re: #229 The Vicious Babushka

I used to be very pro-life. You could say that I still am, since I have never personally chose to have an abortion and I have enough kids and grandkids to populate a sports league. However I always assumed yes, of COURSE there should be exceptions for rape, incest and the mother’s life.

But the problem with the rape exception: why put the victim through a second hell in order to “prove” how raped she was?

The problem with the incest exception: this is a child who is being molested by a family member and she is not going to come forward if she has to go through a second hell in order to “prove” that she was raped by a family member.

The problem with the life of the mother exception: Savita. SHE DID NOT HAVE TO DIE. When a pregnancy becomes life-threatening, as in sepsis, eclampsia and pre-eclampsia, the situation can deteriorate very quickly and THERE IS NO TIME to go around looking for legal justifications to proceed with the procedure they should have done right away.

The only way to resolve these issues is not to make “exceptions” for these situations but to do away with “exceptions” and perform abortion like any other medical procedure with no non-medical questions asked. Like they do in other civilized countries, like Canada, Sweden, Netherlands and Israel.

Well said.

One of the things that I thought Bill Clinton handled extremely well when he was president was abortion, when he managed to form a general consensus that abortion should be ‘safe, legal and rare’. Polling on abortion pretty much maps directly to that thinking - people think that abortion is a tragedy every time that it happens, but that it should be an option that’s available.

Ironically, we could probably cut abortion in about half tomorrow if that was really the goal of the GOP, because we know that unconditional distribution of contraception reduces abortion rates by about that much (teen pregnancy too!) But we’ll never get there because women having sex are eeeeevilllll temptresses that deserve to be punished for their transgressions.