Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
If it there was a real a war on poverty perhaps those who could (help save a life) make a difference, would. A choice is not a choice when there is only but the one option, something those of means, no nothing about.
...Do you...think that's me? A person of means knowing nothing of poverty?
I mean, I'm doing well NOW. But in 1999 though? I was 20 years old and had just birthed my first child. My ex and I were struggling to survive in Cincinnati, Ohio. You ever been to Cincinnati? First I was living in a house on the "East End." That's white poor, if you don't know. Walking to the clinic to get my prenatal care, a bunch of children ran out of the slums there to throw chunks of rock and concrete at me, a very pregnant woman alone, walking down the street. Our house had been damaged badly in a flood but the slum lord was renting it to us anyways. Electrical outlets hanging out of the wall, floorboards you could see through, broken windows and a wide array of vermin, including the biggest rats I'd ever seen.
To "escape" that place, my ex and I, and our infant, moved to an apartment we couldn't really afford that was on the very edge of a neighborhood called Over The Rhine. Fortunately this was before the race riots that left relations between the races so bad that white people including police flatly refused to even enter the area. I was therefore able to walk through it with my baby in a stroller, in the heat of a summer that killed over 90 people in the city, to get free bread from the Mission. I would tie the bags on the stroller and walk back. I was down to 98 pounds (which is about 20 pounds less than a healthy weight for me) during a time when I was breastfeeding, as all of my resources and nutrition, were going to my child.
There is only one choice? You been to a poor neighborhood lately? Gonna tell me there are no kids growing up there?
Finally we ended up homeless because we couldn't afford the place (but hey, it took a couple of months for the owner to evict us!) and we got on a Greyhound with only what we could carry, including the baby and mostly his things, abandoning everything else, to go to Iowa where my ex's family lived. They put us up in the cheapest motel they could find, until we scraped together enough to rent a cockroach infested hole in the wall. That was where we lived when I had my other son.
But some luck, hard work, and determination, did get us out of poverty in time.
Thing is, I was so obsessively in love with my babies from nearly the moment they were conceived. I strongly think this is a chemical/hormonal thing, it was like falling literally obsessively in love with someone only magnified many times over. I would have died for either of them. They were more important to me than literally every other human on earth added together and including myself.
Don't you TELL me, that financial hardship means that there is a lack of choice.
I had a choice. I knew I had a choice. But it was not one I was prepared to consider, so I didn't. I struggled, instead, like a lot of people do. And I don't really regret it, but I also would not blame anybody who felt capable of seeking abortion, because frankly it might have been the SMART thing to do. I wouldn't have been stuck with an abusive a-hole for 18 years. But then, my sons, who are great young guys these days, wouldn't be here. I would not miss them, having never known them...but I am glad they're here all the same. It is possible that if I'd aborted the first and never conceived the second, I could have found a better partner, a better future, had kids later that I loved just as much and who went on to be just as good or better. Hell, I might have decided to have more of them. Who knows? We do not get to know what might have been, if we'd made our choices differently.
But don't act like I'm some hoity toity woman of means who knows naught of the plight of the poor. I've been there. Lived there a while. I know it just fine. But I STILL, had a choice.
...Do you...think that's me? A person of means knowing nothing of poverty?
That comment was not meant to be taken personally by any one as it is an observation in life experiences between the social classes. And I have another observation for you.
Are you trying to say (by your personal experience) that life is not fair?
The economic structuring of the u.s. provides comfort for those who are of means, does little to aid those who live in poverty and because of that 53 million unborn aborted babies will not know, how unfair life can be.
If any one reading any of my post had actually cared enough to read the linked information I provided then the reason abortion for low-income women becomes their only option, beyond their financial reasons, would be known. Roe (McCovey) explained it, as well.
"... I was glad for everyone else. I was glad to know some other poor woman wouldn't have to go through what I did. I thought at least she wouldn't have to face the agony of waking up in the morning and driving to work and seeing kids walking and wondering which one was hers. Because it's not easy to give up something you helped grow, regardless of how the seed got there."
_________________
I am adopted and I'm 58 years old; just now with an even greater understanding of just how brave and strong, my birth mother really was. Also, because of my age ... I don't need the Internet to tell me that which I knew at the passing of Roe v Wade ... 46 years ago.
I raised three children in poverty and as a single mother, divorced after 12 years of marriage. My daughter has had 4 children and is in college, my second oldest son did two tours in Iraq and is now in college working on his masters, my oldest works as a mechanic, doing what he likes to do.
'Those who have eyes, let them see'.
