Danielle Muscato has a public post on Facebook saying a thing that I strongly agree with (and wrote a Free Inquiry column saying a few issues back):
Rant mode engaged:
I’m sick of hearing people say, “No one is pro-abortion. Pro-choice is not pro-abortion.”
Bullshit. I’m pro-abortion. Anytime, for any reason, on demand, no questions asked, no waiting period, no parental consent, no spousal consent, tax-funded abortions, and please take as many free condoms on your way out as you’d like. And I make no apology for this. Your body, your choice.
Copious heated “oh no you didn’t” ensued – nearly all of it from men. Lots of impassioned concern for the other person involved, and the fact that abortion is after all just plain murder. This one especially:
I am pro-choice – but many of you guys are missing the freakin’ point, here. You say you support the woman’s right to choose because women should be able to choose what happens to their own bodies. That’s fine. But don’t for one second believe that pro-lifers disagree with that. They aren’t protesting to end a woman’s right to choose, trivially – most of them are protesting because they literally think abortions are murder…. they think it’s the same thing as walking up to somebody on the street and gunning them down. Would you protest for the woman to have the right to choose if she can shoot a man down in the streets? If not, then don’t freakin’ defend your position by saying that you support a woman’s right to choose. The only difference between you and them is the interpretation of when a life begins or when a life reaches a stage that should not be stifled. Stop with the strawman shit.
No, I thought, I don’t think so. I think the murder is post hoc, a justification for the gut-level reason, which pretty much boils down to not wanting women to have that kind of freedom. After several comments Amanda Marcotte made some, which few people saw on such a long nested thread.
Actually, as a long-time journalist covering this, I would argue the opposite. The claim to believe it’s murder was created to justify the true source of opposition, which is hostility to women’s freedom and a belief that women’s sexual desire is gross and women should only have sex for procreation. We know this because the anti-choice movement works hard to keep women from preventing pregnancy, even though the overwhelming evidence shows that contraception is the best prevention for abortion. Also, they are blunt about it on occasion, when they don’t think outsiders are listening. For instance, this quote from an anti-choice organizer: “And I say even if Planned Parenthood didn’t perform one single abortion, just the mere fact that its sexual ethic is corrupted means right there, should be the reason right there, that they should not receive any federal money. The kind of sexual ethic that Planned Parenthood promotes is sex for recreation, sex for mere pleasure.”
Quite. That’s what I thought, but I didn’t have examples in mind.
Or Lila Rose, who was instrumental in promoting those Planned Parenthood videos: “[S]omething precious is lost when fertility is intentionally excluded from marriage, a sacred bond and a total giving of each spouse to the other.” (That’s anti-code for “You shouldn’t use birth control, even if you’re married, because sex is nasty and only to be used for procreation.”)
Or Rick Santorum, presidential candidate and beloved anti-choice spokesman: “One of the things I will talk about that no President has talked about before is I think the dangers of contraception in this country, the whole sexual libertine idea. Many in the Christian faith have said, “Well, that’s okay. Contraception’s okay.”
It’s not okay because it’s a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”
Valuable stuff.
Edited to add: the guy who said “but many of you guys are missing the freakin’ point, here” then mansplained to Amanda. She replied.
Dude, glass houses and stones. If you are going to lecture me on thinking about it from their point of view, try thinking about it from mine: I am a journalist who has covered this issue for nearly a decade. My expertise is in what they think and why they think it. I speak fluent anti-choice-ese. Now I have some guy who clearly hasn’t ever given a moment’s thought to the underlying issues in this debate is lecturing me on how I don’t know anything about the opposition, which is, I remind you, my literal field of expertise. To be blunt, I do know how they see it. They are religious conservatives who have high levels of sexual anxiety. They believe that sex is a powerful force that will destroy us all unless it’s carefully contained by marriage and faith. They believe that women were put here as helpmeets to men, as indicated in the Bible, and that the proof of this, as indicated in the Bible, is the way that pregnancy is tied to sex. Believe me, I know what they think. But it’s just not very sympathetic, and they know it. So they spin out this story about “life”, because that’s an easier sell to the rubes. If you want to know how they think, though, spend less time lecturing experts on how you know better because you heard a soundbite and actually start reading conservative Christian writings on sexuality and women’s roles.
I’ll add that my interpretation has the advantage of assuming that anti-choicers are not simpletons. The “it’s a baby!” argument is one so stupid that only someone who is too dumb to tie her shoes would actually believe. The debate over sex and women’s roles, however, is a stickier widget. But they’re smart enough to understand that, in our political climate, there’s more sympathy for morons than genuinely smart people who nonetheless have really ugly and controlling attitudes towards women. So they play stupid with the “it’s a baby!” crap, knowing it will hoodwink people who underestimate the intelligence of conservatives. Edited to add: This observation is useful in many realms when dealing with the right, FWIW. If you are asking yourself “stupid or evil?”, odds are they’re evil and hiding it by playing dumb.
