Planned Parenthood--helping the helpless or fortress of genocide?

A Washington Post column talked about the Republican House's efforts to defund Planned Parenthood and Title X (which they'd said they'd spare when the first went after Planned Parenthood--but it turns out they don't want to defund abortion--they want to defund healthcare for the poor. Who knew?).


As you can imagine, this article's comment threat flowered with the usual poster waving.


I said:

Consider this comment by a so-called Pro-Lifer:

/>>barbaracjohnson74 wrote:

/>>...Both poor women and rich women have two legs and can keep them locked from their respective love-making partners. All women, therefore, whether poor or rich, have to be responsible for their own conduct. In other words, put a zipper on Pauline, if not a chastity belt. The author's tears in this article for poor pregnant women are simply not persuasive.
2/23/2011 3:23:52 PM

Now consider this pro-lifer's call for people to take responsibility as you read these tidbits, all verifiable through mainstream (not wacko bloggers) information sources:

1. 32,000 rape victims become pregnant annually.

That's 88 pregnancies from rape per day in America. The number doesn't count "coerced sex" of wives and girl friends.

2. Last April 19, CNN reported that a 10 year old girl in Mexico who'd been raped by her stepfather was denied an abortion by local authorities because Mexican law forbids abortions after four months.

According to "barbaracjohnson74" I guess this 10 year old child must have been asking for it. Now she just has to suck it up--though no 10 year old's pelvis is developed enough to carry a pregnancy to term without damage (possibly lifelong), but she should have thought about that beforehand, right? [I'm just trying to think like the people who call themselves "pro-life"]

Cases like this can be found throughout the Latin American countries whose social policies are directed by the Catholic Church.

3. Last June all the major news outlets reported that the Catholic Church excommunicated a nun/hospital administrator for Okaying an abortion, saying "An unborn child is not a disease ... the end does not justify the means."

The woman, suffering from pulmonary hypertension, would have died shortly without the abortion. The fetus, 11 weeks along, could not have survived the mother's death.

Now there's one heckuva pro-life church, huh? BTW child rapists are not automatically excommunicated.

You can't make this stuff up.

4. A survey on abortion attitudes last year by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life revealed that three out of ten active churchgoers believe that abortion should not be illegal in all or most cases.

OTOH one out of four Americans with no religious affiliation say that abortion should be illegal in most or all cases.

So this isn't a religious vs. nonreligious--nor a political one either. One out of five Democrats oppose abortion, while 29% of Republicans support abortion being generally available.

So all the anti-lib-er-ul invective on this thread is kind of dim-bulby, eh?

5. Nearly all discussion about abortion is based on one side saying women should have control over their bodies, while the other says a zygote--a microscopic one-celled dependent organism should have exactly the same legal status as a one month old baby.

(Note that less than half of all zygotes become babies--the rest die spontaneously, or fail to implant, or are so genetically defective that they can't survive childbirth. So none of these were even potential "babies."

But there's a third opinion: that the world in general and America in particular are in the midst of an overpopulation crisis so extreme that all the world's nations should adopt China's One Child policy.

This has nothing to do with "a woman's right to choose," one way or another. People like are saying it's an emergency that trumps the moralizing on both sides.

America's population has quadrupled since 1900. Many if not most of the measures we've taken to get these people food and water are not sustainable. Porous aquifers are collapsing all over the country. Fisheries are collapsing. Hi-tech agribusiness has polluted waterways and water tables, and large scale monoculture--often of cloned plants--puts us at risk for disease or parasite epidemics like the one that will eliminate the banana we normally eat within a decade or so (as happened to its predecessor in the 1920s).

If you don't understand what I said here you are not qualified to say whether America is overpopulated or not. I realize none of this is obvious. Neither is terminal cancer in its early stages.

We are cantilevered over the abyss. Normal life seems to go on, but under the hood a bunch of really bad things are happening that will eventually make opposition to abortion look suicidal.

Overall the world can sustain about a billion people without environmental degradation. We have seven billion.

Want to see the future? Visit Haiti.