Submitted to a Candid World

Ames, i don’t know where to begin…

First, the most obvious…please explain to me how Obama’s position on abortions is ‘progressive’ ?

Second, I am really struggling to figure out how you call this a ‘comprehensive plan’ :

Barack Obama is an original co-sponsor of legislation to expand access to contraception, health information and preventive services to help reduce unintended pregnancies. Introduced in January 2007, the Prevention First Act will increase funding for family planning and comprehensive sex education that teaches both abstinence and safe sex methods. The Act will also end insurance discrimination against contraception, improve awareness about emergency contraception, and provide compassionate assistance to rape victims.

Obama is not actually offering any concrete method for limiting the number of abortions. he is offering token sex education that frankly most liberals don’t even really believe is all that effective.

The last point I have to make is that if Obama or you or any other liberals were really serious about reducing the number of abortions, you could limit them to the big three (rape, incest, health of the mother) and immediately prevent more than 90% of the abortions (over 1 million per year) in this country. I know I’ve pointed this fact out to you before and I don’t recall you ever actually responding but the fact that liberals like to ignore is that those 90% + abortions are for social reasons. And here’s another statistic, half of the abortions in this country are given to women who have previously already had an abortion. So at least half a million abortions per year are exclusively and unequivocally taking the place of a condom, the pill or simple abstinence. Let me re-iterate that point: 500,000 babies per year are aborted because someone chose to have sex and not be careful.

Liberal endorsement of late-term or partial-birth bans are a red herring. Third trimester abortions amount to less than 10% of overall abortions. To contrast this, liberals see a 10% reduction of carbon emissions to be inadequate and short-sighted. Most conservatives and pro-life centrists have been willing to meet liberals in the middle by making the big three exceptions. Liberals do not believe that is enough. Why? Because they still see abortion as a viable solution to poor choices and the only consolation that they offer those millions of aborted children is some psycho-babble about the mothers agonizing over the decision before ultimately deciding to have an abortion.

PC, for what it’s worth, I think that a big part of what’s touted as Obama’s ‘comprehensive plan’ and a big part of what’s meant to be signified by the changes to the party platform are the kinds of programs he talks about in the second clip above (~1:58).

The idea is that many of the ’social reasons’ abortions aren’t the result of “darn, pregnant again – off to the abortion clinic I go” decision-making. Yes, a lot of abortions are needless in the sense that the pregnancy could have been easily prevented (even without abstinence), but a lot of people simply are this careless – that doesn’t stop the women who become pregnant after failing to use birth control from being seriously conflicted. They may end up choosing an abortion when choosing a condom would have done the same thing, but it’s an oversimplification to say that this means that abortions are nothing more than a substitute for birth control.

This is more than meaningless psycho-babble. That many women are conflicted means that some part of them wants to keep the child. It then makes sense to ask if there’s something that the rest of us can do in order to convince these conflicted women to decide the other way (without resorting to coercion). To the extent that some women choose abortion because they can’t afford to raise a child or because they fear for its well-being, we can make carrying the child to term a more appealing option by passing various sorts of social welfare programs (including adoption-oriented stuff).

Yes, the net effect of all this isn’t going to make a huge dent in the total number of abortions per year, but it’s still something that you’d expect both abortion-is-everything pro-lifers and liberals concerned with social welfare to support. I don’t think Obama was even intimating that his ideas would result in anything like as few abortions as simply rolling back Roe v Wade and banning the practice would; the point is to show that he gives consideration to pro-life values (though they are not all-determining for him). His rhetorical position is that we ought to limit abortion as much as possible without resorting to coercion.

I’ll add that, already, we’re looking into this issue deeper than McCain is.

And, you haven’t addressed the point that the pundits & McCain oversimplify the legal issue.

Most importantly, you assume that limiting the number of abortions is the only goal of reproductive rights legislation. However, cutting down on legal abortions by banning the procedures treats the problem, not its symptom – unwanted pregnancies – and addresses the moral qualms of the conservative majority while failing to deal with the legitimate concerns of mothers who, perhaps accidentally or through bad choices, find themselves with a child they cannot afford or would otherwise be unable to properly raise. The progressive solution is to draw the moral line against procedures that a life-affirming society truly cannot tolerate, while acknowledging the shortcomings of the human race by allowing procedures that cannot be said to terminate a “life,” but are admittedly troubling, while working to minimize unwanted pregnancies in a comprehensive manner by providing for sex education programs that work (i.e., not abstinence) and encouraging safe sex.
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I admit that abortions are something that, in an ideal world, wouldn’t happen. But stopping them by banning them is a half-hearted way to ignore the problem of unwanted pregnancies and sexual irresponsibility by simply upping the ante on mistakes.

