Yeah, they tried to use that crap in the Social Security debate, too.

that is insane. I must be naive but we shouldn't have to still be fighting for this. This is a basic human rights issue, woman deserve access to their OWN bodies.

One thing though..
"Right! If all those white women hadn't had abortions, we'd have plenty of good, upstanding white folks to fill the jobs the scary brown people do now!"

White women aren't the only ones who have abortions. I don't fully disagree with the quoted statement, as it has to be easier for a rich person to get an abortion than a poor person, but there are a lot of poor struggling white people with shitty jobs as well. Just a reminder.

You know, there is a policy that actually causes illegal immigration AND obesity. It's popularly known as the farm bill.

Hear me out; we mass produce cheap corn because the governement pays people to grow it, artificially lowering the price to consumers for corn or corn based products. Sounds good until you think about all the junk food that has high fructose corn syrup or corn flour as primary ingridients. So, we have fat Americans. And, because we produce so much corn that we export it and can undercut local growers because of the government funds, farmers in Mexico who could make a living growing corn have to come to the US to get a job. So, we have illegal workers. Solution? Drop the farm bill, or at least overhaul the damn thing to within an inch of it's life.

Now, I realize that neither of those issues is so simple that eliminating a single government policy would be an automatic fix. But, it's just as ridiculous to say that abortion is the reason for illegal immigration, maybe even a little more. This is a multi-faceted and complicated issue, and there is no easy answer.

Also? As someone who's in college now I'd like to point out that the number of people in college at this point in time exceeds the high water mark left by the Boomers. If they retire when they're supposed to and my generation can get decent entry level jobs like we're supposed to, I really think everything will work out just fine. And so does my mom, who's a Boomer.

WHAT THE FUCK?!

Coming from Northwest Arkansas (home of Walmart, Tyson, Georges, etc) it has been made very clear to me that immigrants are the ONLY ones who will take these jobs. I still don't understand the illegal immigrant problem. Without illegal immigrants doing work that many middle class white people feel 'too good' to do, there wouldn't be a huge economic boom! There wouldn't be a goddamn Macy's going in! There wouldn't be gated fucking neighborhoods whose houses cost no less than 5-7 million! If these women had decided not to abort, their kids would be working at the local Hollister, and NOT plucking chickens on an assembly line for 12 hours straight.

-done with my rant now-

White women aren't the only ones who have abortions.

Oh, absolutely, PamelaV. I was mocking *their* take on abortion/immigration. My sarcasm must not have come across completely...

oh I understand, Anne.

oh, speaking of immigrant jobs/farming

a lot of that corn is for animal feed. Also, Hispanic immigrants make up a large number of slaughterhouse workers. It's very dangerous and they can't speak up about any sort of problems or their families starve. There was also within the last year, a story about a father and son who worked on a pig farm drowned in pig waste. It is a very sad situation.

And DeLay dares to say "Think about it"?????

I wish we could all get rid of all the fucking republicans all at once...perhaps take their heads out of their asses for once and all...

>

I watched the video last night, and had to pause it while I recovered from hearing him blame abortion for our "immigrant problem".

I honestly don't know what to say about it--anything involving anti-choice advocates scares the shit out of me. I will say I find it sadly hysterical that he paused for "effect", as though this was some great intellectual revelation. Then again, it's extremely depressing to know the people in that room likely thought it was.

Also, is it just me, or are those college kids ridiculously terrifying?

Sillies... abortion isn't causing the problem of illegal immigration. Birth control is causing the problem. Isn't that obvious?

And wait... who supports birth control? Feminists. Therefore:

Feminists are responsible for the problem of illegal immigration.

That was fun! Anyone else want to try out what Umberto Eco calls "idiot syllogisms"?

Wait...what? Seriously, how is this a viable argument? Don't abort your fetuses, ladies, because we need them to work low-paid jobs so dirty immigrants don't take them.

This is ridiculous. It's just a way to pretend there is a better reason to oppose abortion than wanting to control women's bodies and reproduction and thinking that women are not capable of making decisoins.

There is an arguement that has emerged similar to this one that claims that there is a link between the legalization of abortoin and a decrease in crime down the road. Apparently approx. 18 years after abortion became legal there was a noticble drop in national crime rates. Has anyone heard this? (Although this one is better because at least it's not a way to trick people into opposing abortion, it is fucked up in the sense that it of course assumes that all/most aborted pregnancies, had they been carried out, would have produced criminals.)

