But correctly identifying a group’s prejudices and motivations is important, especially when the group members are full of face-saving lies.

Not in the least irrelevant, you see. People who oppose abortion do not (necessarily) hate women.

People who oppose women being able to choose abortion - who believe that women should be forced through pregnancy - do hare women.

You’ve made the assumption that anti-choicers “enjoy the idea of a woman suffering ….” and I think that’s unfounded or at least pretty rare.

If you mean that anti-choicers more often consciously deny that their belief women should be forced through pregnancy causes suffering, than that they relish the idea of doing so, you may have a point, but not much of one. You will find, when you take a look at what anti-choicers say when they’re driven back to why make abortion illegal, why try to prevent women from having an early, safe, and legal abortion when they need one, it all comes down to: Women who have sex outside marriage should suffer for it. Pregnancy is seen as punishment, as the fit “consequence” of a woman deciding to have sex.

That’s like saying people against assisted suicide enjoy the fact that terminally ill patients suffer before they die. Or that proponents of assisted suicide enjoy watching people die.

No, it’s not, because there is nothing in either the argments for or against assisted suicide to suggest that either group consists of people who enjoy either. But there is - if you would get down from your high horse and actually inform yourself - a lot of evidence on anti-choice and pro-choice sites that says punishing women for being sexually active is what being anti-choice is all about. (For example, anti-choicers uniformly supported the “Partial Birth Abortion Ban”, even though this would do nothing at all to prevent abortions, merely to prevent women who needed late-term abortions from having one by the safest method.)

I have not “made the assumption“, as you ignorantly claim: I have looked at what anti-choicers are saying and doing, and followed the evidence to the only conclusion possible.

And you are still making the mistake of assuming that anti-choicers and anti-abortionists are the same group of people. Not to mention the more serious mistake of assuming that people who enjoy the idea of a woman suffering for nine months through an unwanted pregnancy or risking death/sterilisation in an illegal abortion, and who support legislation accordingly, are people who like women.

You can have your distinction between the groups. It is irrelevant to the point I was trying to make: that demonizing the opposition is wrong, mostly for strategic reasons but often in actuality.

You’ve made the assumption that anti-choicers “enjoy the idea of a woman suffering ….” and I think that’s unfounded or at least pretty rare. That’s like saying people against assisted suicide enjoy the fact that terminally ill patients suffer before they die. Or that proponents of assisted suicide enjoy watching people die. Or it’s like saying Bush continues the war in Iraq because he enjoys seeing our soldiers being blown up. Oh, wait, somebody in Congress already said that. What do you think that did to his credibility in his own party or in his dealings with people across the aisle?

As you were.

(3) Person. The term, when referring to the victim of a criminal homicide or assault, means a human being, including an unborn child in utero at any stage of development, regardless of viability.

So it’s a person from conception; you kill it, you’re a murderer, unless it’s a legal abortion(That’s provided later in the statute) Basically, the entire rest of the definitions section consists of frantic legislative backscrabbling that stems from THAT SENTENCE, which needlessly extends the longest fucking legal code in human existence.

Although the Western ideal of the “free individual” did in fact arise in the context of a privileged minority that took for granted their right to exploit others, it didn’t rest there–and indeed, as it was arising, quite a few intellectually alert people on all sides (we mostly have the writings of the privileged side but historians can and have reconstructed the thoughts as well as the deeds of the various underclasses) immediately realized the implications of this rising ideal; many embraced authoritarian reaction, forseeing “mob rule” and the “many-headed hydra” in which all hierarchial order might break down. And most of even the most outspoken radicals (at least those of that faction among the elites) tried to draw lines pre-emptively; note for instance Thomas Jefferson floundering around for some kind of ideological justification for slavery and the ongoing subordination of African-Americans. (The Curse of Ham didn’t do it for him; as I recall he wound up settling on the pretty blushes of white women).

It’s all one big culture war, with many fronts. If, or how, it will ever be settled is very unclear, but it is clear that to retreat on any front is to lose ground on all of them. This is true of both sides.

And the battle lines are to some extent drawn within each of us too, lest we get lured into simplistic, essentialist “us against them” thinking.

I get the impression that some of these fundnuts don’t think people should be allowed to make any decision more important than what their favorite flavor of ice cream is.

They think god must make all important decisions on their behalf. And since god doesn’t say too much (or anything) to the individual, this usually means relying on some authority figure in their church, or their ignorant interpretations of cryptic bible passages.

While they do single out women as particularly unworthy of self-determination, they don’t think men should have a whole lot more leeway…

And pregnancy requires a woman, and as people who believe in gender equality, that means it ought to require a willing woman, and no one but her should make the decision. Thus, it is entirely a woman’s choice whether she should continue a pregnancy or not, and when women choose to do so, that defines the beginning of a human life with human rights and all. If she wants to have this baby, then we should all treat it as human, regardless of developmental stages, and support her in her attempt to bring forth another human life, and if she doesn’t then it isn’t–in principle, regardless of develomental stages, and we should support her in ending it as quickly and harmlessly as possible.

In practice no woman whose freedom was properly respected and supported early in the pregnancy, when she first discovered she was pregnant, would choose to carry it many months, each month compounding the inconvenience and risk she herself goes through, only to end it on a trivial whim. So we can ignore the boogeyman arguments that hinge on such strawwomen, and look at the facts which are that women either choose abortion as early as they can, or choose to try and have this baby–and some of them, tragically, don’t succeed. Some of those failed pregnancies require abortion to prevent an already bad medical situation from getting worse, and these are the infamous “late term abortions.” The vast majority of abortions occur long before any reasonable person could assert an approximation of viable human life.

So, Sixties Liberal, you may be quibbling over a techincality, but it seems very much like a wedge intended to cast doubt on abortion as such, and not anything someone devoted to the principle of the equality of women as human beings themselves would stick on. Yeah, yeah, a fetus is biologically alive, and has different DNA than its mother does, and would probably become a human being eventually.

(How probably depends on which stage we are talking about–apparently well over half of all fertilized eggs don’t stand that chance if we start the clock at fertilization; I don’t know how many of the inevitable early miscarriages have already taken place before women typically find out they are pregnant–but even a few months along, some of them aren’t going to make it anyway.)

But if this fetus does become human, it is because its mother chose to do that, and that is the essential ingredient for human life, not some pettifoging distinction about neural development or whatnot. If that is not her choice, then its viability is moot anyway.

Trust the woman to decide-gee, what a concept. It’s almost like I suspect they are human beings!

And I have issues with people who don’t get that, and am not too concerned with building alliances with them based on humoring their half-baked opinions. If they want to get their thoughts completely baked, they can face real-life pregnancy decisions, or they can fool around on blogs like I do until they get their heads straightened out–or firmly cooked on backwards, as the tougher-minded and more relentless of the opponents of choice do, and face up however eagerly to the fact that they are indeed misogynists, and be battled for their wrongheaded convictions.

The women of the world, for millenia that we know of, have fully understood that abortion is a sometimes necessary option; the tricky bit is getting people to admit this forthrightly rather than pretend to believe one thing and do another while interfering with still others who try to do the same.

Honestly, do I have to do all the research around here?

Cara; YES. I already said I’m not googling any of that stuff. I don’t want the Stupid (in this case) cooties gunking up my laptop.

To the regular who wrote me and suggested I was being too hard on Cara…

You were saying?

People out there are working very hard to ensure that some of the most widely used and most effective forms of birth control will be redefined as the murder of a human being and we are arguing over whose rhetoric is pure enough. So who is the gullible twit?