Mind you, I think some of them have bought their own story, because that’s what people do, but I think it’s the hatred of women that came first.
Comments
22 responses to “Created to justify the true source of opposition”
I found this piece of nonsense on a Catholic site: religiousleader.com.
“This is also the reason the Church stands against any form of artificial contraception. By placing a physical or chemical barrier between the husband and wife you are in fact preventing a total gift of self necessary for the true sexual union. It’s like trying to eat a hamburger with the wrapper still on it, it’s just not going to work”… So enjoying sex, with or without contraception, is the equivalent of eating a hamburger. How silly.
My father always believed that the fetal life counted as life, and abortion was murder.
But the last time he said, it, he said, “Abortion is MURDER! — and a woman has *every* right to do it.”
In short, he had not modified his views on when life began. However, he’d come to understand that enslaving a woman to another life was a violation of her rights, and a greater violation than that done to the fetus. And so he had decided that, instead of putting modifiers on when exceptions were allowed, we should trust women to understand the choice the were making and it should be legal and unrestricted.
It really comes down to whether a person respects women or not.
@Samantha Vimes–Good on your father. That’s the argument that should be front and center, IMO.
My comment on that thread:
I don’t care if you think it’s a “baby” (though I agree with Amanda that most anti-choicers know better. Present them with the “fire in a fertility clinic” thought experiment and have a bingo card on hand for all the special pleading.)
But bodily autonomy trumps sentiment about “babies.” It is not legal to force a person to donate blood without their consent. Even to save a life. Not even if theirs were the only blood that could save that life.
We don’t even take organs from corpses without the prior consent of the deceased.
Yet some believe women should be forced to carry pregnancies to term against their will.
At bottom, that’s about whose bodily autonomy is respected, not theological claims about souls.
It’s a side issue. But the response to this question is Judith Jarvis Thomson’s Violinist.
Reminds me of my “rage quit” from Hemant’s blog.
https://disqus.com/home/discussion/friendlyatheist1/friendly_atheist_podcast_episode_24_monica_snyder_secular_pro_life/#comment-1634884811
(technically, “rage desupporting”, but that snowballed into dropping bookmarks, RSS feeds, etc… just got sick of reading through his sniveling “balanced-and-equal” treatment of social issues)
Suffice it to say, I wholly despise the “I’m ‘pro-choice’, but I’ve got to admit those pro-lifers make a compelling case.” stance. Strikes me as “‘I’m pro-science, and totally accept micro-evolution… but I can’t deny the evidence of an Intelligent Designer working behind the scenes.” Fuck both groups. The latter is not ‘pro-science’ by any definition of science, and the former is not ‘pro-choice’ by any definition of choice.
Don’t call them “pro-life.” Call them anti-safe-and-legal-abortion. When they try to shame you by calling you “pro-abortion”, say “you betcha, every child welcomed and wanted.” Or the classic, “Don’t like abortion? Don’t have one!”
They want women and their partners to dread becoming pregnant, to be overwhelmed with their parental responsibilities and be miserable. Frightening.
It doesn’t matter whether or not abortion is murder, because adults cannot be compelled to offer their own bodies as life support to another human being, even for a single day. We are not required to transfuse blood or to donate organs, even though a great number of people die every single day all over the world for want of these things. The fact that abortion requires positive intervention, instead of merely is absence, is only relevant to the degree of the crime. If abortionists are murderers, then we are all at the very least manslaughterers, for each and every one of us could have saved a life by sacrificing our own health and well-being, or even by merely inconveniencing ourselves for a few minutes, but most of us have not done so and never will.
“I think the murder is post hoc, a justification for the gut-level reason, which pretty much boils down to not wanting women to have that kind of freedom.”
I think that anyone who can honestly say this has never seen the pro-life movement from the inside.
Kevin K@5:
Heh. That line is a sure sign that you are dealing with a (usually amateur) philosophy dudebro. Oddly enough, one rarely sees women treating the issue of abortion as a fun little intellectual exercise.
Oh, and further to the point in the OP, the response I usually see from anti-choicers to the Violinist hypothetical mentioned @4 is “ok, but what if you volunteered to have the violinist hooked up to you?” Because having sex is “consenting” to get pregnant, supposedly.
“Abortion is MURDER! — and a woman has *every* right to do it.”
That’s pretty much what my Catholic dad said when as a kid I asked him about the issue.
Abortion is a medical procedure, and should be dealt with as such.
When it is needed, you get one, and your insurance pays.
That is being pro abortion.
When you need open heart surgery, you get it and insurance pays. That is being pro open heart surgery.
Noone says open heart surgery should be safe legal and rare. It should be available and affordable when needed, and we should work to make it less needed.
