PZ Meyers, the inveterate stirpot — more power to him — finds a study that looks at where the state break out on women’s right/abortion protection. It’s not a pretty sight. This comment resonated . . .
Pharyngula::The red is for blood:
PZ, when you wrote “I suspect that there are many hypocrites in the Dakotas and Iowa and Wisconsin who would willingly legislate the morality of the poor underclass of their state, knowing full well that if their daughters have a little ‘accident’, they can just slip across the state line for a weekend in Minneapolis” it reminded me of Dan Barker’s book “losing Faith in Faith: from Preacher to Atheist”
On page 210 he writes the of the following exchange:
I was talking with a Catholic attorney recently who said “Dan, this abortion issue is so emotional that no one is ever going to change their mind”
“I did” I answered
“Well, I was raised to respect the sanctity of life” he said “And I will always vote with my church”
“And that’s why I changed my mind – I respect the sanctity of the woman’s life”
He looked at me for a moment, and in hushed tones said “Butyou know what? I don’t know what I would do if my fourteen-year-old daughter got pregnant”
“You would get her a quick, quiet abortion and worry about the morality later” I offered. With a guilty grin, he nodded his head in agreement. “You have the money and you have the contacts,” I continued “but if you keep voting wrong you may not have the option.” He didn’t know what to say, the big hypocrite.”
The entire book is well worth a read.
I left the following comments there:
I was just reminded of a story in Paul Auster’s collection of user-submitted stories (I thought my father was god).
There was a story in there, I think from the Dakotas, where the writer’s mother reacted to the discovery of the skeletal remains of a long-missing classmate. The girl was popular, pretty, and seemed to have a bright future, but she disappeared and no one knew where she had gone.
Years later, a farmer discovered a skeleton and upon examination, it has a smaller one, almost birdlike inside it. The girl had died of a botched abortion alone in a farmer’s field, all the promise of her life gone, and her family likely never knew what happened. I flash between imagining her feeling alone and dying in that field and the feeling of the father of the child helpless, perhaps unable to imagine the consequences beyond the here and now. Did he stay with her to the end? Or did he leave her to her fate? Did he even know?
And some people want to go back to those days?