Aftermath of Abortion

In the schools they are in, nuns are few and far between. When I was in Catholic schools back in the early-mid 70's, our sex ed was taught by lay (no pun intended) teachers.

Of course Catholic schools aren't going to give what, I assume, you would consider a "proper education" regarding contraceptives. Artificial contraception is against the tenets of the faith. What they SHOULD teach in all schools is 'Natural Family Planning'. The information gleaned from those classes is outstanding with respect to family planning. Also, both females and males learn a lot about what women go through on a monthly basis.

 

It isn't callous. We are talking about problems and issues. Referring to problems in a cause/effect relationship is standard practice in our society. Do I really need a whole new set words to convey to you exactly the same thing. Lighten up.

My point is by focusing on abortion is short sighted. Focus on pregnancy instead. By reducing pregnancies...you will in turn reduce abortions. Same end result. Only this time, you don't have the divisive religious issue as a barrier that stops 50% of Americans. So whats the problem with that? It is a simple concept.

I have no idea what you are trying to say here. Please elaborate.

By

 

I understand your point but my position is that there is another way to stop abortions without outlawing them. If you want to stop abortions, then stop pregnancies. I have seen very little effort, if any, by Pro-lifers on this matter. I think the pro-lifers are fighting the wrong battle...as evidenced by the fact that this has been an ongoing battle for, what, 20+ years. At what point do you circle the wagons and come up with Plan B.

Again, if you are truely interested in stopping abortions...stop the unwanted pregnancies. Best way to attack that is through education.

Some will still slip through the cracks and some abortions may still happen. But if people resort to illegal abortions or foreign abortions, then it's a wash? It's impossible to stop 100% of the abortions. In the meantime, how many babies have died because the focus was on outlawing abortions rather than educating people not to get pregnant in the first place. They could have saved thousands of lives in the last 20 years had they made that the focus.

 

They did make educating kids the focus that is why abortions have increased.
It was called safe sex and taught as sex education in classrooms all across America.

This is human nature.

You teach a mature 13 yr old who has a high degree of personal responsibility and respect for law to wait until age 21 to drink and if there are enough kids with that character a very positive peer pressure develops and kids don't drink.

You teach a immature 13 yr old who is rebellious towards authority that drinking will get them killed and show them every piece of data and statistic to verify it and warn them never to drive and drink and what happens.. they agree with you , get under negative peer pressure and drink, drive and collide.

The same could be said for drug use, smoking, sniffing glue.

Why do kids do the stupid things we tell them not to do.

Why do kids listen to safe sex ed from the time they can get it going in school and the pregnancy rates climb and the abortion rates climb?

Because the more you tell them that if you are going to drink, drink responsibly and if you are going to have sex have it responsibly... they are going to partake and they are going to be irresponsible about it.

I work with kids in poverty areas where they are in and out of juvenile, they are getting pregnant 13-15 yrs of age and doing the hip things, you know drink and smoke starting at 12-13.

So when I ask them about sex ed, they all tell me the same thing. When you have sex use protection. My question, why didn't you? When I had sex I didn't or , I forgot, or I was drinking or I didn't think I would get pregnant, or I really didn't care.

All irresponsible answers. Giving condoms to these kids at school is like giving them a phone number for a designated driver and telling them, when you get drunk call this number.

Is the root problem they are uneducated or is the root problem that the education is defective or is the root problem.

I have never once talked to a kid in trouble with drugs, alcohol or teen pregnancy who had a responsible father and mother in the home and had a healthy relationship with the parents.

The kids that I worked with 15 yrs ago in the gangs are now parents. Most single parents.

In my church there is a single mother who my wife and I helped get off drugs 22 yrs ago. We hadn't seen her for several yrs. until recently. She had a 15 yr old daughter who got pregnant, married a drug dealer and now they both face felony drug charges with a baby in their hands.

I went to the jail and tried to help them.

It is a mess. Everyone had safe sex ed until it was coming out their ears. I asked.

Our problems are very complex and more widespread than you might think until you get out in the playgrounds and hear what is going on in the lives of kids.

