Seen on Facebook; An extraordinarily well written response to an anti-choice post

[BrotherIvan]

121. +1

Anti-choicers will never get the argument that a woman has rights as they have put the life of a clump of cells above any living woman. The largest problem is the insidious idea that was introduced to heat up this debate that "life begins at conception" and a abortion is murder (of a fully formed baby) because the Bible contradicts this. Just as the very misinformed poster above stated, he thinks that a fetus is a baby, his baby which he has equal rights to. If there was some way we could right that wrong, many people who were on the fence about choice could be reasoned with. And I think these are mostly men because I have yet to meet a woman who hasn't thought very deeply about this issue which profoundly affects her. That is why churches target young women with propaganda.

Some men don't see anything about reproduction as important. They don't care about birth control and they don't care about choice. As we have seen on this board, they have been taught that having children (as well as raising them) is a "woman's problem." The more you buy into the extreme gender norms, the clearer that is.

I had a discussion just the other day with a guy (and many guys, unless faced with the issue, have never really thought about it and are usually some strange version of pro-life because they don't have to weigh the physical risks), and he basically said he didn't care about choice or birth control. For him, children were an economic consideration and nothing more. He didn't see why a woman wouldn't just carry a fetus to term and give it up for adoption as if it was a simple as that. When I explained to him the risks and toll of his idea, he started to listen up. When I told him that the posters that anti-choicers hold up are fake, to look up the size of a fetus at 20 weeks, he was surprised. He had believed the same silly idea that every human fertilized egg is sacred and didn't know that spontaneous miscarriage was very high.

He didn't know any of those things because the religious right has taken over the conversation. Their lies have seeped into everyone's minds and now it will take extra effort to deal with them. The right was very smart to call abortion "baby killing" because who wants to kill a baby? Especially the illiterate/uneducated person to whom the word fetus means nothing. I think the heart of the matter is educating anyone who will listen that it is not a baby. It is a potential baby once the mother's body has sacrificed its own nutrients and energy to grow it (I won't even use the passive term incubator). It's not a baby until it can live separately from its mother (he didn't know what viability meant).

And until the unwanted fetus can be implanted in the man who insists it be brought to term, he gets absolutely no say. None!