I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them - Isaac Asimov

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Someone sent me a link to a Christian newswire service article about a burial for an aborted fetus.  I thought, Christ, these fucking wackos are at it again, so I clicked the link to read the story.

27 months after she was killed, Shanice Osbourne will be given a proper burial in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Shanice, a kicking, crying baby of 23 weeks gestation, survived her intended abortion only to be disposed of in a biohazard bag filled with bleach. Police found her body nine days later in a closet. All of this occurred in July 2006 at a South Florida abortion facility in Miramar that has been shut down twice for other reasons.

Shanice is an example of the type of babies that Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic Candidate for President, has fought against giving any type of legal personhood status. Obama seems to have no problem with children like Shanice being killed or left alone to die. As a state senator in Illinois, he directly opposed legislative efforts to prevent such a death.

Now, given that this is a Christian news service there’s always the good possibility that the facts are not how they are presented in the article, which is clearly designed for emotional impact.  However, I did some quick math in my head and figured that this was just a hair under the end of the second trimester line.  I wondered what level of development a baby would be at after reaching 23 weeks, so I did a little Googling and found this site.

Your baby now weighs a little over one pound/ 500 grams and measures about 11.4 inches/ 29 centimetres from crown to heel. Her hearing is well established and she can make out a distorted version of your voice, the beating of your heart and your stomach rumblings. Loud noises often heard in utero, such as the barking of a dog next door or the roar of a vacuum cleaner, probably won’t bother your child when she hears them outside the womb.

Some studies seem to indicate that the unborn prefer classical music.

In addition to advances in your baby’s hearing, her lungs are developing to prepare for breathing. She’s swallowing but she normally won’t pass her first stool (called meconium) until after birth.

Be sure and click the link to see the rendering of the child at that age.  However, the part that really struck me was this.

If your baby were to be born now, she would have a small chance of survival (about 16 per cent) with the right care. Every day in the womb makes a difference at this stage. If she was born at 24 weeks her chance of survival would rise to 44 per cent.

One week later and the baby would have almost a 50% chance of survival.  I’m still a supporter of abortion rights as a concept, but I think that as technology advances and premature babies are able to survive at greater rates and younger stages of development, there’s no justification for keeping the arbitrary SCOTUS-assigned second trimester rule. 

(Brownie Points to the first person who gets the title of this post.)

Monday, March 17, 2008

I have no particular love for Planed Parenthood because, despite my fervent belief in the availability of all forms of reproductive healthcare, I think they clearly exhibit a radical left-wing agenda.  (They’re sort of a corporate Dr. Kervorkian, the wrong messenger with the right message.) At any rate, I have to come down on their side over this stunt.

Planned Parenthood of Idaho officials apologized Wednesday for what they called an employee’s “serious mistake” in encouraging a donation aimed at aborting black babies.
They also criticized The Advocate, a right-to-life student magazine at the University of California-Los Angeles, for trying to discredit Planned Parenthood employees in seven states in a series of tape-recorded phone calls last summer.

The call to Idaho came in July to Autumn Kersey, vice president of development and marketing for Planned Parenthood of Idaho.

On the recording provided by The Advocate, an actor portraying a donor said he wanted his money used to eliminate black unborn children because “the less black kids out there the better.”

Kersey laughed nervously and said: “Understandable, understandable. ... Excuse my hesitation, this is the first time I’ve had a donor call and make this kind of request, so I’m excited and want to make sure I don’t leave anything out.”

If you go to the page you can see the transcript of the conversation, at least the salient section.  I don’t think there was any racist intent in what she said.  This is someone manning a phone bank, and her job is to collect donations from callers.  Someone calls up and places her in a situation where she has to make a split-second decision about whether to reject the money or not, and she made a poor decision.  I think every one of us has, at some point in time, been in a situation where we had to nod and agree with someone who was spouting off some horseshit about one controversial subject or another, and this to me seems like one of those times. 

This, of course, will do nothing but stir up the flames of racism in America.  Some anti-abortion group pulled a cheap stunt, thus proving they’re not any better than the radicals in Planned Parenthood.  I’d be curious to find out how many times they had to make this call before they got the response they wanted.

