Arizona Legislature passes several abortion restriction bills: relation of abortion to war

All of these bills had been introduced in the legislature before and passed, but were all vetoed by democratic governor, Janet Napolitano. Pro life republican legislaters wasted no time in introducing them again when Napolitano became head of homeland security, and Janet Brewer, a republican, took her place as governor. Republican Brewer it is believed will not veto the bills as she has a good pro life voting record.
What will be required now is a 24 hour waiting period after applying for an abortion. Protesters especially objected to this saying that this meant abortion providers would have to make 2 trips to rural areas, first to inform the woman wanting the abortion of what is involved, and what her alternatives are, and then returning to actually perform the abortion.
A bill had also been passed to require parental consent by any minor seeking an abortion. It was discovered that some were forging their parents names, so legislaters wanted an addition to this bill requiring the notarization of the signature. Janet Napolitano also vetoed this bill in its entirely so this restriction was never enforced. I was happy to see this bill strengthened as when my 15 year old son worked and paid for his 15 year old girlfriend to get an abortion, they were not required to tell their parents at all. So I did not get any chance to try to save the child. My son said "I didn't want to be a 15 year old father!" I said, "You would have adjusted. There have been thousands of teens who became fathers." I knew this son was tender hearted, and in time would have come up to the challenge. Sadly this son has never had another child. His girlfriend never saw me afterwards but what she said how she regretted having that abortion. She feared to tell her parents. Clearly, what was a problem with parents at 15 turned into a lifetime of regret caused by an abortion.
The bill also gives doctors, pharmacists, and other professionals the right to refuse participate in an abortion or prescribe emergency contraception (which is an essence an abortion at the very earliest stages.
A second measure to the bill would impose a fine or 2-year prison sentence for performing an illegal abortion known medically as intact dilation and extraction. Currently the prison sentence is one year.

Of course there is always the fear of Obama getting FOCA passed in congress, if enough votes can be mustered, to rescind all the restrictions states have imposed on abortion! FOCA is frighteningly pervasive in allowing late term partical birth abortions without restriction. FOCA (Freedom of Choice Act) would also put legalized abortion in a category where it could not be touched. Yes, that is the aim of those pushing the bill. Never again a restriction on abortion by the states. Never again abortion not available. In fact, they would like people who propose restrictions to be prosecuted!
Let's hope these extremists don't have their way, but pro life people were alarmed at Obama's campaign promises to the strong pro choice faction of the democratic party. As a democrat I continued to fight for pro life democrats to speak up and oppose the party of civil rights being shanghaiied by abortion advocates. To me, the bloodshed of abortion does not put it in the same category at all of civil rights, even though abortion advocates have tried to make it sound like abortion is just as noble a cause as equality for blacks.
I think of them as extremists just as I think of the Bush presidents as war mongerers, believing that brutal crushing modern warfare is the only way to solve problems with Iraq. There is probably going to be centuries of emnity now toward the U.S. in Iraq. I feel President Bush could not get it out of his head that he needed to invade Iraq to finish up in the warrior way what his dad started. It is so easy not to think of the terrible violence that has ensued ever since in Iraq, because it is not happening in our country. We don't have to dodge bullets and get risked being blown up with car bombs and suicide jihaud martys with bombs strapped to their bodies. Our country was not invaded by the crushing military force of the U.S. Our capitol was not bombed as Bagdad was. And then WMDs were not found. Oh sorry! Excuse me.
I abhor war fare. I abhorred the Viet Nam war, thought we had no business there, bombing the country in the dark ages, too, in a war we could not win, because for one thing we just did not have the moral conviction we should be there, just as we did not have this in Iraq. I hated Johnson expanding the war in Viet Nam and I hated Nixon's support of war, and I hate McCain's belief that war solves more problems than it causes. I declared myself a conscientious objecter in my twenties.
Abortion is just another war, on the unborn. Another slaughter of the innocents.

