On Abortion

If the Supreme Court were to repeal Roe v. Wade that in itself would not prohibit abortions.

The only outcome would be that state legislatures could pass laws that governors could sign that would criminalize all abortions, even in the first trimester.

Legislators and governors are elected officials. If they passed such laws, they would face the fury of most of the female voters and more than half of the male voters. Why would they want to do that?

Answer: they wouldn't.

Conclusion: this is a bogus issue and David Brooks is a bogus columnist, but he sure got us stirred up.

It is extremely likely that the majority of women who are sexually active, married or not, even if they use contraceptives, correctly and consistently, will experience two or three unplanned pregnancies over a lifetime.

What do they do? Some have the unplanned children. Many more have abortions.

Look at any married couples of twenty to thirty years standing who have only one or two children and I'd be willing to bet you are looking at women who have had two or three abortions.

Yeah, examine the medical histories (if you could) of the wives of all the antiabortion loudmouths and the loudmouths would quickly shut up.

Women know all this and they're pretty quiet on this issue. All the noise is being made by men.

As I said in a previous post, my plumber told me: "If men could get pregnant, Walmart would be offering discount abortions."

Later, in response to rrgolden0

Let me cite the paragraph that I want to comment on.

"I think your figures are incorrect. I have been married for 38 years, have two planned-for and wanted children and had no need for abortions. A lot of women (me included) used/use failsafe backup methods of preventing conception (for a while at least I used the pill AND foam). Birth control methods are more reliable than you seem to think (provided they are used correctly and faithfully). It IS possible to prevent conception in all but a few cases of accident or failure of method. However, women who have neither the emotional resources nor the ability to say no to pressures of men (or are deficient in impulse control) should not be forced to have babies."

The examples you cite are at the extremes: the super careful and the careless. In the big middle (probably two thirds of married women) are those who use one birth control method. Among this large group unplanned pregnancies are not uncommon because the best contraceptives are only about 98% effective. These women are not super careful or careless, they're just average people.

You also say that women who have unplanned pregnancies should not be forced to have babies. In the absence of legal abortions, most of them would not have babies. The wealthy ones would travel to another country and would have a safe, legal abortion and the poor ones would have a risky illegal abortion. That's the way it used to be before Roe v. Wade.

The people who want to abolish Roe v. Wade are the worst kind of hypocrites. They know that if abortions are criminalized, thousands of poor women will die as a result of botched illegal abortions. The "pro-lifers" don't care about these women's lives at all.