I trust your summary, and my view is that that participants in JANE believed that they were committing necessary murder.

There isn’t any excusable homicide.

I may be getting my legal terminology wrong, but I was under the impression that excusable homicide was the term for things like killing in self-defence. The account didn’t actually use the term, it was my shorthand summary of the views presented.

I’ve also gone with a female friend to Houston to have her breasts augmented (and successfully convinced her to choose smaller cup size on the way!). In this case, however, the only reason her boyfriend couldn’t go along was that he was deployed for his two-week Marine Corps Reserve summer training. Funny how that works.

In this exact same vein, I have never had to deal with abortion on a personal level– the one time I had a girlfriend get pregnant, we went the adoption route. Even to this day, I volunteer with an adoption agency in Oklahoma to ensure that this *choice* remains available to all women who feel this is the best situation for them, as my mate did then. I personally love abortion and think that it would be what I would choose if I were a female facing that situation. I consider myself to be a moderate on the issue, but in America’s environment of increasing calls for abortion prohibition, I wind up being the “wall” keeping the choice open to the free peoples.

Are you following me, now?

Personally I wish they’d just be honest and admit that they’re advocating eugenics. And yes, Robert, I know that comment will offend you, and no, I don’t care.

So who in OUR society is on this forced-abortion extreme?

How about the politicians, “blue” and “red” who think it’s peachy-keen that foreign factory owners who receive U.S. dollars can force their laborers to abort just so the factory can keep spewing out goods at a breakneck speed and at rock-bottom prices ? How about the local industrialists that support such policies and who bankroll the politicians who support them ? How about the pro-life organizations who turn a blind eye to them– because sure we want more White babies– but the rest ? Oh, heck, abort away !!

I’m guessing that if radfem were here, she’d want to chime in about U.S. policies in the past and present that rope women of color, but not Whites, into using birth control or into being sterilized. That’s a related issue, since it involves robbing citizens of their right to reproductive freedom.

So I’m the “moderate”, and the extremists are people who want gun control laws, and the other extremists are the half-dozen selectmen in that little town in New England who passed the law requiring everybody to own a gun.

You know damn well that even the most impassioned pro-choicer here does not want a law requiring every pregnant woman to have an abortion. For once, would you just lay off the disingenuousness ?

Now please read the following carefully, Robert. I’m only going to say it once, and I’m not interesting in jumping through any more of those hoops which you love to use in your customary obnoxious word-games:

These are not Pro-Choice policies. They remove women’s right to choose. The Pro-Choice POV, by definition, is the cornerstone of a moderate movement.

Now go ahead and grumble that I’m not talking about “reality,” even though the situations in my first paragraph have been raised on this blog and others before. Someone else can deal with you. I won’t have either the time nor the energy today to bother doing it.

It just seems like this is a construct designed to improve a rhetorical position (”look how moderate we are”) without usefully describing reality.

I’m pro-gun in the sense that I think that people ought to be able to have the choice of whether to own guns, generally. So I’m the “moderate”, and the extremists are people who want gun control laws, and the other extremists are the half-dozen selectmen in that little town in New England who passed the law requiring everybody to own a gun.

How is that a useful construction of our positions, that describes something real?

China and Darfur are the extremes.

There are people who do say the latter… but the extremists who say the former seem to be all but overwhelming our nation, thanks in no small part to constant propaganda campaigns by American Imams… er, Preachers.

Folks like La Lubu have pointed out previously that choice IS the middle– the only one that should matter. What does it accomplish for me to pretend that the discomfort of others over an issue that I’ve personally made peace with should be grounds for ME having to soft-peddle my beliefs ? I believe that this is what Steve is asking for, and I won’t play. It’s demeaning, and besides, it doesn’t work.

If I tell the “mushy middle,” for the sake of some bogus concept of “bridge-building,” that “Yes, it’s more than a glob of cells,” what is this but another pointless blast of hot air ? It changes nothing. I’d still abort tomorrow if I found myself pregnant. I would still make a point of not interfering with the woman next to me and her, “glob of cells,” “future Rams quarterback,” “three-legged dancing purple hippo” or whatever she wanted to call it.