My family is not the broken mold. For that to be recognizable would mean that society would have had to change the stigma it places on human beings that has existed for over 3000 years. Wealthy begats wealthy and poor begats poor and for the later, their is legal abortion, (where as, before there was slavery) the fix so as the wealthy can remain so.
That is the way it is. That is they way it has always been and for anyone to believe otherwise, they are not paying attention as to how and for who, our government (as well as, other governments in developed countries) does things.
Last edited by Ellis Bell; 05-22-2019 at 05:45 PM..
Fact ... since the war on poverty (1964) was declared by LBJ, few meaningful strides have been made and more recently states have decreased funding for (skills and education) programs designed to give to low-income people a fighting chance at raising their income level. (43.1 million live in poverty today)
Do you really think the government(s) give a rat's butt about empowering the poor? And/or a woman's reproductive rights?
In 1973 the year of the Roe v Wade landmark legislation, the presenting lawyers found Roe (McCovey) an unemployed, addict. Interestingly enough, not a woman of means. That is how they got it passed the Supreme Court. (marketing strategy)
"Many of the children thus begotten are diseased or feeble-minded; many become criminals. The burden of supporting these unwanted types has to be bourne by the healthy elements of the nation. Funds that should be used to raise the standard of our civilization are diverted to the maintenance of those who should never have been born."
It's interesting that people believe the government wants to, [do either] since providing any meaningful economic solutions, is 'seemingly' far beyond their reach.
Not a war on poverty ---- A war on poor people. If you think that the government is going to do anything that takes away their power on population control (reduce the amount of unwanted citizens, I mean pregnancies) you haven't looked into how they really feel about the legalization of abortion.
"There are ideological differences within both parties over abortion, though this divide is starker within the GOP. Among Republicans,58% of the party’s moderates and liberals say abortion should [be] legal in all or most cases, compared with just 29% of conservative Republicans."
If it there was a real a war on poverty perhaps those who could (help save a life) make a difference, would. A choice is not a choice when there is only but the one option, something those of means, no nothing about.
What do you want?
All women denied the right to abort or just poor women?
And, just how does the right to choose prevent our society from enacting changes to help the poor rise out of poverty?
...Do you...think that's me? A person of means knowing nothing of poverty?
I mean, I'm doing well NOW. But in 1999 though? I was 20 years old and had just birthed my first child. My ex and I were struggling to survive in Cincinnati, Ohio. You ever been to Cincinnati? First I was living in a house on the "East End." That's white poor, if you don't know. Walking to the clinic to get my prenatal care, a bunch of children ran out of the slums there to throw chunks of rock and concrete at me, a very pregnant woman alone, walking down the street. Our house had been damaged badly in a flood but the slum lord was renting it to us anyways. Electrical outlets hanging out of the wall, floorboards you could see through, broken windows and a wide array of vermin, including the biggest rats I'd ever seen.
To "escape" that place, my ex and I, and our infant, moved to an apartment we couldn't really afford that was on the very edge of a neighborhood called Over The Rhine. Fortunately this was before the race riots that left relations between the races so bad that white people including police flatly refused to even enter the area. I was therefore able to walk through it with my baby in a stroller, in the heat of a summer that killed over 90 people in the city, to get free bread from the Mission. I would tie the bags on the stroller and walk back. I was down to 98 pounds (which is about 20 pounds less than a healthy weight for me) during a time when I was breastfeeding, as all of my resources and nutrition, were going to my child.
There is only one choice? You been to a poor neighborhood lately? Gonna tell me there are no kids growing up there?
Finally we ended up homeless because we couldn't afford the place (but hey, it took a couple of months for the owner to evict us!) and we got on a Greyhound with only what we could carry, including the baby and mostly his things, abandoning everything else, to go to Iowa where my ex's family lived. They put us up in the cheapest motel they could find, until we scraped together enough to rent a cockroach infested hole in the wall. That was where we lived when I had my other son.
But some luck, hard work, and determination, did get us out of poverty in time.
Thing is, I was so obsessively in love with my babies from nearly the moment they were conceived. I strongly think this is a chemical/hormonal thing, it was like falling literally obsessively in love with someone only magnified many times over. I would have died for either of them. They were more important to me than literally every other human on earth added together and including myself.
Don't you TELL me, that financial hardship means that there is a lack of choice.
I had a choice. I knew I had a choice. But it was not one I was prepared to consider, so I didn't. I struggled, instead, like a lot of people do. And I don't really regret it, but I also would not blame anybody who felt capable of seeking abortion, because frankly it might have been the SMART thing to do. I wouldn't have been stuck with an abusive a-hole for 18 years. But then, my sons, who are great young guys these days, wouldn't be here. I would not miss them, having never known them...but I am glad they're here all the same. It is possible that if I'd aborted the first and never conceived the second, I could have found a better partner, a better future, had kids later that I loved just as much and who went on to be just as good or better. Hell, I might have decided to have more of them. Who knows? We do not get to know what might have been, if we'd made our choices differently.