The following is my open letter to the Arizona Republic just published in my blog g4life. I want you to have the chance to read it since accessing my blog g4life is very difficult.
Open letter to Arizona Republic about using the idea that church and state should remain separate to express prejudice against 'church' thinkers in regard to abortion
The disrespecting of what churches teach us with the legalizing of abortion is denying that the churches have for centuries attempted to find solutions to the age old problems of conception, too many children unhealthy for the mother and society, in fact the gamut of problems relating to conception without resorting to violence and wrong doing.
If you study the history of nuns you find that many women sought refuge in the nunneries of the day formed for women to get away from these very problems that had overwhelmed them out in their society. Vows of abstinence were commonly taken as the only sure way to prevent pregnancy, and many of these women elevated abstinence to something holy, the power of which is not understood today with a media that has attempted to purge all publications of anything to do with 'church thinking', in a misguided idea that we must have complete separation of church and state which is another idea that is pure propaganda in nature, causing people to huff and puff without quite knowing what they are objecting to. Quite as though church thinkers are far more dangerous than abortion advocates when they are not apt to insist killing is harmless (in the case of the fetus).
But then another propaganda idea is that abortion is not really killing. Propaganda is getting people to believe something that is not rational or logical. It is based on arousing the people's emotions, and once the blood rushes to the head, logic can fly out the window.
Well, over a million abortions a year ought to convince us that such extremism is not going to change those numbers, that in fact, we have a long way now to go to find effective ways to curb abortions. Legalizing abortion has only caused the numbers to rise for reasons unrelated to rape, incest, severe birth defects, and to save the life of the mother. We have discovered that if a questionable and violent solution to unwanted pregnancy is made legal, people will use it. If people who are tempted are told it is not killing they will believe that, too. Nothing is really going to bring down abortion deaths besides illegalizing it again except for such reasons as incest, rape, and severe birth defects, and threat to life of the mother. 95 perent of abortions are not performed now days for those reasons.
People thought people just might outgrow slavery too, but they showed no signs of doing so until they were forced to give it up! The press has often denigrated abstinence. Sometimes we can risk pregnancy with extraneous birth control, but sometimes we absolutely cannot have a child without grave hardship, and for this holy abstinence is the only sure prevention besides the violent solution of abortion.
Holy abstinence to me is far superior to unholy blood shed of the innocent fetus.
In order to embrace the killing of the fetus the pro choice faction has had to deny how serious it is to take life. They keep talking about a woman's right to chose what to do with her body, and a fetus is a separate entity and it is only a matter of semantics to deny that the child in that early stage is not 'alive.' The woman is responsible for the sex that caused conception, and she does have the 'choice' of seeing that conception does not happen even if she has to abstain when she does not believe she can afford a child.
With legalized abortion we stopped asking women to be responsible in a rational and logical manner. "A woman's right to choose what to do with her own body" is a propaganda slogan, no more or less, highly effective, designed to cause women to become emotional and indignant without deep thought which is what propaganda is designed to do.
It is time to reactify these questionable tactics by abortion advocates by opening back up the abortion debate to allow thinking to take place from many sources. Around 48 million abortion deaths since 1973 should be enough to convince any thinking people we need more thinking about abortion, more opinions from every source, more people to get passionately involved in saving these lives.
Irresponsible childbearing is a man and woman problem not a fetus problem, but in an abortion it is the fetus that pays the price. The fetus is innocent of all wrong doing and lack of responsibility. We need to put the blame for unwanted pregnancy on the adults, and they are the ones who need to find other ways to solve the problem besides killing their own children conceived irresponsibly.
We do not have a totalitarian government, so we should not support totalitarian birth control that requires killing to accomplish. Totalitarian practices made to sound harmless with illogical propaganda that lead to many deaths can creep into any country and flourish if the people do not perceive them and are not determined to root them out. America has always stood for freedom and equal rights to everybody. We need to give back the fetus the right to life. After conception it takes bloodshed and violence to kill the fetus. That should be enough to convince any American that abortion does not stand for freedom in America. 48 million children killed by legalized abortion since '73 is unAmerican."
As soon as this is posted I am going to respond to comment by one who calls herself a liberal that she has never learned anything from a church! Wow! What a statement. I have read Catholic Saint stories by the ton, whenever I could get them. The brilliance of some Catholic thinkers was I thought acknowledged by everyone. I have gone to a number of churches, sometimes for months when what they had to offer was very compelling. I was raised a Mormon and most of my family in Utah remained Mormon. Some are inactive, some are very active. I have read many books written by women, especially, who were raised in polygamy and became convinced it was not right. I have read many histories, diaries of value by Mormon historians. I have in my cupboard now a truthful and honest account I believe of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, a black day in Mormon history for which they have been vilified ever since. Juanita Brooks, this historian, is respected by non Mormons as well. A person's own ignorance is not a good justification to reject all 'church' thinking, but some people do it. People now days tend to try to get out of reading anything of any length at all. Kids play video games for hours instead of reading! The more you read, the faster reader you become, and above all the better informed about an issue. A nation of video game players and people who cannot stand books is a pretty frightening prospect.

