This will sound strange, but I think I want to have her babies.

Seriously. I would rather have someone scream that my having an abortion over twenty years ago means I’m a murderer and I should face the death penalty than pat my hand and condescend in that disgusting WEBA (Women Exploited By Abortion) mindset that I really wanted to have a baby (what else are women for, after all?), but those nasty ole Planned Parenthood harpies and abortionists brainwashed me into terminating the only thing that would allow me to claim the role of True Woman (TM).

And while we’re at it, can we get away from this tiresome idea that all women feel awful and guilty and wracked with grief after an abortion? Or that at least they should feel that way? I wasn’t dancing in the streets, but I sure as shit felt relief. And for anyone who thinks that makes me callous, I’d just like to point out that I have never hit a child, starved a child, denied a child medical attention, voted for legislation that denied basic services to children, and I have never screamed “I wish you had never been born!” to a kid, as some good Christian “choose life” types I know have done.

Honestly, I think that the way to end the abortion debate once and for all is to get in their faces and say “If abortion is murder, you have the moral and legal obligation, you anti-choice folks, to insist that any woman having an abortion be charged with first-degree murder. If you try to weasel out of it by blaming doctors, etc., then you are basically admitting that it isn’t a completely black-and-white area (which is how most religions see it too, contra the popular mythology), and therefore leaving the choice in the woman’s hands, with reasonable restrictions, as it is now, is the way to go.”

Having adopted three of my kids I can tell you that adoptive parents have to jump through numerous hoops to prove that they’re likely to be “good parents” before the child placement is OK’d.  Birth parents, however, can breed like rabbits, abuse their kids and pretty much have to almost murder them before parental rights are taken away.

OK.  I don’t believe that most birth parents are like this, in fact most of us are very good parents when put to the test.  And most of us recognize when we are not in the position to be parents.  Especially when we are very young.

Pam Karlan sounds very sensible, very intelligent and very plausible as a SCOTUS candidate.  Maybe we can get her candidacy pushed forward!

The position that really makes no moral sense is to allow abortion only in cases of rape or incest. 

If you believe abortion is murder, but you allow it whent he pregnacy is the result of rape, then you are saying it’s OK to murder a baby because its father is a rapist.

The only viewpoint that is position supports is that pregnancy is punishment for having sex.  If the sex act was forced and it wasn’t the woman’s fault, then she shouldn’t be “punished” with an unwanted pregnancy.

Punishment is totally the point. There is no consensus among religions about the morality of abortion, for one thing, so I’ve always thought we should fight back against restrictive abortion laws on the grounds, among many other things, that they would enshrine one particular religious viewpoint into law, contra the Constitution.

And that again is why I get so fed up with these ghouls who just love to talk about how women who have abortions must be scarred, they’re gonna increase their chances of breast cancer (BS!), their psyches are in shreds. Ha! They wish. (And isn’t it funny that so many women who have abortions also either go on to become mothers, or have already been mothers, yet we never hear about this? The world isn’t divided neatly into “women who have abortions” and “women who have babies.”)

The whole “post-abortion syndrome” thing makes me angry (obviously!). I don’t deny there are women who are saddened by it. No one I knew when I worked at Planned Parenthood went flying out of the recovery room going “Whoo! I just had me an abortion and now it’s Miller Time!” But there is no convincing longitudinal data that women who terminate pregnancies are any more prone to psychological difficulties post-AB than women who carry to term (post-partum depression, anyone?) Now, certainly there are women with psychological difficulties who have abortions—and maybe those difficulties are exacerbated by the circumstances of having an unwanted pregnancy, perhaps a failed relationship as a result of that pregnancy, and then the termination. And there are women who cannot safely carry a child to term because of the need to be medicated for mental illness so they don’t harm themselves or others. But again, do we want to encourage women who are unsure about being mothers to “just go ahead, it will all be fine, put those doubts away and stop taking your Thorazine for nine months?” I think not.

Again, that’s why I’d rather have someone tell me I’m a murderer than listen to their sanctimonious wheezing about how they really just want to protect me from the consequences of my own adult agency. I mean, if they are really so concerned about the well-being of women, given that more women die in childbirth than from abortions, they should outlaw pregnancy. It would be just as sensible using their pretzel logic.

And the last time I checked, child abuse was still a problem. Would the concern trolls of SCOTUS like to posit that, given that some women express regret for having children by taking it out on the kids physically, it would be safest to prohibit all women from giving birth?