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flexagonGeez... abortion posting is really going around right now. I like that person's views on brain activity as a delimiter for when a life becomes human, though I actually think that's when the developing person-to-be should be accorded something we already have lying around for conscious creatures that don't happen to be people... animal rights! Humane termination okay, mistreatment not okay, until some future time (say, birth, just to be traditional) when full human rights could take over. It would work beautifully, in my opinion, if only the religous right wouldn't hit the ceiling at hearing the word 'animal' used to describe something with homo sapiens DNA.
To reiterate, but with a couple of cool links and a bit more disjointed ranting this time, my stance on abortion is that people should certainly be careful to not need an abortion (and they usually are, because it's not especially pleasant procedure), but any method of birth control can fail and not every pregnant woman is in a position where it would be responsible for her to become a mother. My belief is that it's TREMENDOUSLY irresponsible to start a human life that will be substandard, and that we should be as careful with the act of creating life as we are with ending it. Yes, click... read the article... it's a very good one, and raises issues everyone loves to ignore, like how we require some testing before someone can get a driver's license but not before they take on the task of raising a human being.
(And by the way, even leaving that article's arguments aside for a second, YES, for environmental reasons alone I think reproduction should be regulated! I don't want to hear about "women's rights," either... the earth is our shared resouce, men and women alike, and I shouldn't have the right to bear 6 children for the same reason I shouldn't have the right to spill a few dozen barrels of crude oil into the local river. Having a child in a first-world country is probably the worst thing anyone can do for the environment. I don't want to stop the average person from having one or two, and admittedly such regulations aren't needed right now in the US, but somehow it blows my mind that they aren't in place anyway.
A long time ago, in high school, I had this fabulous idea of giving each person, at birth, the right to share in the creation of two human lives... and to let these be transferrable on the open market, so that people who reeeeeally wanted large families could have them, but with the overall birth rate remaining at replacement level. Sigh... another idea that will never see the light of day, and I see flaws in it myself, but it's a fun one to play with, anyway.)
Getting back to the topic--to be honest, I think the biggest problem with the abortion system in America today is the guilt associated with having one. It wouldn't be so traumatic for people if it weren't for the guilt heaped on them by other people. I know there are people who believe human life begins at conception, but really, aside from the DNA, I can't think of any attribute of humanity that's present in a fertilized egg. So these people clearly have a different idea of what constitutes a human being than I do.
Sigh... I have a hard time explaining how I've felt this week. Scraped raw, sure, but also just disapproved of. As if it isn't all right to be me, to think what I think, to live the way I live. The nation (with the exception of Massachusetts) just voted against everything I was hoping for, focus on silver linings though I may, and I've been bombarded with "just wait til you have kids, you'll see" messages from people who really ought to fucking know better. Even work has been bad. Without![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bluechromis and HLM I think the loneliness would have been unbearable.
Luckily, I did have them, wonderful and loyal peeps that they are, so I've now improved from miserable to merely pissy and belligerent. Thanks, guys. ;)
To reiterate, but with a couple of cool links and a bit more disjointed ranting this time, my stance on abortion is that people should certainly be careful to not need an abortion (and they usually are, because it's not especially pleasant procedure), but any method of birth control can fail and not every pregnant woman is in a position where it would be responsible for her to become a mother. My belief is that it's TREMENDOUSLY irresponsible to start a human life that will be substandard, and that we should be as careful with the act of creating life as we are with ending it. Yes, click... read the article... it's a very good one, and raises issues everyone loves to ignore, like how we require some testing before someone can get a driver's license but not before they take on the task of raising a human being.
(And by the way, even leaving that article's arguments aside for a second, YES, for environmental reasons alone I think reproduction should be regulated! I don't want to hear about "women's rights," either... the earth is our shared resouce, men and women alike, and I shouldn't have the right to bear 6 children for the same reason I shouldn't have the right to spill a few dozen barrels of crude oil into the local river. Having a child in a first-world country is probably the worst thing anyone can do for the environment. I don't want to stop the average person from having one or two, and admittedly such regulations aren't needed right now in the US, but somehow it blows my mind that they aren't in place anyway.
