No one forced them to get pregnant and no one forced them to shove sharp objects inside their cervix. So if you don't mind, please spare me the sympathetic hyperbole of the "horrors" of back alley abortions as if it were justification for the horrors of abortion.
...which totally ignores the possibility of rape.
Let's play a little game, shall we, NJ? Let's pretend you're a woman. In fact, let's pretend you're an innocent 14-year old girl.
Now let's imagine some monster, statistically likely to be a family member or at least someone you know and trust, rapes you. It's horrible, unimaginably frightening, and a dozen other things that essentially make it the absolute worst experience of your life, and an event that will traumatize you until the day you die.
And now you're pregnant. You can't possibly take care of the baby, and you would choose an abortion, but the new law makes that first degree murder - so that option is out.
For the next nine months, the child gestates. But that's not all that happens. Your body changes in response to the pregnancy, until you have to drop out of (at least regular) school to carry to term. Your educational future has now been significantly damaged, though it's still recoverable. You begin to experience morning sickness, which for many women essentially means 3-6 months of constantly being violently ill.
Keep in mind that every time you feel sick, every time the baby kicks, every time you are reminded that you are pregnant (which basically means "constantly"), you are also reminded of the event that caused all of this. The rape. The absolute worst experience of your young life.
Because your body was still undeveloped in the first place, a normal birth is impossible. A cesarian section is going to be necessary to remove the baby "safely." Because of the new law, you are now forced to undergo a major operation against your will. Being only 15 now, you are terrified of the procedure itself. The doctors prep you for surgery, and cut open your abdomen - a scary prospect even for more mature mothers who actually WANT their babies. As an added bonus, you get a scar for the rest of your life for an additional reminder.
This, of course, is all assuming everything goes
well.
I don't know about you, but I find anyone who would force that on a rape victim to be a monster almost as bad as the rapist. Why, exactly, do you have the right to force someone under the knife over your personal beliefs, beliefs that are completely unsubstantiated by any form of evidence whatsoever? If you believe it's wrong...fine. If your wife agrees, she can feel free to not have an abortion. That does
not give you the right to force others to fall in line with your unsupported beliefs.
The part that gets hazy for me is how someone can be so self-absorbed to actually murder their own child because of something that they are, at least in part, the causation for in the first place.
We like to think about sex as having no strings attached. Its enjoyable, so do it, kind of mentality. Morals aside, its history that tells us that sex has a tremendous responsibility. And should we view it flippantly, it proves that for every action, there is a reaction. Why are we surprised when the consequences come to light?
I'm disturbed by your outlook, NJ. The way you respond with this "you do the crime, you do the time" bullshit not only bypasses instances where there IS no choice involved, it ALSO treats pregnancy as a punishment for a crime. This is what Crash has been berating you over "slut-bashing" for. Pregnancy and childbirth SHOULD be celebrated, revered events. This is the case when pregnancy is actually
desired. When it is not, and a person is forced to go through with a highly disruptive, painful, and often psychologically and physically harmful process just becasue they had sex and had some bad luck, or were raped...
Regarding the shoving of sharp implements into cervixes...you mean to tell me you have no sympathy for all of the women and girls who died because of these crazy procedures? You honestly think that by making abortion illegal again, forcing women desperate to abort to turn to butchers and coat hangers, is a
good idea? The "baby," if you insist on calling it that, still dies, as does the mother. You don't save life at all. You kill more people with such an insane policy.
I've said it before in other threads, and I'll say it again in this one. Why not an adoption? I mean, that alleviates and absolves the mother of responsibility, yet she ends up doing the far more honorable, decent, and moral thing-- which is to allow an innocent the right to live as we do. This also gives a couple who can't conceive the chance to love a child the way the child deserves in a loving, symbiotic relationship the way families were designed to do. The birth mother is happy, the child will surely be happy, and the adopting parents are happy. In this scenario, its a win-win-win situation. With abortion, only the once prospective mother gets her way.
What say you?
Remember the game we just played? That's why. Even if we assume you give the rape-child up for adoption and don't have your life compeltely taken over by the unwanted child, even if we erase the rape part and just make this a normal, unwanted teen pregnancy, the process of pregnancy and childbirth can be extremely traumatic and invasive. You don't just squirt out the kid and hand it off.
And what about severe disabilities, NJ? Lets say that early in the pregnancy it is discovered that the baby has a severe genetic disorder. The child will never be capable of normal brain function. It can survice, but it will essentially be a vegetable for its entire life. In this case, forcing the pregnancy is a life sentence for the parents, and the child. The child has to "live" a miserable half-existance, and the parents are forced to devote their entire lives to caring for something that is incabable of loving them back. Caring for a disabled child can be very rewarding, if the choice is made voluntarily, but forcing such a thing is monstrous to all parties involved.
Every time a fundy breaks the laws of thermodynamics, Schroedinger probably kills his cat.
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