BJean

I beg your pardon. If Mark called YOU a name in that post you quoted, I certainly apologize. But I didn't read it that way.

gadget you've been guilty of dishing out hostility when you've felt someone was being hostile toward your posts. Most of us have. That doesn't constitute name-calling.

396- why don't you carry those babies for your friends for nine months, go through delivery, and raise them and handle all the attendant problems for the next 20 years of your life? If you think that it only has to do with them being "inconvenienced" you just have no clue. By the way, that's a real scientific study you did on the reasons why women get abortions. You haven't even spoken with the women you mentioned, so how in the world can you believe you fully understand their situations, much less the majority of other women's situations?

I missed the name-calling too. Except in Daffodil's posts.

laurend, I don't know about you, but after reading one of the above posts, I rest my case.

FuelMan: We must be about the same age. I totally understand your viewpoint and it is very refreshing to hear someone speak to the problems of society that contribute to making abortion sometimes the only choice for some women. If we made some really serious changes with regard to ensuring that pregnant women and the unwanted children that they are pregnant with, are well taken care of and respected, it would go a long way to solve many of the problems of unwanted pregnancies that we've been discussing here. Some of my earlier posts in this arugment were a reaction to the insistence by the anti-abortion people that these troubled women simply give their children up for adoption. I stopped short of wondering if they had some financial stake in more adoptions. I felt that was just too awful a concept. But I do know that there are people who are in that business, as distasteful as it may be. My arguments had to do with the mother who has nurtured her baby through all the stages its' development, from fertilized egg through the pregnancy and to finally, hopefully, delivering a wonderful living breathing human being. Women are generally nurturing creatures and to transition through all of the stages of conception through delivery and experience the unconditional love that they feel for their baby, it is unconcsionable to ask a woman to then lovingly surrender that child to someone else. It isn't selfish for a mother to want to keep her child - it is nature's way and it is the preferable way, just as I think you were saying. Your suggestions are far superior and more practical - to put women in the position of being able to love and nurture their babies and raise them in a healthy environment. What a huge contrast to the ideas of adoption or abortion. As for the war, I'm afraid most of the people who've posted that they are completely, vehemently opposed to abortion, are the same people who support our president and the war he has committed us to. It is as much a mystery to me as all of the intelligent and thoughtful things that laurend, mark, niecyrenee and a few others have pointed out as weaknesses in many of the anti-abortion posts in this thread. Thanks very much for your input FireMan, I believe you made some very relevant points!

Frankly I'm pleased to see that you Laurend, and maybe even you Susannah, agree with my assessment of the situation to which you refer.

Good grief, how did I get aligned with people who make such nasty comments about the competition... Sunta your point is very well taken. I am a small business owner and although I fully obey the laws, and never intend to break them, I got this mental picture of someone telling me that I HAD to do business with someone who I did not want to do business with, for whatever reason. It has nothing to do with sexual preference, or anything specific, for that matter. I fully support anti-discrimination policies in the work force. I just hate the idea of big brother looking over my shoulder and deciding that I have to buy my office coffee from one particular bean processor or other. Guess I was thinking in much too simple terms. Personally I can't imagine discriminating against someone for their sexual preference, whether the preference is by choice or by "intelligent design."

I never cease to be amazed at how the "pro-life" people refer to women who have had abortions as having made that choice out of convenience. Someone earlier even inferred that women who have abortions are doing it because they want to further their careers. What planet are you living on, people? Why do you insist on spouting your "facts" that women use abortion as birth control and only out of convenience and to further their careers? You are wrong if you think that most women make the decision to have an abortion just out of convenience. Please don't post some silly stats that prove nothing. There can be no stats that give an accurate assessment of the psycological and physical reasons why all women seek abortions. You can probably give stats on the sample you may have, but there is no questionnaire or controlled scientific study participation requirement that is used in most cases of women seeking abortion. I said it before and I will say it again - if you are truly interested in preventing abortions, work toward that goal by helping distressed pregnant women. Women have always aborted babies and they will always abort babies. It won't matter if you manage to get a law passed that makes abortion illegal. Women will get abortions if their situation makes having a child impossible for them. Your harsh approach makes me wonder if you secretly (or maybe even openly) would like to think that a woman who would abort a baby could die in an alley from a botched abortion. You obviously have no respect for that woman and you think she is "stained" and not worthy of your compassion in any way. At one point it was posted that women who get abortions are not making decisions about their own reproductive organs... I mean, huh??? Sometimes I think you just want to fight. You love the mean-spirited fight that this topic inspires. You seem to revel in it. The more you can point fingers and scream murder, and fan the flames, the happier you seem to be. I just do not understand the logic and it flies in the face of your statement about caring about human life. If you do care about human life, it is an extremely narrow range of caring that you seem to have. Whether you want to continue this thread and rant and rave on, I say fine. But just know that women who desparately need abortions will get them. No law can change that. We can be civil about it and do all we can to assist women who are faced with an unwanted pregnancy. Or we can fight them, belittle them, tell them they are murderers, tell them they are killing a living, breathing human being (which of course, they aren't.) None of it will change the fact that a woman who is faced with having a child, when she is unable to do so, may choose to have an abortion, laws or no laws.