For those of you who think that, aha!, this is evidence of the left’s secret racist agenda, ask yourself this.  Suppose someone from DailyKos called John McCain’s donation line and said something similar to this, that he wanted to make a donation to McCain because he’ll protect white interests against the black agenda or something of that nature.  And suppose that this operator, whose job it is to collect as much money as possible, played along in a similar manner.  Would any of you think that this in any way proved racism on the part of John McCain or the Republican Party?  Of course not, it’s a cheap stunt.

I think the real victim here is this woman manning the phone bank.  For the rest of her life she’ll have this albatross hanging around her neck, the racist white woman who wants to abort black babies.

This anti-abortion group doesn’t give a fuck what their stunt has done to damage America, they only care about their petty agenda. They can’t win the argument on rhetoric so they resort to cheap stunts.  Fucking disgraceful. 

Saturday, February 09, 2008

A part of my goals for the blog are to continue to bring movies to the table that are thought provoking and echo many of the discussions and passions of both our writers and readers here. I stumbled upon this movie on a date, who my lovely (she’s reading, I have to behave) *erm* turned me onto after we couldn’t see Rambo (Yes. I admit it. I WANTED to see Rambo!).

The title of the movie is 4 luni, 3 saptamani si 2 zile which means 4 months, 3 weeks, 2 days or some shit like that (in Romanian). It’s a film about a woman seeking an abortion in Romania in 1987 (just two years before the Berlin wall fell). Apparently (in this film, I hav eno idea about the reality of it) an abortion was illegal and this girl sought an illegal abortion. The movie has an interesting dynamic, but be forewarned it is a very tough watch. I wanted to discuss the movie from the angle of the limits of prohibition. These two characters go througnh a world of shit to get this illegal abortion, and maybe this is the intended effect of the prohibition. Please enter under the fold for the movie spoiler and the rest of the debate. Yet another ‘you can’t miss out on this debate BTW:

Thursday, September 13, 2007

Ah, the glories of living in a totalitarian state.

The stars seemed to be in alignment for Jin Yani in the summer of 2000.

She had just married. Her partner, Yang Zhongchen, was a loving husband with a good income. And the couple were looking forward to the birth of their first child – a girl, an ultrasound confirmed. They would name her Yang Yin, they decided.

For a young woman from a broken family, Jin couldn’t believe her good luck. But one evening, a knock came to the door – and all of that shattered in an instant.

Ten local family planning officials burst into her home, dragged her off and subjected Jin to a brutal, forced abortion.

She was in her ninth month.

Her crime? She had conceived her child five months before she and Yang were married, an illegal act in China.

The events that occurred seven years ago this week constitute a nightmare from which Jin has never recovered, although she and Yang have struggled for justice every day.

Now, justice might be coming. Forced abortions are against the law in China. And a district court has agreed to hear the couple’s appeal against a decision by a local court that absolved local family planning officials of all wrongdoing.

Seriously, what kind of a fucking moron would voluntarily move to a country like this?

Tuesday, May 08, 2007

Here’s a fascinating little statistic.

About 90 percent of pregnant women who are given a Down syndrome diagnosis have chosen to have an abortion.

Hmmm.  Ninety percent, huh?  If you go by public opinion polls, however, the number of Americans who say that they would support such a decision is relatively small.  Here are some numbers.  There are a number of polls cited, but generally speaking roughly 60% of Americans seem to state their opposition to a procedure of this type. 

60% claim that they would be opposed to an abortion in a situation like this.  However, when actually confronted with the situation, 90% of them choose to do it.

As the British writer and Nobel Laureate John Galsworthy once said, “Idealism increases in direct proportion to one’s distance from the problem.”

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

There’s goings-on down South.

Mexico City lawmakers voted to legalize abortion Tuesday, a decision likely to influence policies and health practices across Mexico and other parts of heavily Roman Catholic Latin America.

Pretty fucking sad, isn’t it, when Mexico makes more sense than the US.  Just think, when abortion is successfully outlawed in this country, Mexico will have another economic boom as all of America’s pregnant teenage girls make a run for the border.

Wait, what am I thinking.  There aren’t going to be any teenage girls.  The abstinence-only education programs will make sure that no teenager ever has sex.  My God, the plan is FOOLPROOF!

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

And thus it begins.

The Supreme Court upheld the nationwide ban on a controversial abortion procedure Wednesday, handing abortion opponents the long-awaited victory they expected from a more conservative bench.

The 5-4 ruling said the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act that Congress passed and President Bush signed into law in 2003 does not violate a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion.