A long time ago, in high school, I had this fabulous idea of giving each person, at birth, the right to share in the creation of two human lives... and to let these be transferrable on the open market, so that people who reeeeeally wanted large families could have them, but with the overall birth rate remaining at replacement level. Sigh... another idea that will never see the light of day, and I see flaws in it myself, but it's a fun one to play with, anyway.)
Getting back to the topic--to be honest, I think the biggest problem with the abortion system in America today is the guilt associated with having one. It wouldn't be so traumatic for people if it weren't for the guilt heaped on them by other people. I know there are people who believe human life begins at conception, but really, aside from the DNA, I can't think of any attribute of humanity that's present in a fertilized egg. So these people clearly have a different idea of what constitutes a human being than I do.
Sigh... I have a hard time explaining how I've felt this week. Scraped raw, sure, but also just disapproved of. As if it isn't all right to be me, to think what I think, to live the way I live. The nation (with the exception of Massachusetts) just voted against everything I was hoping for, focus on silver linings though I may, and I've been bombarded with "just wait til you have kids, you'll see" messages from people who really ought to fucking know better. Even work has been bad. Without
bluechromis and HLM I think the loneliness would have been unbearable. Luckily, I did have them, wonderful and loyal peeps that they are, so I've now improved from miserable to merely pissy and belligerent. Thanks, guys. ;)
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no subject
Date: 2004-11-07 06:54 am (UTC)ps. Last night I remembered your theory that it should be the default to NOT have kids, and in the least have minor effort required to have kids, such as is required to be an organ donor...still a great point.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-07 05:33 pm (UTC)About the abortion thing... let me speak to you as a parent (since soooo many parents are anti-choice)... IF YOU DON'T WANT TO HAVE A CHILD... DON'T!!! I think YOU took a nice, responsible and well thought out path (although you and your man would have had far superior children to most). But not everyone thinks ahead and so many people in this world make really crappy parents. And the world has too many people in it already. I always thought an IQ and Emotional Quotient test should be given before people are allowed to have children. The world would be a much better place. Of course, I am egotistical enough to believe that if that were the case, my man and I would still be allowed to be parents.
I just spent the weekend at the wedding of a friend and one of the guests and I were talking about this because she and her partner had an abortion last year. She was really surprised when I told her that i thought they did the right thing for them. It IS an individual thing. Case by case. How can anyone else have an inkling what it's like for those couples who feel like it is the only way. Usually they are right, IMHO. Anyway, she's been feeling guilty about it (I blame society) and I tried to help her by giving her the point of view of a parent who is actually pro-Choice.
Sorry to rant on, but the whole 'loving parents' excuse for anti-choicers really flies up my nose.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-07 07:30 pm (UTC)Aww... and here I was getting all ready to pop out a sprog to make my coworkers happy. But, okay, I won't. :)
no subject
Date: 2004-11-08 01:12 pm (UTC)So TRUE!!! I love how people say "We're having a baby!" not "We will have a baby, then a toddler... adolescent... teenager... etc, spend thousands and thousands of $, and completely reorganize our lives". They seem to be over-romanticizing the short term little-bundle-of-joy, without perhaps grasping the long-term repercussions of their decision.
Ok, ok... I grant you that I am WAY over simplifying. I am commenting on semantics of 'having a baby' (and thus the cultural assumptions that go along w/ it) rather than actual people's decisions. I just wish that a more adequate phrase was used for this monumental decision (which unfortunately is the 'default') than "having babies", because that really doesn't cover the importance of the decision one is about to make.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-08 12:55 pm (UTC)I understand what you're saying about having only two kids. But, to be honest, I think that there needs to be a better way to prevent empregnation. And then you can implement such a system. As long as abortions are required for the system to work, there will always be a clash and it will never be fully accepted.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-08 01:04 pm (UTC)I'm in favor of a little switch somewhere on the body... fertility ON, fertility OFF. Not sure if anyone's funding the research on that one though. :)
no subject
Date: 2004-11-08 01:40 pm (UTC)