More insightful political analysis from Troy State. One can only suppose the Science Department at Troy State will be asserting there is life on Mars after similar rigorous examination of this photo.

I find it simply amazing that you believe the state has the right to tell someone how they can reproduce. You *must* have that baby.

It's a heck of a lot like a communist state.

The state did not force the copulation--if it did, you would have an argument.

And, further, I find it utterly amazing that anyone thinks that it is acceptable to kill an innocent human being. It isn't like the child spontaneously grows in the womb like a cancer.

But, of course, it is the most divisive issue of our time.

Look guys. My wife has had 3 miscarriages (2 were abortions), 1 ectopic and one I almost had to decide between the life of my wife and my baby girl. I lucked out and ultimately didn't have to make that choice, and she was born. But I then had to hold her while she breathed her last breath in my arms as we let her die six weeks later.

This is a terribly personal issue and I find it extremely offensive that ANYONE wants to legislate how I make this decision with my wife.

I'd have far more faith in the "right's" beliefs on this subject if the caring didn't stop the moment the baby was born.

I'm just amazed that people who think the state doesn't have the right to make them wear safety belts and motorcycle helmets thinks that this is a perfectly acceptable place to stick their nose in and tell people what to do.

It's *never* an easy choice. And I do think it's moral. So unless your god is going to come down in court and explain himself, just please butt out of our very personal decisions

John, I think most conservatives have arrived at the point where they would accept abortions in cases such as the ones your family so tragically experienced. But what horrifies me, and what, I think, horrifies Steven, is that millions upon millions of perfectly healthy fetuses are aborted for birth control purposes.

If you want to decry conservatives who oppose contraception, I'm there with you.

If you want to decry conservatives who do nothing to further adoption as an alternative to abortion, I'm there with you. (Hell, if it means less abortions, I'll even support gay adoption as a break from conservative orthodoxy.)

But in cases where abortion is nothing but birth control, you're no longer talking about trading off one life for another, you're talking about killing, and every technology (such as this sonogram) which further humanizes the fetus also further erodes the abortion-on-demand status quo. As Nat Hentoff has written, abortion is first and foremost a human rights issue, and nobody's God has to testify to reality of the fetus as human life.

As a father of three, and having lost the twin of my middle chld early in the pregnancy, I certainly have a great deal of sincere sympathy for your situation.

Indeed, true circumstances where one has to make a choice between the life of the mother and the child are hardly what I am talking about here. Nor am I talking about medical conditions such as an ectopic pregnancy, where the child can't be brought to term, and the mother's health is seriously threatened.

And, I am afraid, there are far too many people out there who don't see terminating a pregancy as being all that difficult a decision--if they did, there wouldn't be the number of abortions in this country that there are.

And I won't back off of that type of issue--there are literally millions (according to the pro-choice Alan Guttmacher Institute, there were over 1.3 million abortions in this country last year, and indeed have been well over 1 million each year since 1975), so, yes, there are plenty of people for whom this is clearly not as difficult as it shoud be.

Again, I am not talking about serious medical needs, but rather, basically using abortion as birth control--which is immoral and a tragedy.

JohnC is absolutely correct; the issue is intensely personal and not one which should be legislated by some rightwing politician seeking to impose his version of morality.

And, frankly, it is a bit sickening to watch Taylor claim that conservatives are only against those abortions they deem to be 'birth control' at the very time conservatives are seeking to remove health of the mother determinations away from doctors and placing it in the hands of brain-damaged jerks like Rick Santorum.

For example, the procedure I was precariously close to would - I believe - fall under the rubric of "partial birth abortion". As terrifying as that decision is for me to even make - seeing as how my wife wasn't able to participate in the decision process - what's even more horrifying is to think that in our zeal we may have effectively banned that procedure.

If things had gone differently, I would likely have lost both my wife and my little girl. Where's the justice in that?

It's one thing to fight for education and mental health so we all (statistically at least) make far better decisions than most are likely to make. That is, incidentally why I'm a liberal. But it's another thing to be disgusted with the way some people use a medical procedure and force everyone to live with the consequences of this arbitrary decision.

But what's really infuriating is it seems a lot of people who are absolutely against abortion are also absolutely against any form of contraception. Again, just my belief, but that seems downright insane.

Likewise, it seems counter productive to the thesis that "all life is precious" to not adequately fund programs like WIC. One of my old girlfriend's mother used to work for WIC in Grand Junction. This was during the Reagan years, so "welfare queens" ruled the memes. It was simply astounding to me how inadequate and underfunded the program was.

So, to me, the underlying belief that outlawing abortion will solve the problem seems fundamentally flawed. I would have far more faith in a solution if I saw any desire or willingness to invest the time and money in the areas that we need to deal with the reasons why people have abortions in the first place, not to mention the care and nutrition they need in their crucial first 5-8 years where their little brains are growing gang busters.

I agree on the goal, I just don't see much effort on the other side to reach it, other than by trying to make it illegal.

Laws being prescriptive, not descriptive... Well it just doesn't seem to make sense to go about it this way.

Especially without the follow through.

Not to be snarky, but it's like invading Iraq and not having a serious plan (that dealt with actual reality, not the Rumsfeld parallel universe) for what we're going to do afterwards. Systems are complex and the problems are not usually susceptible to simple solutions.

Abortion stops a beating heart. A life with a completely different dna than either the mother or the father, yet enough of each of them to allow dna paternity tests to be accurate. I am all for choice. You choose to have sex and if a life results from that sex, that child should be allowed to grow up to make his/her own choices.

I do admit that there are times where an abortion is necessary to save the life of the mother and am not against it in those circumstances, but for birth control, I am against it.

If someone finds themself in the situation where abortion seems the only option to them, they should consider giving the baby up for adoption. Many loving families are looking to adopt.

I believe in choice. Everyone has the right to do what they want to their own body. For these reasons I am against abortion. When a woman (chooses) abortion, she is not making a choice about her body in the way the pro aborts try to deceive people into thinking. She is making a choice for someone else's body. The choice to end the life of a person who has no say. If life were perfectly fair, babies would hatch from cabbage patches, but thats not how it works. Life begins in a woman's body. The fact this life is gestating inside the body of another does not make the body of the child any less alive. Pro-aborts argue this all the time. It makes no sense. The problem with the pro life movement are the people who are running it. Bible thumping church people who want to make this a religious issue when it's not. Instead of educating girls about human development and, they quote a bunch of scripture as their arguments on why abortion is murder. The answers to what makes abortion so evil is has nothing to do with the bible. Until more rational people start to take a stand on this issue, things will never change.