Mike Pence travels to battleground states to try and sway votes of pro-abortion voters.

For my first post I would like to talk about a very prominent argument in our political and social spectrum, abortion. Is it good to have, is it bad to have? There was a recent article that I read that talked about current Vice President Mike Pence traveling to battleground states to try and convince voters to vote for trump. He specifically mentioned their perspective on abortion. “According to a Gallup poll conducted in May, one in four respondents said they will only vote for a candidate who holds their same views on the issue,” (Kelly). One in four doesn’t seem like much but when it comes to battleground states in can be very vital, especially since it depends on which state you are talking about. What is a battleground state? A battleground state is a state where voting for the presidential candidates could go either way. A state where voting is close to a 50/50. The ethical issue in this article is that there are many different opinions on this situation. Many people see it as a way of killing an innocent person. Others see it as a way of taking away womens’ rights because it is their body so they should be able to decide what happens to the child. To begin with the arguments I will speak from the side that I am on, the pro-life side. The pro-life side of the issue states that whether it is an embryo or a born baby, it is a human. With this mindset, it would agree with Donald Trumps and Pence’s philosophy when it comes to abortion. Pro-life followers believe that if it was a situation where the pregnancy was not wanted than there is always the option of adoption. This is always not the option that they hope people follow but it is always an option. Obviously the best option for this is to keep the child and love it like any other child. Adoption is a good option, however, it is very tough today because the foster care system does not get enough funding and the system is overflowing from others not wanting to abort and other family situations.
The pro-choice philosophy says that a woman should be able to choose if they want an abortion or not because it is their body and mind that will feel it. They do not see it as an act off murder and believe that it is not a human until it is born. Adoption would be an option but most people who choose abortion do not want to take care of the child at all and not have to go through all three trimesters of the birthing process. This is an option that is always there and is an option for after the unexpected pregnancy happens, so its a “backup” option in case if contraceptives do not work.
I believe that the national solution for this situation is to not have abortion as an option but to help foster care by providing more funding and help by making more foster homes or care centers across the country. This would provide options that I believe both sides would have pieces that they would be okay with. I would also suggest that birth control be cheaper as well so that abortions are less likely to happen because less unexpected births would happen. This is an option that I believe still prefers the pro-life side more than the pro-choice but I don’t believe that there is an actual solution that will give both sides exactly what they want or even something that is even. I do believe that Mike Pence is making the right decision though with making this as one of his main speaking points for convincing people to vote or him and Donald Trump because it is one of the biggest ethical issues in the whole world but mainly America.

Kelly, C. C. (2020, September 5). Pence makes pitch to anti-abortion voters in battleground states – CNNPolitics. CNN. https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/05/politics/mike-pence-abortion-battleground-states/index.html

Things are finally coming to a close. After the work we put in I’m pleased with how everything went. Matts conclusion to the presentation gave it a nice ending and I couldn’t have said it better. Some things I learned from the experience were for sure compromise and flexibility, and working with a team. I’ve worked in teams/groups before but this was different because it was more collaboration. Plus, I got a good group of friends out of it I’d say, even though we weren’t able to spend a lot of time together it still ended up that way.

One thing that I thought wasn’t the best was how abrupt it ended. I know it has to be done at some point, but after the presentation we weren’t really able to make a case for ourselves and it was my understanding that we were going to be asked questions after we were done presenting. I know we technically did this, but one idea could’ve been to have a critique session with more than just one instructor to get more minds/feedback before we presented. That way we could tailor our project more towards what they’re all looking for. Other than that, I’m glad to have had this experience and I look forward to more like these in the j school.

Overall, I am really proud of the work we all put together. Focusing more on my side of things, I was happy with just overall how much I learned from this whole experience. As I touched on in our final performance, this is definitely not something I would have expected to learn much about in college or in life in general as I guess it just was not that high of a priority for me. I think I did I good job of tying it all together in my reflection and it think the work speaks for itself. I learned new ways of capturing and posting media like I had not before and that was a cool aspect of this class. In terms of the group as a whole, I commend them all for staying on top of things and keeping this class as a priority. Their parts of the presentation were all strong, in my opinion, and I can not single out anyone for slacking or anything like that which is rare in such a long and challenging group project like this one. Challenges we had mostly came in the website itself. As the other instructors pointed out at the end, it may have not looked as relevant to the project as we made it sound and we could have done a much better job of tying in the website as a whole into our presentation. That being said, our oral presentations were all strong in my opinion, and I think the media we put out there was strong as well given the circumstances.

