I think your definition of what the choice is is fair, but IMHO, euphemistic. “What to do with the pregnancy” means, bluntly put, life or death. The issue of whether life is being dealt with is simply not a subjective one, it is objective biology. Many who wish to debate that point are…just plain wrong on accepted facts. The question is whether an embryo/fetus has the moral standing as a full-fledged ex utero human; in fact, the distinction between embryo and fetus is that the completion of organogenesis (week 8 only) marks when it is termed a fetus. The fetus does not really develop, it grows. Therefore the usage of the term embryo alone is not complete, since many abortions occur after 8 weeks. As to the moral standing issue, some say yes: “pro-life”, some say no based on the notion of the life being one dependent on the mother: “pro-choice”, and that is the difference. But saying no has logical and moral consequences that most people just don’t want to address. For example: dependency even of a physical nature exists ex utero (but it does not UNIQUELY depend on the mother), how can a neonate self-feed? Or alternatively, if any viable ex utero preemie (the record is 21 weeks 5 days) has been recorded, even one, then any abortion electively performed after this time is morally unsound if it is based on the dependency argument. I could of course go on and on, but these are issues of beliefs, and generally not facts. But all honestly held believers on both sides with whom I have discussed this issue would concede that one side is rigidly consistent, the other not so, because some of arguments invoked necessitate consequences that almost no one I know would support (e.g., the moral equivalence of neonaticide). I like rigid consistency.

I can’t stand the Republican gay marriage position myself. Why do they care? To gays and lesbians who wish to be functionally “married,” I would say go ahead. It is a life commitment that should be supported by society, not shunned. Beats the hell out the divorces and adultery in hick America and the ghettoes. But McCain (don’t know about Palin, but my guess is she thinks gays will “burn in hell” or something like that) is actually OK with civil unions, just not gay marriages. I think that is reasonable for the following reason, even though it stinks of “separate but equal.”

Marriages in our country are both civil and religious. Most religious organizations in this country are currently tax-exempt, or enjoy other government benefits (I don’t think they should have these, separation of church and state was supposed to originally protect the church from the state, not vice versa). If an actual marriage were allowed that is truly indistinct from a civil union, could you imagine attorneys filing law suits against churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples demanding that they comply with the law with respect to RELIGIOUS ceremonies? I could. What the gay movement seems to want is acceptance, not tolerance, and they are only entitled to the latter by law, not the former. So I think McCain is being reasonable, but I can also understand how this is unsatisfactory to many gays/lesbians. If the leaders of their movement did not wish to armtwist society into acceptance, flaunting the most extreme actions of many (drag, lewd public sex acts, etc.), they wouldn’t be in this predicament. No one would care.

That said, most of the country does not think they should have a right to marry, democratic ballot initiatives have failed in every state as far as I know (as opposed to passage by courts, which is anti-democratic). And in a democracy, those are the breaks. K

[This section of my reply is edited from the original reply - I felt there was too much personal information on a public blog]

It is the right to choose what to do with the pregnancy, the embryo and your body without which the pregnancy will not continue. Clear?

And you seem to be a single issue voter. Please see above for all the issues I care about. I hardly want an administration that will say no to gay marriage/civil unions etc. etc. (all detailed in my response to Ram)

1. As a narrow issue, we don’t allow minors to vote, or many other things. So…snuffing out a life is OK though? Life is tough, we face the consequences of our decisions. Engage in an adult act, pay the adult consequences. In other words, tough s**t.

2. As a broader issue, the notion that we should not enforce or views on others is BS. That is what law is in a democracy, the collective expression of a collective morality. Please note that the vast majority of pro-abortion law has been enforced by courts, whereas the vast majority of pro-life law has been passed by legislatures. Which is the better reflection of our views?