We have a big mess. We are telling kids how to have safe sex, they are going out and getting pregnant inspite of billions of dollars of taxpayer money spent on forced public school sex ed. and we are promoting baby murder as the ultimate answer to the whole mess.

The devil himself could not have drawn up a better scenario.

I don't think the best solution has been proposed yet. But I do know by my own personal experience that we are using one of the worst ones we possibly could.

 

The devil would be more pleased with an underground abortion market and women dying from self induced abortions. And he would get and extra kick from them rotting in prison too. He would love the condemnations and the loss of possibilities of redemption.

Sex ed isn't just about contraceptives. I think a big emphasis should be teaching people how to have self-respect. This is a big part of why girls have sex at an early age.

 

Let's don't use this solution, there has to be a better solution.

So if we find qualified teachers of self respect and that will definately solve the problem should we take them away from the bad parents and get the job done? I also talk to alot of the frustrated school teachers who have to police this kinder and gentler generation of teenagers for 8-9 hours a day.

I also know of many kids who are not getting into trouble. At all.

In fact they are responsible caring young people who work hard have respect for authority and are actually useful citizens at a very young age.

Five of them are my own children.

And I know many more. I don't blame anyone for the problem.

I just know we have not found the real answer and the one we are using is terrible.

 

Please do. That is the understanding that I had and if I was wrong, I would like to know. In addition, you are one of the few pro-lifers whose word I would take on a matter like this w/o researching it myself.

 

I know, I just thought it was funny trying to picture a nun teaching those particular topics.

The thing is, because of opposition from religious types, NO schools give even close to a decent education about sex, contraception, or fertility. That is my point, if they did (and in particular, if the pro-life lobby threw their weight and resources behind it), it would dramatically reduce abortion rates IMMEDIATELY, with increasing reductions over the years as more of our kids are educated.

If pro-lifers put their energy and resources toward educating our young people and making sure that contraception was available for anyone, abortion rates would plummet and everyone would be happy.

 

You are taking as fact your opinion that the fetuses are indeed "children" and by extension a "life."

Yes, I would prefer to protect what ALL of us agree and know is a "life" (the pregnant woman) over something that some people think (IE-their opinion) is a "life."

 

Nice usage of the word "They"

Public Education made some attempts as Sex Ed (which wasn't very good). The Religious right has made NO attempts at Sex Ed. They simply have burried their heads and pretended that sex doesn't exist...which isn't based in reality.

The Sex Ed classes I took were a joke. So rather than scrapping it, we could try improving it. And if Religion would be a willing partner in that Sex Ed, it would be all that much more effective.

I agree. Sex Ed as it currently exists in schools is not effective. Maybe showing kids statistics is the wrong approach. Maybe working directly with kids with love and understanding works better.

Drinking/Driving is a perfect example. European kids don't drink/drive nearly as much as American kids. Not because they are given more facts and figures but European kids are allowed to drink moderately at home and taught about responsible drinking at an early age with their parents. When these kids get to college, they don't suddenly go wild with their new freedom.

Americans tend to avoid issues and wonder why their kids fall victim. We a broader approach.

Relying only on Public schools in grade 12 for Sex Ed is the wrong approach.

Try talking to kids earlier.
Try talking to them at church.
Run adds on TV.
Get parents involved.

This needs to be a multi-pronged approach. I don't have all the answers but opening up honest dialogue on how to fix the problem of unwanted pregnancies will get us a step closer

So the argument has been used by Right-Wingers (and in this thread) that it is silly to beleive that people cannot control themselves. So you ARE in fact saying people CAN'T control themselves. So therefore we need to legislate them, huh?

The real problem here is poverty...not even pregnancy or drinking. People in poverty have lower education levels and low self esteem. If you want to fix these problems, then as a society we should give them something to live for. Lets end the parts of our society that breeds the continuation of poverty from generation to generation. People in poverty will always resort to doing things you and I don't agree with. That is a time tested concept probably well over 4,000 years old.

Fix poverty and you'll fix pregnancy and drinking rates.

