Wow. Abortion is an issue again.

[Nathan]

I'm confident a total abortion ban will never happen at the federal level. I'm sure it's still viewed as "a power not delegated to the United Sates" but "reserved to the States, and to the people, respectively".

...no doubt there will be a concerted court battle to insure that.

 

[dilettante]

Rape and incest account for hardly any abortions. So why are they now a focus?

Just 1% of women obtain an abortion because they became pregnant through rape, and less than 0.5% do so because of incest, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Yet the battle over exceptions for both has garnered outsized attention in the national abortion debate.

 

[Della]

But what if birth control is the next thing on the list of things to be banned?

What if the next thing is we get to kill four year-old children if we find out they were the result of rape or incest? After all some people think the mother shouldn't have to be "punished for that for the rest of her life."

Let's take one issue at a time.

 

[Warrigal]

In a society where children are truly valued there would be acceptance of every child born to a woman. That woman would have the financial means to mother her children and the support of the whole community. I understand that this is how Polynesian societies operated. No stigma was attached to children born out of wedlock. Polynesian societies were usually matrilineal, with property being owned and passed down through the female line.

We live in the remnants of patrilineal societies. Patrilineal means that the men make the laws and rules to suit themselves. They have control over their households and their offspring. In the Old Testament it is clear that they once had the power of life and death over the women and children of their household.

When I was a young women contraceptives were difficult to obtain. Only married women could avail themselves of the pill and condoms were only available for men because a woman or girl wanting to buy them would have been made to feel very dirty. Abortion was illegal and many women died or were left sterile by back alley abortionists.

I say stop judging women who fall pregnant unintentionally and support her decision to continue or to end the pregnancy. I for one do not want to see a return to the first half of the 20th century.