The opponents of the act “have not demonstrated that the Act would be unconstitutional in a large fraction of relevant cases,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion.

The decision pitted the court’s conservatives against its liberals, with President Bush’s two appointees, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, siding with the majority.

Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia also were in the majority.

It was the first time the court banned a specific procedure in a case over how - not whether - to perform an abortion.

I gotta side with the court on this one.  This type of procedure is a vile, vulgar practice.  I’m not against abortion in general as a concept, but this procedure, which involved “partially removing the fetus intact from a woman’s uterus, then crushing or cutting its skull to complete the abortion.” You wouldn’t be able to do that to a dog, and you sure as hell shouldn’t be doing it to an unborn baby.

Abortion is one thing.  This was something else entirely.  You can be in favor of a concept without supporting every conceivable aspect of that concept, and this is one of those cases.

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Here’s an absolutely brilliant column by a Harvard political ethist point out some glaring logical flaws and inconsistencies in the Republican stem cell position.

A further reason to be skeptical of the notion that blastocysts are persons is to notice that many who invoke it do not embrace its full implications. President Bush is a case in point. In 2001, he announced a policy that restricted federal funding to already existing stem cell lines, so that no taxpayer funds would encourage or support the destruction of embryos. And in 2006, he vetoed a bill that would have funded new embryonic stem cell research, saying that he did not want to support “the taking of innocent human life.”

But it is a striking feature of the president’s position that, while restricting the funding of embryonic stem cell research, he has made no effort to ban it. To adapt a slogan from the Clinton administration, the Bush policy might be summarized as “don’t fund, don’t ban.” But this policy is at odds with the notion that embryos are human beings.

If harvesting stem cells from a blastocyst were truly on a par with harvesting organs from a baby, then the morally responsible policy would be to ban it, not merely deny it federal funding. If some doctors made a practice of killing children to get organs for transplantation, no one would take the position that the infanticide should be ineligible for federal funding but allowed to continue in the private sector. In fact, if we were persuaded that embryonic stem cell research were tantamount to infanticide, we would not only ban it but treat it as a grisly form of murder and subject scientists who performed it to criminal punishment.

It might be argued, in defense of the president’s policy, that Congress would be unlikely to enact an outright ban on embryonic stem cell research. But this does not explain why, if the president really considers embryos to be human beings, he has not at least called for such a ban, nor even called upon scientists to stop doing stem cell research that involves the destruction of embryos. In fact, Bush has cited the fact that “there is no ban on embryonic stem cell research” in touting the virtues of his “balanced approach.”

A damn fine point.  If aborting a blastocyst is murder, then we should start treating it like it is.  Then there’s this.

The president’s refusal to ban privately-funded embryonic stem cell research is not the only way in which his policies betray the principle that embryos are persons. In the course of treating infertility, American fertility clinics routinely discard thousands of human embryos. The bill now before the Senate would fund stem cell research only on these excess embryos, which are already bound for destruction. (This is also the position taken by former governor Mitt Romney, who supports stem cell research on embryos left over from fertility clinics.) Although Bush would ban the use of such embryos in federally funded research, he has not called for legislation to ban the creation and destruction of embryos by fertility clinics.

But if embryos are human beings, to allow fertility clinics to discard them is to countenance, in effect, the widespread creation and destruction of surplus children. Those who believe that a blastocyst is morally equivalent to a baby must believe that the 400,000 excess embryos languishing in freezers in US fertility clinics are like newborns left to die by exposure on a mountainside. But those who view embryos in this way should not only be opposing embryonic stem cell research; they should also be leading a campaign to shut down what they must regard as rampant infanticide in fertility clinics.

There’s got to be at least one anti-abortiion type on this blog who can provide a logical refutation to this argument, right?  Because I’ll be goddamned if I can think of one.

Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Delusion, thy name is the Missouri GOP.

A Republican-led legislative panel says in a new report on illegal immigration that abortion is partly to blame because it is causing a shortage of American workers.

The report from the state House Special Committee on Immigration Reform also says that “liberal social welfare policies” have discouraged Americans from working and have encouraged immigrants to cross the border illegally.

That’s right, folks.  If only we could stop people from murdering the unborn, that would stop them Messicans from sneaking across the border.

