It’s finally come to this.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - A nonprofit organization has unveiled a series of electronic greeting cards that concerned friends and relatives can send to a woman after she chooses to have an abortion.
[…]
One card expresses sympathy, offering the gentle reminder that, “As you grieve, remember that you are loved.” Another provides encouragement for someone who “did the right thing.” Yet another strikes a religious tone with the thought that “God will never leave you or forsake you.”

But as Allah notes, they’re all so glum. So he’s offered a sample of an “upbeat card“… you know for those “abortion is morally good” folks.

I agree they’re a bit gloomy. They almost reflect a sadness over something cherished that’s been taken away… rather than that empowered feeling of having just rid yourself of a nuisance that was hindering your career…

Maybe we can also design some Death Announcements, with a cute little picture of the medical waste bag and all… you know, for the scrapbook.

Showing their support for an organization that proudly boasts a quarter of a million abortions per year, Sprint is now offering “Planned Parenthood Wireless“, billed as “The Right Choice that Supports Choice”.

Planned Parenthood Wireless is powered by Working Assets, the progressive phone company that delivers quality phone service using the all-digital nationwide Sprint® network*. Since 1985, Working Assets has raised more than $50 million for progressive nonprofits, including $1.6 million for Planned Parenthood alone. You get great cell phone service, exceptional customer service, and the satisfaction of knowing that you are contributing to a worthy cause.

Unfortunately, you’ll find terminating your service is harder than terminating your pregnancy.

So I took a field trip into liberal utopia and wanted to document the experience for you to show you what it’s like. Caution, you may want to grab some anti-bacterial wipes for this one.

By now you’ve probably heard of Amanda Marcotte. She’s the disgraced liberal blogger whose tenure as John Edwards’ official campaign blogger was shorter than Britney Spears’ first marriage.

Thanks to Mark at B4B, I came across Amanda’s latest rantings about how wonderful abortion is and how those who perform abortions ought to be regarded as heroes. Yes… heroes!

I think that abortion is not only a good thing, but I’d like to posit that it seems to me that in the vast majority of abortions, the choice made was the most moral choice for that woman.
[…]
If I got pregnant, I wouldn’t even have to suffer much mental strain to realize that abortion would be the best choice for myself, my family, and my relationship. Abortion, not just the right to abortion but the actual procedure, is a moral good that helps women and families and should be honored as such. Women who get abortions should be recognized as people who can accurately weigh their choices and make the most moral one.
[…]
Meanwhile, other anti-choicers are running around claiming that being an abortionist is like this super great career that people only indulge in for the money. This is horseshit and pro-choicers need to push back and remind everyone that abortionists are heroes, who put up with all sorts of abuse because they want to help women.

If I didn’t know the source of these comments, I would’ve brushed them off as satire, assuming nobody in their right mind would actually think this way. I scrolled through some of the comments and saw a few others who agreed, even cheered, Amanda’s views.

So I thought I’d take a moment to post a comment on the article. Here’s the exchange…

My comment:

“Women who get abortions should be recognized as people who can accurately weigh their choices and make the most moral one.”

No, the moral choice would be that if you’re not prepared to raise a child, you should not engage in sex. Weighing the choices AFTER you’ve become pregnant is neither moral nor responsible, it’s selfish and immature. Otherwise, why not just extend your high praise to women like Andrea Yates for having the moral fortitude to kill her five children and get on with the rest of her life? Afterall, she, too waited until after conceiving to decide to kill her kids… she just waited a few years after conception instead of a few months…

A response by “bluefish A”

dear TexasRainmaker-

please brush up on your reading comprehension skills. if you had come to the discussion prepared, you would have seen that we’ve already been through the having sex doesn’t mean consent to pregnancy discussion about 200 comments ago. see, sometimes contraception fails and unwanted pregnancies do result from that sad fact. also, following your logic wouldn’t andrea yates’ kids have been better off if they had never been born at all- if say she and her husband had used reliable contraception or if she had miscarried or if she had aborted?

To which I responded:

“having sex doesn’t mean consent to pregnancy”

Assumption of risk. I may not consent to drowning when I go swimming in the ocean, but I understand the risk is there. The time to weigh the risk is before I undertake the task, not when a rip current is pulling me under.

“following your logic wouldn’t andrea yates’ kids have been better off if they had never been born at all- if say she and her husband had used reliable contraception or if she had miscarried or if she had aborted?”

Been better off if they’d been aborted? Um, no. They’d still be dead.

“bluefish A” responds:

well in that case, i guess no one should ever swim. or have sex. or go outside. or get pregnant. or eat sushi. or make eye-contact with a stranger.

and then he/she adds:

there’s a difference between a toddler than a blastocyst. kind of like the difference between infanticide and abortion. that, too, was covered 200 or so comments ago.

no more. i won’t feed the troll.

I’m kind of disappointed that he/she was only able to muster two response and a snark before calling me a troll and surrendering. Oh well.

