BJean

gadget claims: "Since when are we only talking first trimester? You've said over and over that abortion should be legal through all 9 months of pregnancy." You're full of prunes. I have absolutely NEVER made one comment about abortion being legal through all 9 months of pregnancy. I have never had any reason to state my feelings on that topic. Abortion is not a matter that should be decided by the government. EVER! It is a matter that is always to be decided strictly by the woman involved and whoever else she chooses to include in her decision-making; medicial personnel, significant other, God, etc. As for the definition of embryo I took my information straight from the dictonary. I will defer to you of course, because we all know you make this such a top priority in your life, you obviously are more well-educated on the proper terminology than I.

Good points Carrie and rodriguez.

To procreate means to produce (young); to beget (offspring). The act of fertilizing an egg is conception, which by definition is the beginning of a process or chain of events. You don't procreate or beget an offspring until you've actually produced an actual offspring. A fertilized egg does not denote having procreated (produced) an offspring. And btw, an "embryo" is the human organism after the first 3 months of conception and thereafter it is considered a fetus. Initially it is a fertilized egg which must become implanted in the proper place (not the tubes, for instance) and goes through a process of development until it is considered an embryo and then later a fetus. All this is for some people purely academic and argument about whether the fertilized egg is a separate entity seems to be an attempt to convince people that abortion in the first trimester is murder. As far as most pro-choice people are concerned however, that is balderdash. Balderdash being nonsense or senseless talk or writing. :crying:

The thing anti-choice folks can't change and can't make go away, no matter how hard they argue that a baby is a separate entity, is that a fertilized egg cannot survive without a mother's heart, circulatory system, reproductive organs, ability to process nutrition, etc., etc., etc. The embryo or fertilized egg, has no individual rights separate from its' mother. It is not a separate entity. It is a part of its' host mother. It does not become a separate entity until it is a separate entity. To be a separate individual person, it must be a separate and individual person. Until a baby can live and breathe on its' own, the host mother has the sole responsibility for its' growth and survival. The government has no right to incarcerate women, put them on watch for 24/7, and force them to procreate.

We understand your insistence that abortion is killing. However we disagree with you and the law is on our side. And the law has been written according to the Constitution of the United States. For you interject yourself in a woman's life and insist that she may not make her own choice when it comes to her reproductive organs, you are absolutely abridging her rights and her freedom. What you want is, by definition, anti-choice. To deny that is insincere. It is understandable that you wish to intervene since you believe that abortion is killing. It is also understandable to most people that it is entirely wrong to equate killing children, abusing toddlers, maiming one's spouse or owning a slave with terminating an unwanted, unplanned, unhealthy and dangerous pregnancy.

Yes, this challenge of Roe v. Wade is just what the anti-choice (calling a spade a spade) people have been after for a long time. Of course I don't think that it's a done deal yet, is it? The Supreme Court hasn't decided to hear the case, have they? To many of us, a lawsuit like this is a colossal waste of taxpayer money. The basis of this challenge - that a fertilized egg is a person, has a soul and all that, is assinine. That just doesn't work on so many very obvious levels. Btw, indiscriminately calling abortion "child killing" is not calling a spade a spade. It's using an inflammatory label that is not necessarily accurate, and it is done like rodriguez said, merely to try to further the anti-choice cause (by trying to generate negative emotions).

Good grief Carrie!!! Maybe you need to just step away from the thread. Seems like it's getting to you, eh? :crying:

Thank you, green.

babygirl I agree that Octo's had a plan all along, but I think that a plan like that makes her unbalanced. She's not right. Even if it's just that she wanted to get the notariety and money that would come with having (giving her the benefit of the doubt) SEVEN children. pg: sure, people are outraged that a woman would expect the world to foot the bill for kids that she knew she couldn't take care of. But the real reason everyone is so baffled by all this and so angry is because of the children. It is patently unfair to the children in every way imaginable! There is nothing that you can say that can make what she did right for the children. And I believe that is one reason why people are so put out with you on this thread is because you don't seem to understand that even if you give Octo the benefit of the doubt, there is no way to excuse the fact that she has brought 6 children into the world knowing that she didn't have a means of support for them, didn't have a father for those children to help in their upbringing and be a male role model every day, and she just didn't give enough of a damn about those 6 babies to keep her from being implanted with more embryos. Probably as far as any of us knows, you're the only person in the world who thinks what she did is fine and dandy. The world sure can use more babies, eh? If someone like octomom applies for public assistance, she should have to agree to sterilization first.

It isn't that I don't like what you have to say. It is that you won't discuss our differing opinions. You preach. I don't need to convince myself of anything. Nature and the world around me shows me there is a creator. For if there is a painter, then there is an artist. These seem like well-orchestrated buzz words that seem trite in the grand scheme of things. There's that "faith" thing again, eh?. Because if you were to really ponder life and nature and art, it would be easy to say that because there are all these things and we can trace their evolution, we have proof that evolution is the creator. As for the "fool" statement, it was your preacher who called people fools. Not God. And you reiterated what your preacher said, so I think that you're saying it too. Not God.

