Abortion – Prog Gold

Pro-life

Published on November 9, 2013Leave a comment

Wendy Davis repurposes pro-life

Wendy Davis announces she’s running for governor of Texas saying she’s pro-life:

“I am pro-life,” she told a University of Texas at Brownsville crowd on Tuesday. “I care about the life of every child: every child that goes to bed hungry, every child that goes to bed without a proper education, every child that goes to bed without being able to be a part of the Texas dream, every woman and man who worry about their children’s future and their ability to provide for that future. I care about life and I have a record of fighting for people above all else.”

Surprise, surprise, the wingnuts don’t like it.

What being pro-life really means

Published on February 16, 2012Leave a comment

Women like this one, bleeding out and (almost) dying from non-safe abortions:

I looked around. A forest of IV poles, laden with blood instead of fruit. Everyone not directly helping was running back and forth to the pharmacy or blood bank. A nurse and another surgeon started to clean the floor. We were all bonded by this nameless woman whose life we were desperately trying to save. And we were bearing witness, because we knew if she died it was unlikely anyone would read about her in the paper. It was unlikely her family would protest. A myriad of potential reasons. Shame of the abortion. Distrust of government. Fear of immigration officials.

Remember: banning abortions means only safe abortions will be banned and women will have to go back to back alley coathanger “abortionists”, which means more women will die. Socalled pro-lifers want this, because they only care about protecting the fetus, not the mother and they’d quite like it if women died for being slutty sexy sex having sluts.

If you’re pro-life, you support killing women. It’s that simple.

The Great Law ‘N Order Swindle

Published on September 1, 2011

At Blood & Treasure they’re discussing Nadine Dorris latest attempt to force her own socalled morality on England and how the economic realities the coalition is enforcing on the country actually makes abortions more likely than less, despite Nadine’s best efforts. Justin hits the nail on the head on why this failure won’t deter people like Dorris from promoting more and more draconic measures:

From one point of view though, it’d work, because an quantifiable increase in the number of abortions would mean the policy wasn’t tough enough and would need to be toughened further. And round and round it goes.

I’m not being particularly cynical: that’s the way in which law ‘n’ order policy had been shaped over the past thirty years or so, in the US even more than the UK, and it shows no signs of failing to work (in the sense of losing votes, or discouraging its adherents) just as it shows no signs of actually working.

Now if we bear in mind that economic policy is increasingly a branch of law ‘n’ order policy – simply a matter of personal fault and personal failure – then we can see how little the question of rationality has to come into it. All you have to do is hit the bad guys. And if it doesn’t get results, then so much the better – hit them harder. Because we know who they are.

Both Labour and the Tories have always imported political ideas from America, but this wholesale adopting of hard right practises, following the GOP playbook of riling up the base and distracting the opposition with social issues while ramming through neoliberal policies is new, isn’t it?

As Justin argues, the beauty of pushing these sort of policies in the current political climate is that they can never fail, only be failed. If your hardline approach doesn’t work, it’s because you weren’t trying hard enough, not because the policy itself was wrong.

Parenthical notifications considered harmful

Published on September 9, 2010

Many American states have some kind of law requiring parental notification for underage women wanting an abortion. The point of these laws is to enable proper communication between parents and children on this topic, that parents are not kept in ignorance of their daughter undergoing a (supposedly) dangerous medical procedure. Some girls however can’t tell their parents even they required to by law and those girls end up in the courts getting a waiver. But who are those girls?

Harriet J. has the answer, based on her own experience dealing with them. Ranked from most often to least often, these are girls who:

have dads missing in action
or a dead parent
or parents opposed to the abortion
or who don’t have an ID
or who have been raped
or who have been raped and don’t (want to) know it
or who come from an abusive family
or who cannot let their parents know as they would not be able to deal with it
or who are in some kind of legal wasteland

And she also knows who these girls are not:

The girl who just whimsically doesnâ€™t want her parents to know grows up to be the woman who just whimsically gets an abortion, all nail-biting and hair-twirling and â€œGosh! I didnâ€™t realize my baby has fingernails WHAT.â€

And the upshot is:

So, there you go. Girls who canâ€™t tell their parents about their abortions? After you pass a parental notification law, they still canâ€™t tell their parents. Girls who can tell their parents? After you pass a parental notification law, they still tell their parents, unless they fall into an ill-defined legal loophole â€“ then they tell their parents but still have to come get a bypass. A parental notification law accomplishes two things: 1) it takes the girls who canâ€™t tell their parents and penalizes them for not being able to tell their parents and, 2) it takes a portion of the girls who can tell their parents and makes them go through the process anyway.

But of course, as Harriet J. and her commenters are fully aware of, the overt reasons why these laws are passed are horseshit. The real reason is to a) make it that much more difficult to get an abortion, b) make it easier to shut down abortion clinics for “breaking the law” and c) perhaps most important, punish these girls for having sex in the first place. It’s the last impulse that makes abortion and sexual politics so frustrating in the US, as this is something that you can’t reason people out of, as it’s not a position they have reached through reason.

So I Lied, So Sue Me

Published on September 4, 2008

I know I said I’d do nothing else on Palin but I just came across this post at Cornell Professor Michael Dorf’s personal blog.

While decrying the GOP’s vetting procedure Dorf makes a point I’ve not seen anywhere else – the massive disconnect between evangelist Palin’s professed anti-abortionism and her having amniocentesis while pregnant herself:

….one acquires the information available through an amniocentesis only at the small but real risk of terminating the pregnancy. This is why younger women are generally not offered an amniocentesis at all — the risk of miscarriage is too great to justify the procedure. For a person in a higher-risk category (an older woman, for example) who either will or might terminate a pregnancy on the basis of a positive result, this risk might be worth taking. But for a person who will not abort no matter what the result is, it would not appear to be. This makes me think that, at least for the moment that she decided to have an amniocentesis, Sarah Palin considered having an abortion.

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