Then “history_mom” weighs in:

It’s sad when people cannot understand the difference between what one woman did in the throes of postpartum psychosis and what many women have done when they have determined that continuing a pregnancy would not be the right thing. Andrea Yates was not a rational agent, able to weigh her options, and therefore her “decision” to kill her children has less than nothing to do with whether other women are capable of determining whether abortion is the best moral choice for them.

But see, I think you already know that but figured you could throw out something you thought would yield an emotional horror response. I guess you missed the memo that squickiness is not an argument for being opposed to abortion.

To which I replied:

“Andrea Yates was not a rational agent, able to weigh her options, and therefore her “decision” to kill her children has less than nothing to do with whether other women are capable of determining whether abortion is the best moral choice for them.”

The comparison is not to focus on the mental state of the mother, it’s to show the inconsistency of promoting the killing of a child in one situation and being outraged about it in another. If a baby can survive, through medical technology or nature, as early as 23 weeks, then how can you say an abortion performed at 24 weeks post-conception is anything different than killing the same child at 3 years post-conception?

And finally “Dianne” tried to toss in a little snark, presumably to be comic relief:

I may not consent to drowning when I go swimming in the ocean, but I understand the risk is there.

Therefore we shouldn’t try to save you from drowning if you start to go under because you knew the risks and decided to swim anyway?

I humored her with a response:

“Therefore we shouldn’t try to save you from drowning if you start to go under because you knew the risks and decided to swim anyway?”

If, by virtue of my taking the risk, I’ve involuntarily dragged another human being into the situation, I’m obligated to aid them - not kill them simply because their presence is now inconvenient to me.

I think the premise of Amanda’s original post and all the comments applauding her goes to show the difference that forms the foundation of the abortion debate… The Left views the situation as that of a single person making a choice, while the Right views the situation as involving at least two people - mother and child. But the Left won’t have the intellectual honesty to admit that, because it would lead to the essential question: “When does life begin?” Without firm evidence of the “magic moment”, it’s hard to rationally argue that an abortion performed at an arbitrary point during a pregnancy is not the killing of another human being.

Honestly, I still think that if modern science were able to definitively prove tomorrow that life does begin at conception, the pro-abortion movement would remain strong relying on the selfish beliefs that a mother should be able to kill at will to accomodate convenience.

Update:
More responses:

Diane:

Therefore we shouldn’t try to save you from drowning if you start to go under because you knew the risks and decided to swim anyway?

Not only that, he shouldn’t try to help himself, nor ask someone to help him.

I’m not worrying about TR; he’s clearly not rational about the subject; he thinks fetuses start at 24 weeks of development. (Or, he thinks talking about a 24 week old fetus allows him to generalize to all states of pregnancy. Doesn’t matter, both positions are stone stupid, unsupported by fact.)

You know I couldn’t help but respond:

“Not only that, he shouldn’t try to help himself, nor ask someone to help him.”

We’re not talking about saving the mother’s life here, we’re talking about abortion-on-demand for convenience (remember, amanda’s point that the “choice” is a moral good?)

“I’m not worrying about TR; he’s clearly not rational about the subject; he thinks fetuses start at 24 weeks of development. (Or, he thinks talking about a 24 week old fetus allows him to generalize to all states of pregnancy. Doesn’t matter, both positions are stone stupid, unsupported by fact.)

Yeah, I’m fully off my rocker.

While one group of liberals is out fighting to make sure that charitable organizations don’t receive federal funding to help those in need…

Next week, the group started by Gaylor and her mother in the 1970s to take on the religious right will fight its most high-profile battle when the U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments on its lawsuit against President Bush’s faith-based initiative.

The court will decide whether taxpayers can sue over federal funding that the foundation believes promotes religion. It could be a major ruling for groups that fight to keep church and state separate.

Another group is out working to secure those federal funds to kill unborn children (hat tip: Black Shards)…

In 2003, Planned Parenthood provided 244,628 surgical abortions, the largest of any abortion provider in the U.S.

Planned Parenthood receives almost a third of its money in government grants and contracts ($265.2 million in FY 2004).

Truly amazing.

Her minuscule feet poking pathetically through a doctor’s fingers, few believed that she could possibly live.

Born only 21 weeks and six days after conception, Amillia Taylor weighed just under 10oz and was only 91/2 inches long.
…
And now, four months later and weighing 4lb, she has been allowed home – the world’s most premature baby to have survived.

This story is important on several levels. Not only is it truly the story of a miracle, but the last paragraph sums up another significant relevancy to this plot:

Babies can still be aborted for non-medical reasons at up to 24 weeks. Recent evidence shows that, of those born at 25 weeks, half of them manage to live.

So here we have a crossroads. Baby Amillia has shown that a baby can survive outside the mother as early as 22 weeks post-conception, yet the law still allows mothers to kill babies up to 24 weeks post-conception. Either the killing of another human being is murder or it isn’t. So when does one magically turn into a human being? This story shows the gaps in the pro-choice argument.