Actually, Katie, it's not an argument for or against anything; it's just an interesting trend from an economic point of view.
It's detailed in the book Freakanomics.

Katie-
That argument linking the legalization of abortion with a subsequent drop in crime rate is from Chapter 4 of "Freakonomics" by Levitt and Dubner. Also, the authors do not assume that every aborted fetus would have become a criminal. They merely observed the trend that women who have abortions are more likely to be unmarried, in their teens, or poor, and their children were MORE LIKELY to become criminals. An aborted fetus was, by definition, unwanted, and unwantedness is more likely to lead to a life of crime. These aren't assumptions; rather, these concepts were confirmed by looking at states where abortion was legalized *before* Roe v. Wade (NY, CA, WA, AL, HI) and observing that their crime rates dropped before the rest of the country.

"Apparently approx. 18 years after abortion became legal there was a noticble drop in national crime rates. Has anyone heard this?"

This was one of the main points of the book Freakonomics (http://tinyurl.com/hvoz9). The argument is that since the abortion rate is higher among poor women, and children born to poor women are extremely likely to be poor themselves, and poor people are more likely to commit crimes, then abortion by definition must lower the amount of crimes because there are less poor people to commit crimes.

It's a disturbing argument, but looking at it objectively it seems to hold weight. If any others could share their views on this I'd appreciate it, especially if you can disprove it.

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(Breathe, pumpkin, breathe).

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PamelaV- RE: corn for animal feed: Corn, while beneficial as an occasional part of one's diet, starts to become a detriment once it is the ONLY thing one is eating. This is true for humans, and also for the animals that this corn being grown for animal feed is actually being given to. Many people who raise cattle for beef like to give them lots and lots of corn because it causes the animals to become much larger, much faster; and more poundage=more money when you sell it. Not to mention that as a result of all the corn-fed farm animals out there, we humans are essentially eating corn every time we eat meat in addition to every time we eat any kind of processed food. This kind of homogenous diet is, IMO, one of the reasons for the high rates of obesity, etc. I guess my point is that saying that most of the corn grown as a result of the farm bill is used as animal feed is really no defense for it at all, forgive me if you weren't actually attempting to defend it- my reading was that you were.

"It's a disturbing argument, but looking at it objectively it seems to hold weight. If any others could share their views on this I'd appreciate it, especially if you can disprove it."

Why is it a disturbing argument? It's not like these women were forced at gunpoint to abort fetuses they wanted to keep. And it had the unforeseen consequence of decreasing the crime rate. What is wrong with that?

And, badnfluence, it's not even an argument.

Sasha-no worries.

No I wasn't defending it at all. In fact I think it's worse.
I was talking about the meat production and unfair disadvantages in the meat industry and how this affects mostly Hispanic immigrants. You mentioned corn so I was talking also about how wasteful it is to raise all that corn (and soybeans, too actually) to feed to animals. The corn and the animals/unfair Hispanic immigrant disadvantage was just an all-inclusive post.

It's better explained in "The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter" (Singer/Mason).
To be fair it happens with food that is human-eaten only as well, such as the case where mostly Hispanic workers (I think in FL?) were basically being enslaved to work on tomato farms. Their room and board was something like 350/week but that's all they made so they were never able to save any money. Right here in the good old USA

[Would it be possible for the post that's thrown off all of the comment formatting to be fixed, please? Many thanks.]

If Republican forced birth assholes want us to do some thinking, let's think about it. 40 years, 40 million abortions, roughly a million a year, meaning there would be 24 million non-aborted people in the U.S. over the age of 16 and 16 million non-aborted people in the U.S. under the age of 16.

There are, by the most histrionic of estimates, 12 million illegal immigrants in the U.S., some of which are children and therefore don't work. So the number of working illegal immigrants is something smaller than that, but just for the sake of argument, let's act like the number of people needed to replace all of the illegal immigrants is all of the 12 million.

That would leave an additional 12 million adults who are unemployed, 12 million adults who are without health insurance, and 12 million adults who would need welfare assistance of some sort (and could not be denied on the basis of being an illegal immigrant).

There would be an additional 16 million children crowding the public school systems nationwide, possibly requiring school lunch vouchers, probably not covered by health insurance and therefore left on the doorstep of Medicaid.