At some level, no one believes in the right to do wrong; the question is how wrong is the wrong, i.e., does it warrant legislation to abolish it? So the position of “I wouldn’t do it, but I cannot limit someone else’s right to do it,” is a morally hollow obfuscation at best. Because what it directly translates to is, “Yeah, it’s wrong, but not that wrong that I would stop it.” That is nothing but a rhetorical trick to appear conflicted (Obama: “…there is a moral component to it.”), when in reality, what should be stated by these people is that they simply do not believe it to be wrong. Of course, no one has the ‘nads to say that, because it would lose votes. What does that tell you about the moral standing of the position? Along these lines, why is it that all pro-abortion (oops, pro-”choice”) politicians skillfully avoid usage of the word “abortion”. You yourself wrote about the “right to choose…” Right to choose what? No one on your side has the b***s to ever complete that sentence. It is simply stated, the right to choose to eliminate life in utero. Why not say it? Because it makes us realize that is a moral issue that requires understanding of medicine/biology, rather than a medical/biological issue that requires an appreciation of ethics.

Life’s issues may be gray, but the decisions we make about them are ALWAYS black and white, never gray. The right to do wrong should only exist if a greater moral imperative is being served, and anything that one’s conscience screams out against should be impermissible.

To answer your point on restricting minors who wish to travel inter-state to get an abortion due to home state restrictions. Forget the father impregnating. The issue is that the girl gets pregnant and is too scared to tell the parents. Cannot get an abortion in state – has to go to another state. Or, the kid tells the parents, the parents insist she not have an abortion – she’s a minor, but she doesn’t want to continue the pregnancy. What are her choices here?

Anyway, we can debate whether minors should have sex (they do, that’s the reality) and whether they should be made to carry the pregnancy to term, but we will never agree.

I’ve been pregnant. I worked really hard to get pregnant. I’ve had that incredible feeling of hearing the heartbeat when the embryo is just a spec. It is amazing. But that is *me*.

I would not presume to tell another woman what she should do. And, by the way, that’s the libertarian philosophy on things – stay out of my finances AND my personal life! You and I will just never agree on this topic, so let’s let it rest, shall we?

1. Obama could not have voted for the federal bill as far as I can tell. Why? He became a US senator AFTER the bill was passed (signed by Bush in August of 2002), fully 2 years BEFORE he became a US senator. To what vote are you referring…
He may claim retrospectively to have voted against the Illinois bill because of language that protected Roe v. Wade being absent, but this is misleading at best. Why is that? Because Roe and the related Doe v. Bolton decision in fact legalized abortion at any stage in pregnancy. Therefore, according to some, any restriction on abortion is consequently illegitimate – is this the argument Obama is invoking without saying it, because it would fit with his other votes. Obama may claim to be for some restrictions, but the fact of the matter is that he has in fact NEVER (that’s right, not once) voted in favor of any. He is rated 0% by the National Right to Life Committee. He is even against restricting minors who wish to travel inter-state to get an abortion due to home state restrictions. Why? Is he worried about a teenager impregnated by the father? Most people pass laws because of the vast majority of cases to which they apply, not due to scenarios whose frequency is on par with the passage of Halley’s comet. Life is not mathematics, and laws cannot be passed as grand-unified theories satisfying all scenarios (at least because not all possibilities are foreseeable, if not for any other reason). And most people honestly concoct such scenarios to justify a view of the majority of cases, i.e., they are really being dishonest. The best example of this is the death penalty (what if an innocent man were executed, which has in fact to my knowledge not been demonstrated in the USA to date); I oppose it on different principles, namely that I believe it to be state-sanctioned murder/revenge, and it has nothing to do with a pragmatic but non-existent concern.

2. As to Palin, my feelings about her do NOT disqualify McCain. As I wrote earlier, usually we vote against a candidate, not for one. I am voting against Obama, because in the balance of things, he is way off compared to me. So yes I don’t think Palin was a good substantive choice, but that does not translate to a vote for Obama.

K

And re: Obama and the Born Alive act – he voted against the Illinois bill but FOR the Federal bill. Why? Because the Federal bill contained language that protected Roe v. Wade that the Illinois bill did not. At least he’s paying attention to the details.

