Amen!
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Butā¦ butā¦ butā¦ adoption!
The same people who think abortion is unnecessary because of adoption donāt really support adoption either. Not to mention that the foster system in many states is FUBAR. Children get placed in abusive homes because thereās no background check, and there are hundreds of cases per caseworker and many more that are unassigned, so thereās no follow-up. Kids are out on their ass when they turn 18, whether or not they have completed high school or have a job or a place to stay, because they are legally adults and thus can fend for themselves 
Just pull yourself up by your bootstraps!
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Yep, that is the term.
Although they may be ignorant about their own Churchās teachings as well, because most religious people arenāt religious zealots. They just think of church as a place to sit their ass down for an hour on Sunday so they can consider themselves good people. Atheists know more about Christianity than Christians do. Maybe thatās why theyāre not religious? They look into their religion, see all the crazy rules and restrictions, and nope out of there.
Iām with you there. I have no problem with people who have strict rules for themselves, until they start pushing their rules on everyone else. Itās even worse if they donāt really apply these rules to themselves.
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Pro-life views on adoption are so complicated. Most of them are against it, at least personally (NIMBY). The only pro-life couple Iāve ever known who adopted is my parents. And for them, it was both their shame and a cudgel. My mom had endometriosis and was very sick. Back then, they didnāt take that type of pain seriously and the disease progressed to the point where she had to have a hysterectomy. Back then, those were done in the maternity ward. She got to spend her night in the hospital hearing families being made around her. She has deep, deep trauma because of it.
My fatherās family rallied against her. I spent my entire childhood hearing how they should divorce, how she faked illness to shame my father, all this stuff. They had a really rough go of it.
During my teen years, the perfect sacrifice of my birth mother was a cudgel to try and beat the sexuality out of me. How could I have condoms in my bag - what if my birthmother was so selfish? I wouldnāt exist! Thereās a weird duality there - adoption is both verboten, and the highest and most beautiful sacrifice.
Among my dadās family members, all his sisterās daughters have had IVF. On their facebook wall, they advocate adoption - though theyāve had 3-5 kids without ever once doing it. Most pro-lifers Iāve seen advocate private adoptions (but not for themselves, heavens no!), which are really problematic and often force birthmothers into contracts they donāt understand. The goal is to bamboozle a young, white woman into giving them her baby whether she wants to or not.
In any event, itās very clear to me that pro-lifers donāt care about children. They care about degrading women.
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I do not know what her political views are. We did not discuss that. I assume she is pro-life in her voting based on her own personal choices, but I have never seen her post on it, nor did I have the conversation with her that I recall.
Iām not sure how what she did is abortion?
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Who knows? Maybe she did. Condoms break. The failure rate is about 5% for perfect use, which means if you use condoms 20 times, the condom is expected to fail once. For typical use, itās much higherā¦ 20 or 25% I think? Itās hard to tell, because people donāt have adequate sexual education so they do all sorts of crazy shit that will defeat the purpose of a condom* or even cause the condom to break.** Iām sure for some people, the failure rate must be close to 100%.
I agree wholeheartedly with this:
Only Iād throw proper sex education into the mix as well.
*Putting it on halfway through, for example. Never date a basketball player. They dribble before they shoot.
**Like, doubling up. People think this decreases the risk of failure, but really it makes it easier for both condoms to break.
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What a horribly fucked up way to treat a child. I hope youāve been able to come to terms with everything that was done to you. I wouldāve severed all ties upon reaching age 18 (and maybe you did, Iām not going to press you) if Iād been forced to grow up in your circumstances.
The Children of Abraham are a messed up lot.
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That makes a world of difference then. If sheās in favor of restricting reproductive choice because of religious reasons, and religious reasons that she doesnāt hold for herself, then sheās ignorant at best and a hypocrite at worst. If she doesnāt, then itās all fine.
She had seven embryos implanted, and only one got carried to term, meaning that the other six were destroyed. These embryos, or lives, were created with the expectation that not all of them would make it to term. Technically more miscarriage than abortion, but the distinction isnāt as big as most people think it is. An abortion is just an intended miscarriage, and in this case, the line is very blurry. Regardless, forced-birth legislators donāt care about what little distinction there is. There are laws on the books that punish women for miscarrying, because thereās always something (according to these stupid laws) that the woman did or didnāt do, making the miscarriage a deliberate infanticide.
