First, I'd like to thank everybody who's stopped by in the last day or so to comment. Whether I agree with your opinions or not, your comments are valuable to me. I think they make topics far more interesting, especially when looking at issues from different points of view.
Secondly, thanks to nearly everyone who has posted here for being polite, if not always thoughtful. There have only been a couple of posters who were openly hostile and prone to name-calling. I think, given the number of comments, that's a pretty good average. It says a lot about the people who came here!
Third, I have to say I was pleased and surprised to have so many guests. If I'd known that pissing off a feminist blogger by calling a spade a spade would get me so much traffic, I would have done it a while ago.
Finally, some notes from the comments:
1. Language is key and language is loaded. Baby, fetus, punishment, consequences, sex, intercourse, patriarchy, anti-woman, phallic worship, choice, responsibility. There was a lot of loaded language in the comments. Few issues that I can think of will cause this kind of war of words the way abortion does. This is because it is a debate where the language is everything. Pro-choice advocates like medical terminology because they think it makes them look neutral and above the fray, but will use emotional language when their other arguments fail. Pro-life supporters use emotional language first because of the imagery it brings up. They will resort to more legalistic language from court cases that have given them at least some support when more emotional images fail.
2. Some people need to learn to read instead of reading into things. There were numerous times in Amanda's "rebuttal" to my post where she misquoted me (I'll give her the benefit of the doubt whether that was intentional) or implied things from other things I said. On my own blog, at least one poster couldn't read simple English and instead complained that I didn't write clearly. What I wrote was plain enough...if you just read it instead of reading it to argue with it. When I wrote that it's only been in the last 100 years that sex has been separated from its procreational function, that didn't mean that people didn't have sex for fun before 1900.
3. At least one person got really hung up on me saying "sex leads to babies." In fact, that person was hellbent on coming up with all sorts of sex that doesn't lead to having children. Of course, that was beside the point, since the discussion was about abortion. I'm sure in some debating circles pointing out that not all sex leads to children would score some points, but when the main discussion is abortion, it's just argumentative.
4. Having said that, there were a couple of interesting side issues that came up, namely that there are actually pro-choice advocates who support informed consent. That's the first time I've seen any poster from a liberal website say that there was a restriction on abortion they could back.
5. Some people need to look up the meaning of the words "punishment" and "consequence." A punishment is a penalty afflicted on someone for an offense or fault. A consequence is the effect, result, or outcome of something occurring earlier. A woman having a baby after having consensual sex is not a punishment. It's a consequence. There were several people who thought that "sex leads to babies" meant either "sex instantly leads to babies" (a bizarre notion if one thinks about it) or that "sex inevitably leads to babies." Neither statement, of course, is true and I didn't say or mean either one. What I meant (and I think finally got someone to agree) is that "babies are a normal and predictable consequence of sex." Even with that being said, there was at least one poster who felt compelled to argue with that point. But to no avail.
6. Only one person argued hard cases, which surprised me. I fully expected a lot of people to make arguments about rape, incest, and the life of the mother, but evidently for a lot of people who posted, the idea that their personal feelings trumped any other reasoning seemed to be ok. It doesn't bother me, since I adhere to that old addage that hard cases make bad law, anyway.
7. When you're stuck arguing about the patriarchy and phallic worship to make your argument, you've lost. From what I've read at Pandagon, Amanda likes using ye old traditional feminist talking points about patriarchy. I dislike that language, largely because it has become a parody of itself. To be more blunt, being pro-life doesn't make a person anti-woman, nor does it make her a phallic worshipper. It just means that she recognizes that there's more than one interest where abortion is concerned.
8. Most of the early posts confirmed the point I'd originally been making about Amanda's version of self-centeredness in feminism and that it is the face of the pro-choice argument that abortion advocacy groups don't want the public to see. The entire point of my original post, complete with quotes from various commenters was that these were the thoughts and opinions of pro-choice supporters we don't usually see. Thus, when I quoted from NARAL's mission statement, it was to contrast the statements from real women giving their (somewhat) harsh but honest opinions about abortion versus the clipped, neutral, and professional-sounding statement from NARAL. I bet you won't see anyone on Nightline saying things like "Trust me, there’s even some who call themselves pro-choicers who will get uncomfortable if a woman is happy about getting an abortion. Many otherwise well-meaning people (*cough*hillaryclinton*cough*) will say that abortion is a “tragedy that no woman wants to experience.” No, it’s a twenty-minute surgical procedure* that saves someone from a lifetime of misery." But it would be fun to watch.
Again, I'd like to thank everyone who posted. I hope you will keep reading and commenting. :)
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