Birth or Not

Have you heard about this yet? There's a couple in Minnesota who claim that they are pregnant and are leaving the decision about whether to have an abortion to a public vote on their website. No, I am not making this up. Check it out at birthornot.com. Or don't, and refuse to give these people any more attention.

They have received a lot of media attention and a lot of hits - obviously because this is a pretty controversial concept. They claim that it is a true story and that the reason they are doing this is to allow people to have a real impact, a voice that actually counts, on an abortion issue.

It's quite clear that it is a hoax, and most likely a ploy by an anti-choice activist to gain sympathy for his viewpoint. The main reason why I believe it is a hoax is that it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever that this couple would be so unsure about their decision to have an abortion - so ambivalent about it that they will simply go with whatever the majority decides. They say they can't make up their minds. But why are they so unsure about having this baby? They say that they've been pregnant twice before, both pregnancies ending in miscarriage. They are married and have been for quite some time. So why are they willing to abort this pregnancy? The father, Peter, says that he wants to have a baby but he knows that they can have another if they end this pregnancy. WTF? It seems pretty clear to me that he's painting a picture of callous, heartless people who conceive and abort babies carelessly - as if that's what people who choose to have abortions are like. It's seems obvious that it's meant to make people angry.

Here are some other questions:
- they are supposedly not taking sides on this issue and yet Peter has a track record of writing and working for extremely conservative religious groups with an anti-choice leaning
- why do we hear so much from Peter and not much at all from his wife, Alisha? all we get from her is posts about her baby's development along with ultrasound pictures - she doesn't sound like a woman who is seriously considering abortion - could it be perhaps, that all of the posts about exactly where the baby is in its development are meant solely to tug at our heartstrings and make us realize that it really is a baby?
- if this is just some social experiment in true democracy, where are there google adsense ads on their site?

There are only three possibilities here:
1. It is real and these poor people felt that this was the best way for them to get their 15 minutes of fame and possibly make some money in the meantime.
2. It is an elaborate anti-choice campaign.
3. Both

If it is an anti-choice polemic - which I'm quite certain it is - it's truly ironic. In attempting to prove that abortion is wrong, and perhaps that it should be illegal, instead what they've done is make it very obvious that having other people make a decision about your own pregnancy and your own life is ludicrous. Why on earth should others vote about this decision? And why on earth would they ever actually allow people who they don't even know to tell them what to do in regards to such an important matter? So thanks Peter and Alisha, you've just proven the point of all of us pro-choicers, abortion is and should always be a personal and private decision.