John Lowell.....

Lets discuss ¨the spirit of the time¨

I doubt, very much, that Ellen or any other women living here in privileged USA or anywhere in this world miss ¨the mediaeval grace of iron clothing¨.

You can blather on about Plotinus and Manes of the third century or quote Mr. Robinson of the late 19th century, but we are not discussing that here......no angels on heads of pins for us women....only blood and guts for us.

We are discussing the law of a multi-cultural country that consciously did not adopt religious doctrine as the law of the land, but declared that we are a people capable of making choices and decisions for our own lives according to our own set of beliefs, not to be dictated by the state, but within an agreed framework of laws, called the Bill of Rights and the Constitution of the United States of America. Nowhere in those documents does it say that we must, because we are women, kill ourselves because it would go against the religious doctrine of our neighbor to stay alive.

Nowhere have you heard us discuss the requiring of abortion, or even birth control, for our neighbor.....even when he has 9 or 10 unruly children who terrorize the neighborhood, will not be educated members of society because there are no resources for anything but bare necessities, and are ¨sort of cared for¨ by a harassed, exhausted woman who has no time for anything but the bare necessities, because we know that to start forcing our neighbors to live be our set of beliefs is against what our country is about, and is against common decency.......even in a vastly over-populated world.

A few salient points, then I will shut up…

Partial-Birth” Abortion Bans
The most recent legislative attacks on abortion rights are bans on so-called “partial-birth” abortions. These bans threaten the fundamental principle of Roe v. Wade which ensures legal abortions in the first and second trimesters. The legislation on late term abortions defines the procedure as an abortion in which the person performing the abortion “partially vaginally delivers a living fetus before killing the fetus and completing the delivery.” This terminology is so vague that it can be interpreted to encompass methods of first and second trimester abortions as well. This poorly worded law could easily pave the way for increasing restrictions on all abortions, which is the ultimate goal of anti-choice proponents.

The phrase “partial-birth abortion” is not a medical term; it was invented by anti-choice strategists for political purposes.

90% of all abortions occur by the end of the first twelve weeks. Only about 600 (1%) of the 1.5 million abortions each year are performed after twenty-four weeks and only 327 of those are performed after twenty-seven weeks.1

Since 1995, thirty states have adopted laws banning so-called “partial birth” abortions. In twenty of these states, the laws were blocked when challenged.2

Sentences for physicians for the crime of performing a “partial-birth” abortion range from fines and short prison sentences in some states to life imprisonment in others.

Every abortion provider in the State of Wisconsin stopped providing abortions (including first and second trimester abortions) in May 1998 when a “partial-birth” abortion law was passed there, out of fear they would be prosecuted. They resumed providing abortions only after Wisconsin D.A.s assured them they would not be prosecuted for first and some second trimester abortions.

A federal judge in Miami blocked a “partial-birth” abortion ban in June 1998 because it “appears to pose a threat” to the constitutional rights of women. He also said the felony charges that have been threatened against doctors and clinics “threatens women with irreparable injury because they may be denied appropriate medical care."3 Most “partial-birth” laws challenged in other states have been overturned by the courts for similar reasons.

As always, the abortion issue brings the best and the brightest, AND the dim and the dumbest into the spotlight.

Partial Birth Abortion.

The dim and the dumbest, male AND female, weep and wail and wring their hands. Such horror! How could any mother (let alone doctor) murder a baby being born!

How indeed.

Let us put this issue in proper perspective.

No woman on the face of the earth would suffer through nine months of discomfort, nausea, and pain, looking forward to the day the baby would be born so, following eight to twenty or more hours of excruciating labor she could kill it just before it delivered!

NO WOMAN ON THE FACE OF THE EARTH!

Of course NO man on the face of the earth can understand that, because no man on the face of the earth has ever been pregnant!

Men can not get pregnant! No matter how badly man may want to believe he and only he controls life, he CAN NOT get pregnant.

He CAN NOT give birth!

So, he does the only thing a man governed by WOMB ENVY can do. He diminishes the woman who CAN. Even to the point where he will cause her to die if necessary so he can claim HER pregnancy and HER delivery as his own.