Switzerland has some of the lowest poverty rates in the world...if not the lowest. They don't have nearly the teen pregnancy rates or drinking problems that exist in America. But Poverty is a different thread. So don't get pregnancy and poverty confused.

"I really didn't care" That sounds like a desperate attitude that often comes from people in poverty without strong family units. Again, help this kid get out of poverty and the drugs, pregnancies, etc could have been avoided.

Not so easy, is it? We have to stop ignoring the basic needs of humanity and stop trying to force feed everybody into our own belief system.

Ah ha! These kinds of statements are what scares people like me. This is why our founding fathers tried to keep Religion and Politics seperate. If you take this statement and perpetuate it accross society and over time, this is how witch hunting began.

Is education really the root of the problem? Really? That is the problem? Or is the root of the problem people who try to manipulate the world based on personal beliefs. And in so doing, try to censure what we see. How does that make you different from Communist China that attempts to remove all forms of Western influence?

Where do you draw the line that some education is good and some education is bad? That is about as slippery a slop as determining where life begins in the womb.

As a single mother I assume she wasn't making very much money. She clearly didn't have enough to save for college. This is another example of a failed person that transferred her life onto her children. We need to end the cycle of poverty.

Focusing on abortion, while certainly a worthy cause, is too narrow a scope. There are many other factors going into why people resort to abortion.

If an overweight person gets liposuction, they probably will continue to overeat and get fat again. Fix the underlying problems and that person wouldn't have needed liposuction in the first place.

I totally agree.

Are we? If we are telling them all the right things, why do they continue to do it? Will outlawing abortion really fix the problem...or will it divert the same underlying problem into other areas?

If we outlaw abortions, we'll have more unsafe abortions resulting in yet more deaths and/or we'll have more single parent families. How does that help?

And simply outlawing abortions won't work either. We outlawed alchohol...people still drank.

We outlawed drinking/driving...people still get DWI's.

We outlaw drugs...people still get high.

I agree with you...we need a better solution.

 

no one is talking about locking up women who have abortions. i've never, ever, never seen that proposed. the proposed legislation has alwasy been aimed at the doctors.

 

see, this argument falls short with me. because if you take this defeatist approach, you can write off the entire criminal code. get rid of all of it. state and federal level. "well, we can't stop it entirely, so why even try??" the reasoning behind this needs to be better than that.

 

Not really, since all the things he mentioned (alcohol, DWI, drugs) do not, in and of themselves, harm anyone else. Same with gambling, prostitution, and, to many of us, abortion.

When you try to ban behavior between consenting adults, the situation invariably gets far messier than it was before the ban.

We may not be able to stop abortion entirely, but we would be far more effective if we concentrated on properly educating people, particularly young people, about sex and provided contraception so that people who wanted to avoid pregnancy could do so before abortion even becomes an option.

I would bet that if abortion were outlawed, RDU-486 (isn't that the abortion drug?) would be just as freely available in the US as cocaine and heroin now are.

 

I'm still reading through this thread but I had to respond to this one.

Maybe if conservatives quit trying to butt into other people's personal affairs.

 

Women who do not want to bear a child should not be forced to because of religious zealots who feel the need to control what women should be able to have their doctors remove from their own bodies. Abortion is here to stay, you just need to get over it and work with others to see that reasonable regulations exist.

If you want to reduce the number of abortions (in reality, not in the fantasy world you live in where banning abortion would keep women from having them), concentrate on educating people and make sure that those people have ready, cheap access to contraception.

It may be a "life" to you, but you have no right to force that opinion on others.

 

andy --

i'm sorry, but i really don't think this is the problem. i don't think this is why we're seeing huge numbers of abortions each year. i don't think it's because of a lack of sex education in this country. congressional testimony and the states' mandatory reports suggest otherwise. we've gotten to a point where abortion has become a form of birth control. i do not believe that's what the court in Roe ultimately intended...but that's where we are. did you see the British study on abortions i posted earlier in this thread? roughly 1/3 of all abortions performed last year in the UK were on women who had already previously had an abortion. Women between 20 and 24 have taken over from teenagers as the largest age group to have terminations-while only one in 100 abortions is carried out solely because of a medical risk to the baby.


and you and have run crossways, mostly because i get frustrated with the way you write a response like you did in the first paragraph. elsewhere, you will say late term abortions or even abortions past the first trimester should only be done in cases where the mother's health is at risk...but then you'll say something like you say in this post that sounds like you believe women have this unabridged right that trumps all. it's contradictory.