It’s the 34th anniversary of Roe v. Wade and since the Left is so fond of body counts, try this one on for size: 46,000,000 per year

That’s the estimated number of abortions that occur each year around the world. That’s roughly 126,000 per day. A little over 5,000 every hour… or 87 per minute. 1.45 every second.

In the time it takes me to post this, another 500 lives will be terminated.

If that perspective isn’t enough for you “body count” lovers, compare these numbers to the following:

17,000,000 - Americans that die from Heart Disease each year
7,000,000 - Americans that die from Cancer each year
1,100,000 - American casualties in the 5 deadliest U.S. wars
40,000 - Americans die in car accidents annually
30,000 - Americans commit suicide each year
17,000 - Homicides committed each year

Add them all together and the total is still only about half the number of lives terminated through abortion each year. It’s amazing that we spend so much time, effort and money researching cures for those things that terminate life… while an entire segment of the population rallies against a known cure for one thing that ends more lives than most anything else on earth.

Of course, it’s worth noting that every single person that rallies in support of abortion… is someone who’s never been a victim of it.

From the AP:

At a pivotal time in the abortion debate, Ms. magazine is releasing its fall issue next week with a cover story titled “We Had Abortions,” accompanied by the names of thousands of women nationwide who signed a petition making that declaration.

Is that really something to be all that proud of?

Tyffine Jones, 27, of Jackson, Miss., said she had no hesitation about signing _ although she lives in a state where restrictions on abortion are tough and all but one abortion clinic has been closed.

Jones said she got an abortion 10 years ago _ enduring harassment from protesters when she entered the clinic _ in order to finish high school. She went on to become the first member of her family to graduate from college, and hopes at some point to attend law school.

“I wanted to do something bigger with myself _ I didn’t want to be stopped by anything,” she said in a telephone interview.

You could’ve forgone the sex, then.

Are we supposed to be proud of you for “making something of yourself” at the expense of a dead baby? Count me out.

I designed a shirt a while back that sums up this whole sorry story:

Pick one up today and send it to your favorite Hollywood murderer.

Talk about your law of unintended consequences:

Simply put, liberals have a big baby problem: They’re not having enough of them, they haven’t for a long time, and their pool of potential new voters is suffering as a result. According to the 2004 General Social Survey, if you picked 100 unrelated politically liberal adults at random, you would find that they had, between them, 147 children. If you picked 100 conservatives, you would find 208 kids. That’s a “fertility gap” of 41%. Given that about 80% of people with an identifiable party preference grow up to vote the same way as their parents, this gap translates into lots more little Republicans than little Democrats to vote in future elections. Over the past 30 years this gap has not been below 20%–explaining, to a large extent, the current ineffectiveness of liberal youth voter campaigns today.

How long before we see liberals moving to allow aborted babies to vote to recitfy the situation?

First of all, the practice of experimenting on embryonic stem cells is not banned, as proponents would lead you to believe.

In fact, there are dozens of groups studying them, including major stem-cell centers recently launched at Stanford and Harvard.

If the promise of breakthrough discoveries is real, you can bet there will be for-profit organizations undertaking the research.

But the real question centers around who is going to pay for experimentation that deals with many Americans’ closely held religious beliefs. This debate is not about defining when life begins, it’s about using taxpayer money to fund research that many find morally wrong.

Bottom line, if you want to conduct research that is morally offensive to me and many others, use your own money… not mine.

John sends word that despite fighting the good fight, Andrea Clark has passed away. Here’s the text of her sister’s announcement:

“Andrea passed away peacefully a little before 3pm today, with her family and her friends at her bedside. We love her so very much and we are going to miss her terribly. We hope that the battle that we fought for our sister will bring to light and bear witness to the horrible acts committed in the name of ethics in hospitals across the state of Texas.

The fact that we had to fight this battle is both frightening and a sad commentary on the so-called “ethics” now being practiced in medical facilities in this state. The battle for life is a difficult one, in the best of situations, but when a family is put through what we had to go through at such a time, it is especially agonizing.

We wish so much that we could have spent more time at our sister’s side, when she was living and fighting for her life, rather than having to visit our attorney’s office, give interviews to radio and television stations to let the public know of the atrocity about to befall Andrea, and literally stand outside the hospital and beg them not to kill our sister. In attempting to deprive Andrea of the most basic of her human rights–life–St. Luke’s Hospital managed to deprive her family and her of that which is most dear to us all, when we are faced with the death of a loved one: a proper goodbye.

How, in the name of God, anyone can call putting someone to death when they are at their most helpless and begging for their lives “ethical,” we cannot imagine.”

May she rest in peace.
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Related:
Andrea Clark Saga: “We’re Going to Give Her a Fighting Chance”
A Houston Woman in Need