Posted on 07/22/2004 7:50:08 AM PDT by ruddigore
bortion is legal - it's just not supposed to be mentioned or acknowledged as an acceptable option. An article in The Times on Sunday, "Television's Most Persistent Taboo," reported that a Viacom-owned channel is refusing to run the episodes of a soap opera in which the teenage heroine chooses to abort. Even "Six Feet Under," which is fearless in its treatment of sexual diversity, burdens abortion with terrible guilt. Where are those "liberal media" when you need them?
You can blame a lot of folks, from media bigwigs to bishops, if we lose our reproductive rights, but it's the women who shrink from acknowledging their own abortions who really irk me. Increasingly, for example, the possibility of abortion is built right into the process of prenatal care. Testing for fetal defects can now detect over 450 conditions, many potentially fatal or debilitating. Doctors may advise the screening tests, insurance companies often pay for them, and many couples (no hard numbers exist) are deciding to abort their imperfect fetuses.
The trouble is, not all of the women who are exercising their right to choose in these cases are willing to admit that that's what they are doing. Kate Hoffman, for example, who aborted a fetus with Down syndrome, was quoted in The Times on June 20 as saying: "I don't look at it as though I had an abortion, even though that is technically what it is. There's a difference. I wanted this baby."
Or go to the Web site for A Heartbreaking Choice, a group that provides support for women whose fetuses are deemed defective, and you find "Mom" complaining of having to have her abortion in an ordinary abortion clinic: "I resented the fact that I had to be there with all these girls that did not want their babies."
Kate and Mom: You've been through a hellish experience, but unless I'm missing something, you didn't want your babies either. A baby, yes, but not the particular baby you happened to be carrying.
The prejudice is widespread that a termination for medical reasons is somehow on a higher moral plane than a run-of-the-mill abortion. In a 1999 survey of Floridians, for example, 82 percent supported legal abortion in the case of birth defects, compared with about 40 percent in situations where the woman simply could not afford to raise another child.
But what makes it morally more congenial to kill a particular "defective" fetus than to kill whatever fetus happens to come along, on an equal opportunity basis? Medically informed "terminations" are already catching heat from disability rights groups, and, indeed, some of the conditions for which people are currently choosing abortion, like deafness or dwarfism, seem a little sketchy to me. I'll still defend the right to choose abortion in these cases, even if it isn't the choice I'd make for myself.
It would be unfair, though, to pick on the women who are in denial about aborting "defective" fetuses. At least 30 million American women have had abortions since the procedure was legalized, mostly for the kind of reasons that anti-abortion people dismiss as "convenience" - a number that amounts to about 40 percent of American women. Yet in a 2003 survey conducted by a pro-choice group, only 30 percent of women were unambivalently pro-choice, suggesting that there may be an appalling number of women who are willing to deny others the right that they once freely exercised themselves.
Honesty begins at home, so I should acknowledge that I had two abortions during my all-too-fertile years. You can call me a bad woman, but not a bad mother. I was a dollar-a-word freelancer and my husband a warehouse worker, so it was all we could do to support the existing children at a grubby lower-middle-class level. And when it comes to my children - the actual extrauterine ones, that is - I was, and remain, a lioness.
Choice can be easy, as it was in my case, or truly agonizing. But assuming the fetal position is not an appropriate response. Sartre called this "bad faith," meaning something worse than duplicity: a fundamental denial of freedom and the responsibility that it entails. Time to take your thumbs out of your mouths, ladies, and speak up for your rights. The freedoms that we exercise but do not acknowledge are easily taken away.
But what makes it morally more congenial to kill a particular "defective" fetus than to kill whatever fetus happens to come along, on an equal opportunity basis?Absolutely nothing.
Got to hand it to her--she's an equal opportunity baby-killer.
So in this nauseating piece of trash, Ehrenreich lambasts women who abort for defects such as deafness or dwarfism, yet refers to her choice to abort 2 healthy children based on her monetary situation at the time as 'easy.' Bullshit is to liberals as water is to fish.
She neglects to mention whether Bill Clinton was the father.
She didn't have the freedom not to get pregnant again?
This is a pretty accurate statement. Lionesses sometimes eat their young, don't they? Hamsters do, but I guess to say, "I was, and remain, a hamster..." doesn't have the same ring to it.
"Yeah, I killed two babies, so what? I was poor."
