I'm still not sure how you get these in utero. Via Mushroom and Rooster @ Flickr.
That would be a quote taken from a comment to this article, from a blog at US News and World Report. It was too good not to share. If you’re brave, you’ll also find racist fearmongering about the rise of “Eurislam,” a lot of frothing about Jesus and the Church and Evil and Other Unnecessarily Capitalized Nouns, claims that oral contraceptives are abortifacents and condoms increase the rate of AIDS infections. And then there’s SHOUTING ABOUT THE PWESHUSS BAYBEEZ. You’ll be laughing too hard to taste the bile rising in your throat.
Aaaanyway, the blog entry itself is about how the new administration might frame its approach to the ongoing reproductive rights debate, given that Obama has been playing the “let’s find common ground” card on this issue (and many others, which seem to end up with “minority” groups getting shit on again. See also: LGBTQs). That Obama appointed Alexia Kelley, who co-founded the anti-choice Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, to head the HHS’s Faith-Based Initiatives Committee isn’t doing anything to ease my mind. While I can’t think of anyone who thinks we should aim for more abortions, I am suspicious of that phrase “common ground,” and I fear that it will lead to concessions from nominally pro-choice advocates in Congress.
Dan Gilgoff, who writes the blog, identifies two main concerns for the administration are “preventing unwanted pregnancies and reducing the need for abortion.” That seems like a single point of concern to me, as women who are gleefully pregnant rarely seek out abortion, but as you’ll see, we’re beyond the realm of logic here. We’re talkin’ BABY. SLAVERY. What Gilgoff really means is that there are competing bills: one aimed at implementing comprehensive sex ed and supplying or subsidizing contraception, and the other focused on “supporting pregnant women.” I assume that incredibly generic phrase means providing financial incentives to women to persuade them to carry to term, although that wouldn’t square with Republican “values” regarding social programs and the undeserving poor/sluts/brown people who suck greedily at the government’s monstrous teat, so it isn’t quite clear.
In any case, people on both side of the debate (that would be the “I respect women as people with the attendent right to bodily sovereignty” side and the “PUNISH THE WHOOOOORES” side) are anxious about how these bills might be introduced. Pro-choice types are understandable leery of the language of The Pregnant Women Support Act, introduced by the banally evil Bob Casey (D-PA, sob!), which is designed to
increase resources for pregnant women seeking alternatives to abortion and would extend the federal children’s health insurance program to “unborn children.”
There you have it: not only will money not go towards a reproductive healthcare plan that would, among other things, subsidize contraceptives for women who cannot afford them (and that’s a lot of women) thereby reducing unwanted pregnancies, but fetuses will be granted universal health care, instead. Next year, I assume there willl be a fetal suffrage bill.
These same anti-choicers are outraged by the Prevention First Act, which, as its name implies, is focused on education and contraception. How they reconcile their opposition to education and contraception with their professed desire for reducing the rate of abortion is quite beyond me, but I’m guessing it has to do with the aforementioned Baby Slavery or something equally logical.
The question remains: will the bills be yoked together, in an attempt to make everyone happy (and we know where that often leads), or not? And if not, which bill gets precedence? My cynical spidey-sense says that we’re going to end up with more money for “crisis pregnancy centers” that do their damnedest to frighten and/or threaten women into maintaining pregnancies they did not plan and do not want, while education and contraception, which has been proven time and again to lower the rates of STIs and unintended pregnancy, will go by the wayside. Not only will that give Republicans their “moral high ground,” when their efforts fail, as they most certainly will, they’ll have the bone-deep satisfaction of blaming Big Government for ineffective programs and wasteful spending. Since they’re not actually interested in reducing abortions, it’s a win-win for them. And it’s lose-lose for women.
I would say there is no “common ground” on the issue of abortion, except there is. There always has been. It’s called the pro-choice position. You choose to stay ignorant, you choose to forgo contraception, and when facing a pregnancy, you can choose to continue it and keep the resultant child, or put it up for adoption. I’ll choose to be educated, to use appropriate contraception, and to have an abortion when and if I become pregnant. You get what you want, I get what I want.