You are right that stopping abortions is ‘half-hearted’ because it’s only half of the equation. In addition to banning abortions for social reasons I fully favor a large increase in tax credits offered to adoptive parents, tax breaks for companies that financially assist their employees in adoption and provide support services and extra vacation in the adoptive year, reform of the child welfare and foster system from the ground up, large grants to successful ‘orphanages’ like Boys Haven or the Milton Hershey School (those kids are better off there than trapped in the foster system), government support for low income mothers in the form of daycare, afterschool programs, early childhood education, job training and increased tax incentives for marriage. I would argue that THAT is the most Progressive (capital P) plan.

Both sides have been terribly remiss on the issue of what to do with the children saved from abortion for social reasons. Liberals have made adoption standards so tough that Americans would rather adopt from other countries, including playing an active role in denying cross-racial adoptions for social reasons. On the other side, conservatives have not dealt with the financial implications of an additional 1 million children per year, mostly in low-income situations.

The stereotypical conservative postion is currently, “Stop killing all these children and then good luck figuring out how to deal with them.” The stereotypical liberal position seems to be, “We can’t deal with all these children, but since they aren’t really a life, let’s just dispose of them and then say we feel really guilty about it.” Both positions are ugly and short-sighted, but I have to always come down in favor of the conservative side because it takes murder off the table as a solution.

At the end of the day, the truth is that liberals don’t see unborn children as a life until late in the pregnancy. So anything they suggest with regards to limiting abortions in those earlier stages is pretty much just lip service. Therefore empty plans like Obama’s can be called ‘comprehensive’ because it’s all just smoke and mirrors anyway. Most conservatives are willing to concede some abortions in the interest of compromise but we still feel a 90% reduction is a worthwile goal. We just have a lot more to do in mitigating the negative effects of low-income women carrying children to term.

No-one has heretofore addressed a constitutional amendment; I’m surprised to hear that that’s the issue.

No, McCain oversimplifies the legal issue by pretending that Roe/Casey stand for abortion on demand, as do the pundits you cited.

I’m impressed to hear your plans for “pro-life” past birth. I’m glad to hear that you’re thinking more on the issue than the conservative pundits you agree with :). The fact is that Obama’s position, though, comes a lot closer to yours than McCain’s. You’ve already gone deeper than he’s ever attempted to do.

But you’re right that liberals don’t see fetuses as children until late in the term; say, until the fetus is viable, until the fetus can feel pain, and until there’s a chance that the being has consciousness. I think that’s reasonable.

PC, I didn’t mean to imply that you wanted to ban most abortions as a way of punishing women. I don’t think punishment comes into it. But Obama is pro-choice; he hasn’t made any effort to hide this. He unapologetically supports Roe and he almost certainly doesn’t believe that a fetus is a person. It’s only natural that his policies on abortion don’t strike you as anything like ideal, but I think it’s commendable that he is promising to take measures in order to limit abortions as much as possible (from within a pro-choice framework). He’s not going to turn away from a “woman’s right to choose”, but he is willing to push for reforms at the margins for reasons that don’t mean that much to a lot of his base. Certainly, some of that 20% would be outraged at the implication that there’s something morally troubling about abortions that makes it a good thing to make them rarer.

I’m not saying that pro-lifers ought to be celebrating Obama’s position – McCain clearly promises policies more in line with pro-life values. Obama’s policies won’t result in a particularly significant decrease in the abortion rate, but they should result in a decrease, and it is a sign that he gives weight to the values of those who disagree with him.

Gotchaye, I know you weren’t suggesting that I saw abortions as punishment. I was just anticipating the likely reponse of others to the suggestion that banning abortions for social reasons is about responsibility. Typically liberals counter by saying conservatives want to use abortion as a punishment for bad choices, so I was trying to pre-empt that.

I concur with your assesment of Obama as supporting Roe and certainly not assigning life to fetuses. That’s why it’s frustrating that liberals are trying to color his inartful dodge of the question as breaking new ground. The old DNC plank on abortion read:

“Because we believe in the privacy and equality of women, we stand proudly for a woman’s right to choose, consistent with Roe v. Wade, and regardless of her ability to pay. We stand firmly against Republican efforts to undermine that right. At the same time, we strongly support family planning and adoption incentives. Abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.”

