Discussion for article #226061
Not real clear on what you’re trying to say. Is it that the entrenched lobby groups should stop dominating the debate on this emotional, controversial issue? Good luck with that.
If that is your point, I applaud it. But as someone who has tried to get the two sides to talk about goals they both should agree on - reducing unwanted pregnancies, for example - I can tell you that it ain’t easy.
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I’ve said privately to family and friends that if women who have had abortions would speak publicly, it would start a shift in attitude - because so many women HAVE had abortions. Just as homophobes suddenly become “gay-friendly” when members of their family come out of the closet, it is possible anti-abortionists might re-think their fervent opposition when an aunt or a sister or a close family friend reveals their abortion.
But it is hard to speak up. The anti-abortion group is so angry! So I admire Aspen if she has been public about having an abortion. I wish all of us could be brave enough to stand with her openly.
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Speaking up finally is great, yet it would be less of an issue had the early movement posed choice, hence abortion, as a matter of equal rights instead of privacy (something Justice Ginsburg has commented on lately). The choice of privacy was intentional by moderate-liberal Establishment feminists and their lawyers back in the late '60s, early '70s, as a way of watering down the issue, trying to find a palatable common denominator. Only it ultimately backfired, as so many favoring an equal rights fight at the time warned.
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Not sure what world the writer’s been living in, but in ours, the antis have become ever more strident, and their demands ever more adamant and implacable. We’ve retreated from abortion and are now re-litigating contraceptive rights, unbelievably. Abortion access is all but gone in many areas of the country. The SCOTUS recently ruled to eliminate buffer zones around clinics so that the screaming antis can now harass anyone going in all the way to the door, and, in a separate ruling, that right wing corporations can impose fundamentalist religious mores onto their employees.
No idea what sort of accommodation is supposed to be possible with these fanatics. We’ll either defeat them at the polls (and remove the 5-vote right-wing majority in the SCOTUS), or abortion and contraceptive rights will be gone.
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I agree on new terms
For pro-choice…Freedom fighters.
For anti-abortion…Goddamn idiotic crotch doggies.
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The issue always seems to come down to anger and blame from those who spend their life proselytizing. It is a potent issue, but nobody should have to be subjected to the harassment we have seen from the holier than thou set. Many of these people are just looking for meaning in their forlorn lives. Dumping the pro-choice and pro-life mindsets is probably not going to happen until we restore privacy to individuals.
Perhaps what we should drop is the term abortion, which no longer has any real meaning in the family planning debate.
Agreed. This article reads like commenting on the emotional impact of a certain color of wallpaper has on someone while the house burns down.
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I’m a little confused. First, I’m left wondering what terms are going to replace “pro-choice” and “pro-life” in the discussion. It is only from reading the referenced NYT article that I learn NOTHING is replacing “pro-choice”–that that term is being dropped by its former users and that the “pro-life” side considers this a victory. The term “pro-life,” meanwhile is NOT being dropped, even if the headline suggests that we should “dump” it as well. And in fact even this article itself refers to that group using that term: “Neither Planned Parenthood nor their pro-life opponents could dominate the airwaves anymore.” Notice the two sides here: pro-life and…Planned Parenthood.
So I’m not sure how this rhetorical victory is something worth celebrating. Yes, it’s always good to move the discussion beyond labels and slogans. But one does need SOME way of referring to your side of a political debate. The anti-abortion people are still happy to be called “pro-life.” And countering them we have, what, the Planned Parenthood group? The Group Formerly Known as Pro-Choice? Not sure we have such great news here…
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The “abortion debate” was decided on 1/22/73.
I think what the TPM and NYT articles are trying to say is that issues for women go way beyond abortion. The term ‘choice’ doesn’t cover other issues that Republicans are willing to impose on women. These issues include access to birth control and family planning, equal pay and childcare rights, economic and physical health, pregnancy and incarceration rights and the ‘fetal rights’ or ‘personhood’ movement.
Example: A new Tennessee law became the first in the US to criminalize pregnant women who use drugs against the advice of most major medical organizations, including the American Medical Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.
ETA: The Tennessee law recognizes fetuses, embryos and fertilized eggs as persons who are separate from the mothers who carry them.
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The author didn’t answer the obvious question. If “pro-choice” goes out of use, what replaces it?
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If you look at the Wikipedia entry on “anti-abortion violence”, I think you’ll see that it’s still an open topic to the nutsos.
And since the few “abortion clinics” that remain provide more than abortions, why aren’t we calling them “women’s health facilities”? It’s a lot harder to justify blocking, screaming, imitating children when we accurately describe what’s going on behind those barred doors.
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A laundry list of over a half dozen issues.
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I think it’s well-intentioned but incredibly naive to think that the people who oppose reproductive rights are amenable to dialog. It reminds me of this stream of tweets Jeff Sharlet put into a blog post http://jeffsharlet.blogspot.com/2013/05/fetishizing-dialogue.html He called fetishizing dialog a “a form of technocratic optimism based on free market myth of “exchange” as end in itself.” He’s right. Sometimes a disagreement is over fundamentally irreconcilable views of the world. In the case of reproductive rights the opponents of them don’t see women as full human beings, period. They need to be defeated, not reasoned with for the 587,208,989th time.
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Exactly. We are now having to defend birth control from people who are attacking access to it diligently and getting cases all the way to the Supreme Court full of lies about “abortifacients”. I don’t know what it will take for dingleberries like Will Saletan to understand what we’re up against and, no, there’s no reasoning with them. Maybe when women are being carted off to jail by the thousands he’ll have his long-needed epiphany.
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That’s because one side pretends to be concerned about “life” and “saving babies” while pursuing an agenda to punish women for having sex. That’s why they’ll never go along with expanded birth control access or comprehensive sex ed. Impossible to have a productive conversation when one side refuses to be honest and argue in good faith.
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“The old dichotomy of the culture war is dying.”
Joking, surely.
The author speaks of a “broader, more layered” approach, but that has little to do with today’s political reality.
We need tactics and strategy, not admonitions.
“Safe, legal and rare” still works for me. If it takes federal troops protecting a clinic in, say, Mississippi to keep it that way then that is fine and dandy. The law of the land must be defended—in all 50 states.