This is why choice matters.

This is the future, folks. This is where we're headed. We've been there before, of course. So what makes anyone want to go back?

Tell me. Because I don't understand.

You are a Christian, or a Muslim, or a (insert religion here). A good person. A moral person. You have a daughter. A beautiful, vibrant girl. A young lady.  A woman.  And you raise her the best way you can, scraped knees and missing teeth. Puberty hits. Dating. You wonder, and worry, but she's a normal kid, and growing up well, and you have to turn loose sometime.

And then, one day, she tells you she's pregnant. And you can see she's looking to you to guide her, to help her fix this, to find a solution she can live with.  Are you disappointed in her? Yeah. Are you scared? Of course you are. All your hopes and dreams for her, your ideas of how her life would be better than yours... they're threatened. She's scared, too. She doesn't want to be pregnant. Maybe it was even rape. Maybe the boy she went out with twice didn't take no for an answer. Or maybe she forgot her pill, or the condom broke, and she can see her own plans, her own future, on the line. All of those ways and reasons to decide I don't want this.

I don't want to give my hopes and dreams up. I don't want to give my body over to this pregnancy. I don't want to be pregnant. I want this to stop now.

How do you look your daughter in the eye and tell her she doesn't have a choice?

How do you force her to harbor the fetus growing inside her? Tell her she has to play incubator for the next nine months of her life, whatever she does with the child after that? That all the doors out are barred to her? No-one's going to help her end her pregnancy safely? No-one's going to make sure she doesn't bleed to death when the desperation gets to be too much and she tries all the other ways she knows of, to make it stop?

The girl in that story could have sustained damage to her internal organs from those blows. She could have broken ribs. She could have had complications that killed her. Or simply ones that would affect her health for the rest of her natural life. Think about it. She was desperate enough, determined enough, that she let him hit her in the stomach with a baseball bat. Every. Day. For. Weeks.

Think about it, and think about it hard. Because no matter how much you may believe that forcing people to stop performing abortions legally means that all those women won't abort their babies and "every child will be welcomed into life"? It's not true. Even if those fetuses make it to birth, that's no guarantee that now everything's okay and they'll have happy homes because their mothers didn't abort.

All that banning abortion really accomplishes? Is telling that girl, and all those other girls like her, and even your own daughter, that that fetus means more than her own life. And while that may deter some girls? There are plenty more who'll risk their own lives to try to make that pregnancy stop. And in a lot of those cases? You'll lose them both. Because more than 75,000 women die annually, even now, from complications of unsafe abortion. And so you lose fetus and mother at once. The possibility and the reality of the child you raised and watched grow... both gone. Needlessly. Just because somebody else closed off the avenues that might have saved at least one of the two.

And how do all your "pro-life" arguments hold up then?

Fractal Prints!

Tonight, I ordered a set of ten 6" prints of my fractals, and purchased an archival-quality, acid-free memory book in which to display them. I also bought a single 8" x 10" floatframe.  And in doing so, discovered that I can offer those prints to you guys at $20 each, framed, and that's shipping inclusive. (If you want me to ship it overnight or overseas or something, ask me, I'll let you know what the pricing is, and we can work something out.)

So, if anyone's interested, let me know which piece, what finish you'd like on the print (matte, gloss, or lustre) and what frame finish (gold, silver, or black) you'd like. The floatframe is designed to be larger than the print, and it's completely transparent except for the edging. So you get the effect of the print being suspended in midair... I'm in love. It includes an easel for stability, and that lets you display the print vertically or horizontally. In fact, here's a picture of the floatframe, so you can see what I mean.



I'm screening comments here so that you can also tell me where you'd like the prints shipped. They take about two weeks to reach me from the printer, and then they'll be in my hands a day or two so I can make up the packages and send them out.  Once I send them out, it's one to three business days First-Class Mail.  So that makes about three weeks, and puts it well into December.  I'd like to do a first batch order on Tuesday, if possible. I will, if you want me to, send them directly to another recipient. And I'll make Certified Mail and Return Receipt standard offerings, since USPS doesn't do tracking except on Express Mail.

If you've got any other questions, feel free to ask! (This offer's open to any LJ users and to people I know outside of LJ. I'd friendslock it except for the latter group.)

I need a bit more time to see if I can extend this to larger prints. I'll let you all know, though, if it turns out that I can, and at what price it becomes feasible.