Besides, as I pointed out above, even if there were no selective abortion and every implanted embryo got carried to term in every case, the Catholic Church would still be against IVF. Because:
2377 Techniques involving only the married couple (homologous artificial insemination and fertilization) are perhaps less reprehensible, yet remain morally unacceptable.*
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I hate the Catholic Church with the fire of a million burning suns. I donāt know anyone brought up in that religion who was not scarred by the guilt of trying to live up to impossible rules. No matter how lax they are in their practice, they all carried that guilt, that sense of being less than. And most everyone I knew was so wedded to it no matter that they never went to church and personally were against most of the teachings, still they felt in their heart they were Catholic and to be anything else would be a betrayal of their own identity. It is just so so so screwed up - and we havenāt even gotten to the pedophilia.
re: IVF, okay, right, yeah I vaguely remember that. Probably she said a few Hail Marys or something ??? Thatās how that works, right?
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What an awful way to treat a child!
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I really donāt understand why people go for IVF, other than a biological drive. (But then I donāt have kids.) Why not adopt if you canāt have children naturally? Weāve gotten closer at least to looking at pregnancy and childbirth as a natural thing, rather than an illness where a woman was in the hospital for ten days treated as an invalid. So why deliberately bring medical science so intimately into this natural process? It seems backward.
But I guess I donāt understand the need to have a child with DNA that matches half mine and half my partnerās.
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True, but it made me tough. Iām the only kid in my family who is educated and financially self-reliant.
Itās hard for me to address this because I didnāt really have a hard time getting pregnant. But I do enjoy being pregnant. Itās a hell of a thing. I get why people would chase the experience of having your own.
I could never afford IVF, though. A lot of insurances donāt cover it - mine doesnāt. Itās painful, inconvenient (being rural, the nearest clinic offering those services is an hour away) and works about half to 2/3 of the time for a woman my age (30). Thereās a possibility that someone my age could throw tens of thousands at IVF and come away with nothing. Again, as a person with no trouble getting pregnant, itās hard for me to talk about a choice I wonāt face. But it really does seem so potentially crushing to work so hard, and spend so much, and still have a substantial chance of nothing. Among friends of mine who have done IVF, there often is a franticness during treatment and an extreme stress because they might only be able to afford one or two rounds.
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I think negative experiences can have that effect. A ālearning experienceā as it were.
Like the old dictum, āI guess you had to be there!ā 
Oh, well, one of those things I suppose my brain is not built to understand. But everyone is different! Iām glad itās so positive for you.
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I know plenty of women from the last generation to get longer hospital stays after giving birth, and they universally remember it as a good thing. Why? Because once they got home they were responsible for themselves and the baby, entirely. At least in hospital they got to rest and someone made their meals for them. Plus they got to hang out with other new mums without having to bundle up themselves and the baby and go out.
Todayās quick discharges assume a family whose members have time on their hands to pitch in, and the expertise with which to do it. Visiting nurses can help, and some countries are better about support than others. But itās not guaranteed.
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Thus what the experience is like (being treated like a new mom rather than as an invalid) is whatās important. Good point.
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On more than one occasion, Iāve been required to explain the difference between Catholic and Protestant to church-going Catholics. And I was raised atheist.
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The difference? Heh, thereās more than one.
Thereās the whole issue with church hierarchy, and with priests (not) marrying, which is something that not even Catholics can agree on. Roman Catholics say priests canāt marry, other rites disagree.
My favorite of all the differences is the Ten Commandments. Whenever anyone of any denomination makes reference to the Ten Commandments like itās a Buzzfeed Listicle From God, I have to ask: which Ten Commandments? Jewish, Orthodox, Catholic, Mainline Protestant, or Baptist? They each have their own numbering. Read that section of the Bible again. They arenāt even numbered in the Bible, and they donāt sum to exactly ten if each part of a commandment is taken as separate.
You are probably referring to transubstantiation though. Catholics believe that communion is the literal body and blood of Christā¦ in theory. In practice, practically none believe that, and several get offended when thatās pointed out. The weird hand movements and stuff that the priest is doing behind the altar have complex and intricate meanings, but Iād be surprised if the average Catholic was even aware of any of it.
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Yup, yup, yup.
Then thereās things like the sacrament of confession, which some people do because they want to have communion,but loads of people donāt because a) they disagree they need the intercession of a priest to talk to God and b) they forgot about that rule anyhow.
And then thereās all the pagan stuff that gets passed on but people think is Catholic. When my dad passed away, my Eastern European grandmother tried to express what happened to his soul theologically, and wound up describing it the way a pre-Christian Greek would have ā pretty at odds with actual doctrine. She also believed the dead could and did speak to you in dreams, which again is way more pagan than Catholic ā but she believed all those things were Catholic.
I always wonder if all that Latin and banning the Bible for lay people for centuries weirdly preserved more than intended. It used to be you went to church because it was the law and you did the sacraments because it was expected and you listened to the priests no matter what. Thatās kind of content-free faith. It has to fill up with something.
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There are apparently eight:
I was only aware of five.
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