Except that’s not what anti-choicers want. They want scarlet letters. They want shame and punishment for women who have unsanctioned sex (however they’re defining it at the moment). And of course it’s about punishing women, not men. The people Obama is having to placate on the issue of abortion are largely dudes. Dudes like Catholic Bishops. Dudes like the leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention. Dudes like fucking William Saletan, who seems physically incapable of shutting his enormous, ignorant piehole when it comes to abortion (or anything else that really doesn’t concern him). Dudes, who will never ever ever be pregnant.
I don’t have a tidy ending to this post. I’m pissed. I can’t believe I’m having to engage with this shit over and over again, and I’m barely scratching the surface of all the goings-on. If you’re looking for something to do, go to Planned Parenthood, or NARAL, or their Facebook sites (friend them already!), get on their action list, and find out if /how you should be harrassing your state senators and representatives on these issues. And I promise, the day the President of my country clearly and firmly states that she will not do anything to restrict abortion rights, but will instead focus on giving women real choices (where to work, whether to marry, etc.) through education and a solid system of social supports, I will free every last one of my slave babies. Common ground, bitchez.
Oh god…I hate to have to say this…Bob Casey is a Democrat. He was the guy we had to sell our souls to to get rid of Santorum. As a Pennsylvanian, I hang my head in shame.
There is no philosophical common ground here, nor with any other issue of social conservatism (or at least, none that is logically consistent). The common ground is, “you do whatever you want in your own damn life and leave me the hell alone”.
Oh, crap, you’re right, baraqiel. I forget, because he’s such a stupid reactionary turd. Will fix.
Was it Mike Huckabee who recently argued against abortion on the grounds that it was akin to slavery OF THE BABY bc slavery is the only other time we can treat people as property and decide whether they live or die.
Silly me, I thought that was marriage! Just the fact that he broached the slavery analogy, and then FAILED TO RECOGNIZE THAT IN FACT IT IS THE WOMAN DENIED AN ABORTION WHO IS ENSLAVED, forced to put her body, health, and identity at risk in order to let a not-yet person FEED off of her, take her cells, shut down her immune system, and then come out of her body.
They just show you again and again that they really don’t see us as people. The long history of women’s unpaid labor — literally labor — not to mention all of our unpaid domestic work, flies totally over his head. Just incubators. The only reason they should support us is when we are carrying or delivering their babies. Its a fucking insult.
Why yes, JD, he did. He argued that he doesn’t want his kids to be able to kill him when he becomes old and inconvenient. Proving once again that anti-choice men like him are still deep in the existential crises that began when they were 13. It’s ALL ABOUT THEM and how abortion makes them feel. Stewart really blew it in that interview, too.
Also, if a “slave” tried to LIVE INSIDE MY WOMB, providing absolutely no services whatsoever, then I have no idea what slavery is. What is he even fucking talking about?
right. but the comparison to euthanasia makes no sense to me because pregnancy is a totally unique situation, which i think is the main fact that anti choice men in particular cannot wrap their minds around. there is nothing like it. you can’t really compare it to anything else. maybe organ donation? can you imagine making THAT mandatory? not organ donation after death but living donation?
and only a man who has never been hurt, has never been seriously ill or injured, and has never truly had the responsibility for the life of another (or who has not taken that responsibility on) could compare the kind of dependence that comes with disability, age, or illness with fetal development. most women have no illusions about the fact that we are that interdependent, that we spend our lives being taken care of and taking care of others. THAT’S WHY WE’RE PRO CHOICE. Because it will be US taking care of those children when and if they are born, not Mike. God.
you are so right about the existential horror. I think especially for Christians/religious folk, the creator is also destroyer. He or she who gives life can take it away. Our reproductive capacity and our reproductive freedom are the ultimate threat to men, the ultimate reminder that women have a kind of power that men don’t. They have to believe that THEY make the baby the minute their sperm shoots into you.