If, however, I do concede that it’s “murder,” my voice is lessened, and the pro-life extremists are emboldened. Sorry. I don’t like extremists and I don’t have all that much patience for “mushy middlers” that can reach my age or older and still muddle about these issues claiming that they “can’t decide.” Considering the statistics that say about 40% of all women will at some time in her adult life have an abortion, I’m guessing that an awful lot of “middlers” are very capable of making a firm decision behind closed doors regarding how they feel about abortion. Their public face may be something else again. You go talk to them. I’ve got better things to do.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The liberal in the street makes no progress because his/her masters are selling him/her out every time they take a breath. If there really is such a thing left in the House or Senate as a liberal, they are failing because they are being sold out by the majority of their colleagues. Because of the constant dilution of the rank-and-file’s message and the ruination of their stated desires by oligarchs who hold the purse strings and the ballots, you will always appear to stand for nothing.

There is no “we liberals,” as you are defining it. You don’t have a damn thing in common with Dean, Reid, Clinton, et al aside from your country of residence. You care about these issues, but the oligarchs don’t care about you. As long as you continue to trust in them, they will continue to undermine and to rob you, because they feel every bit as much contempt for you as Bush feels for the Bible-thumping foot soldiers who think that bullying gays is more important than a living wage. They use you. They are insulated from any negative ramifications of their callous disregard for the crucial issues you care about. You are a pawn, and pawns are not permitted to stand for anything except for the de facto superiority of he/she who moves them across the chess board.

That is the crux of your problem, Steve, and it’s about more than abortion.

…plenty of people who regard life and death decisions as masculine prerogatives, and thus either accept any justification for them that a man makes or who never expect justification for these decisions to begin with.

but because I didn’t think the analogy between war and abortion was valid.

But now that I come to consider it… every day we hear the Iraq war and/or the so-called War on Terror cast as “defending our freedom” and “defending our way of life.” Now, I don’t necessarily buy these characterizations, especially in the case of Iraq, but in terms of how (a lot of) men think of war and how (many, maybe most) women think of abortion, hmm, maybe that analogy is pretty good.

However, Steve is also dead on in saying:

My aim is to figure out why we liberals are failing to make good arguments, connect with people, win elections, and influence the country. Pointing out that the other side is defective or wrong might make you feel good, but it doesn’t accomplish that.

Granted, we’re never going to change the minds of hard-line prolifers. But there is a huge squeamish middle out there made very, very uncomfortable by hearing prochoicers implicitly equate a conceptus (in the sense of any entity between a fertilized egg and a full-term baby) with a tumor. I realize that no one really means to do that, but saying “it’s just a ball of cells” sounds a lot like it.

Just for the record, btw, I am a woman.

There isn’t any excusable homicide. When you hear people advocate excusable homicide, it’s not an enormous leap to recognize that they may assist those who happen to terminate people.

There is another moral ambiguity people accept which paralells abortion, and that is eating meat. I do eat meat, and I know full well that the animals I eat suffer indescribably in slaughterhouses and their living conditions. I love animals so I have no notions that they can’t think or don’t fear their own deaths or feel pain. Yet I eat them. I live in a society in which I could not eat them if I went to the trouble, yet I also recognize that nature set things up so that we humans have to kill to live. I know most pro-lifers would be affronted at the comparision with animals right to life and our acceptance that they be sacrificed, but there it is.

And, Susan, respect doesn’t always mean admiration. Thinking something is gruesome is allowed.

Listen up guys: this is why it is about CHOICE. My choice. Alsis’ choice. Any woman’s choice. Because as long as men ACTIVELY CHOOSE to take human lives then they can go fuck themselves over the abortion issue. Until you guys can prove to me that you are so morally superior that you can EVERYDAY CHOOSE to take human lives (and lets not discount the taking of lives through pollution, poverty, or preventable diseases) and that somehow your CHOICE to KILL gets coded as war, or death penalty, or government sanctions, or Monsanto, then you can again GO FUCK yoursevles. If Scotland Yard can order “shoot to kill”, then any woman anywhere can decide to abort her conceptus, her fetus, her developing child, HER BABY. Whatever. You, men that is, don’t get to kill each other and then ignore it.

If you are going to demand that “we” prove it isn’t murder, then you have to fucking prove why you don’t call yourself a murderer. And then you’re going to have to, one by one, list all the ways in which you take other people’s lives and justify, one by one, why each is called ANYTHING but MURDER. Christ. It really is that simple guys.

It’s your dog that won’t hunt Steve, ’cause I shot it.