of 209:

Jul 20 21:24 UTC 2003

I think #55 is kind of where you need to go if you are really serious about
outlawing abortion, but I would have said that no nation had ever had the will
to go that far.  So I did some web searching.

Best two pages I found to look at seem to be

   http://eileen.undonet.com/Main/7_R_Eile/Romania.htm
   http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/policy/abortion/ab-romania.html

The first is a story, the second is statistics.  Before 1966 the abortion rate
in Romania was very high - between 75% and 80%.  In 1966 Ceaucescu banned
abortion and contraception, aiming to increase the size of his population
(and thus his army).

    Mandatory pelvic examinations at places of  employment were imposed
    on women of reproductive age.  Informers for the security police were
    stationed in maternity hospitals.  Doctors could be prosecuted for
    performing unauthorized abortions,  and nurses were to make unannounced
    supervisory visits to new mothers to determine whether they  were taking
    proper care of their infants.

All women were supposed to have at least four (or five according to some
sites) children.  Economic sanctions were applied to women who failed to
produce four children.

The rate of legal abortions dropped to 28% between 1966 and 1967 and the
number of live births almost doubled.  The legal abortion rate there after
started drifting upward and the birthrate downward.  Meanwhile the rate
of abortion-related maternal mortality rate increased to 10 times the rate
of any other European country.  In 23 years, 10,000 Romanian women died from
unsafe abortion.

Many, many children were put in orphanages.  At the time Ceaucescu was
overhrown, 150,000 to 200,000 children were in institutional orphanages.
Death rates of infants were also higher.

In 1989, after the revolution, the law banning abortions and contraceptives
was one of the first legacies of the old regime to be discarded.  The
legal abortion rate lept back to around 75% but has been steadily dropping
ever since, reaching 52% in in 2000.  Maternal mortality fell by 50% in the
first year after the law was removed.  The slow fall in the abortion rate
is attributed to some improvement in the economy.  Also health care providers
have been slowing rediscovering contraceptives, after 23 years of illegality,
and the Romanian people have been slowly regaining some trust in the medical
establishment.

response 59 of 209:

Jul 20 23:58 UTC 2003

Read my posts.

I never said pregnancy interferes with any rights.

However, if you want the government to be able to force every woman who
becomes pregnant to stay pregnant, then you cannot do that without encroaching
on a lot of her rights.  It is not that state of pregnancy that interferes
with her rights, it is the process of detecting that state and ensuring that
it is preserved that interferes with her rights.

If you want the government to want to detect all abortions, then the first
thing the government has to do is detect all pregnancies.  Apparantly
Ceausesco required that all women be given mandatory month pelvic exams in
their work places so they would know when a woman got pregnant.  I'd consider
having the government closely monitoring every vagina in the country would
be a wee little infringement on women's right to privacy, wouldn't you?

So what isn't a pregnant woman allowed to do?  Let's assume the government
has good reason to suspect a pregnant woman doesn't want to have the baby.
Can they prevent her from travelling someplace where abortions are legal?
(Keep in mind that if Roe vs. Wade is overthrown, then it will be up to the
states whether or not to ban abortion, so abortion will my be legal in Ohio
while illegal in Michigan, so you'll have to prevent pregnant women from
crossing state lines, not just the national border.)  Certainly that kind
of restriction on the right to travel freely would be unprecidented.

Would pregnant women be allowed to run, or ride horseback?  Some people think
that kind of behavior can induce miscarriages.  (They are probably wrong but
it's the kind of thing women used to do to try to induce abortions.) Shall
they be banned from smoking and drinking?  That can increase the probability
of miscarriages (and birth defects).  My they drink raspberry tea?  There
are lots of different things that could place the health of a fetus at risk,
and any of them could cause an abortion.  Many are also likely to place the
health of the mother at risk and if they fail, lead to baby's with substantial
birth defects.  There are about a zillion different ways to cause an abortion,
mostly dangerous and of uncertain effectiveness.  You need to ban women from
doing a whole range of things that they are currently allowed (but not advised)
to do.  I don't know if that violates any specific rights, but it's a huge
contraction of women's personal freedom.

The day you ban abortion, several thousand people will put up web sites
detailing supposedly safe procedures for performing home abortions.  Are
you going to ban those web sites?  If so, that's a contraction of freedom
of speech.