I think sometimes about Psalm 139:13, which Christians often rely on to promote anti choice policies: “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.” To me, the passage is beautiful, in part because it makes reference TO THE MOTHER. What is a fetus in a womb if not context? The context of the woman’s body and her life? And yet it is that context that they seek to deny, the body and life of the woman.
My dear PhD: I do believe you left a few O‘s out of WHOOOOORES. It is properly spelled WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORES
All of this brings up a question for me, an obstacle that I often run across in abortion debates. It’s obvious to all of us that the division is indeed between “the “I respect women as people with the attendent right to bodily sovereignty” side and the “PUNISH THE WHOOOOORES” side” (great phrasing, by the way). But I often hear people, even pro-choice people!, say “oh, that’s not their intention, you’re tarring with a broad brush, I know a lot of pro-life people and they don’t think that way”. To which I often respond with something to the effect of, “People don’t really know why they think things sometimes, blah blah Foucault, look at their logically inconsistent actions a.k.a. how they don’t support live babies or condemn war and yet they talk about women who get abortions as irresponsible, blah blah please read these 8 books”. I’m starting to think this isn’t the most effective way to answer that objection! Harpies and co.: any better suggestions?
Wow, I’m off my game today. Casey is a Dem, and the correct spelling is “WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORES.”
Maybe that’s why I think “blah blah Foucault” is a great response.
baraqiel, I like to tell them that pro-lifers are anti-American because the whole country was founded on the principals of the freedom of the individual to make choices and limiting those choices by presuming that people are incapable of making adult decisions all off their own bat is thus contrary to the spirit of the founding fathers and indeed the very foundations of the American nation. However i am evil and British so my arguments shouldn’t be trusted.
Baraqiel, can you give an example of a question? I know what you’re talking about but let’s put it this way: you pretend to be the anti-choicer or sympathetic pro-choicer and I’ll try to give you a satisfactory response.
I also agree that blah blah Foucault is the correct answer. The only other answer I can really think of is “well, those nice well meaning people are mistaken.” Plenty of people mean well but support policies that do bad things. It’s just that with abortion, anti-choicers really expect you to think they are so moral and discerning and high minded. Ugh.
@emilyanne – I think the response you’d get to that is something akin to, “But what about the rights of the youngest Americans?” Usually when people get to that point I lose hope of ever convincing them of anything with logic. As in, the last time I had a guy answer something like that, he said, “Abortion is oppressive to women, because half of those aborted are women”. That guy won about a week’s worth of episodes of my favorite game show, Who Doesn’t Know What Words Mean?
@JD, PhD – Yeah…the thing is, I often find that people tend to not take kindly to being told that their understanding of society is flawed and incomplete and that they need to learn some social theory, especially social theory by a French dude. It’s like the knee-jerk response people have when they don’t understand prejudice as systematic and instead think of it as event-based and then get really angry and defensive when someone makes what should be an uncontroversial statement like “all white people are at least a little bit racist”.
@SarahMC – The way I can stomach to phrase it is: “But all the pro-life people I know really think that babies are being murdered, and if you thought that, wouldn’t you be concerned?”
The line about half of all abortions being women is one of the most disingenuous of them all. It is impossible to abort a woman, as a woman is an adult human female. I love when anti-choicers pretend to care about girls, though. It’s so obvious they don’t. They aren’t pro-woman in any other aspect of life, but they ARE “feminist” in the sense that they want to “save” all the little fetus-women. :eye roll: Sorry for all the scare-quotes.
Anyway, back to your issue. In the case of an argument like that I would have to appeal to bodily sovereignty. The unborn should not have rights the born do not have (the right to use another’s body against her will). Ask whether organ donation should be compulsory. Is it murder to refuse to donate a kidney to someone who will die without it?
