On the "worst day" of his life this father fought back.

Terrific.

It was good of him to speak up; counterdemonstrate.
Possibly, I might have been a little less angry about it (unless he believed that thay hurt his wife).





David

People against abortions have a good moral argument until they involve the society in punishing the victims.... Making a law is easy, but solutions are not easy... Every pregnancy is different and every abortion is different, and if those against wanted to help, they could do many things such as taking mothers without money and support into their lives...They don't want to... They want it easy... Morality is never easy, but making laws is easy... Bringing the power of the state to bear against individual is easy... But that is the situation generally that ended with people pregnant with children they do not want...

No captions, again, but I think I got the gist of it. Good for him for talking back to them. I especially appreciate that after that, they were gone, and someone else was able to enter the clinic unharassed.

Of course he believed they hurt his wife.

She had, for all intents and purposes, a dead baby inside her, who would never live, and these 2 women are judging her worth?

This guy is a hero. I can't believe he kept that civil a tongue in his head.
Those 2 woman just kept spouting their party line, and couldn't even directly address his situation.

I'm sorry for his and his wifes tradgedy.

Nonsense; the pregnant woman owns her body
and she has an absolute moral right to defend her body from an intrusive parasite.





not always





BALONEY! Very ofen, morality is very easy.





David

He walks up to the women and says "excuse me, I wanna know exactly what it is you hope to accomplish here."
1st woman mumbles something, he says "I just walked in with my wife. We're trying to have another kid." He tells them their child had a 1:100,000 congenital deformity. "and you're yelling at my wife for doing nothing more than having a nearly dead baby inside her?"

they say some like "that's not what we're here for", and he replies "yeah? well that's what you just DID. You don't ask before, you're just yelling at random people, and you have no idea what you're doing to them. It's dispicable, it's dispicable"

She mumbles something else.

him "Oh please, because of people like you, no one wants to perform these anymore, because you make people who are already upset on the worst day of their lives feel even worse."

...

"There's a time sensitive nature on this, and I don't want her delivering a still born baby, and that's what would happen if we waited anymore."

When the 2nd woman waves her hand dismissively, he says "Oh, you want to stand out in public, but you don't want to make public statements? How hypocritical, that's nice."
she says something, he replies "yeah, I have seen the pictures, the one's you hold up with severed heads, because THAT's really eFFECtive (great sarcasm there).
Then they go on and talk about suicides, how she adopted a kid, blah blah blah. Then she says she's going to call the cops.

He says he's on public property, and knows his rights.

I used to volunteer at Planned Parenthood, and every day of the week
these pro lifers were out there showing off atrocious photoshopped pictures and
shouted indoctrinated phrases. They harassed everyone entering the building, pregnant or not. Fanatics of the worst kind, to say the least.

My daughter went to planned parenthood, for an appointment not related to abortion. This goes back a number of years. As she passed the protestors, they got in her face, screaming and shouting at her. They are too hysterical to even pick the right target sometimes.

Thank u; I have trouble hearing.
Your transcript was helpful.

I think he was a little easy on them.

I might have told this story before, but it fits here. In the mid-80's, NYC was having a crack epidemic and one of the places it was evident was in the maternity ward where babies where born addicted to crack via their mothers. A nearby Brooklyn hospital asked for neighborhood people to volunteer to hold babies as they went through withdrawal because nursing staff was overwhelmed. A girlfriend and I volunteered and we're told to go through the women's clinic at 8am to get our instructions. As we were going towards the doors, two middle age women and a man jumped in front of us and started chanting something like "baby killer" and waving fetus pictures at us. We later learned we were targeted because we were obviously young and going into a clinic known to do abortions starting at 8am. When I realized these nuts thought we were going to have abortions I told them we were there to comfort babies going through drug withdrawal. I asked them if that wouldn't that be a better way to spend their time? One of the women looked at me like I had grown another head and said "I don't have time to deal with crackheads I have babies to save". The man said something like "if you're lying you will burn in hell" and smashed a brochure in my hand, which I promptly ripped into confetti and tossed back at him. It summed up all anti-abortion fanatics for me. I'm in favor of a woman controlling her reproductive organs - that means using effective birth control at all times, but when that fails, or a sad story like this emerges, we need to have choices - and not ones made by fanatics.

Thanks for the summary, Chai! Much appreciated. (Another good deed for the day for you...)

