My doctor ran SCREAMING through the halls of that hospital to put me on IV, blood pressure monitoring, give me a SONOGRAM, and let him do SURGERY.

My younger daughter would not have been born 3 years later, almost to the day, if he had not done that and I had died.

I hear, and recommend, you! They need to hear OUR stories!!!!!

don't care about our real stories.

you are interfering with their god's plans.

you, and your choice, and the suffering you may experience are irrelevant. their choice supersedes all.

and nearly killed my mother. I don't even know who to thank for letting me be born when my mother and father went to different hospital.

They, nor any other human, cannot know what the future holds. The way I see it, is that my ectopic was meant to die, and I live, so my younger daughter could be born. Perhaps, in the grand scheme of god or mother nature, her life would have more of an impact on society, and the world she touched, than that doomed ectopic.

Of course, since these people cannot see the forest for the trees, they WON'T see or admit that. You life, and my daughter's, were meant to be. Their siblings had to die so you and her could be born. I am not a religious person, but that is my gut feeling on this.

I intend to speak up for ever if necessary, since my mother and father have good sense.

when I see those ads it make me want to punch them out. I heard with my own human ears, my living, breathing, and fully brain functioning, 3 year old child, say to me, "Mommy, Mommy, please don't DIE". It was not an ad or a figment of my, or anyone's, imagination. A 3 year old is fully capable of logically understanding a life or death situation of their parent. No embryo or fetus EVER WILL.

My 3 year old's REAL words helped to keep me alive.

I didn't think I was the only woman that was alive just because of this issue. Thank you so much for sharing.

She, her mother and my father were in a displaced persons camp in Germany some time after WW2. They were literally starving at times.

They were trying to emigrate to Great Britain, rather than get sent back to almost certain death behind the Iron Curtain. But the British immigration rules at that time permitted a married couple to enter with only one dependent. My grandmother had cancer, and my mother refused to abandon her own mother to starve in Germany. So when she found she was pregnant, she had an abortion. I can't even imagine what that abortion must have been like.

A couple of years later they made connections that enabled all three of them to emigrate to the U.S. I was born here three years after they arrived in NYC.

But I applaud their willingness to keep going on. That's an amazing tribute to humanity.

That's why it makes me so angry when people pretend that abortion is anti-life. So many women wouldn't have even survived to have children.

the historical context of that particular ruling beyond recognition. Historically, when labor failed to progress and the fetus was showing signs of distress (and yes, they could pick that up in the Middle Ages, they were illiterate, not stupid), the only way to save one of them was to do a primitive c-section, something that would kill the woman. If they did nothing, both would die. In that context, it made a great deal of sense.

This isn't the Middle Ages and c-sections no longer kill women. It is absolutely insane to insist a woman die of sepsis from dead tissue in her uterus. It is not going to resurrect and magically turn into an infant. It is only going to kill a woman.

I think Catholic hospitals need to do a little truth in advertising. They offer full services to men, but not to women. They should be seen as hospitals for men.

Even the VA does a much better job of women's health, even if female soldiers have to wear adult diapers during their menses because pads aren't available (true story from the 80s).

but of course, Catholic men at the Church run hospital had better ideas like she could die. My father said hell no, and took her to a state run hospital so that the dead tissue could be taken out. And she could remain fertile and have me. It's amazing to me how idiotic "pro-life" people can be. They prefer to have the nose cut off to save the face.

Regrettably. To this day, I hold the Catholic Church responsible and I consider the Church a gang of murdering misogynists.

At times, it is all I can do not to throttle a Catholic priest, bishop or cardinal when they speak Catholic dogma against a woman's right to reproductive health and privacy.

alive, during the process of fertilization and fusion of gametes in which they form a new organism, create a soul?

A “soul” would be an entity that will survive the death of the physical combination of mass and energy known as a fetus and human, and preserve memories of life as a physical being and experience pleasure and pain after death?

If you equate the soul with life energy then I would say as long as the zygote or fetus is dependent on its host, the mother, it shares the soul of the mother because it is part of her life energy that enables it to live and grow too. My opinion is that only when the baby is able to live and breathe on its own, without the mother, then it has a human soul separate from the host. I know this reasoning has all the aspects of the "how many angels can sit on the head of a pin" debate, which is why I think ascribing a human soul to a clump of cells doesn't make sense.

discuss and listen to disparate opinions on a question that cannot be answered by the scientific method subject to the immutable laws of nature and cause and effect processes that we only dimly understand.

Thanks for sharing your energy with me and back at you.

I treasure that, too.

according to the Bible that is a reasonable assumption. In Genesis, Adam did not become a living being until he took his first breath: "the LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being." Genesis 2: 7

But of course, right-wing nuts have to be different and be oppressive.

as breath. The old belief was that the soul entered the body with the first breath, like when Adam became more than clay.

definition of 'life'. My dog is definitely alive and deserves to be well treated. I am not sure about his soul. Using a 'soul' as the benchmark for whether or not a living being has rights could get dicey for animals. Hell, I am not sure about MY 'soul'. I would like to think such a thing exists, but it might only exist because we would all like to think so.

I believe that a fetus can be considered a separate life when it is developed enough to reasonably survive outside the womb. Which is realistically what...like 25 weeks? I think that if there are no complications threatening the mother's life, after 25 weeks she should not have an abortion. I know there are people who will not agree with me and their number is shorter, longer or whenever. This is just how I feel.

governed by immutable laws that are yet to be discovered, and with basic senses handicapped by inability to precisely measure cause & effect processes.

I hope something survives the death of my body and that something survived the death of my late wife of 47 years but . . . . . . . . ?

