Forced pregnancy will bring us all together
Oh yay, we can all live together at last.
Absolutely. Half of us told we have no rights over our own bodies will do wonders for living together.
Tip Jar
Oh yay, we can all live together at last.
Absolutely. Half of us told we have no rights over our own bodies will do wonders for living together.
Oh, yes, the propertarian view of family, where the man owns the woman and the children as chattels. Such “togetherness”! Stupid women, thinking that they have a right to live freely in a democratic nation. Thinking they have any rights at all, actually. Or are even citizens, or human beings.
Sullivan isn’t this stupid… If anything this’ll just speed up the balkanization process.
He isn’t this stupid but then what on earth did he say it for? What did he mean by it?
Do they just not take it in, people like this? Do they just not grasp that what the ruling means is women forced to bear children against their will? Do they really think that’s just fine?
I wonder if there would be such ‘come together’ admonitions if it was the American right which was the slighted party. I see the article he wrote says the left has a ‘democracy problem’, referencing the outcry at the courts overturning law; is he ignorant of the fact the majority of Americans oppose this change? And is he ignorant of what happens when conservatives don’t get they want in say, a presidential election?
The article proper displays his muddled thinking more clearly than the tweet. I won’t fisk it at length, as my patience ran out almost immediately:
Regarding that final sentence, no, Harris is not saying women should not have a voice in this debate, she is literally saying women should have a voice in what happens to their own bodies. Right there, in the words he quoted.
Anyway, the linked article references two polls on the matter, neither of which makes that claim. In fact the first poll explicitly contradicts this, saying “Gallup found in a May 2018 poll that 26 percent of men said they favored access to legal abortion under all circumstances, while 31 percent of women said they agreed.” The second poll doesn’t even measure support per sex, looking at it in terms of religious belief instead: “A 2016 study done by The Marist Poll found that people who described themselves as practicing a religion were more likely to self-identify as “pro-life” than “pro-choice” by a 58 percent to 37 percent margin.”
Once more for emphasis: Sullivan’s claim is explicitly contradicted by one of the polls, and is not addressed at all by the other. Instead, the assumption is made that as women are more frequently religious than men*, the second poll on religious preferences can be taken as a proxy for the preferences of the sexes.
*This claim is not supported in the article, and I have not seen it made elsewhere.
Look, those leopards aren’t eating Andrew Sullivan’s face, so I’m not sure why you’d expect him to be concerned about them.
‘Sullivan isn’t this stupid… ‘ The trouble is that all too often he is. There is a play of intelligence and fair-mindedness that flickers attractively, like a marsh-fire, above a bedrock of stupidity that derives, I suspect, from the lessons that were instilled into him in early childhood by his Catholic mentors and out of which he has never grown. I have never trusted the man since his hysterical support for the Iraq war.
I’ve just been wrestling with his stupidity in a post and I think you’re right.
Ophelia @3
I think Sullivan’s article on the subject is actually worth reading and thinking about.
He points out that a majority of “pro-lifers” are women (I haven’t checked that claim for accuracy) and that, unlike decisions on interracial marriage and same-sex marriage, Roe has continued to be divisive for decades. Then he points out that draconian abortion laws are unpopular in the U.S.–
He goes on to argue that
Of course Sullivan’s take ignores what for many of us is the central issue: that without access to legal abortion women are denied the fundamental right to decide whether or not they will allow their bodies to be used by others. Forced pregnancy, as Margaret Atwood has pointed out, is a form of slavery. Or a form of forced organ donation. A denial of primary bodily integrity and autonomy.
But here’s the thing: Roe wasn’t decided on those grounds. “Right to privacy” points in that direction, but it’s too amorphous. And Sullivan’s right; it has continued to divide the country, with no resolution in sight.
I don’t want Roe to be overturned. I understand the fury at abstract thinking when actual lives are at stake. We all know the cost. But then again, abortion is already effectively denied many women. So I can see Sullivan’s point. This fight has never really ended, and throwing it back to the States at least is an opportunity to force anti-abortion legislators to face actual public opinion. And I’d like to see us aim for firmer Constitutional ground.
That’d be a bit more workable if we weren’t in a position where some states were being required to enforce the laws of other states… that at its heart was the tipping point for the ACW and while we’re unlikely to see pitched battles in America ever again that’s still not a recipe for success.
Ophelia#7: It is perhaps not so much a bedrock of stupidity as a bedrock of sentimentality that renders people stupid and unable to think beyond a certain point – this is something that, in my experience, seems very common among people who espouse right-wing, or, more politely, ‘conservative’ opinions.
Category error. A majority of pro-lifers are women is not the same as a majority of women are pro-lifers. Since the majority of people (women and men) in this country support at least some level of legal abortion, this is a non-starter. He is lying with statistics, and doing it blatantly, obviously, and without concern for those of us who have actually studied statistics and the pain he is causing us.
Of course Roe v. Wade was divisive; a coalition of right-wing “thinkers” boosted up what was sort of a quiet simmer among some people, and turned it into a full boil to achieve their own ends – a permanent Republican majority. Many of the churches now protesting Roe v. Wade were actually either neutral or supportive at that time, but have been captured by the language of “it’s a babbbeeeee!” So it wasn’t Roe v. Wade that was divisive, it was the use of it in a callous and cynical manner by people who don’t give a damn about women.