••can ye pass the acid test?••

ye who enter here be afraid, but do what ye must -- to defeat your fear ye must defy it.

& defeat it ye must, for only then can we begin to realize liberty & justice for all.

time bomb tick tock? nervous tic talk? war on war?

or just a blog crying in the wilderness, trying to make sense of it all, terror-fried by hate radio and FOX, the number of whose name is 666??? (coincidence?)

Monday, November 07, 2005

depolarization

a few years ago i stumbled on a chat site that i long since lost track of and don't recall its name. the profile section asked how members stood on a long list of issues. two possible answers were pro-life and pro-choice. out of curiosity i took a look at a bunch of profiles to see how those two compared. surprisingly many—perhaps a majority—had checked both.

strictly speaking that's impossible. one position is that abortion should be illegal, the other that it shouldn't.

apparently a lot of users either didn't know those definitions or didn't accept them.

i can see that. in general, i don't think abortion's a good thing, because all life is precious, but i don't want the law to take away women's liberty. if a woman decides she doesn't want to carry her pregnancy to term, it's her body, so why does government have any legitimate power to force her to deliver?

many pro-lifers cloud the issue with emotion-charged abstractions. they always call a pregnant woman a mother. an embryo or fetus is always a baby or child, sometimes but not always preceded by "unborn." they insist the unborn have the same right to life as the born, maybe even a greater right, because they're defenseless, so abortion is murder.

i don't want to rush thru this analysis or oversimplify it. the controversy clearly is one of the greatest in american history. i'll take it a little at a time.

feel free to comment.

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