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My thoughts EXACTLY!! I would take the money say okay and then use that very money to get myself an abortion!

"Oh, honey, if you don't have an abortion we will give you $500."

It reminds me of the tricks my parents used to play on me as a child when they wanted me to do something they didn't really feel like doing themselves.

"Oh, honey, if you rake the entire lawn (all five acres gonk ) we'll give you five whole dollars."

Sure, that trick worked when I was younger, but now? Certainly not -- I have considerably more knowledge regaurding cost benefits. My guess, so do most women of childbearing age.

Sorry Senator, you'll have to do better than that -- I mean really.

Though, admittedly, I fear for those women who are poor and undereducated -- those women that tend to live from one check to the next and, typically, don't make long-term financial plans.

I feel that this is simply another means of exploiting the poor for someone's own moral agendum.

I'm just wondering what the catch is. If you take the money does that mean he can monitor you to see if you actually DO keep it or what? Not that 500$ is enough for any kind of childbearing. Is that the price the lifers are putting on fetuses now? 500$? That is disgusting.

Just speaking from my own childfree bias for the moment, 500 bucks isn't enough to convince me to go against my beliefs and reproduce.

Then again, I don't think there's any amount of money that would be enough to get me to that. But a paltry 500 smackers doesn't even begin to cover the costs of prenatal care or the hospital stay, nor does it even make a sizeable dent in the 18 years' worth of childrearing.

And I wonder if that guy from Texas has thought about making it a legally-binding contract, and accepting the money and aborting would be in breach of said contract and therefore an actionable position. Americans don't have the reputation for being sue-happy for nothing, after all.

How would they enforce this? How can they be sure women aren't taking the money and then getting abortions, or worse, inducing miscarriages?

Also, it just seems wrong to give the woman 500 dollars to put the child up for adoption. For one thing, it's like they're buying something from a factory - she's making tha baby, then giving it to them and they're giving her money. Then they throw the baby into the adoption system, where that child will mostly likely rot away in foster care for 18 years, then figure out how to survive on his or her own. The woman's basically being paid 500 dollars to bring one more person into a life of poverty in a world that can't even handle the people who are already living under the poverty line.

Very true. I hadn't thought of that before you raised the issue.

This uterus ain't for rent, pally.

This has got to one of the most blatantly misogynistic things a pro-lifer has ever done. If you're going to tell us that we don't own our bodies and that we exist only to produce children as commodities, could you at least be a little subtle about it?