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GOOD point. And no matter how you look at it, it's about time this thread was made. After all, points are made by the pro-choice side all the time about how allowing your baby to enter the adoption system is crueler than aborting them (I know, I don't agree with it either), and the even more common suggestion that pro-lifers don't care about the mother OR the baby after it's outside her body.

The system really does need reforms. Owning large dogs or being a smoker or having a divorce doesn't mean you'd automatically be a bad parent. My own mother (single, divorced) smoked for years after I was born and we've always had at least one bear-of-a-dog in the home. And I'm not complaining - a childhood like mine is one that many kids would be happy to have.

And the costs? Geebus. I know two great, happy couples who have adopted and neither could've done it in the U.S. Their kids are from Haiti and Ukraine.

Hopefully within our lifetimes, women with unwanted pregnancies can at least know they're giving their child a good life when they allow them to be adopted - not just a "chance."

I was pretty lucky. If you fight you can get hurt more a lot. Worse, killed. It happens to so many people. It's sad. I consider myself a very, very big feminist. I am woman, hear me roar. I'm proud of myself, I feel my opinion is worth just as much as a man's, and that being born with the XX is an advantage if anything, at least that's symetrical xd I believe no person, male or female, should be made to feel like a nonperson by anyone else. I believe that abuse of any kind is intolerable, that it is too easy in this society to be abused because of the lack of public education on the subject, and that now more than ever people need to fight for themselves and their rights. And I am avidly prolife. Can I be both feminist and prolife? According to Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, I can. People who accuse me of wanting women oppression get me extremely angry. But there is one thing I firmly hold, it is too easy to be abused because people aren't educated more on what exactly abuse is. It's not all physical, not all sexual, emotional abuse is what sets the stage for the other two to occur, and when women (and men) do not protect themselves against emotional abuse, the others are much more likely to occur. I don't blame women for this one though. They can protect themselves in this way, but I'm more apt to blame to people who feed them lies such as "abuse leaves a mark" and "abortion is just a safe medical procedure to eliminate parasites." They set women up to be victimized. I agree with you that women can take measures to be more careful and can protect themselves, but I am not happy with the amount of people who actually realize they can and therefore don't try.

I have no idea why I feel so strongly on this. I do. I hate abuse. Abortion is a form of abuse to me, and like I've said before, though my main concern is for the unborn, I feel women are victimized by abortion as well. I'm not saying I wanna blame everything on society, that'd be unlike me. All I blame society for is apathy. Every person needs to know they can fight back and the way our society is, people don't seem to know that. Heck I dunno why I figured that one out. It's probably just watching my friends go through hell and realizing what they coulda done to protect themselves. There are few cases where I say a woman was raped due to carelessness. More than not, I attribute it to ignorance.

See what i mean about being an activist except not? lol, I get so...upset. I want every person to be treated as such and since that's not all that likely, I get upset.

@symphonic: thanks, you put it much more clearly than I do. I'm a bit of a muddler sweatdrop

Thank you for mentioning this. I can tell you first hand, although I hate to admit this, but...*takes a deep breath before starting a LONG story*:

My parents never liked my bf. They liked him even less after I got pregnant. However, we were in California and I was living with my grandparents and him with his mother when it happened. We gathered as much money as we could and moved back to where I had come from, which is the great (people within excluded) state of Arkansas, because the cost of living is much, much lower. We got an apartment there, lived there for awhile, but right before I had our baby, he lost his job, our relationship floundered, and we separated, with me moving back into my parents' home because I really, really, really needed help with the baby. My family got way too used to me being there. They became overly-attatched to my baby. Eventually, my significant other and myself reconciled, and his mother offered to help us if we moved to California with her, because she had an extra room in a really nice house in the suburbs. So, he came back out to help get our things together to move away. My parents found out we were leaving, and called DHS, and lied to them, making up really horrible things to tell them that I had done to my baby, and that I was leaving the state. They were there and took her within a matter of hours (because she "didn't have anything that she needed", but mind you, we were packed up and moving out the next day.) Fast forward one long, heartbreaking year later, and EVENTUALLY we got our child back, and have been living together happily in Colorado for several years now. smile

Our crime? Being young and poor. We didn't do drugs. We didn't abuse our child (as a matter of fact, she had never had a scratch on her in our care. When we got her back from foster care, she had BITE MARKS ON HER, which absolutely infuriates me). The foster care system is SO MESSED UP IT'S SICKENING. The adoption system is also pretty absurd, as I understand it. So, yeah.