We've all seen the sitcom scenario. Junior trashes the family car then tries to hide the damage from the cheap auto repair. But try as he might he cannot hide the damage and the car is irrevocably scarred, even worse than it was when Junior ran it into the utility pole. Junior now faces consequences FAR worse than he would have faced had he simply faced up to the music.

LW wrote a wonderful heart rending article that tells this story from a woman's perspective. One who has been there. One who KNOWS. You can read about it here (https://forums.joeuser.com/?forumid=17&aid=156393#1245882).

Of course, the fallout was predictable. Poster after poster decrying how horrible it was to "punish" a woman for getting pregnant.

Well, despite what you've heard, most abortions are elective and performed for reasons of "convenience". Women trying to evade the consequences of (NOT Punishment for) their actions.

Now here's where I don the flameproof suit: I believe very firmly that any parent who sees a child as a "punishment" for having sex is unfit to be a parent. Any parent who believes their children to be a burden, a sentence, should be relieved of the burden of having them in the first place (that is, in the idyllic world where we ride unicorns and eat ice cream beside the Big Rock Candy Mountain). There is, of course, no conscionable way to legislate this, and thus people who hold such hateful, spiteful views of children and childhood will be able to keep procreating as they should, but it is a pity that such children need to be raised in homes where their parents view them as a burden rather than a blessing.

We won't even touch the issue of welfare for the children who are born here, and I don't want that tangent on this article. That is a tangential issue and I am stating right now the promise to delete the comments of anyone who tries to detour it in that direction. You want to discuss that? Here's a primer:

• Go to the JoeUser main page
• Click "Create New Article"
• Spew garbage to your heart's content

Now, back on track. Like junior, parents who relieve themselves of the "burden" of children will find themselves with irreperable, irrevocable damage that no amount of antidepressants will erase. The kind of nightmares that oddly don't appear in Planned Parenthood or NARAL flyers. And people who counsel these parents to rid themselves of the burden are nothing short of deplorable; they will not have to face the consequences for those who follow their lousy advice.