I know we have to be politically correct and try to focus on the emotional damage abortion does to women, but my feeling, from talking to these abortion-seekers, is that they continue to make bad choices (having sex outside of marriage, picking losers to be involved with, no sexual morality, looking for quick fixes, focus on self, absolutely no focus on the baby, etc).

I have much less empathy for these women than before I became involved in this volunteer work.

There’s a good 50% chance that you’re wrong.

A few points.

“I too would like to believe that in the total absence of any real or imagined pressure from others, no woman would solicit an abortion to kill the baby she conceived.”

Who believes that? No one said “no woman”. A more accurate and honest description of our position would be that more women than we ordinarily imagine are coerced or pressured into getting an abortion they don’t want.

Aside from that, I fail to understand your logic. You say that you agree with MZ that we are being ‘condescending to women’. But about the study cited, you say,

“Guess what, “felt pressured” means whatever the female answering the survey chooses to make it mean. Her answer is next to meaningless.”

First of all, the original article notes that 64% of women CLAIM to have been coerced, and perhaps I could have made that clearer in my post. Why is it meaningless?

It can’t possibly be because of the handful of cases where women falsely report rape – and we certainly aren’t going to remove laws against rape because they are occasionally misused.

No, a law against forced abortion would, I should hope, presume that each case would be investigated in the same way a rape claim is investigated.

Now how is it not ‘condescending’ when you have 64% of women saying they feel coerced, and you say it is meaningless? Do you think 60% of them just want to make up false stories? 50%? Does your knowledge of “womanhood” tell you that all or most of these women are lying? If not, then can you really justify invoking the outlying exceptions to scuttle the proposed rule?

Finally its just ridiculous to propose a sexist bias here. Plenty of people, men and women both, I say again, MEN AND WOMEN BOTH, are ignorant of their Constitution rights and are often victimized because of it. Instead of worrying about potentially offending someone because we don’t assume they are a legal expert, we ought to be striving to empower people with knowledge and protecting the vulnerable. Yes, I will wear the label of “condescender” if I must.

Would “the better perspective on women,”Lewiscrusade wondered, be that their motive for abortion is “so materialistic that they’d kill their own children or that they’re pressured into abortion…?” To ask such a question is to risk implicitly swallowing a certain pro-abortion view – remember candidate Obama describing pregnancy as “punishment”? Alternatively, the question supposes that a pregnant woman has only two courses, the crude materialistic motives of the morally immature or no will of her own at all to resist “pressure,” is a very condescending view of women. We should simply reject the question entirely and preserve the “better perspective” for the other women who genuinely deserve it because they didn’t resort to bad reason A or bad reason B or whatever as an excuse to abort a baby.

Yet because most people prefer not to attribute wicked behavior to any woman, the search for ways to excuse her or for a scapegoat to carry away her blameworthiness is popular. Thus, we’re treated to claims such as this one mentioned by Matthew in Fairfax, “64% of women who aborted felt pressured by others.” Well, I had done the prudent thing and read that study yesterday after M.Z. questioned its honesty. Guess what, “felt pressured” means whatever the female answering the survey chooses to make it mean. Her answer is next to meaningless. It’s a junk study very like the NOW/Koss survey that produced the very hyped claim that one in four women are raped in college. There is no college rape epidemic (sorry NOW, but reality is reality) and there is no coerced abortion epidemic (sorry Elliot Institute).

I too would like to believe that in the total absence of any real or imagined pressure from others, no woman would solicit an abortion to kill the baby she conceived. But I know too much about womanhood to buy that. Suppose there is a law banning “coerced abortions” as Donald R. McClarey suggested. I forsee all sorts of mischief arising from such a law. The female has post-abortion regrets? Or her momma cries, “What happened to my grandchild?” and the female feels bad about upsetting her momma? Well, guess what, to escape the shame she now says she felt coerced and try to prove her wrong. Women have lied about being raped for even weaker face-saving motives and the falsely accused men have gone to prison.

Perhaps most bad laws begin with those paving stones of the highway to hell, good intentions. In another of his comments, Matthew in Fairfax supplied links to legislation now proposed in Minnesota. I looked over the bills and noted the lists within them of what the legislators considered “evidence of coercion.” As I read them, the case of the Florida mother who marched her daughter to the abortuary at gunpoint mentioned as one of the “Extreme cases of coercion” at the mccl.org link Joe Hargrave supplied earlier kept coming to mind. No, the abort-at-gunpoint momma didn’t get sentenced to 20 years in prison for kidnaping, child endangerment, deadly threats, assault with a deadly weapon, gun crimes, and all the rest of the book that could have been thrown at her. No, abort-or-die momma didn’t get even 2 years in the slammer. She got 2 years probation. Until the existing laws are properly enforced, even against women, who commit genuine cases of coercing abortion, what’s going on now in Minnesota is legislative grandstanding. Let’s face it, should those bills become law the courts will see them as attempts to harass and strike those laws down just as they have struck down previous attempts to harass abortion-soliciting women and the abortionists they use.

I regret that abortion on demand is legal in America and I can see how pro-life activists might let their concerns get ahead of their better judgment and start promoting claims that the average person is prone to misinterpret as something especially alarming. The “64% coerced” claim sounds startling and engages people’s natural inclination to rescue females but it’s not what it appears to be. The same goes for the “murder is the leading cause of pregnancy-related death” claim; it is startling and people who don’t question startling claims are gulled into imagining there’s an epidemic of murdered pregnant women. There isn’t. Nor are such deaths “underreported” (by an honest, in-context meaning of the term) as Foxfier fretted. The reason so few jurisdictions bother to make “murdered while pregnant” a separate reporting category for the death statistics they collect and aggregate is that it is so very, very rare. What’s next, an anti-euthanasia organization complaining that government agencies aren’t compiling “murdered while under chemotherapy” statistics and therefore such deaths are “underreported”? C’mon, let’s get real and insist that our fellow pro-life advocates steer clear of the temptation to spin incomplete and out-of-context facts in ways that obviously mislead the public.

Bottom line, I very much doubt that this proposed Minnesota legislation will “cut the abortion rate down significantly” even if it is not struck down by the courts as harassing women who are exercising their (shamefully) court-given “right” to abortion on demand. Remember, that Florida woman who coerced a young woman to have an abortion at gunpoint got probation. There is nothing this proposed law really does that isn’t covered by other, existing laws. Women aren’t so helpless that they can’t pick up a phone and call the police if they are truly being “coerced” to do anything against their will. I agree with M.Z. that “there is a certain tendency within the prolife movement to be condescending to women” and, though saying so may seem uncordial to some, this Minnesota legislation is a manifestation of that tendency.

The idea of trying to prevent abortion support via talking to companies isn’t new:
http://metrowomenscenter.blogspot.com/2008/05/46-percent-of-american-health-insurance.html

As for supporting pro-life businesses:
http://www.prolifepages.com/
http://www.buyprolife.net/