You know, things like lack of childcare, the way society treats and views mothers, the isolation, postnatal depression, the financial costs, and the less cute and sentimental realities of it all. And how both Mum and kid’s mental health fare with those issues in their paths.

Had I known from the beginning that I was going to terminate the pregnancy, I would not have had that ultrasound. Because I did look at that picture and see two little humans. But seeing the pictures didn’t change the circumstances I was in… didn’t bring in extra money or extra emotional support from my boyfriend, didn’t change that I needed to put all my attention on my living child with his new diagnosis, didn’t change that what made me high-risk in my previous pregnancy would be even a bigger risk with this more complicated pregnancy. I spent hours at work not working but instead crunching numbers in a spreadsheet trying to figure out how I could afford three daycare payments and still pay the rent. Its too bad we aren’t all living in a Lifetime movie, but we’re not. So I terminated and I felt really bad about it, probably worse than I would have if I had not had the ultrasound, but I still did what I had to do at that time.

I guess my point is that you can show these ultrasound pictures to women, and you can make them feel sad and guilty and maybe even make a lot of them change their minds. Or you can just put one too many obstacles in the way of their choice. But in the end you have a lot of women who have babies who don’t have the circumstances to support these babies and so you end up with big social problems.

I just don’t agree with threatening death or mutilation toward anyone except murderers and rapists (actual ones, not rhetorical). And even then I have second thoughts – maybe it would be better to just lock them up somewhere, in order to avoid descending to their level.

Yeah, actually. They don’t really believe in bodily autonomy. They honestly don’t believe that people own their own bodies. You know how right-wingers basically believe that they’re born into a huge web of social obligations, so there’s only really one right way to live, which is the way enforced by their particular culture? Well, if you take that to its logical conclusion, you have to come to the realisation that they don’t believe people own their own bodies.

It’s the only premise that makes parsimonious sense of being simultaneously antiabortion, anticontraception, antifeminist, and pro-war, pro-executions, and pro-conscription. See, if nobody actually owns their own bodies, the people in power have literal control over who is born and who isn’t, who lives, and who dies. And they really get off on that kind of thing. You could call them the objectively-pro-slavery crowd…

If these anti-abortion people don’t trust a woman to be able to make decsions like that about her life, how the hell can they trust her to actually raise children?

Can anyone tell me the logic behind that? Anyone?

Oh, this part’s easy. The answer is the Appeal to Maternal Instinct. Raising a child is supposed to be a process that takes cognitive place in a woman’s cerebellum or brainstem.

Well it does say that about gays and adulterers. I don’t really know if it says women who get abortions should be stoned. - Godless SOB

It doesn’t really mention them as such, but it is pretty clear that a foetus isn’t a person:

“And if men struggle and strike a woman with child so that she has a miscarriage, yet there is no further injury, he shall be fined as the woman’s husband may demand of him, and he shall pay as the judges decide. But if there is any further injury, then you shall appoint as a penalty life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.”

That doesn’t go far in considering women people either, but it clearly removes a foetus from consideration of injury done to a person.

[From this page, conveniently titled "Why abortion is Biblical"]

I’m with you on the tone of some of these posts. Disturbing. Here I thought we were supposed to be the good guys.

Come on everybody, we’re better than that.

Which is why all those anti-choice billboards informing us that “a baby’s heart starts beating at 18 days” (and I thought it was more like 21, but what’s three days between friends?) show us pictures of a 13 week fetus rather than an 18 day embryo. I never knew being purposefully misleading was a “Christian” value … oh wait, didn’t Paul say “we are deceivers”?

Anyway, Chris, the reason we’re being so hard on Saletan has been discussed at length already (Atrios has recently reposted Pollit’s (?) response to Saletan which gets at why): but the short reason is that Saletan’s position is seen as a “reasonable” way to “reach out to the unwashed masses” with a pro-choice position that respects people’s discomfort with icky medical procedures that kill purty little fetuses. However, it’s a very silly position that tends to lead to compromises that not only allow anti-choicers to stick their feet in the door but also bans abortion procedures that, by any reasonable consideration of morality, are the most moral procedures around (see, Partial Birth Abortion, so-called, ban on): i.e. because it’s somehow considered a “reasonable” compromise, women with massively infected fetuses inside them cannot have those fetuses removed intact in the safest way possible.

That’s why we dislike Saletan so. That and he’s being so smug and condescending.