Well done, I think it's a stark, in-your-face reminder of what's going on.

Yeah. This is a very real danger right now. Illegalization of abortion does not work, has never worked, and never will work. It's simply advocating the slaughter of women along with babies, as well as making it impossible for men, women, and children to get other necessary reproductive health care services like mammograms, urology services, STD treatment, sex education, contraception (including condoms), pap smears, and critical prenatal care for folks who WANT to have babies but are are uninsured.

This more than abortion. This is about health care. We need to get the right-wing idiots out of the way of progress so we can actually make a difference and stop the hell of unwanted pregnancies before they happen and makes sure we can all get help when we need it.

I don't see this as pro-choice/pro-life. I see it as those who understand and support the first amendment and those who don't.

Government mandated religion isn't what the establishment clause is about as such (Britain has that) it's about government mandated religious law. Or in more plain terms, laws based on made up bullshit with no basis in reality designed to opress those who disagree with a particular religous view.

Forget about refighting battles from the fifties and sixties, how about not refighting battles from 220 years ago!

I don't think I agree with the first sentence, but I definitely agree with the rest of it. I can't really talk about countries other than the USA, but here in the US, it's pretty much all about religious subversion. Man is under God, woman is under man. The best way to jam women back into their good Christian place is to take away their bodily autonomy and ability to control their pregnancies.

Well, neither do I quite frankly. Perhaps I should have said 'pro-choice/[wacky finger quotes]pro-life[/wacky finger quotes]'.

Is this intended to target only that relatively small subset of pro-lifers who engage in, as you put it, "violence, harassment, and terrorist tactics"? Or did you mean to imply that all pro-lifers engage in such tactics?

I'm pro-life, but I too despise those individuals who engage in violence, harassment or worse. Such activities only tend to be more divisive, where what is needed is more meaningful dialogue.

It's targeted at ALL pro-lifers, but Voice of Choice specifically goes after the really nasty ones who do things like post personal information about women and clinic workers on the internet so they can be targeted for harassment and fear tactics.

And by pro-lifers, I mean the folks who want to restrict or illegalize abortion. If you are personally against abortion but do not believe in restriction or preventing access to abortion, you are actually pro-choice.

Pro-lifeism in general is a terroristic approach because it directly advocates the oppression the freedom, rights, and healthcare of women and children. This has been tried in the past -- actually, it's being tried right now in other countries, and the results are horrific and totally unproductive actually helping reduce unwanted pregnancies. It never changes. There used to be entire wards set up in hospitals back before Roe v. Wade dedicated exclusively to women who were dying form botched abortions. That coat hanger was a reality and that's what it will end up going back to.

In this country, pro-lifers continually get in the way of allowing access to contraception, education, and reproductive health care resources, which has been PROVEN to actually have an impact on reducing the number of abortions and unwanted pregnancy. I've been debating this topic with them for 15 years now. It always boils down the same stupid crap from their mouths. "If you don't want a baby, just don't have sex." "If she didn't want to get pregnant, she should have kept her legs closed." "If you have sex, then you need to take the consequences if you get pregnant."

These statements are simply idiotic and unproductive. They all boil down to one message: Women are not worthy of their own lives except as incubators, and motherhood and children are seen as punishments for the crime of having sex. Which is just plain sick. There's not a whole lot of meaningful dialogue that can go on there with that because it's not even talking about the same thing as reproductive choice.

To me, being pro-life means one thing alone: that I believe a healthy, viable child in utero is a person who should be entitled to the same rights and legal protections as a child who has already been born.

I do not concur with the positions that some pro-life groups take on the other issues you bring up. On contraception, I am totally okay with and in favor of any form of contraception that prevents the union of the sperm and the egg; I'm ambivalent about methods that allow that and prevent or interrupt a pregnancy at some point after that; and opposed once brain activity has started except in situations where the pregnancy is non-viable or non-survivable for the developing child.

I am in favor of sex education for youth, and of giving the whole picture, not some severely watered down version like "abstinence only". It is totally pointless to pretend they won't find out about sex anyway, and it's better to teach them what is accurate rather than have them learn on their own what often is not.

And don't get me started on some of the other "religious right" positions that some pro-life groups have been known to take that have little or nothing to do with abortion, such as gay rights or creationism or the role of women in society.

I absolutely believe in equal rights for women, and for seeing women succeed in ways and in areas that in the past were considered to be for men only. Is is my belief that when a woman is pregnant, there are two persons whose rights need to be taken into consideration. To say that the woman is unworthy of rights except as an incubator is to deny her rights. But neither can I accept the notion that in order to give the woman her rights you have to deny that the child should have any.

Once upon a time I heard of an effort - I think it was called Common Ground. It involved pro-life and pro-choice groups getting together to see what they could agree on, once they agreed to disagree on the core issue. They found they could agree on quite a number of related issues, such as supporting efforts to decrease the number of unwanted pregnancies.

You of course have the riht to believe what you want - but I have to ask a couple of questions: You said above you were against violence, harassment, or worse. Does 'worse' in your view cover using government law to enforce a specific religious-doctrine on everyone?

Secondly, the view that an embryo is a person is to a large extent counter factual. In that whatever definition of 'person' you use, there is no scientific evidence that will support your views without some unintended consiquences you probably won't like. (Cows and pigs have 'some level of brain activity'. So if that is the criteria for personhood, then...) What would you say to the view that in having and defending your own founter-factual opinions, you actually are supporting their ability to assert and defend their own counter-factual opinions?

Well, unfortunately, it's sort of impossible to give them legal protections. A fetus is life within a life, and it can't exist independently from the mother until the point of viability. So giving them legal protections automatically destroys the rights of the mother, and it simply ends up with both being killed (I refer back to that picture of the coathanger I drew. I don't especially want that heading up my vagina, or gulping copious amount of quinine, or throwing myself down the stairs to try to get rid of it).

Plus, there is also the fact that most abortions happen between 6 and 8 weeks along, when the embryo is around the size of a pea, and has no consciousness, ability to feel pain, sentience, or awareness. None of that shows up till after the point of viability, which is around 26 to 27 weeks or about 5 months along. By that time, data shows, abortions are mostly only used on WANTED pregnancies that have become either unviable or too dangerous to continue. They aren't done on healthy fetuses on healthy mothers.

In that case, I just don't see this as an ethical issue. If there is no chance for suffering, I don't see any grounds for pro-lifers to stand on here with legal restrictions of any sort.

So then we're back to what you and I agree on: Reduce the hell of unwanted abortions through legitimate means of education, contraception, and free access to reproductive health care.

=^.^=

Personally, I suggest that the escorts should bring pepper spray.

You and I know how unruly these Anti-Choice extremists can be.