P.S. The reason I can't describe what all they did to him is because I just don't have the stomache for it. Get off Dr. Kevorkian's case. You obviously do not know what you're talking about.

tink: you obviously didn't read my post from last night. My dad had a living will and a DNR. His doctor refused to allow him to die. His doctor was one of those doctors who after saving so many lives, decided that HE was God. I wish I could describe exactly what all they did to my dad just so his doctor wouldn't have to face the fact that his surgical procedure caused my dad's death. That louse kept my dad on life support, with no possibility of recovery, for an entire month. It was horribly gruesome and extremely painful for my father, like torture.

Thanks, tink. I believe I understand your opinion too and I certainly believe there is room enough on earth for both of us to live together in harmony as long as we can respect each others' opinions and beliefs on this issue.

Read what tink says. You'll get my point. You see they don't believe that there is a scientific answer to when life begins or how the world came about. They've decided everything points to intelligent design. How are you going to argue science with someone who believes that?

laurend, your points and babygirl's go exactly to the crux of the issue that's been debated here. But you will never get any satisfaction from trying to debate it with people who are so closed up to anything but what they believe with all their hearts and minds. That is true about rabid people on both sides of the fence, by the way. Abortion is not just a scientific question. Abortion is a religious one, a political one, a psychological and emotional one. It isn't as simple as arguing when a life begins, scientifically. If science came out and declared that life begins when the fetus is 8 weeks old, or after the baby has been born or somewhere in between, abortion would still be an option for women. It always has been and it always will be. That is the major reason why certain men and women, even though their convictions are strong enough to cause them to be outraged - absolutely certain that they are correct - should never be making decisions about it for everyone, whether those outraged men and women are for a woman's right to choose or against a woman's right to choose.

Sounded like a truly horrific experience. I couldn't believe how many others chimed in and said they'd had the same thing. I'd never heard of it. Btw, do you know what's happened to TOM?

laurend I completely agree with you. Btw, I hope you're feeling fine again.

You're just plain silly. Do you really think you're winning friends and influencing people with that drivel? Is that the best you can do lately? I know ya'll keep coming up with more outrageous claims and scenarios all the time to try to get your way, but I think you're going to have to do much better than this tripe. Websters defines tripe as anything worthless, offensive, etc., rubbish, trash. Yeah. Tripe fits.

P.S. laurend, your last question is great. I don't recall anyone for their team actually committing to a specific time, except to say that once the sperm finds a cute egg, and they dance a little, it's a life.

You know what laurend, what he did was criminal as far as I'm concerned. We seriously thought about suing. We certainly had plenty of justification to sue him. I think some of the medical staff would have loved for us to do it. But in the end, it would not have helped my dad. It would have continued to bring us unfathomable pain. And I was not prepared to spend anymore time across the table from that quack. If I thought it would save another human from the same fate, it would have been worth it, but I had very little hope that would be the case. That doctor was a very powerful man not only in that hospital, but also in the other major hospital in Orlando. My dad was 83 and had gone through many medical procedures in his last 15 years. He was in constant pain from spinal arthritis. He had no business being put through another surgery. He told my dad that he "had to have the surgery because if he didn't, he would probably drop dead one day in Winn Dixie." No, pop didn't shop at Winn Dixie, but the doctor scared dad so bad, he agreed to it. laurend, thanks for your support. I really do appreciate it. My dad was great. Wonderful sense of humor, very intelligent and all the little old ladies loved him for everything he did for them every day. I loved him because he was wonderful to me and loved me unconditionally.

Yup laurend, we've come full circle and no one who wants to make the choice for women can tell us precisely why THEIR belief of when life begins is the only true answer. gadget, you do not own another woman's unborn baby. You cannot give it life, no matter how much you want to. It cannot become a full and complete human being without a host. You (and those who share your beliefs) are not God and it is not for you to tell everyone else when life begins and that abortion is murder. It's between God and the host. Right or wrong, that's it. Because even if you succeeded in passing a law that required women to carry babies to term in all cases of pregnancy in America, there would still be abortions. To make them illegal is only going to succeed in putting it back in the hands of the desparate women who, for whatever reason, are unable to continue their unwanted pregnancies. I realize that is just exactly what you want, but the majority of Americans will not allow you to be in charge of their unborn babies, no matter when life begins.