Just sick.
She's right.
There's no way you can call a woman who pays someone to murder two of her children a bad mother, can you?
And I am sure she is a lioness toward the other children that she allowed to be born - lionesses do eat their young, don't they?
No matter what one thinks of abortion, this woman is an a moral elitist.
Personally,
I think she shouldn't be a mother at all.
"Yeah, I killed two babies, so what? I was poor."
Avarice spreads his wings in triumph.
Latest LibLine: "We kill the children because it's for the children."
BTTT
Abortion will be abolished and history will look back on the age of abortion as an age of barbarism. School children will read of it in history books and will crinkle up their noses in disgust much like we now regard infant exposure practiced by the Roman empire and slavery practiced by the colonial powers. Tapes of defenders of abortion and editorials like these will appear in special interactive formats so that children will take away the appropriate frightening lessons that such people did indeed exist and could return some day again. Then we will all work with more conviction and zeal to eradicate such opinions from our society.
The trouble is, not all of the women who are exercising their right to choose in these cases are willing to admit that that's what they are doing. Kate Hoffman, for example, who aborted a fetus with Down syndrome, was quoted in The Times on June 20 as saying: "I don't look at it as though I had an abortion, even though that is technically what it is. There's a difference. I wanted this baby."
Oh really? She wanted her baby and says her abortion is only "technical". She wants the kind of baby she wants--not the gift God has given her. What message does this send to people with down's? They aren't of value because they aren't "perfect"? What is the definition of perfect?
I have heard of women being told that their babies would have down's syndrome but chose to have their babies anyway---guess what? The babies didn't have down's.
Gee I wonder why dwarfs complian of this practice. Maybe they worried that society will start POST natal abortions....
Yes, and wondering what mommy will do to them now when they aren't being perfect. This woman is pathetic.
or, having gotten pregnant, she could have chosen to give the baby she didn't want up for adoption by some stable, married couple who were unable to have a baby of their own. But that thought never occurs to these people.
I guess if she'd carried them and put them up for adoption, instead of killing them, she'd have to deal with Catholic or other faith-based charities, and that would probably have been a fate worse than death (or at least the death of her unborn children) for her.
A friend of mine was told that the only possible way for some test result to be so high was if she were carrying multiples, and they ALL had spina bifida.
One child, perfect little girl.
No, slice and dice is their first consideration.
I suppose if she ever gets too poor to support all her children she will do the right thing and kill one so she can remain a "good Mother" to the others.
"Choice can be easy, as it was in my case, or truly agonizing"
I guess, using her own statistics, that the women who had abortions and do not support abortion on demand, are "truly agonizing" over their decision to abort. Maybe their lack of support is because they don't want another woman to make the same mistake. The author's own research seems to make this point perfectly clear.
*** I should acknowledge that I had two abortions during my all-too-fertile years.***
"All-too-fertile years" translated, "when I was in heat and had the morals of street walker."
***You can call me a bad woman, but not a bad mother.***
Bad Mother? You? Nah. you just arranged for your children to be slaughtered in the womb using means less compassionate than spraying a cockroach with diazinon.
Hey if you kill cockroaches in your den, might as well kill kids in your womb. Right. Yeah, you're a great mom.
The move is already afoot. I forget the guy's name, but he's a philosphy professor and he's started a movement in academic circles to pass legislation granting personhood only to children older than 2 years old. Rush has mentioned this guy and his warped, evil ideas a number of times.
He actually espouses the belief that you should be able to end the life of your 1 year old if you find raising him to be to bothersome.
The bulk of the article is admission against interest.
He actually espouses the belief that you should be able to end the life of your 1 year old if you find raising him to be to bothersome.
Evil is alive and thriving in America
I call you a bad mother. You are a bad mother. Bad mother.
If you lost your job would you shoot your "extra-uterine" children because you could not longer afford to feed them? You decided to kill your pre-born children rather than give them a chance at life. You decided you knew enough about the future that they would not be able to live, or at least live as well as you wanted them to. Or perhaps you decided that you would not be able to live as well as you wanted to if they lived.
Whatever excuses you can make for your selfish choice, you chose to kill your own children rather than give them a shot at life.
That makes you a bad mother. There is no other "choice."
Shalom.
Okay, she paid a butcher to kill two of her kids. It was cheaper than raising them. It was, she says, "easy".