But don't act like I'm some hoity toity woman of means who knows naught of the plight of the poor. I've been there. Lived there a while. I know it just fine. But I STILL, had a choice.
"Initially functioning as a place for student parents to meet, the center now offers parent and child playgroups, kid friendly study lounges, tutoring, academic counseling, a free children's clothing exchange and free organic produce. The center staff includes – a marriage family therapist and a social worker who works with the students to connect them to ongoing college and community support services. To take advantage of the services, parents must be enrolled at LA Valley College and have a child under the age of 18 living in the home.
<snip>
There are significant tax contributions, to the tune of– nearly $8 billion– over the lifetime of all the single mothers expected to graduate with a degree. And public assistance savings would be in excess of $310 million, just in the four years after they graduate.
<snip>
There's no categorical funding for these kinds of services on campus. I write grants and solicit donations from– private philanthropy. And we have some community people who are very– wonderful patrons of what we do. But basically, I cobble money together.right now, we're in pretty good shape, but it changes. It changes from year-to-year."
Quote:
All women denied the right to abort or just poor women?
Keep the law, render it mute, through government funding programs that will change the situations of 43.1 million people who live impoverished, so as they can have real choices in how they live their lives.
Quote:
And, just how does the right to choose prevent our society from enacting changes to help the poor rise out of poverty?
It doesn't. It does however, provide a way for the government to reduce the population of the poor.
Last edited by Ellis Bell; 05-23-2019 at 03:35 PM..
Zygote, blastocyst, embryo, fetus, baby, parasite, infant, spawn, person. Use whatever sound in the wind makes you happy.
Play semantics all day and all night.
Despite that though, and despite knowing how that intense and obsessive protective maternal love felt like, I STILL believe that a woman should have a right to safe and available abortion, as an option. Even though I did not consider it an acceptable option when my sons were conceived.
I find it interesting in an almost clinical way, how the later pregnancy I had, the miscarriage situation after my tubal ligation, did NOT cause that "in love" feeling, though I still felt changes in my body and had the thought that it felt an awful lot like pregnancy and I was like, "Well that should be impossible but I'll get a test." And I was. And the blood tests confirmed it. And they tracked my blood hormone levels for a couple of weeks very closely, until I miscarried. But during that time, when I was thinking I would have to pursue an abortion, as I had no intention of carrying a baby, I felt mostly kind of vaguely angry that I was dealing with this, when I'd gone so far as to get my tubes tied. And it's not that the surgery didn't take, it's just that my doctor gave me bad information about when I could resume sexual activity afterwards. She said the "odds" of conception were astronomically, insanely small and it should not have happened.
But I suspect that it being a non-viable (as in, it was never going to live, it did not implant properly in the lining) embryo, may have changed how my body released chemicals. One of the hormones they measured was not quite as high as they expected it to be. And I didn't feel the (likely oxytocin related) emotional response.
Being aware of physiological changes that heralded conception at an early point, is not grounds to argue a point of personhood philosophy. Being very enthusiastic and having excited and protective emotions, triggered by surges in biochemicals designed by nature to invoke that exact effect, does also not form a solid foundation to argue the philosophy of personhood-at-conception. It truly does not.
Both of us have far deeper roots for the beliefs that we hold, than that. And I think we both know it, as well as I think we both know that our positions are a lot more than a matter of semantics.
The reason I'm cool with abortion has little to do with the word we use to describe what is killed. You can holler "baby murder" at me at the top of your lungs, and think that it makes me a ghoul all you like. I still will shrug and say that it should be legally safe and available to any woman who decides that it's her best option. And that she shouldn't need to justify it to anyone. Even "baby murder" is less horrifying to me, than "forced breeding."
To the poster who talked about "life omg!" and life on Mars and how sacred is every living cell. Have ya never killed a bug? Never eat meat or plants (how are you alive?) I just see this thinking as a weird denial of reality, because for every life, there is death.
We have the potential as humans to kill other people even (not that humans are more special than other animals either). You drive a car you risk your life and plenty of other lives. You use a ladder. It could fall on someone and crack their head open. You serve food. The person you served to could get food poisoning. Maybe it could even be something you said that drove someone to suicide. You want to be a doctor? You could kill someone while trying to save their life. You cut a tree at your house. Someone could walk by and the tree can fall on them. The possibilities are endless. Unless you live your life as a shut in someone could die because of you. Most people don't think about that regularly and that's healthy not to because in many cases you don't mean for it to happen so I get it but at the same time before you preach about abortion realize that living life means someone could die because of your choices anyway.