My daughter temped at Brigham and Women's Hospital while in college. She was assigned to a stomach cancer team. She had to cross a picket line every morning. One morning, an anti-abortion demonstrator spat in her face. I was more worried about that man's sputum than I was about anything else.

I think fanatical commies, fanatical nazis, fanatical supporters of gun control and fanatical Japs were worse (just my opinion).


Over the years, I have taunted & provoked the anti-abortionists: made fun of their logic.

Some of them were strangers; some were my friends.

Taunting anti-abortionists can be fun.





David

To say a woman owns her body is not a moral argument; but a legal argument...

Here is the problem: If a woman is not free within her own body, where is she free??? And that too is a legal argument, and not a moral argument, because sometimes sins are sins sure enough, and immoral, the price of removing people from their rights and freedoms is too high... You just have to trust, if you trust in God, that God will recognize his own...

That is false; it is both.






No; that is only a procedural question.
She (or anyone) has an absolute right of self-defense.





I am not discussing religion.
I choose not to do so.




People 's rights can be and are violated; people cannot be removed from their moral rights.
This has nothing to do with religion.





David

I've been wondering...

Has it ever happened that these fanatics yelling at people outside the clinic resulted in someone saying "you know, you're right. I'm not going to get an abortion"

I watched boomers video again that night, and ended up finding these 2 characters

hugh and ron and one of their "confrontation" videos.

they are nuts.




"stop giving me confrontation, and we'll stop recording"

"it's illegal for you to assault my camera"

"everyone who comes up to us gives us confrontation"



etc.

When you use a term like moral right, you are stacking infinites... Moral forms cannot be defined, again, because they are infinite, and morality is a moral, which is to say, spiritual form, and one we find essential to health or wellbeing, and generally, to happiness, which of course demands survival as a predicate... And rights are a moral form as well... At its most basic we may suggest that a right is any power or freedom, another moral form, essential to life... At the extreme we may say a right is a power, or freedom essential to happiness, another moral form... That is about how we deal with moral forms, defining them in terms of other infinites, so stacking them does not help...

At some point, if we agree that political equality is a right, and that the free exercise of rights is a form of justice, then one must be free some place to be free any place... One must have some refuge of freedom such as ones room, or ones physical space, or in body, or mind, at a minimum, to be thought free... And what one does with ones self in ones space may be at root immoral, but that freedom must be allowed to people if they would engage freely, and act independently as a free society requires... We can stand a few people acting immorally in their bedrooms, houses, and persons because the price of denying such freedom is tyranny absolute... It is when a whole society becomes immoral, and demoralized that they are in trouble, and We Are in Trouble...

It is immoral to kill ones own unless required to do so for peace or justice... It is moral to defend ones own, and the rights of ones own to the death... That is traditional morality; that blood is thicker than water.... If any mother feels she must kill her own life, the life of her own because she cannot bear to share slavery with that one, or if the price of demanding civil and equal rights for that one in the commonwealth is too great, then she is demoralized, defeated, and a true slave beyond hope... We all need to defend the rights of the young, and look at those who seek love out of the devestation and destruction of their society as the most hopeful and promising of people...

We have no love... WE hate those little babies, and begrudge them their lives because we are overburdened, and look at every new mouth as a thief of what little we own... It is because we have too long shared our civil rights with property, and that is immoral, and demoralizing and it is destroying our society as we watch... You must understand, that if you read history, that morality, the morality we once all shared and which brought us intact out of primitive conditions surrounded by enemies, also survived until money and wealth made one the master of another, and it is that division over wealth that was the destruction of many societies, and that, for example, is the primary conflict in the dialogues of Plato, because their society was being destroyed by wealth and inequality...

We are in trouble, and those who kill their babies do not do so for themselves... They do it for us, so they will not have to challlenge us where we live to live up to our Christian principals... What free mother would not wish to share freedom with her children, and what slave mother ever welcomes a baby into slavery??? It is impossible for slaves to be moral, and we have become a nation of slaves waiting only for a moral people or a new morality to defeat us... Consider that the Roman's and the Greeks had their birth control and abortion...

They found their lives meaningless, too meaningless to share, and their society caved in around their ears... The Christians castrated theirs just like the pagans, and sold their daughters into prostitution for a mite... They died as a society because they had no self love, nothing to share, and no reason to live beyond the next party or plate of food... That is how societies die, on the way from feast to vomitorium, and when their boredom grows too great, or as old age creeps in, they open their veins and become so much rotting meat... Societies die of immoraltiy just as they become great with immorality... They take the easy way out of existence... And there is nothing easy about morality...