Hope asked:

Abortion is legal, free and widely available in the Netherlands, for example, yet that country is home to one of the world’s lowest abortion rates. By contrast, abortion is completely illegal in countries as diverse as Peru, the Philippines and Uganda, but all have abortion rates that far exceed the rate in the United States.

LEGAL AND RARE
Where abortion is illegal, the rates often surpass that of the United States and can far surpass the rates in many other countries where abortion is legal.
Most recent rates per 1,000 reproductive-age women
Legal ————— Illegal
Belgium7Dominican Republic47
Germany8Peru56
Netherlands9Philippines27
Switzerland9Uganda54
United States21

Sources: Guttmacher Institute and WHO Regional Office for Europe.

The Common Thread: Unplanned Pregnancy
Put simply, abortion rates around the world are high where unplanned pregnancy is high, and they are low where women and couples are better equipped to prevent those pregnancies they wish to postpone or avoid altogether. In the industrialized world, unintended pregnancy rates are lowest in western and northern European countries, where sexual activity from the teen years on is generally accepted as a fact of life. In these countries, therefore, “personal responsibility” is equated much less with refraining from *** than it is with a commitment to using contraception consistently and correctly.

http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/gpr/09/1/gpr090102.html

What do you think about this?
I didn’t realize the USA is a developing country.
My bad.
Does this mean the USA is neither a developed country, nor a developing country? The abortion stats are right in-between.
Clearly level of development is an important factor because it affects the accessibility and availability of birth control.

The Equalist asked:

Do feminists here really believe the myth that “if women ran the world, there would be no more wars”? Do feminists truly believe that a global matriarchy would mean the end of all wars?

Throughout history, there have been women leaders that have started or engaged in wars and military aggression.

Queen Isabella II of Spain invaded Morocco, and started wars with Peru, Chile, Cuba, and Puerto Rico.

Queen Victoria of the UK sent her nation to fight in the Second Boer War.

Catherine The Great of Russia was an expansionist which led to her invading the Turkish and Polish lands.

Elizabeth I of England started wars with the Spanish.

More currently and closer to home, Condoleeza Rice is an advocate and proponent of “pre-emptive war” (political alternative term for “aggressive warmongering”), and she is a supporter of the war in Iraq. Senator Hillary Clinton also voted for military invasion of Iraq.

Congressman Ron Paul is against pre-emptive war ideology and the Iraq War.
Clearly Paul, a male, who voted against military intervention in Iraq, is less violent than both Rice and Clinton.
Reference points:

Bill Maher on Feminism (03:12)

Sally Field’s recent Emmy Speech uncensored (01:33)

Watch Bill Maher’s comment about how people will applaud over this cliche’d myth, and then watch Sally Field state this cliche’d myth while the reaction is applause. Was Maher correct?
Franzia: Obviously the phrase “if women ran the world” indicates that it’s a hypothetical notion. Of course women have never “ran the world”. You say “we have no way to know”, but then again isn’t the phrase itself claiming to “know” that we’d have no more wars. So your point is moot.

Your second statement claiming “men who didn’t mind war and violence would probably attack them and force them to participate in war anyway” is also ridiculous. If women were in total power, then men wouldn’t really have the power to begin war without women’s consent. Secondly, why do you assume that only men wouldn’t “mind war”? Third, didn’t you just say that “we have no way to know”? So why are you already bringing up a conclusion if we have no way of knowing? Oh wait — you only bring up conclusions in hypothetical scenarios as long as it’s anti-male?
Franzia: (cont’d)
How do you know these women weren’t acting in their true nature? Did you know them? Were you there? These monarch women had absolute power and the final sayso. Secondly, all of these women I listed were the ones in control, not the kings. Why do you make the sexist notion that the king is always “the idiot”? Are you saying a queen can’t be an idiot? Isabella was quite an idiot as well. Look at her track-record. She was a supporter of the slave trade and she was put in exile. Victoria was threatened with assasination attempts for her bumbling idiocy and butchery.

Your statement about comparing Ron Paul to George W. Bush obviously shows your lack of education and abundance of ignorance. I never voted for Bush. Aren’t you Canadian? Anyway, Paul and Bush are polar opposites. Paul is against the Iraq War, and against most of Bush’s policies. Paul is an isolationalist that believes in non-interventionism and believes that the US should only use war in self-defense.
Franzia: (cont’d)

Maher and Fields are “uneducated” just because they’re celebrities. Another bogus statement you pulled out of your rear end. Bill Maher has a degree in English from Cornell University. Sally Field decided not to go to college, but does that make her uneducated? Malcolm X never went to college — was he uneducated? No, he was far more educated than you ever will be.
Rainbow:

Good one! I forgot about Margaret Thatcher and her military aggression against Argentina! She was definitely a warmongering woman.
I find it funny Franzia Kafka states that the women I listed “weren’t acting in their feminine nature”. But in many of Kafka’s rants around Yahoo Answers, she claims there’s no such thing as a “feminine” and “masculine” side, and that “gender is a social construct”. This is a belief held by many feminists. So does Franzia only refer to “gender” only when it serves her misandrist interest? If a woman commits a crime, she was “in touch with her masculine side”? If a female teacher commits statuatory **** with her student, was she acting within the bounds and mindset of a patriarchist? Was Mary Winkler in touch with her masculine side when she murdered her innocent husband with a shotgun blast to his back? So any wrongdoing a woman does, we’ll just say that for that split moment she wasn’t a woman, in some kind of a “trance” overcome with masculinity and patriarchial demons? LOL! Too funny! Please post more of this!
Wendy: That statement Queen Elizabeth made sounds pretty sexist against women. I don’t know any feminist that would support such a statement. Are women “weak and feeble”? Do women not have as much “heart and stomach” as a man? Not saying that I disagree, based on my observations of gender-related trends. But would a feminist agree? Afterall, feminists would state that such gender-related trends that indicate men have more “heart & stomach”, and that women are “weak and feeble” is all based on social constructs created within a patriarchy, and that none of these gender-traits are on inherent.