I need to get this off my chest

This is in response to some of the commenters to this post over The Chemist's - his comments aren't working:

However, the choice of when you reproduce is made BEFORE conception...not after.

Yeah, and sometimes the condom breaks, or the birth control doesn't work, and then you find yourself unexpectedly pregnant. Not you, AC, because you're not a woman, but I've been there, sir.

You might find it disgusting that a woman might choose to have an abortion just because she doesn't want to be pregnant. I mean, it's really unseemly that a woman would be able to have sex and not have to suffer some sort of consequence, isn't it? Only women who are already downtrodden and victims, of rape or incest, are permitted to decide whether they are ready to be a parent when they find themselves unexpectedly pregnant?

Frankly, I find it abhorhent and repellent that you think you should have any right to consign a woman to giving birth whether she wants to or not - and to suffer the many risks inherent with pregnancy.

Take me, for example. With my first pregnancy (unexpected because of condom failure, but don't get too disgusted, AC - the guy and I got married, and despite our premarital fooling around, we are still happily married 17 years later) I had hyperemesis, i.e., I threw up several times a day, every day, for the entire pregnancy. I lost 60 lbs when I was pregnant with my first child.

That's actually not as major as some people I know - a friend of mine who was due around the time I was developed preeclampsia, and in order to keep her from dying, they delivered the baby at 24 weeks along. He was in NICU for several months, well after the time he would have been delivered if she had not developed preeclampsia, and to this day, he has trouble breathing and is a few years behind his age cohort in school.

Another friend due the same week as me had what they call an incompetent cervix. Her son was unexpectedly born at about 25 weeks. He is now 9 years old. He doesn't walk, he cannot talk, and he lost an eye because he was on oxygen for so long.

Both of those babies were very much wanted and were lucky enough to come into families that had the resources to care for them. And those are just two of many, many things that can go wrong during pregnancy.

Now, if I had either of those problems, I would have been in deep shit. We had no medical insurance and made about $14,000 a year, which was supposed to support a family of 3. I went a lot of days eating only a hard boiled egg. At Christmas, we splurged and bought a chicken. I breastfed because I couldn't afford formula, and I ended up losing a tooth because I couldn't afford to buy vitamins to supplement my diet and the calcium I was losing by nursing. (Never mind visiting the dentist - I thank my lucky stars that we had fluoridated water, because we couldn't afford a dentist visit until my daughter was 7 years old. You know why? Because we had no medical insurance and it took us 7 years to pay off the hospital bill for her birth.)

You every try to get a job when you're missing a tooth, AC?

So please don't get too disgusted, AC. Sometimes, when a woman has to make a difficult choice, she actually analyzes her current situation, and tries to make the best possible decision she can under the circumstances, and maybe that doesn't meet with your approval. But who the hell are you to tell her she shouldn't be allowed to assess her own life, her own situation, and make the best decision she can without useless, bloviating moralizing from people whose need to feel morally superior is so much more important to them then the lives of the people they are hurting.

to Ryan:

I rather think that the life has intrinsic value, wanted or otherwise.

but apparently, only the potential life has intrinsic value. The slut who had sex made her choice already, am I right?