Bobert that old scatter-gun of yours ruffled my feathers a little matey.
You at least did get one thing right about me and so I gotta plead "Guilty M'Lud" to not knowing the folk you work with in Richmond.
I don't want to get into a "my poverty is bigger than yours" urinating contest as I suspect you have already tagged and bagged me coming from a comfortable background. You don't know nix about me matey but where I spent my formative years was no Disneyland, unless you consider that 10 of us living in a 2 bedroom house to be leading the 'life of Rockefeller';and that too in an area with the highest rate of unemployment in the UK. But funnily enough having to live in close proximity - and being second last in the pecking order - with so many kinfolk led to an early lesson in external consideration and love for other human beings. Some of the most balanced years of my life; I don't buy the argument that poverty is the cause of all the ills in this world. When you live in a poor community you don't,as a child, think that you live in, for example, a slum - it is the outsiders who visit the area who make the comparisons;to you it's your home.
Now my take on you,and I'm known to be frequently wrong,is that you are from a lower-middle to middle class background and I would guess an outsider to living in poverty - you have never walked the mile in their shoes.
Other countries especially in the 'third world' have far worse poverty problems but those societies don't throw in the towel and exclaim "anything goes" just because other societies are doing it.

Your sentance that starts: "Where I am personally anti-abortion...." I take it to mean, that you do not favour abortion for yourself but for others?
"I can accept her *choice*...." Just like Pontius Pilate you opt out and wash your hands of having to make a moral judgement and leave it others to do what you wouldn't have done to yourself.

You are so very mistaken I am not a Christian, psuedo or otherwise as the ideals of Christianity are too far away for me to attain.
Christianity forbids murder. Yet all the the whole of our progress comes to is progress in the technique of murder and progress in warfare.
How can we call ourselves Christians? But that is another issue.
I am just a simple minded Limey who can see that the Emperor isn't wearing any clothes and says so in a very loud voice. People don't like to be woken up or disturbed.

The beauty of conscience, when it can be disinterred, is that it will not allow one to do anything selfish or contrary to other peoples interests, or harmful to anybody- nothing, in fact,that we may consider wrong or evil.
One conscience will not contradict another conscience on a given issue.
Of course this is light years away from reality and we gotta start from where we are now.

Just an after thought Bobert matey, how many Americans have failed to reach their Birthday in the last 29 years?

Oh wise one at Silly River - I try not to be offensive to folk so I will ignore your contribution.

Have a long life.
CD