So called partial birth abortion happens when the life of the mother and usually the baby is at risk. Most doctors will try to save both. Few doctors will stand by and do nothing and watch both die. Sometimes a husband is called upon to make a choice. Most husbands will demand the mother be saved.

A man who truly loves his wife and family (and himself) will have another child. Those are the best and the brightest.

Irregardless, the need to make a life and death decision is none of Bush’s, or a repub congressperson or the Supremes business!

These dirty old men need to pull their heads out of from beneath women’s private lives and do something worthwhile for a change.

They care so much about life? Why don’t they stop the torture and the wars? Why don’t they do something about the mess Israel has made of Palestine?

Why don’t they stop killing children in the Middle East?

I’ll tell you why. They all have WOMB ENVY!

They don’t really give a big flat fig leave about life!

So much for the dim and the dumbest.

Absolutely NO excuse for the woman who supports this “law”. She cant be suffering from womb envy, so she must be just plain dumb.

The 21st century and were still burning witches, for their own good.

How different is this issue from slaveowners controlling their slaves, for their own good?

How different is this from violently controlling (selective) innocuous verbs, free adult Americans choose to put in their own bodies?

The law may seem right or may seem ridiculous, but the true nature of these types of laws are only illuminated when we see how they are enforced.

What is the reason behind the meaning to protect the unborn, what if a woman is single and has four children, must she have a fifth child, what will be the fate of that child born to a mother who can barely take care of four?

Most concertative people think that if you have children you surely must stay married, but what is marriage if you are still concidered by some that women are the property of men, to be used and abused, when a women is abused enough times she elects to become single.  Of course men can engage in sex and not be concerned with its outcome, but women have this problem of wanting to have sex, but always have the problem of maybe getting pregnant.

I think that men should also consider when they have sex will the women become pregnant.

Again, I think that most women really do not want abortion but since thay are the people who take care of their children (even when men won’t) they should be able to choose abortion.

The matter as to guilt is sure you might feel guility but if you have too many children are the same people against abortion going to feed the children they are so concerned about?

M. Currey

The Supreme Court of the U.S., a politically appointed institution, which has become a bastion of the right wing views, is as independent in its decisions as the chairman of the Republican party. Yet, we are told by charlatons that this is an independent institution. I would rather trust the judgment of con men on the street who are politically independent rather than opinion of a politically appointed body.

This matter might have some call to attention except that these justices, do not advocate the social programs needed to feed, cloth and shelter and provide medical care to children already here. Their actions means back to the back alley abortionist, or if you are wealthy enough a trip to another country.

Don’t kid yourself that these judgement has anything to do with concern for life, if it did they would do something about the abuses to the Bill of Rights by the people who appointed them judges. They are corrupt and willing to increase suffering to get a cheap self righteous high.

If you don’t support the welfare program than you don’t support life. Forceing pregnancies to term will not hide the fact.

Well, yes, I suppose its true that someone with Ellen Goodman’s zeitgeist would consider any attempt by the Supreme Court to ground the modern female in nature as “backward”. In Ellen’s very comfortable, elitist world, “wymin” populate a kind of contextless, ethereal zone, one free of the moral constraints life otherwise imposes on the rest of us, one so free, in fact, that “wymin” aren’t bodies, they simply possess them. Ellen’s logic presupposes a kind of two-part human being, one a “self” which is only contingently connected to that which is biological, the second a “body”, over which one is said to have “rights” but something nevertheless alien and utterly objective. For Ellen, to be free - and progressive - means to be unencumbered; to be otherwise is anachronistic. What Ellen doesn’t grasp, of course, is how hopelessly anachronistic this anthropology of hers really is, having as it does more in common with that of Neo-Platonism, Manicheanism and the ancient world than anything at all more modern. It was just this hideously out of date, inadequate dualism that the Christian notion the “person” was designed to correct. But Ellen, like Minimer Cheevy, prefers the days of old, days when people were not quite fully human. You can always justify killing what’s merely semi-human, can’t you? Just ask Ellen.

John Lowell

This nation moves towards some very scary times.

B