Today is the day we give babies away...

[lydy]

My grandfather was a sailor, and he used to sing my mother the clean parts of sailor songs as lullabyes. Barnacle Bill, as you might guess, was severely truncated. He would also say, "Today is the day we give babies away, with a half a pound of tea," but he never followed it up with the next line, "So if you know any ladies that need any babies, just send them all to me."

God knows why that's on my mind at 3:30 a.m.

They haven't called Ohio, yet, but I am pretty sure it will go to Bush. Minnesota went to Kerry, so I guess I did my part. As for the rest of it, I have either too much or too little to say. I wonder...will abortion be legal in 4 years? I do wonder. And there is the too much and too little, all in one sentence.

"It's all over now, Baby Blue."

Comments

[joel-rosenberg.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'll take that bet. I think that there is, in the collective mind, a fair amount of wiggle room on 2nd trimester abortions -- and far more than I'd like to see on ugly-sounding procedures, like "partial birth abortion" -- but it's not 1972 anymore. RU486 and other "morning after" stuff aside, legal first trimester abortions have become part of the set expectations of this society.

I know that there are folks who would like to roll those back, just as there are people who would like to outlaw birth control (other than "Natural Family Planning"). I just don't see them succeeding, and the folks I know in the anti-abortion movement (they don't call it that) despair of that ever happening. (In fact, some of them sound a lot like Michael Moore -- every defeat, they unpersuasively argue, no matter how humiliating, is merely the prequel to eventual victory.)

I'm not at all eager to legislate it -- in fact, I'm opposed to legislate it -- but in addition to wanting abortions to be rare, I'd strongly prefer that all elective ones happen as early as possible in the first term.

Part of the problem abortion opponents have is that they don't believe their own dogma. If a fertilized egg is a human being, and to terminate a pregnancy is therefore murder (I reject both of those, of course), it's just as much murder in the case of rape and incest -- and the mainstream view even in anti-abortion circles is that abortion should be allowed in cases of rape and incest.

Given that, it's really just a matter of drawing legal lines. (Again: I'm opposed to drawing legal lines, because I don't think that they can be done well enough. That said, I've no sympathy at all for the desire of a woman to have an abortion at, say, 8.5 months because it's inconvenient for her to have a baby at that time -- and that said, elective, "I don't feel like it" late term abortion decisions are pretty much although not entirely mythical.)

I'm sure that the lines, if they're ever drawn (and they may be, if and when Roe v. Wade goes away) will be drawn to your liking, or to mine. But I think the idea of them being drawn to prevent first trimester abortions is a nonstarter.