Finally, this barbaric practice can end!!!!

Are you serious? If so, please elaborate. I don't understand what kind of response you're expecting.

Are you serious? If so, please elaborate. I don't understand what kind of response you're expecting.

No clue as to what part you want me to elaborate on. Let me know, and I will be happy to do so.

Wow Green. That seems wierd to me. Abortion being legal and sterilization being illegal. Doesn't seem congruous. I think they should both be legal, of course.

Yes, it struck me as being very weird, too. I first learned that sterilization was illegal in the systeme juridique course which I was taking at the local university and I was flabberghasted. It appeared that French law regarded sterilization as mutilation and that is an illegal practice. Or was when I was living there in the early 1980s.

Later on I met a woman at a party who had some sort of medical condition which meant that pregnancy was dangerous for her. She was married, loved kids, and had had two with great difficulty. Her two children were followed by two abortions, abortions which she had because of this medical condition. My French was not fluent enough to understand all the details, I regret to say, and thus I cannot pass these on to you. I found it strange that she could not simply have her tubes tied and forget about dealing with pregnancy altogether.

On another note altogether: the other thing I remember about this woman was that she taught English as a Second Language at a highschool. I was speaking English with my friend, Louise, who was English. This woman spent time listening in on our conversation and then finally announced that she had no trouble understanding Louise but found my Canadian accent incomprehensible. :paranoid

I think it is completely within your right to have a tubal. Where were you living at the time? Was this outside of the United states. you talk about france, were you just visiting? I understand your anger about it, but cannot really comment on the laws outside of my country, as I have not studied them fully. I really do not like debating something that I do not have a good amount of knowledge on. But as for the personal issue, I agree that you should have been given the option to have a tubal any time you wanted it. Birthcontrol is an important thing to women like you who really do not want to ever be pregnant.

When I first went on my quest to have my tubes tied I was living in Canada, in the heart of Toronto, a large city. My pregnancy and subsequent abortion occurred while I was living in the south of France.

You must remember that I am quite a bit older than you are. It would be interesting to find out how I would be treated today by Canadian doctors if I were to make the same request. I must try to remember to ask my doc the next time I see her. I should also ask my brother what he would do. He is a doctor who is practising medicine in Virginia.

I've looked into having the procedure done before (not to the extent of asking my doctor, but did online research), and a lot of the sites that I found had a statement somewhat to the effect of, "Young, childless women may have difficulty finding a willing surgeon." It sucks, because it basically means that we are royally screwed. Either we run the risk of possibly having to have an abortion or we never, ever have sex.

actually there have been many doctors who have come out stating that they are very willing to do a tubal ligation for women. it has also become very popular for young men to get fixed. there is no longer a huge taboo against it. So I recommend you actually talk to your ob gyn. Your chances are much better with a young female ob gyn.

Sorry Funnydunnies, I didn't put your post in quotes so you would understand what I was responding to.

Anyway I'm over it. Never mind.

Every 7 seconds a child dies of starvation. They do not get enough food to eat, and so, in the time it takes to write this post, over 50,000 young human beings will take their final breaths. Bellies empty. Thousands more children will die from dehydration in the next few minutes; thousands will expire from diseases. These are merely the children. They die needlessly, even as countless others—young, old, and in between—endure similar fates.

Suffering is a way of life for more than a billion human beings on Earth. One out of five people has no possessions and struggles to survive on less than $1 a day.

Not one of us—not one in over 6.5 billion—gets to choose who will win this invisible global lottery. No one gets to decide who among us will be recognized as persons or who will become our, de facto, expendable commodities.

Each year the world’s population increases by at least 80 million. We humans have not succeeded at rescuing even a few million of the desperate, billion-plus people among us who already struggle every day--morning to night--for mere survival.

I have no tears to shed for the malformed babies whose little skulls are pierced and whose brains are swiftly sucked out of them, and who die within seconds as they leave their mother’s bodies.

I cry for those already living, conscious beings who suffer and suffer and suffer while we sit here at our keyboards yammering away across cyberspace about a few pathetic infants, some of whom, theoretically, could be kept “alive” at the cost of millions per infant while, in reality, hundreds of thousands of people—no less valuable than you or me—are dying slow, terrible, agonizing deaths every day from starvation, dehydration, and diseases that are curable or treatable.