Overall, after giving our practice presentation, I felt strongly about where were at but I knew that we were far from perfect from giving the best presentation possible. However, from the critiques that we were given, we knew what we had to fix up. For starters, we figured out how important it is to show how diversified all of our experiences were and how that is such a unique thing to share in our project. It is definitely something that separates us from the rest of the pack. It was also a good idea to make sure Zach hit home how his experience was such a key contributor to the success of how we did overall with teaching us. Also, since I was the one giving the reflection, it only made sense for me to go last so it sends us home on a good note with everything we had learned. We also fixed up some of the media on the website to give it a more clean and less cluttered feel.

We basically just had to do all of the things mentioned earlier this week and had to put the finishing touches on everything we had worked hard on. I helped Josh when necessary with the website and also tried to coordinate times to meet on Zoom to iron out the details. A challenge we had was getting all together at the same time with such busy schedules, but we made it work.

At the time of when this post would have been made, we had not yet practiced our whole group presentation together. We had each figured out what we were going to say and had written our scripts, but we had not yet gotten all together and practiced. We figured out the order of Zach talking about the history of the sport and his role as the expert, and then Clark talking about the newness of being a fresh untested golfer, Dane talking about the simulator, Josh discussing the creation of the website and then me talking about just an overall refection and where we go from here. Josh determined he would be the one screen sharing because of the way he created the site and since he has a strong internet connection.

During this week, we had put together all of our individual videos for the website and edited them together to make it easier for Josh to put it on the website. I for one had done my interview in my room in a way so that I would look as professional as possible given the circumstances. Some challenges we had at the time were creating the website, and some of the files we had uploaded were not mixing well with the site. However, we eventually got it all figured out.

The week has finally come where we conclude this chapter of our journey, we presented this week! The presentation went better than I expected but we did miss dome important areas I believe. The website was something I believe that we should of worked on together more. It seemed like it was scattered but still has beautiful layout and design. I believe that my part was very good. I gave insight on what it was like to be an instructor rather than a student of the game of golf. I do think that we focused more on our experience too much rather than the website.

I believe that as a team this whole time we worked together perfectly. We communicated whenever something came up and people stepped up when nobody HAD to but they did it to help the team. I would give everyone a perfect score for participation because no one was slacking at any point. This started out as an experience between four strangers but I believe that we connected very well and actually became friends. This was a great experience all the way around, I just wish we would of had more time at the university to had been able to go out to the courses more.

Overall I think that our group did very well. Our presentation went well and we hit our time. I think that we told a unique story in the fact that it was shown from different levels that all came together into one big story. I worked on a lot of the website and so if I could improve it I think some things that I would change are the overall organization of it, in the feedback Katie said that I could have condensed some of it. The other thing I would do is just add more detail to first time users know what they are actually looking at. I don’t think our group really ran into many challenges outside of the big one that everyone had to deal with. I really have no complaints everyone pitched in and did their fair share which made the project effortless and smooth.

This week was all about just getting our project finalized. We had our practice presentation so we were able to take that feedback and make some tweaks to our final presentation. We figured out how to incorporate the rules into our project in a way that fits into our story better. I was also absent for most of the presentation which didn’t help because I made the website. Overall though I think that after we get a couple more practice sessions in we’ll be ready to present our project. 

This week also I just made some minor tweaks and  finalized the website 100%. The only problem that I really encountered was a couple of the interview videos being too long so I had to get those edited down a little bit in premiere but besides that everything was smooth and I think we are ready to go.

This week, we had our practice presentation, and overall, I think it went pretty well. I think we have a good, clean website, but more importantly, it does a good job of illustrating not only that, despite everything that happened, we still accomplished our goal of improving at the game of golf, but that it tells the story of how we did it, and how much fun we had doing it. I think the practice presentation was really helpful in preparing for the real thing next week, too. It was our first time really going through the website as presenters, and I think it was helpful to us in terms of finding the best order to present in, learning out time restraints, and seeing where the website still needs improvement. Before Wednesday, we’ll be able to put the finishing touches on our project, and I think our presentation will go very well.

This week, we worked really hard on getting the website nearly finished, as well as organizing and planning our presentation. We will be much more prepared for our final presentation come Wednesday as a result! All semester we have worked really hard on getting done with everything we needed to, and we have had a lot of fun doing it.