The same goes for abortions. But somehow when you say you are pro abortion, people think it means you just want more abortions, but that is missing the point. I want people to have less need for abortion, but always have the opportunity when the need arises, just like with any other medical procedure
Yeah I think it’s pretty clear that 99%+ of the anti abortion crowd don’t believe their bullshit about fetuses being literal people with the right to bear arms and everything. I mean, if you think that there’s literally Holocaust scale mass murder occurring nationwide (which is what logically follows if you take the abortion = murder contention seriously), then you should be doing a hell of a lot more than holding up some signs outside of Planned Parenthood.
Gorman at or -that’s always been my point, too. Yet the pro-life crowd always tries to distance themselves whenever an abortion doctor is murdered. They disavow any connection with that, never admitting that it’s the logical outcome of “abortion is murder”. It’s the old “kill Hitler” question. If you do get a chance to go back and kill Hitler, you are a murderer. If you have that chance and refuse to kill him, you are passively complicit in millions of murders.
“Anytime, for any reason, on demand, no questions asked, no waiting period, no parental consent, no spousal consent, tax-funded abortions, and please take as many free condoms on your way out as you’d like. And I make no apology for this. Your body, your choice.”
Never said better.
The actual ‘choice’ that they oppose isn’t abortion. It’s ANY expression of independence or autonomy on the part of women. Even the sexual aspect is really subsumed under the desperate desire to keep women from fully human status.
And from the other side, the ‘choice’ to abort is the last line of defense for women who are unable to exercise choices over their own bodies, unable to access education, contraception or sexual pleasure on THEIR terms. Consider the whole question of the status of women in countries with savage anti-abortion laws.
Forget open-heart surgery. I’m pro-abortion like I’m pro-mole removal.
Some people get it done because it’ll save their lives. Some people get it done because it makes life more convenient in some way. Some get it done because of reasons I would reject (for myself) as frivolous. And not one of those categories should ever be told ‘no’, other than basic safety regulations applied to any other medical procedure (as opposed to the disingenuous TRAP laws).
Ahhh…now this is interesting
“They are religious conservatives who have high levels of sexual anxiety. They believe that sex is a powerful force that will destroy us all unless it’s carefully contained by marriage and faith.”
I’ve always understood the abortion controversy in strictly Darwinian terms: men seeking control of reproductive resources (i.e. women). I do think that theory has a lot of explanatory power, but there are some things that it doesn’t simply account for–notably, the many women who oppose abortion rights.
This sexual anxiety thing sounds like an important piece of the puzzle.
Steven @18,
My confidence in evo psych theories is pretty low these days, but I don’t think you have to work very hard to come up with an explanation for anti-choice women. (That’s part of my problem with evo psych — it’s easy to come up with these hypotheses, and hard to reliably test them.) In fact, I think this is probably from something I’ve read, not an original creation of mine: if men value sexual fidelity (because they don’t want to “waste” their paternal resources raising some other man’s child), then women will compete for males by signalling their fidelity. Denouncing abortion as something only done by those evil slutty slut sluts who “can’t keep their legs shut” is a cheap and easy way of presenting yourself as a good, decent, monogamous partner.
I think my preferred explanation is essentially the same thing, but without the evo psych layer to it: whatever its origins, our (patriarchal) culture still prizes female “purity,” so women who say “let’s punish the sluts” are praised for their display of “virtue.”
Yep.
You don’t need to dive into biology when culture is a sufficient explanation.
If female wombs are viewed as the property of fathers/husbands of the women involved, then patriarchal values will want to control and constrain the sexuality of the women within which those wombs happen to be inconveniently located.
In a patriarchal culture, one of the ways a woman can acquire and exercise power is by submitting to and enforcing the patriarchal norms. So you get the phenomenon of women acting as the enforcers of patriarchal values against other women. Particularly in situations where it would be overtly patriarchal for a man to enforce those values. Getting women to do it makes it look superficially less patriarchal, so it’s more insidious and less obvious.
Could it be possible that evo psych plays a role in this? Sure, maybe. But there’s no need to reach that deep in the causality chain when culture has sufficient explanatory power.
I dunno…seems like pushing on a rope…
I think this is true, but I think it only works for women at very high levels, like Sarah Palin, and Phyllis Schlafly, and maybe Anita Bryant.
I guess it depends how you feel about these things. I would say, “You don’t need to drag in culture when biology is a sufficient explanation.”
People expend a lot of resources on this conflict. Whatever is driving it has to be powerful and fundamental.
The thing about biological explanations for differences in behavior between the sexes is that, most of the time, they just wind up as post hoc just-so stories that serve to validate existing cultural norms and preconceptions.
Culture is such a powerful force in human behavior that we have to rule culture out as a variable first before we can start attributing things to biology. That’s even more important when we consider any alleged differences between the sexes.