Over 100,000 women in Texas have tried to give themselves an abortion, study finds

I’m out of likes! Have a “well played” from the Clerks cartoon instead…

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Man I gotta be one old grumpy lady! I have never run out of likes! LOL

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I think I just run out because I’m trying to brown nose and get people to like me more! I have self-esteem issues! :wink:

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LOL - probably a better tactic than my “no, now I will yell at you” plan of action. :wink:

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I should probably yell more, actually. I bet that makes you more popular!

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Nobody here would ever do that. Especially not in a certain locked thread.

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This is it precisely. If not forbidding abortion, then it’s forbidding sex. If it’s not sex, it’s certain foods on certain days. If it’s not food, it’s other shit in an old book telling people what to do and how to be. It’s control and noise, echoing down the millennia. People in power want to retain power by imposing their will on the mass of people. 1% vs the 99%. It has nothing to do with morality and everything to do with politics in a general sense.

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There’s also the guilt>condemnation>forgiveness>sin>back to guilt cycle. If you can make unavoidable human functions sinful, then you can keep them crawling back to the church on their bellies. All you have to do is convince them that normal healthy stuff makes them completely depraved and evil, and that the only way to be saved is by obedience to the church.

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Worked for me.

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I am pro choice for many reasons. One of the main reasons I don’t want anyone to be pregnant who doesn’t want to me. My pregnancy would have killed me without the massive amount of medical intervention I needed. Not everyone can afford the obstetrician fees like I could. And I know someone who did nearly die because someone at the hospital didn’t take them seriously. This wasn’t years ago. This was February.

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If it were merely about oppressing women, there would be a greater gender difference in support of pro choice policies. There is space between the genders, but only since 2012. I do wonder how much that is affected by the fact that anti abortion policies have been increasingly extremist, to the extent that they will change the minds of women who might not otherwise have a strong opinion.

I think it comes down to the question of how we define human life, which cannot be answered scientifically, and isn’t specifically a women’s issue. In this case, it overwhelmingly affects women though.

Some mothers I’ve spoken to have suggested that pro choice advocates can’t have had children themselves. Feeling a foetus inside you should be enough to convince anyone that this is an individual human being with its own personality. It doesn’t mean that they don’t care about bodily autonomy, but it complicates matters as there is no longer just one body to think about. Some people would abort a foetus if it were likely to have downs syndrome, for its own good. Some who have downs syndrome or whose children have it find this deeply offensive. This obviously isn’t everyone’s perspective or experience, and I recognise that supporting abortion does not mean that you are less compassionate. However, it is more than about controlling women and it is worth having discussions where these motivations are shared - not just to change minds, but to understand each other beyond crude stereotypes.

These are some of the reasons I am also pro choice. My wife is definitely anti abortion, so I had a vasectomy after we had our first child (this wasn’t the only reason). The whole issue is so politicised that while people theoretically are ok with abortions where the pregnancy puts the mother at risk, it’s never going to be good enough. I really don’t know how bad it would have to get before she would agree to terminate the pregnancy, and I didn’t want to roll the dice again.

Pro life and pro choice applies to unwanted babies too. Insisting that they are born for the sake of a principle is extremist, but I’d also want to see a big reduction in the number of times this scenario comes up. “Pro life” policies do not help here, despite the hype.

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They would be wrong.

Half of the roughly 1.2 million U.S. women who have abortions each year are 25 or older. Only about 17 percent are teens. About 60 percent have given birth to least one child prior to getting an abortion.

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(psst: I didn’t want to stomp all over your post, but “sacrifice” also…it must have been a late night!)

Who is “pro abortion”? Who? You really think there’s someone who wants more abortions to occur?

Furthermore, the phrase “pro-life” is a politically-charged term with a very specific meaning. In effect, it means anti-life for women and babies, because the people who wear that mantle work very hard to deny every bit of support for women and their offspring.

When you explain yourself in full paragraphs, your explanations make reasonable and supportive sense. But then you use phrases which are designed to indicate very specific political and social goals that have at their basis the belief that women and children are not full human beings with the same rights as men.

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Hence why I like the term anti-choice. :wink:

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I used to date someone who used the phrase “consistent life ethic” to describe a philosophy that was anti-war, anti-death-sentence, yes, against abortion. Of course what they weren’t for was passing laws that prevent women from having abortions, because those laws don’t save lives and don’t accomplish anything positive. If words meant what they meant on their face, then we’d call that position “pro-life” because it was actually pro-life, and not even just for humans as it included veganism.

But that’s not what “pro-life” means. “Pro-life” in most conversations means “in favour of laws restricting abortion.” That is what people are going to hear when you use the term. It’s going to cause a lot of misunderstanding if you mean something more like “actually wanting people to live,” since the laws that pro-life people generally advocate cause people to die. We all know this is an extremely polarized debate, and saying “pro-life” is choosing a side - the wrong side. This isn’t about semantics, this is about using labels for political causes. Even though all political parties in America are democratic, it would probably be a very bad idea to describe yourself as being part of a “democratic party” if you mean the Republicans.

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I’m still having a hard time reconciling the positive spin on “side-walk counsellors”…

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I’ll admit I jumped through a bit of the middle of that discussion to save myself some time. Are side-walk counselors people who try to stop people going into abortion clinics and convince them to do something else? Maybe this kind of effort could be redirected to the front of banks to try to convince people who work there to seek other work and stop fucking up the world.

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Yup. This benevolent idea of kind hearted side walk counsellors that don’t carry placards and don’t shout is really at odd with the evidence, (see here: http://misandry-mermaid.tumblr.com/post/133559351296/do-u-really-think-that-standing-outside-of-planned) - and this idea that is not based in religion, puhleeeze, ain’t fooling no one!

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