“We hear a lot of arguments today that the reason that we can’t get serious about our borders is that we are desperate for all these workers,” he said. “You don’t have to think too long. If you kill 44 million of your potential workers, it’s not too surprising we would be desperate for workers.”

National Right to Life estimates that there have been more than 47 million abortions since the Supreme Court established a woman’s right to an abortion in its 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling. The immigration report estimates that there are 80,000 fewer Missourians because of abortion, many of whom now would have been in a “highly productive age group for workers.”

See, this is a great example of what I am talking about.  There isn’t a blanket need for workers.  Mexican doctors aren’t sneaking across the border.  These are poverty-stricken people who come to America in search of a better life for their families, and they come here because they are willing to work for less, doing shittier jobs, than their American counterparts.  It’s simple economics.  They’re not filling a need for workers, they’re creating a demand for workers who will do the same job for less.  You know, that’s called capitalism and the free market, and its something the Republican Party used to believe in.  Now, it’s all about fetuses and them durn homersekshuls.

Wednesday, October 18, 2006

A reader named Lib (liberal?) sends in the following email.

For which reasons are you pro-choice?  I don’t ever remember reading about your reasons.  Would you care to share?

This is actually a subject I’ve blogged on numerous times.  Rather than rewrite everything, take a look here and here and here and here and here.  That should get you going.

Friday, October 13, 2006

This is just so stupidly hilarious that I have to share.

A legislator was charged with scuffling with the cockroach-costumed president of an anti-abortion group at a gubernatorial debate last month.

Democratic state Rep. Vaughn Flora, 61, turned himself in Wednesday on a battery charge filed Sept. 27 in the dustup during the debate at the Kansas State Fair.

Troy Newman, president of Operation Rescue, and another man attended the Sept. 9 event while wearing cockroach costumes and masks bearing photos of Democratic Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, who was debating Republican challenger Jim Barnett.

The costumes referred to Operation Rescue’s criticism that under Sebelius, the state has allowed substandard conditions in clinics that perform abortions.

Two grown men in cockroach costumes fighting with an elected legislator over abortion.  Welcome to politics in America, folks.

Wednesday, March 08, 2006

I absolutely fucking love this, because it’s true.

Contending that women have more options than they do in the event of an unintended pregnancy, men’s rights activists are mounting a long shot legal campaign aimed at giving them the chance to opt out of financial responsibility for raising a child.

The National Center for Men has prepared a lawsuit — nicknamed Roe v. Wade for Men — to be filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Michigan on behalf of a 25-year-old computer programmer ordered to pay child support for his ex-girlfriend’s daughter. The suit addresses the issue of male reproductive rights, contending that lack of such rights violates the U.S. Constitution’s equal protection clause.

The gist of the argument: If a pregnant woman can choose among abortion, adoption or raising a child, a man involved in an unintended pregnancy should have the choice of declining the financial responsibilities of fatherhood. The activists involved hope to spark discussion even if they lose.

“There’s such a spectrum of choice that women have — it’s her body, her pregnancy and she has the ultimate right to make decisions,” said Mel Feit, director of the men’s center. “I’m trying to find a way for a man also to have some say over decisions that affect his life profoundly.”

Give ‘em hell, bruthas!

Thursday, February 02, 2006

Once again, the radical lefties impose their will on everyone else through the awesome force of law.

Three Massachusetts women backed by pro-abortion rights groups sued Wal-Mart on Wednesday, saying the retail giant violated state law by failing to stock emergency contraception pills in its pharmacies.

The suit filed in Suffolk Superior Court seeks a court order compelling the company to stock the so-called “morning after pill,” in its 48 Massachusetts pharmacies.

“Wal-Mart apparently thinks it is above the law,” said Sam Perkins, a lawyer for the three plaintiffs.

A new state law that took effect late last year following heated debate among lawmakers requires all hospitals to provide the morning-after pill to rape victims. It also allows pharmacists to dispense the pill without a prescription, but does not require it.

The lawsuit, backed by abortion rights groups Planned Parenthood of Massachusetts, NARAL Pro-Choice Massachusetts and Jane Doe Inc., argues Wal-Mart is violating a state policy that requires pharmacies to provide all “commonly prescribed medicines.” They are suing to force compliance with the regulation through the Massachusetts Consumer Protection Act.

“Massachusetts pharmacies are required to stock all medications that are commonly prescribed to meet the usual needs of the community,” Perkins said.

