Reply #192: I agree with Hillary, abortion should be legal, but unwanted pregnancies

[noonwitch]

are the real issue here. There are good people on the other side of the abortion debate who do put their time and money into helping pregnant women who don't want to have abortions. The anti-abortion side has the right and responsibility to provide alternatives, as long as they are not trying to trick women with deceptive ads to get them in the door and then berate them for wanting an abortion.

Even if we disagree with them, we at least need to understand why they think abortion is wrong. There might be some who oppose abortion who are about keeping women "barefoot, pregnant and powerless", but that's not most of them. They oppose abortion because they think it's murder. Deomonizing them for their beliefs is not going to solve anything, and it does make the pro-choice side look bad when we do it.

My grandparents raised two handicapped children, both of whom were deaf from RH incompatibility and one who also had cerebral palsy, due to contracting a dysentary-like disease in the hospital nursery after he was born. They are anti-abortion because they loved their children and worked hard to give them good lives. They didn't have the option of abortion and reliable contraception, and Rho-gam hadn't been invented yet. I don't agree with them, but I understand why they feel the way they do.

I've lived my life in a way to ensure that I would never face a choice like that, because it can't be an easy decision to make. Even with that, I wouldn't hesitate to abort a pregnancy that resulted from rape, or if I discovered that the fetus had a serious deformity (not Downs, or blindness, deafness, etc.). I don't need the government making that decision for me.