So, I'd really, really like to know whether the Republicans would prefer to have (1) abortion be legal and have 12 million illegal immigrants or (2) abortion be illegal, have no illegal immigrants, and have 12 million workers without health insurance or retirement savings, 12 million adults added to the welfare system (and without health insurance or retirement savings) and 16 million children added to the fiscal burden of Medicaid and public education. I'd love to know how the GOP would pay for those additional expansions of entitlement programs. Would the GOP be willing to raise taxes to pay for the expenses of these children born by force?

"Why is it a disturbing argument? It's not like these women were forced at gunpoint to abort fetuses they wanted to keep. And it had the unforeseen consequence of decreasing the crime rate. What is wrong with that?"

It's sickening to me because it really reveals the plight of the poor, not because I'm against abortion. I can't imagine a situation where I would be against abortion rights.

Weren't we just all complaining about how much unemployment there is in the US? I swear I hear that so much... so how can we go from that to claiming that there's not enough US workers?

badinfluences-- it's disturbing b/c it essentially assumes that most aborted fetuses would have grown up to be criminals, which isn't really a pretty thing to think about.

This is really nothing new. Some shitfuck politician from some shitfuck state actually said a few months ago that abortion was not only to blame for the immigration problem, but also for the lack of participation in the military. It was pretty much the same quote - "those 40 million murdered babies could have been in the army!" type deal.

Right? Because all life is precious, and we need precious poor people having as many precious babies as possible so they can grow up and join the precious military out of complete desperation and get their precious heads blown off in a precious sand trap somewhere. Because, remember, all life is precious.

Fuck.

That guy needs to be reminded that there are tons of young, healthy College Republicans available to serve in the military (who won't).
But it's so convenient to blame feminists!

I think we can't decide what the aborted fetuses would have done. This reminds me of that picture in the Feministing Flickr lineup of the lady who had the sign that said "you killed the next president". No, no one killed the next anything. We can't say who would have done what. To be fair, someone should have also had a sign that said "you killed the next serial killer" or "you killed the next rapist" etc. We can't say what lives the fetuses would have held. Some may have grown up to be decent human beings, and some scumbags. We can't use womens' choices as a scapegoat. It's both racist AND misogynist..which I guess these people aren't too much against anyway, so why I am I surprised?

Oh man, if I hadn't had that abortion then my child could be working for less than minimum wage in inhumane conditions. Dammit!

I thought everyone knew by now that fetuses have no worth ethic anyway.

So basically he's saying that if it weren't for abortion, we'd have an underclass of 40 million more people than we do now.

Dontcha know? Abortion cuts down on the supply of children brought up in desperate poverty by immature parents, given crappy educations, who have no choice but to take shitty jobs when they grow up, and be thankful for them too. The remaining workers get all uppity and start wanting bathroom breaks and vacation and overtime, which is why we need to import Meskins to do our dirty work for minimum wage.

"Yeah, they tried to use that crap in the Social Security debate, too."

One of my Philosophy professors said that the baby boomers had created a social security crisis by aborting all of the fetuses that they did. While technically he is right, I disagree strongly with using this as an argument against abortion, because there are so many good reasons that women are having abortions (including the fact that we have a huge climate crisis on our hands due in part to overpopulation.)

I love the argument that abortions are killing "next presidents" and "next war heroes" and "next Nobel peace prize winners".

If my husband and I were to procreate, our offspring would have white-fros (we both have thick/curly hair), bad teeth (he had braces), bad vision (I have contacts), struggle with their weight (we're both muscularly built), and would be so analytically charged that every peer-conversation would end with: "Please, please...shut the fuck up."

In other words, they would be hairy, handicapped, socially awkward hermits who are too intellectual for their own good: the next unabombers.

Swell!

I remember reading somewhere that cows naturally eat grass. We feed them corn and that changes the pH in their digestive systems and allows e. coli to thrive.

Ooh ooh, I've got one! What if we hadn't spent those billions of dollars on that massive failure of a war in Iraq. For that matter, what if we hadn't spent the money on the Gulf War either? We could have insured the uninsured, revamped Medicare, secured social security, housed the homeless, funded alternative energy research... heck we could even have bought up some rainforest while we were at it. What would our situation be like now I wonder?

That's right... American imperialism is responsible for global warming! See I can do it, too! (Except, well, mine actually makes a smidge of sense... Foiled again! Curse you, Tom Delay!)