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Excellent response

Thank you for your very thoughtful response. You take a much more thoughtful approach than at least your partisans on this website.

We may have to agree to disagree on whether it’s OK to prefer not to be born with a birth defect or to an impoverished family. If others made a different decision, I’d be delighted to support them financially. I guess I’m operating under the assumption that if my embryo were terminated at a few weeks, God would find another one for me.

Time magazine had an interesting article several months ago about a married couple who had a mild form of Down syndrome and were supported by their families. When the woman was informed that it was very likely that any child of theirs would also likely have Down syndrome, she chose to get sterilized. Was her decision “insulting” or just better informed than anyone else?

As for my main point of the Republicans being in no position to criticize Democrats from a scriptural basis, I’m still 100% certain of that. It was the Republicans who reduced the tobacco company penalties from $130 billion to $10 billion despite the fact that they were targeting teenagers and manipulating nicotine levels. About 1,000 people die every day prematurely from smoking. It was the Bush Administration that gutted New Source Review regulations, saving power plants billions of dollars in required upgrades. It was the Reagan/Bush National Highway Traffic Safety Administrations that ignored SUV rollovers for years at a cost of 12,000 lives. They justified their inaction based on the public’s “right” to choose vehicles. On the other hand, Bush II appointed former representatives of the pharmaceutical industry to run the FDA. In five years, FDA’s warnings on misleading drug ads were cut in half while the reports of violations stayed the same. FDA also adopted the pharmaceutical companies’ assertion that imported drugs were “unsafe.” That assertion was “discovered” in a focus group formed to determine what would turn Americans off to imported drugs. Now the public had no “right” to choose. In both the SUV and drug issues, Republicans ignored the science in favor of the big bucks. After midnight in 2003 the Republicans gave away billions to the drug industry by forbidding Medicare from negotiating with them. The key sponsors in congress walked away with huge salaries in the industry. The money lost through forbidding negotiations could have been used to provide more services to 47 million uninsured Americans. An estimated 18,000 Americans die each year for lack of health care. During the Iraq/Iran war, the Reagan/Bush Administrations sold anti-aircraft equipment to the Iranians while advising the Iraqis to step up their aerial bombing. Now we’re in the midst of a war that was planned from day 1 of the Bush Administration and substantiated by a series of demonstrably inaccurate statements.

So I’ll take you at your word on all of your facts and figures. As I said, I’d like to see my party do more on abortion. Some in congress are doing so. I’d love to see someone take on the Spring Break phenomenon in our country. But if I have to choose between a party that’s callous with embryos and a party that’s callous with walking, talking, innocent, and genetically distinct people, I’m afraid I’m going to have to go with the former rather than the latter.