I mean, since he's busy cutting and pasting bits and bytes from civil rights speeches to claim as his own and all ...

It seems to me that what Obama is missing is that we are pro-choice precisely because we respect the difficulty, seriousness and emotional minefield that women face when dealing with pregnancy, and do not presume to be able to decide for others on the basis of our own individual beliefs.

In fact, I would submit that people who support the right of women to make their own reproductive decisions have more respect for what is at stake, and that is why we do not impose ourselves on that decison-making process.

How does he not get that?  Really, how?  

It's comments like his that make me question whether he really understands what it means to be pro-choice.  And I have a viscerally negative reaction to being condescended to - again - as if being pro-choice means I haven't bothered to take the time to consider the totality of the issues.

I've only ever been pregnant twice, and I have two wonderful 20-something daughters who make me proud every day.  I was fortunate to have been married and financially secure and healthy and to have planned both pregnancies.  I don't know that I could have had an abortion - but I could not and would not presume to impose my own feelings on any other woman.  Ever.  

Honestly, the more I hear this man speak, the worse I feel about him.  And the more my response to him is, "Who the h*ll do you think you are?"

I'm sorry, but I don't want a president who is that in love with himself and his inflated idea of who he is - I want a president who is in love with America and in love with us, the people.

Like abortion should be safe, legal, and rare?

He doesn't have the vaunted Rethuggernaut pounding on media and local partisans to support stupid statements.

Bush is a lightweight whose every stupid statement had "support" in that the slightest critic got shredded [by phone banks, bosses at the media salt mines, party machinery donors, the character=assassinating Wurlitzer and so on.]

Therefore Bush could walk into any Village cantina and shake his saber or spout his hooey as the buffoon at the head of the right wing and corporate phalanx.

But TeamO can't keep relying on their usual excuse-making with their candidate screwing up this persistently with his own actions and words.

His fans can't claim that the evil Sen. Clinton misrepresented Obama's words or put them in his mouth when they're right out there, baldly stating the latest POS he just baldly stated.

They can't cry Leave Britneybaaaama Alonnnnnnnnne because he's being called out on his own words -- and expect, too, to be taken seriously as the leadership of Destiny and Change.

Down the road in the GE, they can't pretend that there's "swiftboating" going on -- ie, revisionism from invention -- with all this fresh, obvious crud Obama has left in his win-ugly, scorched-earth campaign when his magical roller coaster ground to a haltto before he sealed the primary.

Gargh. Barak, abortion is a private matter between the woman and her healthcare provider. Keep yourself out of it.

About 4 weeks later, she had to attend a seminar on abortion, as she went to Catholic school.  She was depressed and distraught for weeks.  She said she would never do it again, and was positively beside herself for her "lack of responsibility" regardless of how much my friends and I reassured her.

In college, she got pregnant again because the condom broke.  Whether there really was a condom or not, I have no way of knowing.  But she had her baby, and finished college as a single mom.  The dad, of course, bailed.  But she kept telling me she couldn't have an abortion a second time because she "[was] responsible."

Purely anecdotal, but when people beat that dead horse of pro-choicers not having a moral compass or understanding or what-have-you, I think of my friend and get irate.

Rights and protections: not only do we all DESERVE them, they're not something he can strip away to use as political capital.

Obama is just slippery. His pattern is that whatever is right is what gets him good news coverage or transient support in his immediate fight to take down his immediate obstacle to the WH.

Problem is, in scorching away what's in front of him he's also taking apart what'll get his back in the fight against the GOP wood chipper ahead.

I believe the automatic awarding of Catholic support to the anti-choice column -- based on the wrong-headed mainstream tendency to run away from this "icky" issue instead of making it a cornerstone of human rights -- is a big reason the Dems consistently lose out on support.

Being anti-abortion and pro-choice isn't uncommon among practicing -- and even practicing conservative -- Catholics. That gets yadda yadda'd a lot by numbers crunchers who stick it in the Special Interest aisle only because they don't care about it.

Their other empty exercise of tweaking filigreed frames always comes off as patronizing and outright stupid. No one needs Democrats to tell people how to practice their reliions and save their souls.

In fact, I've even said what you said about appendectomies.

I happen to believe that a fetus becomes a baby when the mother thinks it's one.  For some it's way before the pregnancy and for others, it's never going to happen.

AND, "I really wish that progressives would stop pandering to the right on this issue. Abortion is a medical procedure. When we start to overlay moral issues on private medical decisions, things get ugly fast. "

Abortion is something women do when they have no other choices, and generally, when you are at a point where you have no other choices, you are not in a very good place.

And abortion is one of those things where, when viewed in the abstract, it seems wholly clinical - I mean, what's the big deal, right?  Collection of cells that isn't a person - might as well be a bunion - or so it seems until you are actually pregnant.

I would never want abortion to not be an option for anyone.  And it irks me no end when men presume to want to control what our choices are.

But - and I say this as a mother - there is a huge difference between what abortion can mean when you are not pregnant and have never been pregnant, and what it means when you are.  At least in my opinion.

When I was pregnant with daughter #1, I first felt her move at about 15 weeks - just barely into the second trimester.  With #2, it was a week or so earlier.  Trust me when I tell you that when it moves, it's no longer an abstract, it's pretty real.  And you don't feel like you did before you got pregnant - what with all the hormones and the big b**bs and the constant nausea - so it's not like you are the same person.  It's all different.

I don't say all this as a criticism of your opinions - just as someone who knows that feelings change - or can change - when something goes from being abstract to being real, and it's suddenly your reality, not something that concerns some faceless, nameless woman.

As I said, above - it would have been a very difficult decision for me, had I been in a position where I had to consider it.  Not from a moral standpoint, but from the standpoint of something being lost, I guess.

Some women become anti-choice after having children, but for me, it strengthened my feeling that no one - no one - should have the right to step in and make a decision like that for someone else.

Having been there during my wife's ultrasounds, I'm not inclined to make a comparison between an appendix and what I saw.

I reserve the right to overlay morality on a private medical decision AS LONG AS I keep that overlay to myself.

I hope that's OK with you.