In the meantime, look at the lengths we go, and the money we spend, to keep the extra food out of our stomachs. Gee, if we wait a couple decades, lap bands won't be necessary. Global climate changes, mass migrations, and steadily increasing populations will make forced starvation the new solution for obesity--for all but the super rich.

If we're really lucky, a worldwide plague will get most of us first.

Smiles,

peaches

Peaches' perspective on this debate is an interesting one. It is certainly true that current technology permits us to rescue preemies who would have perished in other eras and still do in those countries where medical resources are scarce. Of course this technology which we take for granted is very, very expensive.

It may, therefore, be argued that those women who do discover that they are carrying foetuses who will be born with gross defects should be permitted to be able to make the decision to destroy them without being forced to deal with any outside judgements. It may be that this issue of the lost pre-born might seem kind of irrelevant when stacked up against those losses of human lives which routinely occur as part of the cost of daily living in other parts of the world.

The truth is that most of us who post here do live inside the bubble of affluence. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this. It has been only our blind good luck that we have been born in affluent, civilized and democratic societies and not in one of those environments where human life is little more than suffering, followed by an early death - an early death for sure when contrasted to the average age of death as set by our affluent, post-industrial western countries.

Sorry. I don't believe that because some children suffer, it's OK to brutally slaughter others.

Sorry. I don't believe that because some children suffer, it's OK to brutally slaughter others.

While I am strongly pro-choice, I also do not agree with Peaches on this. I understand her point, and it is true that the world does not "need" more hungry mouths to feed. But I don't believe we help the unfortunate children of the world by increasing abortions in wealthier countries. I believe the best way to honor the lives of those less fortunate is to honor life everywhere.

I am still strongly pro-choice, however, because I believe that the woman must have the final choice in her own particular circumstances, and that the moral values of others should not dictate the course of action in this most personal of all circumstances. Abortion is unique in that two entities are inextricably intertwined, and decisions relating to one necessarily affect the other. In that situation the adult, living woman must have the freedom to make the call. To honor life in this situation, to me, means to honor the life of the woman. In the case of an unwanted pregnancy, someone is going to have to pay a high price. I understand the theory of dropping off the unwanted child like dry cleaning, but I just don't agree that it is that simple. Not by a long shot. And regardless of what anyone thinks of the morality of the woman's choice, it must be her choice.

Sorry. I don't believe that because some children suffer, it's OK to brutally slaughter others.

That's a rather cavalier statement! It's interesting that people who've never had to see babies born with a dependence on drugs, fetal alcohol syndrome or work with abused children, have no compassion for those who have and refuse to even validate their point of view. It's their way or the highway.

Kind of why this discussion will go nowhere. Yet, I always swallow the bait...

It's interesting that people who've never had to see babies born with a dependence on drugs, fetal alcohol syndrome or work with abused children, have no compassion for those who have and refuse to even validate their point of view.

Why would you assume that? When did I say I'd never seen babies born with any of those complications or never seen or worked with abused children?

For that matter, when were we discussing children with FAS or abused children? We were discussing children in 3rd world countries who were starving.

Mark if it weren't for the likes of you... I'd leave here screaming and heading for the hills. God bless intelligent and wonderful you!

Jeninco it isn't solvable here, but unless we stand up for what we believe in, we can certainly feel trampled and will probably eventually be trampled.

Sorry. I don't believe that because some children suffer, it's OK to brutally slaughter others.

What do you feel "sorry" about?

I am not advancing a formal argument in a thread on a message board for people who need help to avoid overeating.

I am simply confessing my feelings.

I cannot cry or feel sad for the aborted fetuses and/or babies.

Yet I grieve and shed tears for the millions of people I mentioned (who you call “some children”), who suffer horribly each day—who slowly starve to death, who must sell their own bodies or the bodies of their children, who perish from diseases that my own family members have been easily and successfully treated for, who pick through trash piles for the promise of maggots to gulp down, and who do whatever else they have to do to try to stay alive...to no avail.

These are the human beings whose suffering I would prefer to deny, but cannot. These are the lives that haunt my nightmares and my thoughts.

Perhaps there is something terribly wrong with me.

love,

peaches