Pro-lifers: a bunch of disturbed people.

I hate pro-lifers.

Some I have to grudgingly concede have a right to their opinions, such as Jane Russell, the octogenarian former actress and brassiere pitch woman. She was damaged and rendered sterile by an incompetently performed abortion in the early part of her career and, embittered, turned to fundamentalist Christianity when it wasn't fashionable and has been an abortion opponent for decades. I mean, I'm sorry that happened to her, but that doesn't make her right.

But mostly, most women and all men who oppose abortion being legal are just idiots.

I know women who feel that women and only women should opine on this issue. That's an arguable position, but I don't quite agree with that either. For one thing they think women will see it's kept legal, and that, for them is a dangerous assumption. But also, it does impact men. Even though men do not have babies, they father them, and our society makes them liable for the children they father. To some extent that's necessary and right, but it also means that men must have some say in the matter too.

When I was 14, I got a girl pregnant. She was older-nineteen-and she should have known better, and I should have known better too. That was when abortion was very legal, and her parents took her in for "the procedure" with little comment. She graduated college, got married, and has two kids and a happy marriage today.

If there had been no abortion, she would probably be a single mother today. She'd be working at a crappy no-degree-needed job to support her kid. She wouldn't be getting child support, from me, because she would never have been able to name me as the father.

We're first cousins.

Three minutes of romping on the floor in front of the TV in her mother's house during a commercial break of "Space:1999" could have resulted in a catastrophic change in her life. But instead, a trip to the doctor's office resulted in a one-inch organism being removed and discarded and two miserable lives not lived.

What the pro-life whiners don't realize is that that abortion not only saved the quality of the mother's life, it allowed her two children she has now to live-healthy, well-provided-for children raised in a stable marriage.

Violent Acres is a woman who seems to have a lot of sense in the matter. She posits that it takes two parents to raise a functioning child and that the death of a fetus is the least traumatic death there is. She's right on both counts.