But she's not, she says, a bad mother.
If this is supposed to be sanity, thank you, sweet Jesus, for making me insane.
Anything to avoid that grubby, lower middle class horror.
Fawlty: That's not a hamster. That's a rat!
Manuel: No... is hamster.
Shalom.
Predictable...
I would have liked a "Barf Alert", however.
How sad. In order to assert her love for her children, this woman has to distinguish between the kids she choose to keep, and the ones she had eliminated for convenience's sake. She's quick to point out that she loves and protects her "extrauterine" children.
I think when I get home, I'm gonna throw open the door and shout "extrauterine children, daddy's home!"
As a conservative, it's nice to be on the right side of arguments, so that I don't have to use weasle words and euphamisms to defend my beliefs. And I, a right-wing extremist, don't have to specify which children I chose to love.
Fletcher J
They will spend their life with babysitters, grandparents, friends, boyfriends, strangers. And maybe, just maybe, someone that can give them love and guidance out of the cycle of selfishness and dispair.
Probably Peter Singer.
My reading of the piece is that she lambastes women who abort their children for congenital deficiencies, for not owning up publicly to their actions.
I think abortion is killing. However, if we do make it illegal, how do we enforce this? Fines/imprisonment/forced sterilization?
I just read through all of the comments and noticed that, apart from your initial statement, you have had nothing else to contribute to the thread. I am interested: what do you think of this woman's decisions and assertions? C'mon, speak up now.
What's bold is the increasingly brazen stance of the pro-abortion types. For a long time, the argument was supposedly over when life begins. But in the last year or two, many of them have abandoned that ground and essentially admit, "Yeah, OK, so we ARE killing babies. Big deal. Sometimes killing babies is the right thing to do."
This writer freely acknowledges murdering her unborn children in favor of the "extra-uterine" ones. And she wants not mere legal tolerance but active public approval for her infanticide. Evil, yes, but bold.
I'm sure she'll be completely understanding then, when her children, locked in their own struggle to escape the grubby life of the lower middle class, opt to put mommy to sleep in lieu of wasting their money on that expensive assisted living facility.
To: ehrenreich@nytimes.com
---
Honesty begins at home, so I should acknowledge that I had two abortions during my all-too-fertile years. You can call me a bad woman, but not a bad mother. I was a dollar-a-word freelancer and my husband a warehouse worker, so it was all we could do to support the existing children at a grubby lower-middle-class level.
---
Ms. Ehrenreich,
Did it not occur to you that there are tens of thousands of families in the US waiting to adopt infants? That a healthy child born to a healthy mother with a known medical history often has a list of prospective adoptive parents, all vying for the good graces of the mother, which reaches a dozen or more? That right now, over 1.5 million children in the US **live** with adoptive parents? [http://www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/censr-6.pdf]
My wife and I have struggled with infertility for over a decade, and are right now going through the steps necessary to adopt a boy and perhaps also a girl. I find it deeply tragic that you chose to kill your unborn children - that you forfeited the opportunity, 18 years hence, to meet them and befriend them and discover what they've done with your gift of erudition and intelligence - a precious opportunity which my wife and I will never have with our own flesh and blood.
Was it perhaps the shame you felt at the prospect of having to accept charity from willing adoptive parents or faith-based organizations which cost them their lives? Or perhaps the astonishing bureaucratic and legal red tape and pitfalls that plague the US domestic adoption and foster care system?
I hear some abortion advocates say that abortion should be rare, but I rarely see self-identified abortion advocates calling for the reform and streamlining of adoption in the US. Instead I read in the New York Times Sunday Magazine about a woman killing two of her children because she didn't want to have to buy big jars of mayonnaise from CostCo.
-Michael Pelletier.
She seems to hope that women who are post-abortive will "out" themselves, thus making abortion more acceptable, a la homosexuality.
I very much doubt she wants post-abortive women like me to speak out--women who discuss the guilt and anguish which follow abortion. I don't think she wants to hear from me.
She can't shut me up, though.
I'm inclined to agree. My post was actually a bit of a taunt.
"Paging ruddigore, paging ruddigore. Your opinions are required on aisle five!"
"But what makes it more morally congenial to kill a partcular "defective" fetus than to kill whatever fetus happens to come along on an equal opportunity basis?"
That's a chilling statement. I can't believe it was written in this country in the year 2004.
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