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Besides the fact that this argument involves more emotion than reason, I have a personal view on this one.

Using that logic, every handicapped person, sick person, etc. should be killed. THink about it. I'll go with lyme disease, since I know more about it and am currently going through it. When I was diagnosed, should I have been killed because I'm missing a few years in school, have picc lines and mediports being put in and taken out, skin allergies occuring, broken relationships with friends and my boyfriend, a long, hard path to getting better, uncertainty as to whether I ever WILL be better, inability to think clearly, hear well, see well, walk without help, sleep, and very bad clinical depression including suicide, self-harm, social-anxiety, and the rest of the grabbag of depression fun? Why should I have to live through that? Why should I have to be put through that, when it'd be easier on me if I just die now. There is no way to know the future. There is no way to tell what will happen to me, what will work, what my options will be. My choice now is to live or kill myself. If I kill myself, it'll be my choice. I won't. I don't advocate suicide. But I do think that I'd rather have the choice than have someone else decide that I'd be better off dead. How prochoice is it to decide someone's future without letting them choose whether to live or die? My situation isn't bad in the least bit, but if someone thought it was and decided to take pity on me and kill me, I'd have to put in a request with God to send that person to hell.

I wouldn't put any child through what she endured, either. I think most lifers would agree with the choicers that children don't deserve a life like the one she described...or a life of poverty, homelessness, or abuse, for that matter. A lot of prochoice friends have pointed out to me that many women who have abortions are at a societal disadvantage, and that it would be cruel and irresponsible for them to pass on that societal disadvantage to new life, to choose an excruciatingly painful - psychologically, emotionally, physically - to their unborn children.

Hmmm...that sound almost reasonable...except, whose fault is it that these children have a 90% chance of leading s**t lives? Let?s check the baby's record, shall we? It looks like all he's done is chill in his mama's womb and grow...a lot. Perhaps we can find a clue in the term "societal disadvantage." Could it be that the real culprit is...society? For some reason that still eludes me, choicers insist on sentencing the unborn child to death for a crime (s)he didn?t commit ? for OUR failings as a society. It?s OUR fault that children have to grow up in neighborhoods where strangers drive through to sell pot (I was visiting a little girl that I mentor at her house in the inner city near campus?and just happened to walk by two men making an exchange. I thought, ?well, that sucks royally?why is the world like this?? The last person I would?ve thought to blame would be my 7-yr old mentee.) It?s OUR fault that at least one-third of the children in our country alone (and we?re supposed to be one of the richest!) live below the poverty line. And so on, and so forth. Society is in large part responsible for the fact that children grow up to be uneducated, poor, addicted to drugs?caught in a ?vicious cycle,? as people like to say.

It saddens and angers me that an innocent life can be willed away because people who claim to be doing it a favor refuse to take up the responsibility of making sure that it can be realized in a fruitful way.

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There are people who grow up with horrible circumstances and turn out to be wonderful adults (and some turn out to be mass murderers) but the point is that you don't know what anybody's future holds. Yes it is a horrible way to live but killing off the children isn't an acceptable solution. More effort should be made into helping these kids- not keeping it legal to kill them. However my husband is prochoice just for this very reason. My philosophy is that a 3 week old fetus is no less a person or deserving of life than a 3 week old infant. If you wouldn't kill the infant for it you shouldn't kill the fetus for it either.

What if the mother were to be so f'ed up she didn't know she was pregnant until she gave birth? Should she legally be allowed to kill it then for fear it will have a bad life?