The language and imagery of the anti-abortion movement are ubiquitous in American life.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1416911
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1416911
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Excellent article.
They said that when you devalue certain life, it opens up devaluing all life, like the killing of the elderly or anyone you see as lesser.
Two things:
One, liberals believe in equality. We don’t devalue life. Conservatism has the distinction of depending upon “better” people – the king, the wealthy, skin color.
Two, there is no such thing as “certain life.” Politicians have no authority to arbitrarily define the status of anything before birth.
Women are people too.
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With all that…all the antiabortion language and theater…still near 70% of the people in America favor keeping it available to those that choose it. In the end that will out. The Robert’s Court will be corrected. Citizens United will be off the books and a version of Roe back on. It was the Robert’s Court that said fuck precedent so precedent is now fucked. That includes precedent set by Roberts and his clan.
There’s a Kennedyesqe person somewhere and that person will come. Not in my lifetime but it will happen. Until then limiting the damage is all one can do.
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My uterus did not kill those kids and teachers in south Texas so why does it have more regulations than a gun?
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In 1967 I adopted a child whose mother was 14 when she was conceived. Abortion was much in the news at that time and I was grateful then and more grateful now that my daughter was not aborted. One of my closest friends at that time was a German woman whose father, a minister, had helped Jews escape Nazi Germany. Elsa was adamant against abortion being in any way sponsored by the government, because of her background in Nazi Germany and the actions of that government against anyone weak and helpless. And I agree with her. What women choose to do with their own bodies is their choice and should be so - but it does become a slippery slope if the government pays for it.
I’m also very uncomfortable about late term abortions being allowed in most circumstances - my grandchild was born at 23 weeks in 2000 and has now finished college - but that’s another story.
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How about pushing a counternarrative that’s far more accurate:
GOP: “Pro” life until birth. It loves fetuses, not so much schoolchildren.
However much resonance its dishonest anti-abortion messaging has been, we can turn its stance on guns against it, and then some, and use that win back enough power to eventually make abortion legal in every state AND reduce mass shootings and other gun crimes drastically. It’s all about messaging and winning back seats and this is an ideal wedge issue.
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I respect your views and choices and the great care you’ve taken of your adopted daughter. But we can’t put abortion, which is ultimately a medical decision and procedure, in a separate category from other medical medical decisions and procedures, just because some people have moral objections to it. If it’s legal, it should be treated as any other medical decision and procedure and I see no legal basis for doing otherwise. That abortion was abused to promote eugenics is no reason to ban government support of it. And late term abortion is only when it’s absolutely medically necessary, not otherwise an option.
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Yep, their overturning precedent to promote a political and ideological agenda will ultimately be used against them.
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Perhaps the pro choice movement should design a bumper sticker with a fertilized egg on it that says “is this a baby?”
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late term abortions are very rare…usually becuase the fetus is abnormal, in some way…it is very seldom about the life of the woman. would you have adopted a baby, knowing that it was abnormal in a way that affect its whole life? government pays for very few terminations…the ones it does pay for are for medical issues…,
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and neither did mental health…they died because a guy shot them with a gun…my new motto…’ COWARDS CARRY…MOTHERS & FATHERS BURY…’
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Forced birth is unamerican.
Forced birth is not freedom.
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We’ve come full circle. The Texas Tower sniper killed an unborn child on 8/1/66 (along with 18 others).
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And in the end, this is just another successful Frank Luntz-style campaign to mangle the English language.These people should properly be referred to as "anti-choice’ and/or “forced birthers.” They really seem to think that they have some say in the medical concerns of other people. Fuck off.
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I have always found fetal heart beat baffling. The heart beat starts at 6 weeks according to the anti abortionists but the heart isn’t formed until 20 weeks. Quite the time travel.
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I believe, I feel, I know, triumphs over fact every time.
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Read a rather scary article that reframed this as a “seizure of your body by the government” because up till now no one has a legal / constitutional requirement to save the life of another.
FORCING a woman, at gun point, to “save the life” of anyone, including her own child, is legally no different than requiring her to give blood, or a kidney, or be an organ donor. Nightmare stuff.
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Stealing women and girls’ human rights is criminal on the individual level and tyrannical when cloaked in law. Their goal is to increase production of white babies by force through withholding alternatives. If the goal was to increase production of Americans, they’d support making it easy to raise all children. They don’t. It’s an unintelligent and abusive political movement using women and girls as chattel/property.
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I’ve never met a pro-life activist that could have children of their own.
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I would argue that R-W/Christianist success in framing abortion also lay in the willingness of media to repeat and amplify that framing rather than actually reporting on its implications for liberty in a nominally secular democracy but that’s just our corporate media – a mile wide, an inch deep, and hard-wired to uncritically echo conservative talking points in headlines and ledes – but, that aside, there are implications beyond the moral, civil, and medical worth discussing as others such as Ursula Le Guin note; e.g.,
My friends at NARAL asked me to tell you what it was like before Roe vs Wade. They asked me to tell you what it was like to be twenty and pregnant in 1950 ...—what it was like to be a senior at Radcliffe and pregnant and if you bore this child, this child which the law demanded you bear and would then call “unlawful,” “illegitimate,” this child whose father denied it … What was it like? […]
It’s like this: if I had dropped out of college, thrown away my education, depended on my parents … if I had done all that, which is what the anti-abortion people want me to have done, I would have borne a child for them, … the authorities, the theorists, the fundamentalists; I would have born a child for them, their child.
But I would not have born my own first child, or second child, or third child. My children. ... – Ursula Le Guin
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