I happened to stumble upon this site earlier today, and was inspired to write its author an e-mail (which was subsequently bounced due to a Relay Access Denied error). The post to which I was replying was this poll about how many people who read their site support abortion vs. how many support abortion laws (which I’ll quote here so you don’t have to go there and search for it, since they don’t have links to individual posts):

Last week many of you responded to our poll question, “Do you support the South Dakota abortion ban?�

Here are the results:

a) yes = 146 (97%)
b) no = 2 (1.5%)
c) not sure, undecided 2 (1.5%)

We are definitely encouraged by the overwhelming response in favor of a law forbidding surgical and medical abortions.

And here’s my response, which I probably would’ve put up here anyway, even if the e-mail didn’t bounce:

Must be real life-affirming to know that people who already read your site completely agree with your views. Changing the world one choir-member at a time, huh?

By the way, ever consider that there may be other ways to significantly reduce abortion rates? For starters, figuring out /why women get abortions in the first place/? Much of the time, it’s an issue of finances. Part of the problem is that one simply cannot raise a child on average wage let alone minimum wage without falling well into poverty. a) Should we limit reproduction to the upper classes? b) Well, gee, how about just making the necessary adjustments to ensure that the world is a welcoming place for expecting mothers and their potential babies? If it’s not a burden to have them, it won’t be an issue to keep them.

(What particularly irks me is the assumption that there are all these women just anxiously champing at the bit, hungrily licking their lips, legs spread, waiting to get knocked up so that they can sprint to the nearest abortion clinic and have it scraped out of them. Using the terminology ‘pro-abortion’ illustrates a massive disconnect between one’s perception of reality and how things really are. You say ‘pro-abortion’, Schizophrenic Larry down the street claims his toaster can talk. I’m certainly not seeing the existence of either of those things, myself. It’s the choice that matters–it’s just as wrong to force someone to get an abortion as it is to force them not to get one.)

Not to mention, of course, rather likely developments in biotechnology over the next several decades: I propose to you the pseudo-uterus. It’s an artificial, independent (that is, it functions on its own without a body), nutrient-bath-type womb grown similar to the concept of vat meat that would allow the transfer of a blastocyst, fetus, what-have-you into it for continued development and subsequent birth. Might sound crazy, but then again, so did the Internet. It’s decades away, I’m sure, but possible.

In any event, banning it will be useless, because it’s impossible to enforce unless one takes extremely fascist approaches toward pregnancy as a whole. Do you investigate every miscarriage as though it were a murder? Do you register every pregnancy so that you can know when a pregnancy doesn’t result in a baby? Though you may scare a small amount of women into not having an abortion, you’re only going to force the vast majority into simply inducing miscarriage through other means. And I wouldn’t consider that a victory-march-worthy success for the anti-choice movement.

-J Crowley

The site, by the way, is called “Rock for Life”. Which makes me wonder if they think that bands who support abortion rights would/should be on a site called “Rock for Abortion”. Which is kind of funny, considering that apparently crack and cocaine can induce miscarriage, which is certainly an alternative that’ll be available to many women if medical methods are made illegal.