Monday, February 23, 2009

Overheard

William Saletan, a pro-choice writer, has a Op-Ed in the New York Times entitled, “This Is the Way the Culture Wars End” which discusses birth control and abortion. He writes,
Eight years ago, the Alan Guttmacher Institute surveyed over 10,000 American women who had abortions. Nearly half said they hadn’t used birth control in the month they conceived. When asked why not, 8 percent cited financial problems, and 2 percent said they didn’t know where to get it. By comparison, 28 percent said they had thought they wouldn’t get pregnant, 26 percent said they hadn’t expected to have sex and 23 percent said they had never thought about using birth control, had never gotten around to it or had stopped using it. Ten percent said their partners had objected to it. Three percent said they had thought it would make sex less fun.

This isn’t a shortage of pills or condoms. It’s a shortage of cultural and personal responsibility. It’s a failure to teach, understand, admit or care that unprotected sex can lead to the creation — and the subsequent killing, through abortion — of a developing human being.


Jay Nordlinger comments on the case of Baby Shanice and how he became prolife in his Impromptu column.
The gruesome cases make you think a little harder. But, of course, they’re all gruesome—some are just less seen than others. Sycloria Williams was shaken up on seeing her baby. The baby’s death was very messy—visible to those who were around. But the baby’s death was going to be pretty bad, anyway—just behind the curtain, so to speak. All nice ’n’ clinical.


David Gushee has some thoughts on the out of control IVF industry.
The reproductive-technology industry is almost entirely unregulated. Professional standards for the industry are primarily framed as guidelines and not enforced by law. For example, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine established a guideline, not a rule, that doctors should transfer no more than two embryos for women under 35, and no more than five (!) for women over that age. But this is just a guideline, and even statistical reporting of what fertility clinics are doing is voluntary.

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