The contortions they indulge in, in order to avoid saying the word “women.” Columnist Monica Hesse in the Washington Post:

‘Abortion tourism’: A tidy phrase for punching down at desperate people

Subhead:

Republicans made it harder to get abortions in red states. Now they have a punchline for trivializing the journeys people undertake to get the procedure.

But it’s not “people” who undertake the journeys. If it were, Republicans wouldn’t oppose abortion rights. It’s not “people”; it’s those harlots known as “women.” It’s those weak, stupid, yet eternally plotting and rebelling people with no penis and too much freedom. Women must be forced to carry and push out babies they don’t want to carry and push out, because they are inferior people who refuse to recognize their inferiority.

Nevertheless Monica Hesse carefully avoids saying the word.

Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) has used it. Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) has used it. Focus on the Family uses it; so does the Christian Coalition of America. All of them use it to describe the same broad concept: A patient who needs an abortion travels to a location where they can get an abortion.

Where they can get an abortion – that, unlike “people” and “individuals” and the like, spells out the ridiculous underlying doctrine that men too get abortions.

The phrase itself isn’t new; its use dates back at least 40 years ago, mostly in European countries, to neutrally describe the act of individuals crossing national borders to end pregnancies. But in the past 15 months, since the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the phrase has bloomed in the United States, used almost exclusively by antiabortion Republicans and with obvious intent: to make pregnant people, whom the party has forced into desperate straits by pushing draconian state laws, seem like harlots on holiday.

Oops. Slipped up a little there. “Harlots” doesn’t usually mean men.

Maybe she lost the plot after “harlots,” because suddenly women appear.

Are women who live in abortion-restrictive places traveling across state lines in order to access abortion? Yeah, almost definitely…

Are women crossing state lines in order to take in a Broadway show, finally eat at Momofuku and grab a relaxing abortion before ice skating at Rockefeller Center? Please.

So she does know it’s women, and that Republicans are insulting them because they are women…yet, in the next paragraph…

“Abortion tourism” is a dismissive, frivolous phrase that implies abortion is a dismissive, frivolous thing — something that bored pregnant people do when they’ve suddenly run out of “Abbott Elementary” episodes. “Abortion tourism” implies that reproductive care is a luxury, not a necessity, and that pregnant people…

Dismissive? Frivolous? How about the frivolous dismissal of the fact that all this bullying and bossing and punishing is aimed at women, specifically and exclusively women? Punishments for not wearing the hijab are aimed at women and forced pregnancy laws are aimed at women. It matters that they’re aimed at women. We can’t name the power imbalance, the injustice, the persecution, the tyranny if we can’t name the people it’s aimed at. Wake the fuck up.

We’re deep in a battle of terminology. Not only in the obvious way of “fetus” vs. “unborn child” or “intact dilation and extraction” vs. “partial birth,” but in the more innocuous-sounding terminology that needs to be unpacked in order to fully grasp how insidious it actually is.

Insidious is it? Take a look in the mirror. Your deliberate erasure of women is insidious. Your innocuous-sounding terminology needs to be unpacked.

I cannot count the number of times I’ve heard antiabortion activists decry the concept of “abortion on demand,” a phrase clearly meant to imply that people seeking abortion are treating medical clinics like the customer service line of Comcast. That they are impatient, impulsive and self-centered. That they want what they want, and what they want is three free months of HBO and unlimited mifepristone.

In other words how misogynists usually do think of and talk about women. Not people, but women. Women specifically. It makes zero sense to talk about misogyny and pretend that it’s “people” who need abortion rights in the same damn column.

What is the protocol that these activists would prefer? Abortion upon polite request? Upon begging? Abortion upon getting permission from your husband, your father, your priest and a slim majority of your state’s legislative body?

Husband. You’re talking about women here. Quit pretending not to.

And, of course, there is the newest turn of phrase I’ve seen cropping up in recent weeks: “Abortion trafficking,” which implies that pregnant people are being kidnapped and thrown into vans, dragged unwillingly to unwanted abortion appointments. What does it actually describe? Friends or romantic partners giving pregnant people lifts…

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has an entire guide related to insidious abortion terminology. It is almost entirely composed of the terms that antiabortion activists use to make abortions sound scarier than they are, and to make the people seeking them sound less trustworthy…

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has an entire guide related to insidious abortion terminology. It is almost entirely composed of the terms that antiabortion activists use to make abortions sound scarier than they are, and to make the people seeking them sound less trustworthy.

“Mostly” women. Imbecile.

H/t What a Maroon