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Pastimes : The Boxing Ring Revived -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: one_less who wrote (3848)	1/17/2003 5:16:08 PM
From: The Philosopher	Respond to of 7720

Raising straw boogeymen is a standard tactic of those who are losign an argument.

To: one_less who wrote (3848)	1/18/2003 6:44:31 AM
From: Solon	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 7720

Why would you male such a flippant remark? You know that "coat hangar" abortions is used as a metaphorical reference to "unsafe" abortions. You also know that ACTUAL coat hangers have been used for abortions ever since they were invented...and that they are used today. Do you feel comfortable expressing such sarcasm against the memory of all the millions of women who have died or become infertile through infections, loss of blood, and other consequences of back alley abortions? Or perhaps you think that all the medical and WHO Statistics are invented as part of a conspiracy (scare tactic)? Perhaps you ought to put something like this into a search engine: ILLEGAL RATES ABORTIONS INFECTION DEATH UNSANITARY BLEEDING SCARRING UTERUS INFERTILITY Approximately 20,000,000 unsafe abortions are done every year. Unsafe abortion is responsible for 13 % of all maternal deaths globally. And we haven't even mentioned infertility due to scarred uteruses, tubal occlusions, pelvic inflammatory disease, etc. About 43% of American women will have at least one abortion at some time during their life. We are not talking some "other" people here. We are talking about OUR wives and OUR daughters. If it is illegal it will almost certainly be unsafe--which means an increased likelihood of death or infertility, or other permanent health problems. That is not a "SCARE TACTIC". That is a simple unadulterated FACT. To refer to the deaths and infertility of such countless numbers of women of all ages as "scare tactics" is nothing for you to be proud of to say the very least. It almost sounds like you would like to see those 43 out of 100 American women getting their abortions illegally again. Illegal abortions are almost always unsafe abortions. If you think that is something to smugly refer to as "scare tactics", then I don't know what to say to you... Yes. If abortions are illegal, then unsafe "coat hangar" abortions will take the life and the health of many young girls and other women. Here is a poem for you to enjoy. No. I doubt she wrote it as a "scare tactic" or a conspiracy. It sounds to me like a genuine expression of a person's fundamental autonomy...just the way that you have autonomy over your sperm. "Right To Life" A woman is not a pear tree thrusting her fruit in mindless fecundity into the world. Even pear trees bear heavily one year and rest and grow the next. An orchard gone wild drops few warm rotting fruit in the grass but the trees stretch high and wiry gifting the birds forty feet up among inch long thorns broken atavistically from the smooth wood. A woman is not a basket you place your buns in to keep them warm. Not a brood hen you can slip duck eggs under. Not a purse holding the coins of your descendants till you spend them in wars. Not a bank where your genes gather interest and interesting mutations in the tainted rain, any more than you are. You plant corn and you harvest it to eat or sell. You put the lamb in the pasture to fatten and haul it in to butcher for chops. You slice the mountain in two for a road and gouge the high plains for coal and the waters run muddy for miles and years. Fish die but you do not call them yours unless you wished to eat them. Now you legislate mineral rights in a woman. You lay claim to her pastures for grazing, fields for growing babies like iceberg lettuce. You value children so dearly that none ever go hungry, none weep with no one to tend them when mothers work, none lack fresh fruit, none chew lead or cough to death and your orphanages are empty. Every noon the best restaurants serve poor children steaks. At this moment at nine o'clock a partera is performing a tabletop abortion on an unwed mother in Texas who can't get Medicaid any longer. In five days she will die of tetanus and her little daughter will cry and be taken away. Next door a husband and wife are sticking pins in the son they did not want. They will explain for hours how wicked he is, how he wants discipline. We are all born of woman, in the rose of the womb we suckled our mother's blood and every baby born has a right to love like a seedling to sun. Every baby born unloved, unwanted is a bill that will come due in twenty years with interest, an anger that must find a target, a pain that will beget pain. A decade downstream a child screams, a woman falls, a synagogue is torched, a firing squad is summoned, a button is pushed and the world burns. I will choose what enters me, what becomes flesh of my flesh. Without choice, no politics, no ethics lives. I am not your cornfield, not your uranium mine, not your calf for fattening, not your cow for milking. You may not use me as your factory. Priests and legislators do not hold shares in my womb or my mind. This is my body. If I give it to you I want it back. My life is a non-negotiable demand. Marge Piercy