Fighting over issues on Youtube

My video "Gerry focuses on Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA)" has gotten 27 hits so far, which shows there is enough interest for me to deem this video worth making, but let me tell you what has alarmed me about such things as this extremist legislation--what I am seeing on Youtube. Obama turned to Youtube to help spread his word, which proved to be highly successful in reaching the young, but just as strongly, those in opposition, especially to this bill, have turned to Youtube. I have seen videos now of Obama making promises in his speeches to support this act all the way as he did in one to Planned Parenthood. Now this is unprecedented for a male candidate to do this in our history of legalized abortion. I just saw a video that said "This man will be supporting 6,000,000 deaths in his term of office." The video goes on to say that the US is estimated to be killing 1,500,000 a year in legalized abortion. The implication is that if this bill is signed, the numbers will climb, which I think they surely will, and Obama will be tied to these deaths.
What I fear is that Obama is being made the sacrificial goat for the abortion rights extremists who are going to make everybody in opposition furious if this bill is signed into law that can't be touched. He will be a much bigger target for violence than they will be. If you google FOCA you will find the full text of this act which does not leave out one single way people have tried to oppose legalized abortion. It practically even forbids those in office of talking against abortion! When they say untouchable law they mean it.
If you support the solution of abortion you are entering the killing fields and many things change when you do that, including the safety many have taken for granted in this country. Once the country is killing 1,500,000 a year in the unborn, our country becomes increasingly unsafe for anybody. People think just because it is the unborn, which we have managed not to think about very much at all, the rest of us are perfectly safe. Wrong. We are not safe. Nobody's safe when that much killing is going on.
Abortion advocates keep talking about protecting the life of the mother. In FOCA we see that the sacrifice of the child means nothing which is thinking that many do not espouse or think is logical. So are we to let abortion extremists rule? This act will in my opinion create a very volatile atmosphere, where the violent will feel they have more justification to explode.
Obama sounds so committed to this cause in these videos, I do not know if he can be influenced. I think now is the time for all citizens to weigh the consequences of going to extremes with abortion and try to make themselves felt and heard. Obama is not just an attractive and intelligent black man, as he is to most, he is a black man with a very troubling agenda to me, if these videos are any indication. I have fought the extremists for years in both parties. I left Mormon Utah because of their extremist religous views toward a lot of issues, including homosexuality. I have not attached myself to any church since because I think they all tend to be extremist. I had to look at it from the viewpoint of one who thought her father was gay, the man I relied on to protect me. I thought my father was wrong in a lot of his behavior, but it was wrong for his society to make him feel there was no way out but suicide. I fought his suicidal tendencies my whole life. And I continued to fight the condemnation that causes bisexual men to be suicidal.
With legalized abortion, we may get such extremist views from both camps, it can only lead to extreme violence! This is what we need to try to prevent if we possibly can by sounding the voices of moderation, moderation. All people's thinking on this issue is very important in order to prevent a clash between uncompromising camps that could produce another great national tragedy. There needs to be dialogue and a lot of it about what can be done to be more moderate. I am a great believer in the power of thought coming from the many.
You can google FOCA. I copied and pasted it and have it among my papers. I also copied a timeline on abortion since it was legalized. I am trying to get myself as well informed as possible. I am also going to speak out as a democrat objecting to the idea that the democratic party is the party of abortion. I know there are a lot of democrats who just aren't considering and speaking out about this issue if it means clashing with more vocal extremist leaders, but if they want to protect their young leader, they will get very knowledgeable about a very dangerous issue. Trying to find a path of moderation that will not lead to violence.
Trying to force Catholic hospitals to do abortions by law if they do anything with women in the gynocological and obstretrical fields is extremist. I suppose they are furious at how strongly the Catholics continue to fight legalized abortion, and tend to think they need to be soundly defeated, destroyed if possible. FOCA purports that abortion should be an untouchable right, indicating that the Catholic opposition to it since the 3rd century is completely wrong! That is extremist thinking and will lead to violence. I have often wondered if abortion extremists would ever be satisfied without more late term abortions, less restrictions. The ban on partial abortion infuriated them for example. Mothers will die! How many mothers are actually going to die because the gruesome practice of partial birth abortion (tearing apart the child no matter how late term)is banned? FOCA retrieves that abortion right by overturning the ban. Angry extremist thinking. Dangerous thinking.
Extremists create war when peace would be better. Bush, for example, showed his extremist thinking that war was the only solution and far over extended the US in war after 9/11. To heck with the cost. The world was going to tolerate his war against bin Laden but it was a good deal less supportive of his invasion of Iraq, and eventually hardly anybody seemed to have supported this war, but did he allow their reservations to stop him? Well, he moved too fast, catching many off guard still trying to access what to do after 9/11 which shocked and threw everyone off balance. We will have to forgive Bush because of his brash haste in invading another country, but he was our leader, and as he reminded us it was his decision to make and then try to marshall our support later. Reluctantly we gave it. By the end of his term we are hardly even showing him enough respect to listen to him talk, president or not. Extremists will suffer such consequences and worse.