There's no evidence for it. It seems likely it's something people have made up to make themselves feel better and deny that death means death.

and don't like thinking that their "specialness" will die out with their body. Humans have tremendous ego, but wishful thinking doesn't make something exist. There's no evidence for the existence of souls, even though billions wish it so.

It would be like me saying: "PROVE that that purple tap-dancing unicorn I believe in doesn't exist."

So why should those who believe in a soul have the right to force those who do not to follow their religious concepts?

And certainly under American law, that should NOT be a consideration.

overwhelming majority can control government and pass and enforce any law it wishes.

If however you believe there are some things prohibited to government, then what are they and from whence did those preexisting rights proceed?

I also do not believe in "preexisting rights". Human societies have generated agreements as to how people should behave. As societies change those agreements change.

Abortions were likely prohibited for various reasons - until relatively recently many abortions were not safe and could result in infertility or death for the woman. They also reduced the control that males had over the bodies of "their" women.

Once contraception and abortion became safer and more reliable, the current dichotomy developed between the people who wanted to maintain the old ways when contraception and abortion were dangerous enough to deter most women from taking that chance and people who accepted their reliability and adjusted their world view to allow women more freedom and control of their lives.

If your beliefs do not accept contraception and abortion, that is your problem and if you are male, the problem of any woman who gives your a part of her life. But don't subject other people to your beliefs if they don't share them.

I grew to adulthood when abortion was illegal and I don't want to to return to that time. Making abortion illegal does not reduce the number of abortions, it just increases the number of women dying from botched abortions.

Education and availability of contraception is the best way to reduce the number of abortions. If you want to reduce abortions, make sure there are good sex education programs in schools and that contraceptives are available to every female who wants them.

That there is a contingent that would prefer women die than have sex. Period.

Women having sex is anathema, but men having sex is just fine. Well, it takes two to tango.

the not so subtle tale that sin and other evils exist only because Eve listened to the serpent.

Was what created sin. Knowing that the sex act caused pregnancy was a female secret back in the pagan days. Fertility rites were practiced in the ancient temples as rituals. The women were the heads of the religion. The bible has some references to pagans having temple whores but for the most part any concept of a female deity has been scrubbed from reference.

That's why priests still wear robes.

still coexist in nature without killing each other.

Not all can do that and too often threads on DU degenerate into ad hominem attacks that only feed hate.

That's pretty pathetic.

was commonly accepted that girls should be virgins when they married, but boys needed to get experience first so they could teach their brides. I remember having girl friend conversations that started with, "Who are the boys supposed to get experience from if the girls are forbidden to participate?"

The whole argument made no sense, so as you can imagine my generation was the first one to become sexually liberated, this nonsense thinking and the invention of the pill did it.

As a preteen I questioned the dogma coming from the lofty pulpit.

The minister would never answer my question as to how people who came to church each Sunday, sang hosannas and alleluias the loudest, and occupied the amen seats reserved for the deacons, could go forth to the coming week and cheat and take advantage of the the poor in spirit, the meek, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, and the sick.

Today I'm an old man and accept the answer is the hypocrisy of mankind.

Then we wouldn't have to die, and they wouldn't get to reproduce.

They were not allowed to perform the procedure thanks to the ant--choice members of Congress. I was so shocked at the time. I had no idea how common such horrible decisions are. The men who made them should rot in hell for their lack of compassion.

My mother was cared for by a Doctor at a Catholic hospital. My mother miscarried twice in about a year's time. (1954-1955) After the 2nd miscarriage, the doctor handed my mom a brown paper bag in which he placed a diaphragm. He gave it to her because he thought she was getting pregnant too quickly, and didn't want her to have another miscarriage.

Mom used the diaphragm for about a year. She then got pregnant with me. My mother and that doctor both could have been arrested and served in time in jail.

This is what the repugs want, contraception illegal. I thank that doctor at the Catholic hospital who cared more for my mother's health than the doctrines of those he was employed by.

Thoughtful and kind.

Remember the "teach-ins" of the Vietnam War era? We need one now about contraception. Let the medical scientists on university campuses advertise openly public teach-ins about the truth and the LIES about birth control to the people so they can understand what is AT STAKE in this battle. Otherwise, they will LOSE their right to privacy under the Griswold and subsequent decisions that guarantee that right!

The American people don't know what they are at risk to LOSE in this!

Margret Danger revisited.

early '80's my mom thought she had taken DES, while pregnant with me. I contacted the doctor, he sent her records to us very quickly, and as she had taken DES, he wrote a note to me, hoping that all was right with me. All is well. Some health concerns, but none associated with DES.

I am against abortion but do not feel it should be illegal.

stopped at 7 wks when the baby stopped growing and had died... Obviously, the dead fetus has to come out... But that's the thing, some of these whack-a-do's would call this procedure and abortion... 4 months later, she was preggo again, and I have a beautiful niece.... It was a sad time for us all and painful to have my sister in pain about losing a wanted child. Things happen, even when there is a wanted baby... This is why medical decisions are best left up to patient and Dr and family if patient wants advice...

not be an abortion. At that point, the doctor is performing an abortion, but rather a procedure to remove dead tissue from the uterus, both to preserve the woman's future fertility and/or preserve her very life. How on earth can they call that an "abortion"?

I sometimes get a bit annoyed with some people who are pro-choice, but who nevertheless seem to have the attitude that abortion is somehow a great evil or a bad thing. US TV often takes this attitude that when someone is shown to have an abortion, somehow this must be portrayed as a morally-diminishing choice. At the same time, the woman who "bravely" chooses not to abort, despite doctors telling her there's a great chance the pregnancy will finish her off, is often portrayed as heroic rather than foolish.

As some of the stories here show, sometimes an abortion is the more moral option than continuing a pregnancy. I wish that statement was less controversial than it seems to be, even in pro-choice circles.