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I don't mind discussion. I just recently found out about Peter Singer, professor of bioethics at Princeton, who says 'Yes, abortion is killing; we do kill; that doesn't mean it's all wrong.' I felt liberated by that notion, because arguing over when life begins wasn't cutting it for me, and a woman gets to decide what to do with her own body was too, although not as much.
Joy, see my post #9. During this existence, you kill to survive. Take a deep breath, hold it for 5 seconds, let it out. You just killed 5 million organisms. Life is cheap.
I read your post, Cats. I went right to ethics of human abortion because of all the people who already recognize that we 'kill,' but who place human life in a category of it's own.
The same people hollering about too much government, and regulation are the same people who want to make laws telling people what to do with their lives. They want to ban all abortions, but holler when you have to feed, clothe, and educate the babies.
I think we let females make their own decisions and give them as much FACTS, and SUPPORT as quickly and early as possible. That does start with a doctor as soon as possible, no matter who pays for it. We all pay in the end one way or another anyway.
I think its deplorable to reduce the value of such a complex subject as female health to who can and cannot afford it then justify it with simple soaring rhetoric that broad brushes hand picked situations that lump all cases into the same basket.
For some it comes down to who can afford to survive and how. Its easy to blame and criticize the have nots for not having, while placing a higher value on those that have. Moral righteousness by networth.
Well spoken, tal.
And I as a woman sit here with my TV on, with every other commercial one for an ED drug, a drug covered by Medicare for any bozo who whines about his sex life, so OUR TAXPAYER DOLLARS are paying for those ads and those drugs!
And yes, I'm exaggerating the whiny men wanting those drugs, but only a TINY BIT, and I did it for effect. That will surely be lost on the men who sit on their high moral perches.
You have to ask these wannabe doctors just how many of those unwanted babies they're willing to raise. You'll find a couple of sincere folks who've adopted, but not many.Quote:
They want to ban all abortions
Talking in absolutes changes nothing, there are solutions to these problems but insufficient responsibility to implement them
To get back to the OP, some people reading the report note that the group's terminations went up while most of the rest of their services went down.
Planned Parenthood Performed 174 Abortions for Every Adoption Referral in 2014
What solutions do you have in mind?
With all the birth control handed out, it's mind boggling what we would have without it. And PP hands out tons of it.
327,166 to 327,653? How meaningful.
Isn't it wonderful how we can make a stat sound any way we want?
PP provides OPTIONS, all of them. If referrals are down, that is because of they are rejected by the women. DUH!
If contraception provided is down, that could be because the 72 hour pills need a doctor's script. Girls who want to hide from parental knowledge may be joining the women who are getting them overseas, I hear. Not too sure, but I don't trust that article anyway.
Anyone who thinks PP's agenda is to give abortions is a rabble rousing fool.
Well the women choose whether to abort or carry and put up for adoption. I think you're barking up the wrong tree.
Karma I think what we have here is much barking, but you know as well as I do that these arguments will go on unresolved
My solution is quite simple, Joy. Planned Parenthood should increase fundraising efforts and curtail grant-writing. The only objection I have to the organization is their receiving funding from their opponents. A privately funded non-profit would not be controversial, except for the WBC jihadists protesting them.
So your solution is to withdraw funding from these quasi non-profits, a non-profit should be about promoting a cause not provinding services, but if you do that you have to do it across the board, which will cut into many government programs
Countless non profits provide services and get tax dollars. I have worked for one in the mental health field. It was called "cheaper than a hospital bill.' Same with PP - cheaper than 18 years of welfare supporting an unwanted child, usually of a girl much too young to be a parent and often not wanting anyone to know she is pregnant.
The down side of that is ... ??Quote:
if you do that you have to do it across the board, which will cut into many government programs
Go ahead, cut the government programs and many who need services won't get them. Hope you never get in that position and have nowhere to go.
The fundamental difference in viewpoint between the libertarian and statist viewpoints. Statists believe with religious intensity that only the government can provide charity. Libertarians believe with equal fervor that charity should not be funded at gunpoint.Quote:
cut the government programs and many who need services won't get them
I am neither, but when churches and private business cannot provide for the needy, the government should step in and help. The great recession made a lot of people needy. Even during good times churches miss many and a breast exam may be a bit out of religious expertise.
