Thank you for your response. I can understand where you’re coming from. The more I think about it, anyone who aims to control “another person’s affairs” as you put it and especially if that person is not known to you generally is acting amorally.

I think I may have made too many concessions to pro-lifers out of respect for their submission to religion. However, I’m starting to feel it’s merely a facade to shield themselves for taking consequence for their behaviors (I’m just carrying out god’s wishes).

As always, your blog sparks thought. Thanks!

I suppose I did a bit of freestyle differentiating between anti-abortion types — people who are against abortions, which really includes almost everybody, since they suck and are gross and emotionally horrid — and “pro-lifers”, defined (rather on-the-fly, I admit) as those who support (and/or don’t openly condemn) organizations that use harassment and victimization of women and abortion-providers as ways to express their displeasure with abortion. Aggravatingly, as you point out (and as George Carlin famously illustrated as well), these same people (both groups of them) often don’t do crap to support the things that could actually prevent abortions without victimizing others: sex education, birth control availability, adoption services, etc.

I’m not at all opposed to pragmatism — in fact I mentioned the Presidents speech at Yale, where he made the *awesome* point that both pro-and-anti types can and should get behind prevention, and I’m with that 100%. But I don’t think pragmatism can include tolerance of the intolerable, which includes but isn’t limited to murder. I think that in order to make productive forward progress, we have to not only get the people together who are ACTUALLY anti-abortion, but to single out and put the spotlight on those who are simply using their crusade against abortion as a cover-up for misogyny. (We’d end up including a lot of “pro-family” and “sanctity of marriage” types too, since the one thread that permutes most of their arguments is the control and subjugation of women.)

I’m all about people working together to end abortions — in a perfect world, they’d never be necessary. There would never be rape, or coercion, or incest, and individuals and couples who wanted children would choose to have them; or in the case of an accident (which, come on, in the real world accidents are *going* to happen, and we can stop demonizing the people they happen to already), it would be easy for the birth parents to give the child a good home with people who want children but can’t have them biologically. But we need to stop letting people frame the argument as pro- and anti-abortion…NONE of the major groups involved are “pro-abortion”.

And “pro-lifers” certainly aren’t pro-life. It just seems to me that clarifying what the positions actually are in this debate would go a long way towards making the answers (sex ed, birth control, adoption, etc.) much more easy to discern. What we have now isn’t a fair debate: It’s a social movement that’s been hijacked by an extremist group that uses deliberate obfuscation and misleading statements to muddy the waters for everyone, and in doing so manages to protect their violent and radical behaviors under the guise of a free expression of the other side of the issue, when that’s not what they are at all. They — what I’ve labeled the “pro-lifers”; those who are anti-woman not anti-abortion, as their actions reveal — ARE terrorists, and I think they should be publicly called out as such. Once they’re removed from the debate, and stop being seen as a legitimate side of the argument, I think it’ll be tons easier for the rest of us to make real progress in preventing abortions.

Yeah?

I feel you, though. Revulsion isn’t a strong enough word for what people who behave like this, and who condone it (openly or otherwise), make me feel. *gak*

However, I don’t know if I’d go so far as to call all antiabortionists terrorists. Frank Schaeffer of the Huffington Post wrote a great article that I think exhibits the kind of communication we need between each side. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/frank-schaeffer/how-i-and-other-pro-life_b_209747.html. I don’t agree with him about re-regulating abortions according to fetal development, but I can read his opinion with respect. I prefer the preventative approach rather than making it law. And luckily for both of us better sex education (which he supports) and access to abortions (which he supports up to some point in development, I do not know at what point) will help to mitigate those late-term abortions.

I don’t think calling half of America a terrorist really works.. What are your thoughts on a pragmatic approach?

Then I read this. I am SO disgusted. I don’t even know what to say, because it feels impossible to kill somebody just because you have a different opionion.

* That could actually replace nearly** every law.
** nearly, because I want to be on the safe side… just in case I forgot something…