I think my views are aligned with Krishna; philosophically conservative but not necessarily Republican. I’ll vote for McCain, but not without qualms. His honesty is not in question in my book, with the exception of the immigration issue (craven pandering to xenophobes). What the NYT etc. have taken him to task on are frankly related to matters of interpretation of facts, not the facts themselves. The best example of this is is the sex ed bill – investigative journalists who have spoken to the authors of the bill in the Illinois State Senate themselves concede that the bill was NOT primarily geared at sexual predators and in fact WAS geared at sex ed expansion to younger ages – I can provide the link to anyone who likes. On the other hand, Obama claims that McCain wants to stay in Iraq for 100 years (a gross distortion of his comment), and gets a free pass. That claim, given the high profile of the war, is undoubtedly the most egregious stretch on either campaign’s part. We routinely question the objectivity of those with prejudices – what about the journalists themselves, over 90% of whom are registered Democrats – such luminaries as Moron Dowd etc.? This is why the NYT readership is in the toilet.

I think at the end of the day, most of us really vote against a candidate, not for one – no one really nails 100% of our views, but plenty of candidates are unpalatable. To that end, plenty of Obama’s views that aren’t getting airplay would be anathema to most American voters. Now I might be characterized as a single issue (life) voter, but it happens to be the right from which all others are derivative -the only issue on which I completely agree with Sarah Palin’s exact position in toto. Barack Obama thinks that it is OK for a woman to undergo a second trimester induction of labor, birthing of the fetus (now a baby), to allow the baby to die ex utero (no suctioning etc. that even the average “viable” baby gets). This in fact occurred at the ironically named Christ Hospital in the Chicago suburbs. He was against the Illinois State equivalent of the “born alive” infant protection act (the federal version passed 98-0 in that right wing legislative body…the US Senate).

I do not understand, and never will, how those on the political Left, who claim to stand up for the downtrodden, can support a modern-day Holocaust on innocents (93% of whose only misfortune being consensually conceived by the irresponsible), and how any candidate could do the same. If Democrats wanted to win decisively, all they would have to do is run a pro-life candidate. This would expand their base dramatically – I would vote for them; the voters they would lose are bunch of fringe eugenicists/feminists (all 5 of them).

Similarly, I don’t know how McCain could support state-sanctioned murder, i.e., the death penalty. But that affects 1/1000th of the lives, so in the balance of things, I know where my vote goes.

As to other views, I just hope someone asks this bozo about reparations…he is previously on the record in support of them. Or his wonderful friends, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn (a domestic terrorist couple; the latter is the wife of the former, and a previous apologist for the Manson family murderers).

Moreover, as a former Hyde Park resident and UChicago alumnus, let me state that Obama and his wife didn’t do a ***-damned thing as far as I am aware. His own colleagues at the University’s esteemed Law School did not think much of his scholarly output, although he was a well-regarded teacher. What has this guy done? I’m a surgeon, and I can tell you that no patient would ever want someone operating on them without adequate experience. And this is why picking Palin was a bright idea. It has zip to do with her credentials. She was and is Democrat bait, and those dimwits fell for it; her weaknesses are similar to Obama’s. Any criticism of her boomerangs onto Obama. The Democrats tried to get her on experience and knowledge base, and frankly, Obama’s is as bad if not worse. Remember, this is the dumbinsky who actually thinks that we should unconditionally hold talks with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Kim Jong Il. Sarah Palin is clearly not sharp (wait a sec…Joe Biden, 76/85 law school class rank), but is Obama that great? He has not released his SAT scored, or transcript from Columbia undergrad…Yes he edited the Harvard Law Review, but that is a subjective achievement, not an objective one.

As a parting comment, why is it that simpering morons are rendered geniuses by the mere adoption of left-wing views? Al Gore had equivalent SAT scores and worse collegiate grades than did George Bush, and failed in Vanderbilt Law school (Bush at least got his HBS degree). John Kerry, Yale grad like Bush, lower grades too, and despite being in Skull and Bones and decorated war vet, went to BC (not bad, but being from an influential Boston family, why didn’t he go to Harvard as also in Boston, or another elite school?) for law school and was totally undistinguished there. Clinton is in fact the only president in modern times with an outstanding academic record, and no one can actually demonstrate causation with respect to the successes that we experienced under him (i.e., how were his policies causally linked to our success, as opposed to being unrelated).