Are we selling our country to finance our wars?

The fact that our national debt is growing larger every day worries me immensely. As a country I think this indicates we have been living beyond our means for some time. Or more to the point, we have been fighting a war we could not afford. The war in Iraq I believe came out of panic and paranoia over 9/11. What to do, who to punish? This was a puzzle that would have confounded any president. Our president, unfortunately, had a thing about Iraq because his father fought the Gulf war with Hussein and decided not to march to Bagdad when he was winning. I think Bush senior had gotten extremely sensitive to the criticism he had received over that war. I remember well all the justifications he brought before us for saving Kuwait's oil from whatever nefarious thing Saddam Hussein might do with it. It seemed like a good time to stop the war when Kuwaiti oil had been secured again, to be owned by the Kuwaitis who had it in the first place.

But that is neither here nor there. The point is you have to stop and think when you want to go to war if you can afford it, because modern war is very expensive. I remember Bush saying that as our commander in chief it was up to him to decide whether the security of our country was at stake, which he thought it was with Iraq in possession of WMD. Even had Hussein had some sort of weapon of mass destruction, to march on Iraq was a preemptive strike. I suppose Bush had jumped ahead in his mind and imagined a scenario where Hussein who hated us over the Kuwaiti war would suddenly drop the bomb on a US target and he would be to blame for not stopping him. But a president's paranoia after 9/11 could cause him to make a serious mistake. He not only had to continue with the war on Afganistan which he hastily claimed had been won (even though Osama ben Ladin was still at large) he now had to finance an even bigger and more costly war. To do that he was going to have to borrow money. Did not Bush understand that to finance his war he was going to have to sell the country back home more or less to the highest bidder?

I guess he did not understand high finance, so this did not bother him enough to think again and again. Naturally other countries want to buy the United States. It is not their fault that we have no idea what it is to be owned by the money men. They have been willing to help us go into the deepest deficit we have yet experienced, and this is not even a major war to most of us, because no attack on the US was actually perpetuated by Iraq. Bush told us he was saving us from sure attack, but it was obvious intelligence had not been good when no WMDs were found in any holes in the ground, caves, or anywhere else. It seems that the aging Hussein had just not got around to making any WMDs since idle threats terrified the presidents of the United States so effectively.

Bush ran amok with our promises to pay for others to finance this war, like a man pursued by demons. But being the president of the United States is a big job, and some men are just not up to making good decisions about all that it entails. War is a serious thing, and even if it is a mistake, it is so costly in manpower as well as war equipment nobody wants to contemplate the fearful idea that it might not even have been a good idea. I mean that the war is a dreadful drain on our finances and the longer we spend humongous amounts of money in Iraq, the more those who lend us the money for it are going to be in control of us in some degree for years to come. Somebody has to pay for war, and if we have gone to borrowing money to pay for it, what kind of price will we have to pay for our indebtedness? Our government has been as fiscally irresponsible as anybody in the private sector could possibly be, thinking war will get paid for somehow because they are necessary. Not all wars!

I remember being very worried about the deficit World War II had run up. Everybody was worried, and we had been attacked by Japan and Hitler was over running Europe. It seemed like we had to go to war. I think the fact that we came back from that huge deficit caused present presidents to think that war could always be paid for. If you will remember, the war in Vienam became a quagmire in which we were pouring an astronomical amount of money, and even after ten years commanders were calling for even more troops if any progress was to be made. I always thought that war was a mistake, the whole reasoning behind it. If we did not go to war over Vietnam the communists would take over. We did and ten years of very expensive war fare later we still had to let that happen. Now nobody even seems to know or care what it did to the world when the communists controlled Vietnam. After all the bombing and all the blood shed. Now if our young people said what was that all about we would be hard put to give them a sensible answer.

A lot of mistakes have been made by men too eager to go to war. Let us face it, some men like war games, and I am sure a nation of video game players making war for years on their computers might produce some more men that will think making real war might be a lot more fun. Will we then blow ourselves up, let alone have trouble paying for old wars? This could get worse. If McCain should lose, as far as war goes, that might be a good thing. He seems too fond of war, unfortunately. There is a bright side to anything that happens. Let us hope that the winner can add and subtract better than our present commander in chief.