That's the problem. Being made up of bureaucracies, the government cannot stop stepping in since the fundamental mission of any bureaucracy is to grow its budget. How does the old one about the camel getting its nose under the tent go?Quote:
the government should step in
Camels are very important if you are in a desert. So is a bureaucracy if you just lost your job and have cancer. If you need something you put up with the down side of getting it.
What are you going to do? Shoot the camel for sticking his nose in the tent, or tie him up further away from the tent?
Bureaucracy, like a camel, needs control and oversight, not elimination. Ever hear of throwing the baby out with the bath water?
Never gonna happen. Hasn't for a century, what's to make it change?Quote:
Bureaucracy ... needs control and oversight
Edit with an example: The EPA was started to clean up pollution and make the country livable. Half a century later, the bureaucrats are trying to justify their salaries by stopping the Keystone XL pipeline which will reduce the dangers of oil spills from trucks and trains that are much more hazardous to the environment.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamescon...truck-or-boat/
You get tired enough of the camel sticking his head in the tent and do something about it. Same with bureaucracy. Or anything else that ain't working efficiently.
Weren't you just arguing against doing something about it?Quote:
You get tired enough of the camel sticking his head in the tent and do something about it
Yes, I think you were.Quote:
Go ahead, cut the government programs and many who need services won't get them
You missed my sarcastic wit. Darn that sarcasm font!!
Point is Tal, you can't move bureaucracy it is relentless force every growing, so the point is you move the tent. While ever you have a choice between one bureaucracy and another, which is the choice you have, you will have bureaucracy, howelse are your representatives going to deliver the programs you know you want after you have been told you want them
Surely those can't be the only two options available... unless you're slanting the discussion so that only you can win.Quote:
Statists believe with religious intensity that only the government can provide charity. Libertarians believe with equal fervor that charity should not be funded at gunpoint.
To the subject (And bureaucratic BS),
All Those Alternatives to Planned Parenthood? In Texas, At Least, They Don't Exist
As you know I live in Texas, and have watched this play out as PP clinics are closing, and there are no alternatives, and we aren't talking abortions either, just (poor) women's health care services. Even poor CONSERVATIVE females are suffering under the States handling of (poor) women's health care services.
Like I said, throwing out the baby with the bath water.
Tal, that article is almost 4 years old. It is from 2011. Surely with Obamacare in full swing there are plenty of options as everyone has healthcare right ?
In 1992, I went to Planned Parenthood to confirm my suspected pregnancy. I was 16, a junior in high school. I was 10 weeks pregnant; due to irregular periods, I didn't "catch" it the day my period was "due", because I didn't really have a due period--despite being on birth control pills. Sometimes the "blanks" made my period come, sometimes it wouldn't. I was a straight A student, and had been with my boyfriend for more than 2 years.
I got pregnant the 2nd time I had sex. I was using 3 forms of birth control--correctly, because I was TERRIFIED of getting pregnant.
The first thing they did at PP? Got me in to see a counselor. That counselor gave me ALL of my options--adoption, abortion, and parenting. She gave me her phone number so I could call her day or night if I had more questions, or just needed to talk. I decided to get an abortion... only it was SOOOOO expensive. I had to borrow money from 5 friends to be able to afford it. But, I figured, if I couldn't afford an abortion, how the hell was I going to be able to afford a kid? And please remember--I had 3 weeks to figure out what I was going to do, because my state doesn't allow 2nd trimester abortions. Before it even got down to the wire, I changed my mind--in part because that same counselor really talked to me about adoption.
So please--don't give me the crap that PP doesn't talk about adoption, or tries to foist abortion on women who would otherwise choose adoption. I'm proof that that is not the case, at least not always.