 

NO.

I did not say people cannot control themselves. Just the opposite is true.

Legislation is not the answer.

Please re-read the post or let me say it a different way:

1. Murdering babies is not the answer.
2. Murdering women is not the right answer.
3. Murdering Doctors is not the right answer.

We should not be doing any of the above. Let us all agree on that.

Abortion is murdering babies for profit. It is a billion dollar industry. That is sick.

Back alley abortions are horrifying crimes against women by very wicked profiteers who would endanger a woman's life and murder a baby for money.

Bombing an abortion clinic is demonstrating the same calous evil motive of those who profit from the abortions. An eye for an eye does not fly on this.

Now let's consider if children have a very good chance of learning good judgment from parents at home who have good judgment whether they are in Europe or America or Africa. Perhaps the root issue here is in the home. And perhaps public education has not been able to eradicate what ineffective parents have neglected.

So either the target area is to vastly change public education and take over effective parenting, or find ways to drastically change the culture of parenting to one of wise choices, direction and character.

Either parents must become more effective. Or the State or Govt. must become more effective.

The second idea of a state solution would require a dictatorial govt. where the ultimate power rested with the govt. That is a horrible solution and has always failed in the past.

Changing the good judgment of parents on such a large scale would require a complete change of culture and is rather unlikely.

So I am involved in my community helping a few get a better chance, seeing some make it and over the past 25 yrs making some positive difference in lives of children and parents.

I don't know what that has to do with right wing or separation of church and state. I never thought about that when I go into the playgrounds and spend time with kids who don't even know their fathers. I just love them and talk to them and try to point them in a direction that will help them make wise choices.

I have seen more changes come from prayer and faith than from telling any of these kids about condoms or safe sex. I have seen the difference in the ones I have known for a few years and they have made it. ( I am not suggesting putting prayer and faith back in the schools- let's not go there)

One couple in our church the husband was a former cocaine addict, another the husband was a former gang member who did time for felony. Now we are helping them with their families and they have chidren who hopefully will respond to the example being set in the home. Actually there are many of these kind of stories concerning families in our church.

I don't have the perfect solution. I am doing what I think I can as a follower of Jesus.

But I am more convinced than ever that the sex ed and safe sex efforts are hitting at surface issues and failing miserably at getting to the root of the problem.

Tell me how to get marriages strong with loving parents who live wisely making good judgments and I would support that so strongly because it would work far better than what is going on today.

My own sister had two abortions. With her permission I may ask her to post the trauma, damage and suffering she has endured like many other women when her boyfriend convinced her this was the right thing to do.

Women in our church have the same experience. If anyone would like to hear real life testimony from women on this subject I will ask for permission to share it here.

 

I will never claim that the abortion rates we now see are caused directly and solely by lack of sex education, particularly given that we have NEVER had the kind of sex education I would be a proponent of.

Abortion has become a form of birth control, but that could be changed. If we really educated people about sex and to the proper use of contraceptives and then made them so available that it was very easy to use them, we would see reductions in the abortion rate. Those reductions might be modest at first, but they would accelerate as more and more people get educated.

You know that I believe in reasonable restrictions. I post in a way that the right seems "unabridged" mostly in response to people who try to play the "murdering babies" card. giddyup got my dander up and I responded to it in strong terms, but don't let that keep you from believing that I am against reasonable restrictions.

Heck, if I could come up with a way to eliminate abortions altogether, I would do it. Abortion is the absolute worst form of birth control and it should not be used except in extreme circumstances. However, I also know that my belief about when abortion is appropriate should not be forced on any other person.

I just get very frustrated with people who will fight tooth and nail to reinstate a ban that will end up costing women's lives and dignity yet will not lift a finger or will actively fight against education and providing contraception.