Yup. Guess it just don't pay to be a smarty pants. Better to be a dumbass and let everbody else do the work. The beeotch is laughing all the way to the bank. I cringe everytime I see that pasted-on innocent, coy, I-don't-understand look on her puss when Phil or someone is talking to her. She's crazy like a fox, that girl. But crazy for sure.

It's obvious that fundamentalists either choose not to listen to people who disagree with them or they just do not know how to discuss religious beliefs. Preaching they can do. Do you get the impression that they need, desperately, to repeat the same carefully structured lines over and over to convince themselves thatwhat they say they believe is true? Btw, in the Bible it says that calling a person a "fool" is one of the the worst things you can call him.

Well this straying from the original topic has been a welcome respite for me. I find patty's rants about Jesus being God and about heaven and who's getting in, to be sadly amusing. I have been where Patty's been. I took the Bible as God's word. I believed that we persecuted Jesus and that he died for our sins on the cross. I believed that if I wanted to go to heaven when I died that I had to be baptised. As I grew up intellectually and physically I noticed that those Christian sinners who preach ad nauseum about how right they are and how wrong everyone else is, are filled with buzz words and rethoric that they've been fed all their lives. Just like I was. And Fundamentalist christians are so out on a limb that there is no room for discussion. Every legitimate question is answered with the pat answers that they've been told like folklore down through the ages. They call it "faith". They know they're right because the Bible tells them so. They know the Bible is God's actual words because preachers told them so. Their preachers tell them every time they go to church that they are going to hell if they don't follow the word of God (which they said is written in the form of the Bible). They tell them that the only way into heaven is to accept Jesus as their savior and then none of their sins matter, they'll get into heaven, just so long as they always ask forgivness for the dirty rotten things they do. I just can't rationalize living that way. If you ever stop to consider the way Christianity came about, if you ever question the discrepancies in the Bible, without accepting the irrational answers that have been fed to you your whole life, it doesn't take you long to understand what organized religion is all about and how and why Christianity became what it is today. You also understand how fully endoctrinated extremist Christians are and why they revel in it. I respect people who believe in God and who love reading the Bible, if they aren't fundamentalist, brainwashed, extremists. To me, Chistian fanatics are in some ways similar to extremists in any other religion.

Just to be fair, and accurate, my experiences in Quebec were from over 10 years ago. Things may have changed and lightened up there. I hope they have, but with many of their hard-line francophiles, I doubt it.

Tell me patty, what does it do for us to have "In God We Trust" on our currency? What did it do for any of us to have "under God" placed in our Pledge of Allegiance in 1950's by the Eisenhower administration? No one is wanting to change laws to put "praise Allah" on our currency. What we need to be is a country that does not exclude certain American citiizens on the base of race, creed, color or national origin. We need to be a country that does not discriminate against people just because they are different from the original people who founded America or from the original natives to North America in fact, as rodriguez pointed out. When we lived in Montreal, we were discriminated against because we were English speaking residents (although temporary residents). The Quebequois believe that if you're going to live in their part of Canada, then you will read and speak French, period. They would also prefer, like some far right wing American seperatists, to be a separate nation. They don't like the fact that Canada, as a whole, has English as it's official language. They don't like that signs are written in English. All of their signs are in French. Do you know how the rest of the world regards that way of thinking? They think that people who are steadfastly discriminatory and self-righteous, are stupid. Did you know that some of the staid, single-minded religions in America are dying out because they are so exclusionary and self-righteous? I believe that is a natural death that often comes to a sect that practices discrimination and a belief that they are the only right religion in the world.

Carrie is absolutely right. Medical insurance is not available to everyone and that problem is getting worse by the day. We have medical insurance through a very large corporation that my DH used to work for. It is a very expensive plan and we pay huge premiums every month to keep it. However one by one our doctors are informing us that they will no longer accept that insurance (a primary health care provider in the United States.) Also, we recently received a form letter from our internists office telling everyone in their practice that when their patients become eligible for Medicare, they will no longer accept them as patients. What?! I made an appointment for my husband to see a dermatologist last month. The earliest date available was in late May. At the same time that the clerk told me that, she also informed me that the doctor also does not accept our insurance and that he will be a self-pay. We recently decided to offer medical insurance to our employees because we know what a huge hit they are having to take each month for the various insurances they have now. We also thought it might be an option for us if we decide to drop our medical insurance through my DH's former employer at some point in time. We had to jump through hoops like you wouldn't believe just to get our people covered. We were turned down flat by Blue Cross and Blue Shield and others because I had a colon resection surgery last July. Now understand that we were not applying for insurance for me or my husband. But they told us that even though we were willing to sign off on it and agree not to try to get B.C.B.S., they refused to cover our employees. We eventuallly (after 2 months of trying with an insurance agent) found someone who would agree to cover them. Turned out to be Aetna. And we were not shopping for a low-priced company. We were looking for the best coverage available for our people. Cost could have been an issue, but we never even got to that point in the process of getting all the turn downs. I'm sure that this experience is not exclusive to us. I'm sure that other people are having the same difficulties with medical insurance and coverage by their insurance companies, so we have to hope that President Obama is able to sort this mess out before we are simply thrown to the wolves when we get seriously ill.