Election conclusons...

As I struggle through this election process in the midst of a lot of financial turmoil, I have been trying to draw my conclusions about what I see shaping up. My new blogger friends won't know that I am such a political animal as my aol journal friends are aware of, but I now do a blog on http://www.azcentral.com which is the blog site for the newspaper, the Arizona Republic, which I have been reading for years and years. I just started my blog there several weeks ago called G4Life. I also do some political videos on my Youtube channel gerryking40 where my creative partner Doc has helped me to film 50 videos!

I took three of my plays and turned them into a mini series, with Doc and I playing all the characters improv style. I am holding up doing another series for a while, at least until the election is over. One of my series is taken from my play and my memoirs called Daughters of the Shadow Men, so if you want to find out some of what my life was all about I refer you to that series: gerryking40 on Youtube. Shadow men is what I term fathers and husbands like my dad who was essentially gay I thought but married back in the old days in lieu of ever 'coming out' so great was the stigma attached to homosexuality! Still don't come out but rarely in those country ranching towns. Most of the time the women or children are not aware, or only dimly aware in some cases that something is not quite normal in their relationships.

So this became one of my issues, the hidden homosexuality in some marriages and how it affects the other mate and the family. (This is behavior not just confined to the males, but I think it is much more common among men) I also had a grandmother raised in polygamy so that became another of my issues in Mormon Utah which eventually caused me to leave the church among other reasons.

My mother was also one of the women who was reputed to have aborted a child with 'a coat hanger.' I think she said it was a catheter that her aunt sent her. I never thought that this self induced abortion improved things at all, but I could see that her frustration with her marriage was the primary reason she became so desperate. (I had awareness of the problem my dad had when very young.) So the abortion issue became a big one for me. I have always been on the side of Life as my mother went on to have three more children, sisters I have enjoyed immensely. My mother went through a repentence process for a number of years, just as though she had committed a violent crime. She never tried to justify it.

I felt we had gone down the wrong road with Roe vs Wade, which overturned the restraints to abortion that had been in place in most of the states for years. New York I think allowed abortion for more reasons but most states did not. Because of this decision about which I thought the Supreme Court Justices were not prudent, abortion numbers went sky high and have remained at troubling numbers ever since.

40 million children are aborted every year world wide. The last abortion statistics reported over 1.2 million in this country alone, estimating about 1 out of 4 children aborted! A recent article in a Mormon Magazine Ensign reported that this yearly toll is more children than soldiers were killed in World War I and World War II put together. We have just got used to abortions. Well, so did China and Russia, and they also got used to the holocausts of millions of adults, too, as happened in Nazi Germany's attack on the Jews and other groups. We can become very blase about holocausts which are going on right now with the unborn as long as it is not us who are cast as the victims. What makes the abortion issue so difficult is because every mother who attains one is assured that she did nothing wrong by the abortion factions, and pretty soon she sees nothing wrong with it.

I am troubled in these elections because Obama has supported Roe vs Wade all the way, I am afraid because he perceives that was the only way for him to insure the nomination. Unfortunately he was probably right. Bush and McCain on the other hand have supported a war in Iraq for the wrong reasons that has been ruinously expensive, and so they do not have the support to win this election I am afraid. Such men may love making war more than saving the lives of the unborn. It is going to take not making such mistakes to do anything about abortion. The practice has become deeply entrenched.

So I await the election knowing that the democrats are the party of abortion and thinking how I will fight should they win. It will be hard. Clinton was a pro choice candidate I hated to see win as was his wife Hillary. Black people are generally loyal to the democratic party which gave them the civil rights they and the Kennedys fought for. But that was before the democrats encountered the deep pockets of rich democrats who favored the philosophy of abortion. I would say these are the liberal, leftist thinkers who were influenced by communist thinking in Russia and China, of which abortion became an integral policy. Did we want that? I don't think we thought much about it. Those who do not think much about their beliefs are doomed to be dominated by those who do and are willing to use force to implement their ideas. Abortion is a violent means to control population and a number of other factors thought to be 'necessary' in an overcroweded world, according to that line of thought. Money is a means to bring in the new order.

The new order was abortion on demand, so it will take some doing to restore the integrity of the democratic party, to my mind, of which I have long been a member. I vote republican when I think they are more principled, especially on this issue. But when I hear war mongering from the republicans I am thrown into a quandry and don't know whether even to vote.