more controversy

http://www.slate.com/id/2137436/

"But pro-lifers can't launch the post-Roe era, because they're determined to abolish its guarantee of individual autonomy, and the public won't stand for that."
An interesting argument. One that proves once again that people in this debate "talk past" each other. The pro-life people argue they are defending individual autonomy...the autonomy of the individual being killed.


"Three years later, in Casey, Blackmun warned the country that he would soon have to retire, putting Roe in jeopardy."
An oft forgotten point. The original case was 7-2...meaning slightly more than a 3 to 1 majority of a small sampling of the U.S. overturned what had previously been overwhelmingly the other way...yet those 2 are forgotten, the previous 200 years are ignored that they were overturned...again, for one side of this issue, history in this debate goes back only to 1972 and it is a static moment in time. All other thoughts are irrelevant. It is the Bible for them.

"The last time they were in power, from 1993 to 1994, they tried to enshrine Roe into federal law and subsidize abortions through Medicaid and President Clinton's health-insurance proposal."

Could there be anything worse? "Not only do you have to accept this action you find morally repugnant, not only must you accept murder, now you must pay for it." Why do you think it was stretching too far?


"Meanwhile, sonograms and embryology have made people aware of how well-developed fetuses are while still legally vulnerable to abortion. We even do surgery on fetuses now, which makes aborting them seem that much more perverse."
Well, that or the fact it puts the lie to the "fetus" thing...as long as people are just whacking tissue or technical terms they can avoid emotional involvement. Of course, if you are paying attention to recent activity, there is a huge groundswell of backlash because the vast, and it is an extremely vast, majority of women who did have abortions have guilty consciences about it, regrets, etc...I laughed pretty hard when I saw one abortion clinic where "moms" (I enclose it in quotations because that term in this context is an insult to real mothers) could write on little hearts to the child they just killed. What is the point? If you really loved them (as some are said to have written) then the "inconvenience" they represent probably wouldn't have killed them and had their bodies...I'm sorry, the mass of tissue...thrown out in the dumpster with your neighbors Happy Meal. But that is just me pointing at you being ridiculous.

"But if medical technology has helped to expose this moral problem, it can also help us solve it. Second-trimester abortions are becoming not just harder to stomach, but easier to avoid. "
The arguement seems to be that "yes, we now, thanks to technology, realize we have been killing babies with developed hearts and minds, just as we have been told. However, we have an easy solution. We will just kill them before they can develop that far. Hence, no moral difficulties."

"The same high-resolution ultrasound that makes you queasy about aborting a 12-week fetus has made it safer to perform abortions at four or five weeks instead of waiting, as women were once routinely told to do."
Not my line, but I will repeat it anyway: safer for who? Not, I am sure, the baby.

Technology can't avert all our failings or tragedies. There will always be abortions.
Of course, this is all about terminilogy. Go back and read this again. Every time the word "abortion" is used, read "murder", because that is how many, perhaps even most pro-life people read it. They don't read it "getting rid of a cancerous growth" or "tumor" or "fetus" or "mass of tissue". That is not in their understanding.
Just to point out how this argument really has nothing to do with the woman's right to choose, no matter how it is positioned by some, read this: oops, the link disappeared. Oh, well. I will summarize; a woman in England had cancer. She and her boyfriend had some embroyos frozen. She took the cancer treatments which meant she will no longer be able to produce children naturally...except with those frozen embroyos. Her last chance to have her own natural children. Meanwhile, she and lover boy broke up, and he removed his permission for her to use them.
And this time it sticks...British courts and the International Human Rights Courts denied her the right to use these, which must be destroyed. If it is REALLY about a woman's right to choose, why is there nobody screaming about this? Oh, suddenly the male has a compelling interest in the right to have or not have a child? Not true in this country. But then again, that isn't really the issue, is it? No, and it never really was.