If you are not already reading RH Reality Check, you should be. Amanda must have a stomach of steel, because she actually read Justice For All’s 113-page training manual and lived to tell the tale. Justice For All is an anti-choice organization that targets college campuses and the naughty, nubile young harlots who congregate there.
I don’t remember coming into contact with anti-choice protesters as a college student. Granted, Boston University is not really a traditional college campus; maybe that’s why. Or maybe the anti-choicers figure the BU student body is beyond hope. I’m sure some of you have had delightful experiences of your own, however. I imagine most students simply ignore the activists and their giant fetus posters, or yell obscenities. But this manual aims to prepare Jihadists for Jesus for those times when they’ve convinced pro-choicers to engage them in conversation.
Some PDF scans from “Abortion: From Debate To Dialogue” are available at the link provided (my computer dislikes the dishonesty and wouldn’t let me download it). As you’d expect, it’s full of lies. To wit, the section entitled “What If The Mother’s Life Is In Danger” claims ectopic pregnancy is the only instance wherein a pregnancy can threaten a woman’s life – and thus, is the only valid reason for abortion, ever. Other risks such as eclampsia and placenta previa are dismissed as myths used to get away with abortions.
But, as Amanda details, it’s also full of instructions on how to appear compassionate to women. The section “Sound Bites For Showing Concern” explains how to soften a person up before comparing an elective abortion to shooting a toddler. They recognize that open hostility towards pregnant women turns people off, so they attempt to hide it.
The manual is designed to address common pro-choice accusations against the anti-choice movement, with titles like “Why Don’t You Pass Out Condoms and Promote Birth Control?” and “Abortion Isn’t Genocide!” Read further and you’ll learn how to evade the first question and defend the claim that yes, abortion is performed by doctors who simply hate fetuses (and love money).
Gee, I wonder where that sort of rhetoric might lead…
I would love to know if this kind of bullshit has actually changed the mind of one pro-choicer. It seems like preaching to the choir to me–I can see how it might radicalize someone who’s already anti-choice, but in my experience, people rarely change camps. Arguing about abortion rights–rationally or otherwise–doesn’t seem to have much effect regardless of which side of the issue you’re on.
This makes me passionately stabby. My mom’s life actually WAS close to endangered when I was in utero and she was on bedrest for abnormal bleeding and it was touch-and-go. But it wasn’t an ectopic pregnancy, so fuck her! My guess is that these people are the kind who think women should never, ever complain about the blessings of pregnancy. Sorry, but by month 5, I felt like the heartburn, judo kicking, nausea, fatigue, and hormones were enough to feel like I had an enemy combatant in my body. But suck it up, don’t complain, and fulfill your place in the command to be fruitful and multiply.
/rant
@BeckySharper – In my years of escorting, I’ve heard of exactly one woman turn away from the clinic because of an anti. She couldn’t speak English and had no idea what was going on. Yeah, their rhetoric works wonders. Given, that was “street counseling” and not “debate”, but I think the principle stands.
Viewing the world completely without nuance is so disturbing on so many levels (so much so that, as jdregent points out, they have to be instructed on how to appear “human-like,” ie, compassionate). Completely agree with sarah.of.a.lesser.god, makes me feel stabby in that having-a-brain-aneurysm-sorta way. I just don’t know what it is that people don’t get– call it a life or not, during pregnancy two “people” live in that body and guess which one I think should get legal priority. Sadly, I guess anti-choicers’ conclusion really is that the person who is not independently viable gets that priority.
@jdregent I’m an Aspie here, thank you
I know what you’re referring to here, but maybe ‘child and robot’ would have been a slightly less ableist choice of wording.
Also believe me, our minds work too empirically to be fooled by anti-choice propaganda. That’s their major failing, propaganda-wise, it’s all so contradictory and makes zero scientific sense.
I’m sorry, MC, my bro is Aspie too, perhaps I am just importing family jokes that are better left in the family! My apologies.
in fact if editors could remove it would be great, hate to (rightfully) offend another.
@JDR: Done. Have made comments like this myself but luckily I can change them, so happy to do the same!
But it worked in ‘Juno’!
Seriously though, I can see how someone young, unscientific and already pregnant could be convinced that their fetus is actually a life worth preserving. I heard a radio interview on NPR with a young woman in Queens I think, who was doing and excellent job of trying to keep her chit together while parenting, as a teen, a young child. She said that she was convinced to continue with her pregnancy becuase anti-choicers told her that his might he her only shot at motherhood.
It was unclear whether the implication was that the termination would fuck up her fertility, or whether the implication was that getting pregnant is so perilous and precious that one should treat every conception as though it might be their last and only chance.