Dan Fogleman, a spokesman for Bentonville, Arkansas-based Wal-Mart, said the company “chooses not to carry many products for business reasons,” but he declined to elaborate.

However, in a letter to Perkins regarding the lawsuit, Wal-Mart attorney John W. Delaney wrote that Wal-Mart has “long had the corporate policy of declining to make available EC (emergency contraception) medication, based on, among other things, a view that EC medication is not ‘commonly prescribed’ and within the ‘usual needs of the community."’

Wal-Mart is a conservative company, they always have been.  When they refused to sell music with profane lyrics, record labels began releasing edited versions of their products.  This wasn’t some gross violation of free speech rights, it was Wal-Mart, as a private entity, simply choosing not to sell a particular product.  The morning after pill is exactly the same deal.  If they, as a company, choose not to sell a particular pill for business or moral or any other reason, then they should be permitted to do so without the radical feminist harpies descending upon them with their manicured claws prepared for battle.

Saturday, January 28, 2006

Sometimes the British attitude is better, like in this case.

A majority of women in Britain want the abortion laws to be tightened to make it harder, or impossible, for them to terminate a pregnancy.
Evidence of a widespread public demand for the government to further restrict women’s right to have an abortion is revealed in a remarkable Observer opinion poll. The findings have reignited the highly-charged debate on abortion, and increased the pressure on Tony Blair to review the current time limits.

The survey by MORI shows that 47 per cent of women believe the legal limit for an abortion should be cut from its present 24 weeks, and another 10 per cent want the practice outlawed altogether. Among the population overall, reducing the upper limit was the preferred option backed by the largest proportion of respondents, 42 per cent, made up of a 36-47 per cent split among men and women.

Only one person in three agreed that ‘the current time limit is about right’, with slightly fewer women (31 per cent) than men (35 per cent) saying that. Just 2 per cent of women and 5 per cent of men think the last possible date after which a woman can end a pregnancy should be increased from 24 weeks.

The leader of the 4.1 million Catholics in England and Wales, Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor, called on politicians last night to heed the evidence of a growing demand for a rethink on abortion policy, to include The Observer’s findings. ‘There has been a moral awakening over the last few years about abortion; the British public have been undergoing a reality check,’ said his spokesman, Dr Austen Ivereigh. ‘The Cardinal sees in this moral awakening a growing unease with, and erosion of, the idea of abortion as simply a woman’s right.’

Increased awareness of the realities of abortion, and the impact of ultrasound images of a 23-week-old foetus smiling and grimacing, have made people change their views, said Ivereigh. The latter ‘very dramatically showed that what had been depersonalised in many people’s minds as a foetus was clearly seen to be a baby, a human being in formation, and that has come as a shock to many people’, he added.

Why is the British way better?  Because it allows for some flexibility based upon society’s ever-changing values.  Here in America we tend to see things in terms of absolute rights, which is a result of our country being founded by men who believed deeply in this concept.  So when it comes to the issues that divide society, people tend to fragment into groups who believe in one type of polarized absolutist position based upon rights.  Abortion on demand is a right, claim the pro-abortion folks.  Abortion is a violation of the rights of the fetus, claim abortion opponents. 

The problem with this approach is that it sets up abortion as an all-or-nothing proposition.  In other words, abortion is available only so long as you have a Supreme Court which believes the Constitution provides a right to one.  As soon as the makeup of the court changes, which it appears is about to happen, then that “right” can disappear overnight.  Either the pro-abortion groups are completely placated or the anti-abortion groups are, there is no middle ground.

Of course, as simple logic dictates, most people in America do not accept a polarized position on anything, and always see some kind of middle ground.  The attitudes of Americans are generally similar to those of the British.  Generally speaking, the American attitude is that abortion is not a good thing, and should not be available on demand, but it should not be removed entirely.  The issue is that our legislative branch is entirely too gutless to tackle the abortion issue themselves, simply because of how polarizing it is for so many people, so they are more than happy to sit idly by and allow the judiciary to assume the legislative role.  See, the judiciary is comprised of lifetime appointments, and is therefore unaccountable to the voting public, unlike legislators.  It’s much easier for a legislator to rail against a judicial decision he doesn’t like ex post facto than it is for him to choose a position and argue in favor of it himself.

Our way sucks.  The British way is better.

Monday, January 23, 2006

In the preceding post I asked the following question.