Carlele, when my father died, he had a DNR, living will and specific instructions to his kids that we not allow him to be kept alive on machines. A highly recommended doctor did surgery on him (which I completely disagreed that he needed) and within 3 days after the surgery, dad had some kind of episode. This whiz-kid surgical doctor would not confirm a stroke. However he insisted, and the hospital followed his orders, that dad be kept alive with a ventilator, dialysis, feeding tube, and everything else he needed to keep him from being declared dead. That night after they had him all hooked up, he haunted my dreams, telling me I needed to save him and help him pass on. My sister had those same very clear dreams and directions from dad. We were completely beside ourselves seeing him being treated just the way he had designated that he never wanted to be treated. The rest of the hospital staff was also bumfuzzled. They knew he had no chance of survival. They knew he should be allowed to die on his own and in fact, had advised us to get the family together because they said he wasn't expected to live out the week. But the surgical doctor continued to insist that the hospital follow the doctor's orders to keep him alive. We cried and wrung our hands and spoke with every person on his case, and others, begging to know why this was happening to dad. We even consulted with the patient advocate in the hospital and called in other doctors to evaluate his case. All of them, except for the doctor who did the surgery agreed that his case was hopeless. The surgical doctor, however, said that my father walked into the hospital on his own and that as a doctor he was compelled to keep him alive by any means he deemed necessary. I was in a room set aside for grieving families one day and a very frank and compassionate nurse said to me, privately, that she was the one person who was not afraid of this very powerful doctor. She said that she was near retirement and he could not touch her. She said that he would not allow a patient of his to die within a certain amount of time following his surgery. It would mess with his outstandingly high numbers of successful surgical outcomes. They had to discharge my dad from the hospital after 4 days and sent him to a critical care nursing home. He was allowed to die there one month later. It was simply devastating. What we wouldn't have given for someone with a heart, like Dr. Kevorkian, to have been his doctor.

Some of you do not believe in a woman's right to an abortion. Some of us do believe that women should be the ones to make decisions about their reproductive organs. Many posts have been made back and forth. The pro-lifers (I'm always confused by the use of that term by anti-choice people because I consider pro-choice or pro-abortion people to be pro-life), are adamant and firm in their beliefs. They want abortion of any kind to be illegal. They believe that they are quite capable of making decisions for all women with regard to whether every pregnant woman should be compelled - forced, by law - to carry that potential human being to full term. (If the fertilized egg is physically capable of becoming a baby.) I would like for those people who present themelves as being the only right ones in this argument, to consider something that makes more sense to me than any African-American slavery or Hilter analogy. What if the pro-abortionists became a huge majority in numbers and they spewed hatred toward any woman who became pregnant out of wedlock because they believed it was incredibly wrong for an out-of-wedlock pregnant woman to go to term with the pregnancy and subsequently give birth. What if the vast numbers of pro-abortionists worked hard to prove that the world is over-populated and that over-population contributes to global warming and to the eventual end to civilization as we know it. What if that argument was so compelling and popular that the law was changed to reflect that belief. What if the new law required that any woman who was unmarried and became pregnant must have an abortion. How would you feel if that became the law of the land? Well, pro-choice people feel that is the same kind of power you are wanting to wield over all women in this country. The pro-choice beliefs and new law would require women to do something you totally do not believe in, to us that is no different than your efforts to require women to do something that we just as strongly do not believe in right now, today.

Although I am pretty much a straight forward liberal, I'm afraid I must pretty much agree with Podna on this one. If EHarmony accepted money from the government for anything related to their company, then I would agree with you, Sunta. But I believe that privately owned companies should be able to seek business from any segment of society that they choose. I don't believe that it is right for government to intrude into the operations and pocketbooks of privately owned businesses, except to collect taxes. We don't collect taxes from churches, yet we are pretty much hands off when it comes to how they conduct the business of the church. Why should a privately owned business be different from a church? We are trying so hard to be politically correct, sometimes we lose sight of the foundation that our country was built on. Freedom. Freedom from people forcing their beliefs upon others. I do not approve of Chick fil A's conduct with regard to politics, but they should pretty much have the right to set their own standards and follow their own beliefs as long as they pay their fair share of taxes. Any company that enjoys govenment funding of any sort is a different story. As a government by and for the people, we can't take tax money from everyone with differing beliefs and then discriminate against them by allocating that tax money to companies that discriminate against a certain segment of taxpayers. But I am sick and tired of us all trying to tell each other what to do and force each other to be good. Fairness and goodness are different for different people, based on their belief systems. If I want to have only 100% American Indian gay women as employees in my new business, I should be able to do so without interference from the government. If you believe I am being discriminatory, you should not do business with me, and you are free to point out my policy that discriminates against whites, Asian, blacks, men, and others, to everyone you know.

And one last word to Daffodil... no, I have never had an abortion. Not that it is any of your damn business. But I know your curiosity was getting the better of you. Nitety-nite, you sweet people.

gadget, are you nuts? Abortion isn't a religious issue? Egad. We're really having fun here tonight, aren't we?