So if someone gets an abortion it really doesn't matter because they are just living their life just as the people who drove the car, served food etc. and making what they feel is the best decision.
We have the potential as humans to kill other people even (not that humans are more special than other animals either). You drive a car you risk your life and plenty of other lives. You use a ladder. It could fall on someone and crack their head open. You serve food. The person you served to could get food poisoning. Maybe it could even be something you said that drove someone to suicide. You want to be a doctor? You could kill someone while trying to save their life. You cut a tree at your house. Someone could walk by and the tree can fall on them. The possibilities are endless. Unless you live your life as a shut in someone could die because of you. Most people don't think about that regularly and that's healthy not to because in many cases you don't mean for it to happen so I get it but at the same time before you preach about abortion realize that living life means someone could die because of your choices anyway.
So if someone gets an abortion it really doesn't matter because they are just living their life just as the people who drove the car, served food etc. and making what they feel is the best decision.
It goes beyond, for me, "someone could die."
EVERY SINGLE LIVING THING WILL DIE. Not "could" and not "might." WILL. You will know what it's like to experience the end of your own existence on this planet and I will, too.
Maybe we will be fully aware and sentient, dying slowly of a disease like cancer, maybe we'll go in our sleep, maybe we'll snuff it quick and dirty in a car accident... But everyone WILL in one way or another, die at some point. The embryo with no functioning brain structure won't be aware of its ending. It will come and go without any suffering. The rest of us? Who knows?
But to add to your statement, again, not even normal people taking chances, we as a society make a great big honkin' exception when human lives are lost in wars. Somehow convincing ourselves it was fine that some city was bombed and a bunch of actual sentient persons burned alive but hey, there was some glorious and noble cause for that I'm sure. I mean, we wear the white cowboy hats here in America! We're the good guys, right??
And still no word on why it is that the IVF clinic embryos are not precious to the cause, as the embryos that stand to be evicted from a uterus. "You're asking the wrong question" I was told. What is the right question? "You wouldn't understand." *throws up hands and walks away*
I cannot for the life of me comprehend how one could be fine with an embryo in a lab being killed, but freak out about an embryo in a womb, unless one brings in the element of "You are a woman and you had sex, so you should suffer." No, until we can get a handle on justice for rape, that does not work. When we have all these voices being like, "Ayy rape, is it even a thing?" no, I won't accept the "just be a responsible vagina custodian" argument. Nope.
Nah, still think all of this at the political level hasn't a damn thing to do with the sanctity of life anyways. It's the Southern Aristo/Gentry doing herd management. You don't tell your sows and ewes and cows and hens they can choose not to reproduce if you're counting on your slave flock to keep your wealth and prosperity flowing. You get the low classes to breed as much as possible. Does not matter if some of them die along the way, plenty will make it. You can always stick 'em in prison work camps if they don't want to be productive cattle...I mean "citizens."
That doesn't give you the right to go kill someone else just because you feel like it.
And I did not say "you wouldn't understand." I said it's a larger issue.
here's a thought: Remember debates in HS? When you got assigned a topic you hated and disagreed with?
Go so some research. Pretend you have to defend XYZ whatever it is you don't understand/don't agree with. See what you find. Read a number of pro/con articles. Look at resources you would NEVER have looked at before.
It's not my job to educate you. That's your job.
You need to let go of the punishment argument. It's false. 100% false as well as logically imbecilic. Anyone who is prolife does NOT think motherhood is punishment or that children are weapons of torture. They would think getting an abortion was punishment.
If you truly truly want to understand the "other side"? Start doing your own research.
That doesn't give you the right to go kill someone else just because you feel like it.
And I did not say "you wouldn't understand." I said it's a larger issue.
here's a thought: Remember debates in HS? When you got assigned a topic you hated and disagreed with?
Go so some research. Pretend you have to defend XYZ whatever it is you don't understand/don't agree with. See what you find. Read a number of pro/con articles. Look at resources you would NEVER have looked at before.
It's not my job to educate you. That's your job.
You need to let go of the punishment argument. It's false. 100% false as well as logically imbecilic. Anyone who is prolife does NOT think motherhood is punishment or that children are weapons of torture. They would think getting an abortion was punishment.
If you truly truly want to understand the "other side"? Start doing your own research.
You aren’t educating anyone, however you certainly are getting schooled.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