That said--I wouldn't force an adoption on my worst enemy. On women who have proven they can't raise kids--absolutely. Take the kids away at the first sign of abuse and sterilize the parents. But don't make a 12 or 14 or 17 year old live with giving away their child when society SAYS they applaud women choosing adoption, but they don't support those women when they go through depression and become suicidal afterward. The rhetoric ends up being "I could never give MY child away!". You are made to feel less, often by friends and family who you need to support you, for not choosing parenting. I got HATE letters from my grandma and great-grandma telling me that I was a monster for giving my own flesh and blood away. So please--back off what you don't know about. I STILL have issues with trust and with depression because I chose adoption 22 years ago---and I CHOSE it. Eyes wide open, thinking I knew what I was giving up. I ended up in the psych ward 6 months after the adoption was final, because I'd attempted suicide for the first time. The next couple times, I was treated for the attempt and released, with a suggestion that I get counseling---that wasn't, of course, provided by my non-existent insurance.
I've heard from so many anti-choicers about how it's murder and how you have to live with that forever. Guess what? You have to live with whatever choice you make forever. And adoption has side effects that are just now, FINALLY getting studied---including unexplained infertility. How's that for a kicker? Make the best choice you can and give your child to someone else to raise, for the benefit of all of you, and then find out you can't have any more kids. You gave the only one you'd have away. No wonder the number of women choosing adoption is going down.
So yeah--when you are facing that decision yourself, or your daughter is, come back on your moral high horse. For most people the only moral abortion is the one that affects THEM.
And don't even get me started on birth defects and fetuses that won't survive birth. There are so many medical reasons for an abortion that I'm betting your average hospital performs more of them than Planned Parenthood does. Planned Parenthood, however, helps those who cannot afford to go to the hospital and who don't have insurance for birth control and a regular OB/Gyn and yearly pap smears. They serve a vital area of medical care in this country, especially for poor women. I don't CARE that they perform abortions, even if I would (probably) not get an abortion myself. However, I'm 40 now. If I got pregnant (and we ARE trying), there is a much greater chance that the baby would have birth defects. Would I have an abortion if MY child were the one with birth defects, with a condition that would cause him/her to be in pain from the moment of birth? I honestly don't know. I dread having to face that question. But I would hope that love for my child would spare him/her suffering where I could--even if that meant not giving birth.
Thank you ladies, for those first hand accounts. The emotional impact on females and pregnancy has always been all but IGNORED by activists and do gooders of moral values.
@CDAD,
Texas Abortion Clinics Seen Facing Long Odds in Fight on Limits - Businessweek
Texas ranks highest for uninsured after Obamacare (Government blog) | Lubbock Online | Lubbock Avalanche-Journal
Obamacare leaves millions uninsured. Here's who they are. - The Washington Post
So while health services for poor people are being cut, many are still left behind from the very law to help them by conservative state legislatures refusing to expand Medicaid. I only linked the older article as an example of how long this assault against economically stressed females has been going on.
Hi tal I think it was always known the ACA wasn't a catch all. The only way you will get universal health care is to implement universal health care which is a big strain on the budget and therefore unpalitiable. One could expect that those not covered might also be those who aren't voters but your stats suggest a high impact on whites and those bulletproof 18 to 44 but the full impact of penalties hasn't hit yet. Those people are going to be between a rock and a hard place
According to Guttmacher 89% of ALL counties in the US have no abortion provider. Why pick on Texas?
And P.S., try addressing why 42 percent of women having abortions live below the poverty line instead of just expanding the bureaucracy.
Seems about in line with current stats, nothing unusual about that.Quote:
42 percent of women having abortions live below the poverty line
And you have no problem with poor women being disproportionately affected by abortion?Quote:
Seems about in line with current stats, nothing unusual about that.
How are they affected?
Abortion is a choice therefore you can't say they are affected by it without being specific, abortion is a cure without a disease
I'm going to hazard a guess that poor women are 'affected' by abortion as you so delicately put it because they are more likely to have not planned for sex and for birth control, or been able to get to a clinic, or to get good advice from family and friends. That's just for starters. I hope no one is thinking there's a conspiracy afoot to influence any particular groups of women.
But the percentage is not disproportionate. That 40% equals the poverty level + no medical insurance numbers in the US.Quote:
poor women being disproportionately affected
This isn't a long story but I think relative to what Joy is talking about.
When we lived and worked in Michigan years ago on green cards, my husband started up his own business and money was tight and no benefits, I got pregnant. The hospital in Flint gave me the names of a lot of free clinics for testing, pregnancy care, etc. and it was all free service and information. That was 32 years ago, there must be the same clinics available to women now, right?
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