Aborting The Issue

Alison Piepmeier recounts her story of conception, decision, and finally cessation.

I thought about all the selfish reasons I wasn’t ready for a child—I want to write another book, we might need to move for my job—and wondered whether it was okay for me to decide based on my own desires. Walter had tumultuously mixed feelings; he has children from a previous relationship and didn’t think he wanted to be a father again, but he wasn’t sure he believed that abortion was an ethical decision. I listened intently to him even as I talked back in my head: “It’s not your decision to make! I can’t keep being pregnant!” We talked about adoption, but I knew we couldn’t do it—we can’t even walk by a pet store without getting attached, so I knew if we spent nine months with this being, it would be ours for life. So where did that leave us?

Listen, I have all the respect and concern in the world for people’s personal struggles, and I wish Mrs. Piepmeier and her husband all the best. But this piece represents everything that’s backwards about the pro-choice worldview. She cannot afford to have the child; she cannot choose adoption, because obviously she cannot be expected to maintain that decision until the birth. And what might happen? She might decide to keep the child! Do you see the mentality here? She decided she could not let herself want the child. Was it an unwanted pregnancy because it was unaffordable, or was it unaffordable because, really, it just wasn’t wanted?

The pro-choice mentality places supremacy not on human dignity and life but on the whims and personal anecdotes of select individuals. But even the whims aren’t what’s most important. Mrs. Piepmeier’s story shows us that the modern pro-choice mind is now so entrenched in fundamentalist feminism that there is now an effort to fight any desire for life. How sad.

Read: Mike Adams responds.

Author: “Obesity Is a Lifestyle Choice”

I don’t know what a “health economist” is, but it sounds pretty straight shootin:

 As adult obesity balloons in the United States, being overweight has become less of a health hazard and more of a lifestyle choice, the author of a new book argues.

“Obesity is a natural extension of an advancing economy. As you become a First World economy and you get all these labor-saving devices and low-cost, easily accessible foods, people are going to eat more and exercise less,” health economist Eric Finkelstein told AFP.

In “The Fattening of America”, published this month, Finkelstein says that adult obesity more than doubled in the United States between 1960 and 2004, rising from 13 percent to around 33 percent.

I wonder if anyone might take offense at obesity being called a “lifestyle choice.” Certainly, there are many people who suffer from various diseases and disorders that encourage obesity. But I would be willing to wager that for ever 1 such case, there are a dozen instances of laziness and overeating.

Here’s a radical idea for my American generation: Turn off the Xbox, unplug the iPod, and take a nice stroll through your neighborhood park. There just may be more in it for you than you think.