That is actually more detailed than what Obama says in his Blueprint for Change. Reading through his position, as provided by Ames, I don’t even see him doing enough to limit abortions within the pro-choice framework. He doesn’t even mention adoption on his website.

Obama doesn’t represent any movement at all on pro-choice from what I can tell. He is maintaining the same line that has been drawn by the Left for many years.

The mother accepted the risk and should accept the consequences. That’s about responsibility.

In other words, stopping abortion isn’t about stopping some immoral act, it’s about punishing women with a side effect of having sex that they don’t want.

What I should have said is that when 90% of abortions are carried out with no restrictions…

If there is one set of circumstances where it’s possible to get an abortion without restrictions, and one where it is, is it really so surprising that most things will happen where the restrictions don’t exist? It’s like being shocked that most pedestrian-car accidents happen at a crosswalk.

Eighty-nine percent of abortions occur in the four weeks (trimester and a third!).

http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/fb_induced_abortion.html

I find it hard to believe that anything developed at that state is a “child.” Flat out, that’s our difference. I would be with you 100% PC, if I thought it was a child.

Both Ames and DM make the correct point that the true difference between pro-choice and pro-life is the assesment of life. Pro-choice folks simply do not believe a child is a child until much later in the presidency (third trimester?)

That’s why I get so ticked about the arguements from pro-choice folks about women’s rights, etc. Why not just simplify things? Why not just say the truth which is that you don’t care about abortions in the first two trimesters because it’s not a life. Just leave it at that. I can actually respect that position better than nuancing it around issues that are really moot.

Why not just say the truth which is that you don’t care about abortions in the first two trimesters because it’s not a life. Just leave it at that.

because it’s not true, pc. your characterization is ludicrously simple. i, and the vast majority of pro-choicers i know (and i am going to throw ames in the pot), care very much about abortions, whenever they happen. i am sorry that abortions take place. i am sorry for every woman who has to make such a decision for herself, for her partner, for her family … it is a mind-blowingly difficult position to be in, and i am sorry that our society does not provide the necessary supports to minimize the incidence of abortion …

and if you read ames’ post carefully, you will note that that is what obama is looking for: societal tools to reduce the number of abortions that take place every year by reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies. you are exceptionally dismissive of everything obama has proposed, summarily writing it off as lip service to programs you say “most liberals don’t even really believe is all that effective.”

i think you are wrong. i also think you are absolutely out of turn invalidating what a woman goes through in making the decision to continue or end a pregnancy as just so much “psycho babble.” you have also said in a previous thread that the 150 or so women who would die in pregnancy is a small price to pay for 0ne-million babies. (are you suddenly an actuary?)

your characterizations effectively reduce women to stupid, slutty cows.

the time has come to discuss abortion and birth control and family planning … and marriage and divorce … as the complex human issues they are rather than in the dogmatic terms you, pc, throw around. (by the way pc, smart money is on you knowing at least one woman who has had an abortion. you might work with her; you might sit next to her in church; she might be a distant relative. you probably enjoy her as a human being. considering the tone and substance of your comments, would your friendship with her survive your finding out she had an abortion?)

the abortion discussions on your site, ames, often drive me nuts because so few women participate in them and because no matter how pro-choice or pro-life any of you men are, you are still men. women, unfortunately, in this society have to look to men to protect our interests and our health (not just on the abortion front, but on all health fronts). it is a frightening and terribly insecure position to be in.

Also, on Obama’s plan: It’s crap. In his Blueprint for Change he doesn’t even mention adoption. He will do next-to-n0thing to deal with reducing abortions, because as he has already stated, forcing a woman to carry her child to term is a punishment.

actually, pc, i am quite content with your thinking that i am a passionate proponent of premeditated murder. in fact, you are more than welcome to have an image of me standing on a hill of embryos and fetuses, crushing a rattle between my teeth.

i am not content, however, with revealing my very personal, very deeply felt beliefs or betraying intimacies for assessment by anyone whose position is one of arrogant presumption and draconian myopia.

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by the way, you throw around adoption with the same cut-and-dried perspective with which you deal with abortion. guess what? women also have an incredibly difficult time deciding whether to give their children up for adoption. i don’t want to bore you with psycho babble, of course, but news flash: adoption has its own set of lifelong consequences for both the birth mother and child. although i am pro-murder, i’m certainly not anti-adoption; i do think it important, though futile, to point out one more place where i find your thinking to be cartoonishly oversimplified.