Abortion

1. An undue burden is anything that actually prevents a women from getting an abortion. Sure, the government can limit the amount of facilities that give abortions or give regulations for when it is no longer moral to abort a fetus (i.e. several weeks before its birth, when it could potentially be born and survive on its own) but laws that actually prevent women from getting aboritions at all are, in my opinion, "undue burdens". Restricting abortion clinics with dumb laws like they have to be in a "pretty" setting or have hallways of a certain width and lenght would be what I consider undue burdens.

2. Taxpayer dollars should pay to help people who shouldn't or do not have the means to pay for abortions (poor unhealthy mothers-to-be) the same way we support any other charity cause. Tax dollars should not be used to cover health plans of people who, for some reason or another, get abortions, can afford it, but don't want to.

3. Abortion needs to be legal. There are too many "what if" situations where it seems like people just need abortions. When you make abortions illegal, nobody has access to them. If you keep abortion legal, people who are against them don't have to get them and can do everything they can to convince people not to, but at least the option is still there.

Renovations

The pictures in the renovations plans slideshow do not look like anything I would expect Deerfield to be capable of having. In recent weeks, I have come to realize how truly horrible our facilities are. Despite having an average ACT score of 26 and a graduation rate of 99.8%, it seems like Deerfield has the worst facilities out of any of the schools in the North Shore. We don't have a good heating/air conditioning system, the windows don't work, our PERC is full of old and rusty machinery, and many rooms look outdated and unkept. It's absolutely ridiculous that people aren't willing to pay seven extra cents a day because they think their taxes are too low. We live in a nice town and want to maintain our reputation; in addition, real estate prices don't matter unless you're selling your house right now. If we make our school more desirable and more people move here in the future, real estate prices will go up, if anything. We students aren't asking for iPads or Segways to take us from our classes; we're asking not to have to learn in stuffy classrooms with outdated facilities. That's all. And I don't think that's too much to ask for.

The Execution

Despite the video's attempts to humanize Boggess, I still think he deserved capital punishment. His crimes were horrifying and he seemed to commit them casually, bragging about them afterwards. He wasn't forced or in a bad position, he simply decided to act, and that is the worst part. I think that to use Boggess's religious conversion as leverage for lightening his punishment is a bad idea. I feel like in many cases, people on death row will become religious or will say they have "changed" in order to distance themselves from their crime. I'm sure people change during their time on death row, but the fact is that they can never erase the damage they have done to other people. Of course, instances such as Leslie Gosch's botched executions should never occur; execution should be as humane and painless for those sentenced to die. Gosch definitely suffered psychological cruelty and should not have had to go through that.

What I learned about the case was that capital punishment is treated quite differently across the country. Even if you commit the same crime in two states, your chances of receiving capital punishment can be drastically different. I think it's so bizarre that in one state an action warrants death and in another it does not.