It's the minimal program because anything else ...like free childcare, health coverage for kids, education.... would actually cost money. It remains a crucial issue not because feminists/women are happy about killing fetuses but because once the fetus becomes the "property" of anyone except the woman (the father, the state, the church, the doctor), the situation become impossible and extensible into the woman being the "property" or "object" of the aforementioned agents in all other kinds of ways. It is then entirely possible to control a woman through rape for example, a practice that was not uncommon in rural Romania were forced marriages were accomplished in this manner.
And, let's be perfectly clear, making abortion illegal makes abortion inacessible only to the poor. Women who have money will always be able to get it.
>And most of us, I'm sure, have
>received our share of scare literature at election time from Planned
>Parenthood, NOW, etc. So it's not as if I'm exaggerating the focus on the
>inalienable right to toss what will be a child into a garbage can.
I am not thrilled with PP's fund-raising tactics, which do feature abortion rights prominently and sometimes exclusively. I am way less than thrilled with their exclusive "lobbying" strategy. On the other hand, I have lived in rural USA where the only place where a woman can get birth control is from a PP office. For that they deserve praise and support.
A fetus is not a child. What makes a child out of the fetus is a woman's work, commmitment, love, energy, sanity etc. Yes, sometimes men are involved in that work - sometimes. Still, your distance (as a male) from the reality of that process, makes it easier for you to conflate "fetus" into "child".
> The
>suggestion that I think of feminists as bloodthirsty is a nice (not cute)
>dodge, but in my experience in the political realm, there ain't a lot of
>tolerance for thinking abortion is wrong.
Most women I know who have had an abortion or who consider that possiblity AGONIZE over that decision. I once thought I was pregnant and, though my period came a week later, I'd have to say that was the worst week of my life.
I don't hang out with feminists much if at all -- I am pretty much disgusted with the direction that the movement has taken in the last twenty years. But I think you're totally misrepresenting and confusing the issue by arguing whether abortion is "wrong" or "right." It is, ideally, a problem that should never come up in the first place.
Joanna