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Contraceptives save lives

I can see how this video would rankle anti-choicers. She kept blabbing on about how a woman should have the right to decide when she becomes a mother. Short of violence (or getting roofied like Mary), she can decide.
 
Cain said:
I can see how this video would rankle anti-choicers. She kept blabbing on about how a woman should have the right to decide when she becomes a mother. Short of violence (or getting roofied like Mary), she can decide.
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Can you explain a bit more. Lack of access to family planning means a woman can choose how exactly?
 
kerikiwi said:
Can you explain a bit more. Lack of access to family planning means a woman can choose how exactly?
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Not to speak for Cain, but she can of course choose not to engage in activities (i.e. sexual intercourse) that have a likelihood of impregnating her. I'm not necessarily advocating that be the choice everyone makes, I just thought I should mention that it is a viable option. Obviously, the expectation that all men and women eschew sexual interaction until they are in an economical and emotional condition to support a child is not realistic, as history has shown, and so we can hardly deal with the issue if that is the only choice we expect people to make.
 
Not to speak for Cain, but she can of course choose not to engage in activities (i.e. sexual intercourse) that have a likelihood of impregnating her.
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Logical and reasonable. But in reality it's not that simple. Women are expected to submit to their husbands, regardless of her desires or the consequences to her life.
 
TheAnachronism said:
Not to speak for Cain, but she can of course choose not to engage in activities (i.e. sexual intercourse) that have a likelihood of impregnating her.
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Sexual intercourse? What does that have to do with pregnancy?? What I had in mind involved shooing away the stork.

DragonLady

Logical and reasonable. But in reality it's not that simple. Women are expected to submit to their husbands, regardless of her desires or the consequences to her life.
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Maybe I'm just being totally racist here, but are you make it sound like most of these pregnancies happen within marriage.
 
Cain said:
Maybe I'm just being totally racist here, but are you make it sound like most of these pregnancies happen within marriage.
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The video mentions India and Kenya. I'm not real sure how their marriage laws work, but I get the distinct impression that most couples there are doing the equivalent of what we call "shacking up" here in the States. I don't know what kinds of legal obligations married couples have to each other there, or to the children of their unions.

Birth control pills are legal in Kenya, but women who take them risk public shunning and violence from their husbands. A wife is
often considered to be nothing more than a baby making machine despite the health risks, and the poverty. If a woman fails to
give birth often enough, or has unhealthy babies, a man may divorce her and take another wife. I suspect "deadbeat dad" syndrome is just as prevalent there as it is anywhere else, and that the ex is just on her own with little mouths to feed.

Last time I paid any real attention, India was pushing sterilization instead of birth control pills or condoms. For women there it's
permanent or abstinence, and we know how well abstinence works. It doesn't. So we might as well just take that off the table as even a temporary solution, and work on providing methods that are proven effective.
 
Don't they save fewer lives than the lack of contraceptives generates?

Jus' sayin'.
 
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DragonLady said:
The video mentions India and Kenya. I'm not real sure how their marriage laws work, but I get the distinct impression that most couples there are doing the equivalent of what we call "shacking up" here in the States. I don't know what kinds of legal obligations married couples have to each other there, or to the children of their unions.
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I only ask because I'd expect unmarried women to be more at risk for poverty than married woman.

For women there it's [sterilization] or abstinence, and we know how well abstinence works. It doesn't. So we might as well just take that off the table as even a temporary solution, and work on providing methods that are proven effective.
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Well said.
 
Beerina said:
Don't they save fewer lives than the lack of contraceptives generates?

Jus' sayin'.
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We've all seen pictures of starving African babies. I saw some particularly horrifying ones a few days ago. Stuff to make your blood curdle. I won't inflict them on you.

I'd rather a child never be born in the first place than to die like that.

The most humane way is to have fewer babies but higher rates of survival for the babies that do get born. The goal is not to increase the population but for people to only have as many kids as they can afford to care for.
 
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Beerina said:
Don't they save fewer lives than the lack of contraceptives generates?

Jus' sayin'.
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Just saying what, exactly? That any life is better than a sperm not fertilizing an egg? Not denouncing your point of view, I just want to understand. A child being born into horrific poverty and dying at the age of 2 from cholera because the mother was poor and didn't have birth control, and was in no way prepared for a child but bowed to social / biological pressures to have sex, is better than a sperm not fertilizing an egg?

Or (choosing another comon fate), the rights of a sperm is greater than a child starving to death?

The rights of a sperm is greater than the rights of the mother to decide if she wants to be pregnant? Doesn't the sperm come from the father? So since the sperm is one cell, a tiny infintisimal fraction of a man is > an entire woman?

I'd be delighted to hear this point of view from you further...
 
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And she's putting her money where her mouth is:

Melinda Gates' $560-million disagreement with the pope

It’s being billed as a major smack-down: prominent Catholic laywoman versus the pope. Melinda Gates, Microsoft founder Bill Gates’ wife and one half of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, “disagrees with the Vatican on the use of contraceptives,” according to the Guardian newspaper. With the British government, the foundation this week sponsored a London Summit on Family Planning designed to provide 120 million women in the world's poorest countries with access to contraceptives by 2020. Gates pledged $560 million for the effort.

"Of course I wrestled with this,” Gates told the newspaper. “As a Catholic I believe in this religion, there are amazing things about this religion, amazing moral teachings that I do believe in, but I also have to think about how we keep women alive. I believe in not letting women die, I believe in not letting babies die, and to me that's more important than arguing about what method of contraception [is right]."
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Didn't know she was a Catholic, but that's OK. I'm glad she can still think for herself, and her thinking on this is much better than the pope's.
 
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