If it could be shown that a proposed ban on abortion would actually make life worse for women and, by proxy, the children they would be forced by law to bear, would you still support it?

In the ensuing discussion Yahonza remarked:

Lee asked if it could be shown that that fetus would have a better life having been aborted, would an anti abortionist still object to abortion.

My point is that its nearly incomprehensible that it could be shown that you would have a better life if you didn’t have a life at all.  I think Lee was being somewhat incoherent, and I think it is obvious that no one opposed to abortion would be troubled by Lee’s question for the very reason that they consider abortion the death of a baby, and it would be hard to show that a fate worse than death awaited a nonaborted fetus.

Its a little like saying that if it could be shown that the Jews were better off being sent to the gas chambers, would you still be opposed to Hitler?

I think this is an important point of discussion, so I decided to respond in a separate post.  Allow me to elaborate on my point.

I am against the war on drugs.  Not because I think drugs are a good thing, or because I think society is better off with drug use, but because I recognize the futility of the fight.  I also see the astonishing degree of harm that has been inflicted on society as a result of this war.  For example, look at the number of lives that have been ruined due to harsh prison sentences due to mandatory minimum sentencing rules for drug offenders.  How many young black men have done a long stretch in prison because they decided to sell a little weed when they were in their teens?  Then, after ten years, they get out, convicted felons, jaded toward the world.  As conservatives, we encourage communities to find solutions to their problems themselves, but this is quite hard to do when a significant portion of your able-bodied male population is either incarcerated or has a criminal record and is therefore unemployable in all but the most menial of jobs.  The war on drugs has done nothing but provide astonishing profit streams to criminal enterprise, which in turn inflicts untold amounts of damage on the social fabric.

Drugs destroy lives.  The drug war destroys lives.  It’s a matter of value judgments.  What cost are we as a society prepared to endure in order to fight against drugs, a product which a significant percentage of the population wants to indulge in?  Is the cure actually worse than the disease?  I think it is.  Opposing the drug war does not mean supporting drugs, it means that we recognize that drugs are a permanent evil in society, and that there are better, more intelligent ways they can be fought.  It is the pigheaded moral absolutism of our political establishment that has enabled a well-intentioned mission, to protect America’s youth from the scourge of drugs, to snowball into the massive liberty-destroying leviathan that we see before us today.

Which brings me to my point about abortion.  I consider myself pro-choice, not because I think abortion is a good thing or that I encourage abortion.  I have said many times that I find abortion a vile, reprehensible procedure.  If I were female I certainly would never choose to have one.  That being said, I think that we really need to have a serious discussion about the costs to society than an actual ban on abortion will bring about.  For example, there are going to be tens of thousands of babies born to low-income women, who have no spousal support.  These children are going to need public assistance money, which require a massive expansion of the welfare state, funded by enormous tax increases or copious deficit spending.  Welfare mothers are more likely to become pregnant than educated women from more affluent families.  With more welfare mothers getting pregnant, and abortion not an option, we’re going to end up with even more welfare mothers.  The chances of a young woman being able to work hard to get an education and get off welfare decrease significantly when she has a child she has to feed and raise at the same time.  So, one result of a ban on abortion will be a guarantee of decades of Americans mired in poverty, spending a lifetime suckling at the government teat.  Babies of welfare mothers will be more likely to end up on drugs or in a gang or in prison.  This damages society as a whole.  As mentioned above, this will result in even more numbers of young men incarcerated.  When they are incarcerated they are unable to provide for their children, nor provide a father figure role.  This will significantly increase the likelihood that these babies themselves will end up in prison.  Another self-perpetuating societal drain.

The notion of protecting the rights of unborn babies is a noble and just one.  It cannot be denied that there has been a great cost to the fabric of society due to abortion.  The question we face now is, what damage to society are we willing to endure?  To get back to my original question, if it could be shown conclusively that an abortion ban would result in a substantial degree of damage to society as a whole, far exceeding the damage currently done by abortion, would you still support the ban?  In other words, in your zeal to remove the evil of abortion from society, are you willing to confront the even greater evil of the consequences of all the subsequent unwanted births?

I don’t support legalization of drugs because I like drugs, and I don’t support abortion rights because I like abortion.  I simply recognize that, in both cases, society is choosing a noble battle and fighting it in exactly the wrong way.