I have never argued that the predominant religion in this country is not Christian. Why would I? But many Americans are not Christians. And they are just as American as anyone who does believe in Christianity, whether you believe that or not. And to follow the logic that you use from time to time: just because one religion dominates America, doesn't mean that it is right. (Or are you the one who said that just because the majority of Americans believe that women should have choice in the matter of abortion, that doesn't make it right?) But the real point is, this is America. People are allowed the freedom to practice their own religion, no matter what it is. Setting the laws up just to satisfy one doctrine, whether it is Christianity or any other religion, is wrong. That is why we need to ensure that America is a not a theocratic nation. Surely we learned something from the Pilgrams.

Hot damn! Nobody told me there were prizes!! Whoo-hoo! :scared2:

Our goal as parents should be to raise healthy, happy, productive members of society. When children depend on their parents for too long, they do not learn how to adequately take care of themselves. They can't make good adult decisions on their own. They do not make good spouses. And they often behave like spoiled children even though they are adults. They are often the people you meet who believe that the world owe's them something.

It's called "cutting the apron strings" and it is a very important step in parenting. You don't do it for yourself, you do it for them.

Patty there are basic human rights that all citizens should have in this country. And it goes far beyond the fire department, the police and the military. If we are to be the greatest country in the world, our individual citizens have to be the strongest and smartest people in the world. We must provide a world-class education for every person. We must be sure that every person has access to quality medical care. And we can't disenfranchise our aging population and just toss them away. We lose out when corporate lobbyists have so much power in Washington that pharmacutical companies and insurance companies actually control our medical care and make it impossible for many Americans to afford medical care and medical insurance. Your saying that people can get their own medical insurance just isn't the case. Not anymore. Things have become so lopsided in this country, that we have been forced into a situation where we must put some controls where we hoped control wouldn't be necessary. Like oversight in the banking industry. Like oversight in the medical, pharmacutical and insuance industries. And in so many other places where the government should never have to be involved. But the fact is, this is capitalism run amok. It is the very wealthy feeding breaking the backs of regular Americans. It's obscene greed at the expense of American workers. We have to step in. We have no choice. We've found ourselves on the brink of disaster and we have to hope that it isn't too late. We have to hope that some government intervention can save it for all of us. We have to hope that the current White House and Congress can and will do whatever it takes to make things right again. All the Republican idealism about free enterprise and capitalism can work as long as greed doesn't ruin it. I hope that one day we actually can go back to a time when people cared about each other and when employers cared about their employees and when our politicians had a conscience.

yes, rodriguez. That's the only way we can ensure that Americans have the freedom to choose their own religion. We can't have one religion calling the shots for everyone else and then claim that we have religious freedom.

The problem with not offering sex education in school is that parents, in fact, do not properly educate their children about safe sex. This does impact the entire country. We have one of the highest rates of teen pregnancies. It's a vicious cycle. We didn't allow sex education when the parents were in school and the parents don't have a clue when it comes to giving their children an open and honest education about sex. It's perfectly fine if you tell your children to abstain from sex, but give them an education that prepares them for this all important biological function. Teach them about the conseqences of unprotected sex. Teach them about the raging hormones that are coursing through their bodies. Teach them about birth control in such a way that they completely understand it. Teach them that the sexual urges that they have are normal, and if they do not have those sexual urges they aren't normal. Because that is the truth. And if you tell them to abstain, also tell them that if they find out that they cannot abstain, you will help them get proper birth control and protection from communicable diseases. And then get it for them. If people were smart enough to do that, and then did it, we wouldn't have such a disgraceful national problem with unwanted, unplanned pregnancies in young women and girls.

The religious right wants the government to do what's right in THEIR eyes. They've decided only they know what's right in God's eyes. They have interpreted it all for everyone else. And they are hell bent on forcing all Americans to worship the religion of THEIR choice. This country was not founded by people who thought that all Americans should be Christians. They came to this country to flee from religious persecution. The religious right in this country have gone off the deep end. They have decided that they are the only people who know God. What the religious right want for this country goes against everything that our founders fought to give us.

Oh really patty? Where did you hear this? What poll was responsible for that report?