Abortion Vote Couple Posts Final Numbers: 74% Say Give Birth
From LifeNews:
by Steven Ertelt | LifeNews.com | 12/3/10 7:51 PM
The infamous couple that received international attention for asking the Internet to vote whether or not they would have an abortion of a 17-18 week-old unborn child have posted the final numbers from their survey.
Although more than two million votes were cast in the poll, the couple were concerned about significant vote fraud given how the side favoring having an abortion shot up drastically and rapidly after they received media attention.
After having an unnamed firm analyze the polling result, the couple said today the valid numbers show just over 278,000 votes with 73.79 percent urging them to give birth and 26.21 percent saying they should get an abortion.
Although the couple has since admitted the BirthOrNot web site and corresponding vote was not meant as something on which they would actually base their decision, Pete Arnold said today the couple did have an initial pause when pregnant.
“This website and the vote behind it was started due to our initial uncertainty with our current pregnancy,” he said.
“We had two miscarriages before this pregnancy. One of them ended with a trip to the hospital and Alisha being induced to give birth to a baby whose heart had stopped beating 3 weeks prior. The second miscarriage actually happened during our trip to France. The photo of us in front of the Pont du Gard in southern France (pictured left) was chosen specifically because Alisha’s second miscarriage happened two days later,” he added.
“We started this website in hopes to have a discussion with people in regards to our situation and to ask others to vote on what they think we should do based on the information,” he concluded.
Arnold said he hoped the web site would show the “hypocrisy” of what he considers misnomer labels, pro-life and pro-choice. he said his wife Alisha hoped to point out how people do not take voting seriously.
In two long posts both Pete and Alisha Arnold go after the media and the pro-life side of the abortion debate.
Pete Arnold aligns himself with the pro-life side but the self-confessed libertarian berates pro-life advocates for not supporting all human life and then undermines his argument by defending abortion in cases of rape and incest.
He chides pro-abortion people who say they are pro-choice and support pro-government views on other political issues that take away choice. Still, he refused to call those who support legalized abortion as pro-abortion saying the vote doesn’t reflect the 51-42 percent pro-life to pro-abortion split Gallup found.
Alisha Arnold closes her post with a defense of her views supporting legalized abortion, agreeing with her husband that the vote totals show her people who are pro-abortion aren’t necessarily anti-life even though they defend the legalization of a procedure that destroys human life.
“I discourage women from using abortion as a repeated form of birth control,” she adds, though she admits she supports abortion as a form of birth control for “teenage girls and other young single women making a “mistake” and finding themselves alone.:
Instead of directing such women to pregnancy centers that would help them find resources to carry to term or make an adoption plan for the child, she suggests abortion as an “option” and urges women to consider contraception or birth control.
Ultimately, both sides of the abortion debate condemned the web site and the vote, with pro-life people saying it made a mockery of the pro-life side of the debate because the vote was an apparent publicity stunt. On the pro-abortion side, blogs condemned the vote mostly by citing Pete Arnold and his conservative and pro-life views — something he condemned in his final post.