>>Life is full of those choices and what we call "character" is largely defined by the way a person handles them.
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>That's rich, Bill, really rich. Every year, roughly 25,000 or so women - raped, brutalized, traumatized, will probably never be the same again....and carrying a rapist's baby. A rapist, possibly carrying a disease, a chemical imbalance with a propensity for violence....and your answer to a woman making possibly the most intimate, crucial, and tragic decision of her life is the "character-building" line.
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>People will call you many things for this "character" comment (and you'll likely deserve every one of them). For me, I'll simply say that if you truly believe that, you are not a defender of individual rights.

Lots of people have called me a lot of things, Kevin, so get at the end of the line and call away to your heart's content.
Individual rights - am I a defender of them?
Well, I gave up just about every individual right I had when I was sent off as a teenager to places where people would try to kill me.
I'd rather not have had to do that, but the guys who told me that I had to go there weren't obsessing over my individual rights at that moment.
I could have refused. I didn't and that had consequences for me. Many people did and that had consequences for them.

Saying that someone should be free to make difficult choices but not have to deal with the consequences is nonsense- that's why we call them difficult choices.

Of course we have individual rights. We exercise them by making choices. But choices have consequences, whether we want to make them or not, and those choices ultimately define us.













Life would be nice if we weren't faced with those character-building moments, but they present themselves anyway.


All of the things you say - disease, chemical imbalance, etc. might be said about a pregnancy resulting from a wild night in a bar.
At the end, the woman has to make a difficult choice- and yes it is a character-building moment.
She has the right to make that choice, but I also have a right to approve or disapprove of her decision.