Abortion: Salon (thanks Paul Waldman) had two articles on abortion that highlight my basic philosophy. One was written by his sister, who spoke emotionally about her own second trimester abortion, which she chose to have after discovering her fetus had a serious deformity. The fetus was no abstraction, she mourned, and still firmly believed it was a correct decision for various reasons. Thus, someone can believe an embryo or fetus is in some way (human) life worthy of respect, but still morally choose to have an abortion. Or, so is the belief of people across the abortion divide in quite a few cases.
Language can and is used by those in the pro-life camp, so those on the pro-choice side are leery about terms. Nonetheless, when we look at the stories of real life women, things look a bit different. For instance, women testified about their "partial birth abortions," including those with seriously deformed fetuses with little chance of even surviving, and had the procedures to be able to become pregnant again.
This is a quite "tragic" situation, but when the word is tossed around (including by Sen. Clinton), we have a right to be a bit uneasy. As the second article suggests, many women really do not see abortions as tragedies, especially the more horrible connotations of the term. Again, real life stories help add perspective, and perhaps are the most valuable way to show why the right to choose is so important and complex.
No Integrity: I'm sickened and tired of hearing about the administration and all of its wrongs, but how can you ignore some of its misdeeds? There was the smear of Richard Clarke, a career government employee, who served his country through both Democratic and Republican presidencies. He was said to be some sort of disgruntled pro-Clinton nut, mainly it seemed because of strong criticism of the Bush Administration and the guts to apologize for not doing enough before 9/11.
One thing Clarke did do, though Condi Rice and company denied it,* was supply a report on the al Qaeda threat. Secretary of State (sigh) Rice has been in Europe lately to accept apologies from "Old Europe" for being right on WMDs. Not being totally disgusted at this sort of thing is quite hard. And then you can read in Slate and other places about non-action and questionable choices respecting North Korea ... and so on.
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* "No al Qaeda plan was turned over to the new administration." - Condoleezza Rice, March 22, 2004. Rice and company has a penchant of not wanting to admit or release material that would even possibly put them in a bad light, even if there is a good chance that eventually it would come out anyway.
I once had a tedious debate with someone on a message board concerning the ability to be wrong but not at fault -- we learn from our mistakes, though our mistakes are not always negligent in nature. Nonetheless, we need to examine what we did so that we can reflect and have a full accounting. This might be used by some for mischievous ends, but people with integrity have the guts to face this risk because we must have a full accounting.