It is certainly possible to ban abortion and do none of these things.  But the
ban will be a joke.  Any woman who wants an abortion will have thousands of
easy options.  Only the poor and the stupid will be prevented from having
abortions.

The sane way to reduce abortions is to improve the quality of and access to
birth control.  Then women who don't want babies won't get pregnant and then
won't have abortions.  I don't object to encouraging abstinance either, since
that has the same effect, but I don't think that is a solution by itself.
Men and women who don't want babies are never going to stop wanting sex.
I don't object to people trying to talk women out of having abortions.
Probably making improvements to the systems in place for handling adoption
would encourage more women to give babies up for adoption instead of aborting
them.  There are a lot of sane and sensible things that could be done to
reduce the abortion rate.  Illegalization is not one of them.

The fact that much of the pro-life camp has no interest at all in things like
improving access to contraception means to me that their goal is not to reduce
the number of fetus's killed.  A narrow focus on illegalizing abortion as
a solution to the abortion problem means to me that a fundamental part of the
agenda is a desire to control woman's sexuality.  Improving contraception
would be solving the abortion problem by increasing women's control of their
own sexuality, instead of by taking it away.  Can't have that, now can we.

response 61 of 209:

Jul 21 02:27 UTC 2003

A pregnancy, or a forced pregnancy, Bruce?

response 63 of 209:

Jul 21 13:59 UTC 2003

Bru: The premise hidden in your questions is: unless it can be shown 
that pregnancy somehow interferes with any of the pregnant woman's 
rights, then abortion is wrong.  The premise is bullshit.  Give me one 
reason why a non-viable fetus should not be aborted for any reason the 
woman pleases.  If your answer is that you feel the fetus is a human 
being, I'll answer that it obviously isn't.  If you can't do that, then 
the truth is that the pregnant woman has a right to have an abortion, 
and your aim is to give the government the power to deprive her of that 
right.  Talk about slippery slopes.

response 67 of 209:

Jul 29 03:02 UTC 2003

I should stop argueing about this.

You who oppose me may never understand why I see this as an infringement of
a basic human right, the right to life.

If you can rationalize the murder of an unborn child, you will have no problem
accepting the right to murder others under the right circumstances.

response 69 of 209:

Jul 29 06:43 UTC 2003

I see it as an infringement of the right of a woman to control her own
body - and not have it controlled by the "state" - to not allow an abortion
after due consideration.

response 71 of 209:

Jul 29 14:12 UTC 2003

My objection to the last paragraph of resp:67 is not that it is wrong, but
that it is vacuous.  Everyone accepts the right to kill under some
circumstances.  If someone starts shooting at a fellow customs agent, Bruce
is going to go for his gun without spending a lot of time worrying about his
right to kill, and nobody is going to criticize him much afterwards.  But he
said "murder" not "kill".  And the difference is ... um ... "murder" is
unjustified killing.  If we accept his choice of word, then we agree with him.
If we don't then the statement is meaningless.  All he is saying is "abortion
is murder because I feel it is."  Can't argue with that, but don't expect it
to convince anyone either.

I asked Bruce how he would like to see a ban on abortion enforced.  He didn't
answer.  I have never yet seen any pro-life person address this question,
which I think is absolutely essential to consider.  There just seems to be
this quiet assumption that when we illegalize abortion it will go away.  But
that's absurd.  When we illegalize abortion, it becomes the job of our law
enforcement officiers to make it go away.  How would they do it?

response 73 of 209:

Jul 29 16:02 UTC 2003

i love readin janc's responses. i usually always agree with him. but jan, 3
minutes of pleasure????

response 75 of 209:

Jul 29 17:09 UTC 2003

Re #72: I don't understand either why those that are anti-choice are also
often anti-contraception. This combination is even the policy of many
current governmental leaders.

response 77 of 209:

Jul 29 18:46 UTC 2003

Every sperm is sacred???  Hahahahahahahahahahahah.  

response 79 of 209:

Jul 29 20:11 UTC 2003

"I'm one of those kooky types that
doesn't consider "life" to be official until "birth" ie. when a BIRTH
certificate says you were BORN.  "

Someone needs to tell those tribes out in Africa, they're not alive!!

;)

response 81 of 209:

Jul 29 20:57 UTC 2003

and that means if someone aborts a baby during the 8th month by cutting it
out of the mother it isn't murder?