I don’t know, I guess I am of a mind that it is a little bit of a zero sum game. It’s either the fetus or the woman. If the fetus is a person from minute one, and it’s murder, then yeah there are few defenses for abortion. But if you buy that line of reasoning you also have to accept that women’s lives will be seriously limited, that we will not have equality in society, that we will be forced to be mothers and that it is our biological destiny to do so. And if you buy that argument, then you might as well argue against women working or becoming educated. I just think if you accept that women should be equal in society, you can’t have forced pregnancies. So just sort of force people to take that logic all the way. Like de facto racism, the anti-choice position can be coming from an anti-woman/anti-equality place, but it can also be that people who don’t have the intent to cause gender inequality nonetheless do so by their policy preferences. I don’t feel like it’s that different from other issues (as you point out) except for the seemingly insurmountable difference on whether the fetus counts as a person.
But I also think Sarah’s good samaritan argument is a powerful one, because it also appeals to basic libertarian instincts. I mean, conservatives love to let people die! It’s sort of their platform!
Healthcare for unborn babies, instead of for pregnant women, tells you everything you need to know about anti-choice advocates (down to the fundamental misunderstanding of pregnancy that JD describes).
@SarahMC – “The unborn should not have rights the born do not have (the right to use another’s body against her will).” Yes, I think this is a good place to take the argument and I’ve had at least moderate success with it. The problem is when people start making value judgments with regard to rights, and saying that taking away the fetus’ right to life is “worse” somehow than taking away the woman’s right to bodily autonomy. Moreover people often make the argument that the woman has “invited” the fetus into her body by engaging in PIV sex in the first place (regardless of whether or not there was a failure of contraception involved) and thus has forfeited her ability to refuse to undergo a pregnancy. Given that people like this are often anti-sex in significant ways, they almost never concede that it’s unrealistic and almost malicious to expect people to go without sex rather than providing them with a way to resolve the unintended consequences.
@J.D. – Now that is a pathway that I haven’t taken all the way before. The next time I get into one of these debates, I will try your tactic and see how it goes.
Well if they insist that the woman “invited the fetus in,” I am going to assume that they may be the kind of people who make exceptions for rape victims. In which case, you got them. If a fetus’ “right” to live is dependant on the circumstances of conception that’s a dead giveaway that it’s about controlling female sexuality rather than saving babies.
And I mean, look right there in the article. All these groups interested in “saving babies” are OPPOSED to funding contraception and sex-ed programs. Actions speak louder than words so if you’re ever in an argument with one of these people, just press them on what they’re doing to “save babies” (other than shouting at women outside Planned Parenthood). The silence will tell you all you need to know, and you should throw it right back in their face.
@Sarah: to add to your point about pushing anti-choicers on what, other than protesting abortion, they are doing for the babies, I found it soooo telling that, after Dr. Tiller’s murder, the people who used to protest his clinic had no freakin’ idea what to do with themselves. The founder of a pro-life group that lead daily protests there told the press that members were calling to ask what would become of their shifts, and wringing their hands about what they were going to do to fill their time now. I was like, REALLY!?!? If you honestly care about children and babies, there are plenty of organizations in Kansas that provide help and services to struggling mothers, and needy children who are ALREADY BORN that need volunteers and support! There are foster care agencies, group homes, the March of Dimes. DO SOMETHING PRODUCTIVE with your new found free time for fuck’s sake! The protesters’ reaction just reinforced to me that, deep down, it’s not really about children.
I had to read this article in 2 takes, since it made me so so so angry. I’m not surprised at Casey-and god help us, he’s still miles better than his predecessor, Mr Man-on-Dog Santorum.
For me, the point is that conservative Democrats are being allowed to run the show with the permission of the man we elected to put a stop to this nonsense. there is simply no reason to have an anti-choicer in the office of faith-based initiatives. None. Obama is betraying his promises to us every day, us being people who are GLBTQ or allies, women, those who oppose the war, and on and on. I hope desperately that Senator Al Franken will add some spine to the Democratic caucus, because with friends like the ones the Dems have been up to now…
Sometimes, Barry, people are just not going to like you. Suck it up and be an adult.