Anyone else catch that interview?
In my almost 20 years of clinic escorting, I’ve also seen exactly one patient turn away. But it wasn’t because of rhetoric, it was because of sheer terror at the bloody signs and waves of hostility and anger emanating from those lovers of life. We all figured she rescheduled her appointment for a weekday.
I don’t worry about patients being influenced by the nutjobs, although I do worry about them being upset and traumatized by them. But in our state, patients have to get state-mandated “counseling” (designed by antis) before they can come in for their abortions, so they have already thought quite a lot about their decision.
It’s the poor frightened women and girls who fall into the hands of “crisis pregnancy clincs” or who are subjected to brainwashing attempts by their anti-choice “friends”. (Dang, sorry about all the quotation marks.) They will tell any lie, guilt trip these women up to their eyebrows, show them fake pictures and stories about how they regret their abortion blah blah, and we’ll give you whatever you want blah blah and really, going through the pregnancy so you can give the baby to someone like them is just like not being pregnant at all! Those places are dangerous.
Ooooh, scary stuff! Thanks for bringing attention to this, Sarah. I’ve felt a lot of pain for/ solidarity with your country in the past week. May good triumph over what is so clearly evil.
It’s too bad the RH Reality Check comment sections are filled with anti-choice trolls. It just proves the point that anti-choicers don’t want to debate, they just want to spread their “message” by means of lies, malice, and intolerance.
I dunno. When I found myself accidentally pregnant, my knee-jerk reaction was “I can’t have an abortion!” Upon reflection, and self-examination, I realized that this was not what *I* really thought, it was a reflexive impulse informed by anti-choice rhetoric — both the strident anti-choice garbage peddled by Justice For all and their ilk (which I am very much against, but which nonetheless gets under my skin) and the more insidious stuff like all the movies and stories wherein the courageous mom-to-be chooses to continue with an unwanted pregnancy.
Luckily, through the support of my boyfriend, healthcare providers, and friends in whom I confided, I found the self-awareness to realize that termination was the right choice for me. Keeping that pregnancy would have been disastrous to me for a lot of reasons, and the fact that I even considered it speaks to me of how deeply I had internalized the anti-choice rhetoric, even though I was and am very pro-choice and usually smart enough to know better.
Long story short, this kind of thing matters, and it does have an effect.
@jdregent Thankee! I figured you didn’t mean it in an abusive way. Sometimes I still find myself slipping and using the word ‘lame’ (damn you 90′s) and wouldn’t mind a gentle reminder to help me reform that habit either. So I thought I’d mention
I have encountered these folks and their massive dead fetus pictures. They are trained to be “nice” but not in much else.
I and a few other women systematically dismantled their arguments and corrected their errors. For example, I had to tell them that abortion was criminalized only toward the end of the 19th century (they thought it had always been illegal pre-Roe) and that Sarah Weddington, not Jane Roe, was the lawyer who argued Roe v. Wade.
Not that it mattered. They still had giants pics, they didn’t change their minds, and I wasted 45 minutes of my life.
I always get very defensive of people who are anti-choice but parade around that it’s “OK” if the “mother is at risk.” I am on a medication for RA that depletes the folic acid in my body. Should I accidentally become pregnant, the fetus would fail to develop appropriately and would be born with severe deformities, etc. My rheumatologist told me, on starting this medication, that they recommend termination of the pregnancy. When I point this out in conversation with anti-choicers, they stammer around. I’m surprised I haven’t heard the “Well, you should love your child, no matter what!” Not being as eloquent as you ladies, I’d probably just laugh, but really, how fair is it to bring a child into this world, knowing full well that they would be unable to function? Not one bit better than guilting a woman in a high risk pregnancy to finish to term.
Like Blind Irish Pirate, I also take a medication that is not fetus-friendly. There is some literature suggesting that if a pregnancy were detected early and I quit the meds and went on high doses of folic acid the kid might be OK. I, on the other hand, would probably be less than OK, since (1) these meds are the only thing that has ever worked for my bipolar disorder, and (2) sudden discontinuation can cause seizures. I’d really like an anti-choicer to come explain to me why I should have seizures, 9 months of untreated bipolar, and the kid’s still at risk anyway depending how quickly the meds were stopped and the folic acid started.
Assholes.
As I touched upon in another post, I take meds that aren’t fetus-friendly too – meds that make my life liveable. And even if they weren’t harmful to fetuses, pregnancy would certainly cause my body tremendous pain that I am unwilling to deal with if I can help it.