I’m looking into “Secular Pro-Life” now, having not done so before. They are repulsive. Their rhetoric is religious in its exaggeration and its coerciveness.
Like:
For five years, Secular Pro-Life has united people of every faith and no faith to fight for the most vulnerable members of our human family.
That’s religious bullying via sentimentalism. “Vulnerable members of our human family” is religious language for a developing fetus.
I’m sure they think they’re secular, I’m sure they aren’t officially religious, but their rhetoric is saturated in religiion, whether they’re aware of it or not.
They reported on their tabling at the 2012 American Atheists convention. (Yes. Sigh.)
Kelsey: One elderly woman looked me in the eye and said “I don’t understand how women could be so hateful to other women.” I was upset by the attack, but calmly responded: “I do not hate women. No woman wants to have an abortion. No woman wakes up and says, ‘I’m going to have unprotected sex today, so that I can get pregnant and have some doctor put sharp objects up my privates.’ No one wants that. And we want to make sure women don’t end up in that situation.” That settled her down a bit and she walked away.
No woman wants to get pregnant when she doesn’t want to get pregnant; that’s true by definition. But if a woman who doesn’t want to get pregnant does get pregnant then she may very well wake up and say, “I’m going to have an abortion today” and feel massive relief that she can say that and it will be true. Kelsey and her friends don’t have the power to make sure that no woman who doesn’t want to get pregnant does get pregnant.
Rebecca has a post about those people at that convention.
it was disheartening for me to discover that a booth at this past weekend’s American Atheists conference was presenting the “scientific” argument against abortion:
That photo is from Surly Amy. By the time I arrived, he had been joined by a woman who was obviously well-versed in anti-choice rhetoric. I interviewed them for about an hour, and while I mostly kept my cool as they grinned and talked about how a fertilized egg deserves “the same” rights as me, I had to stop the interview shortly after the man insisted that a fertilized egg has the same rights as a 12-year old who has been raped and impregnated by her father. Then he went on to tell me that he’s one of the people who waves photos of bloody fetuses at women, and he refused to condemn the actions of anti-choice activists who surround and harass women attempting to enter Planned Parenthood. The best he could offer was that the strategy may be ineffective, and when I pressed him he agreed that specifically calling a woman a whore is “wrong.”
I told him he is a horrible person and I walked away because I couldn’t deal with it anymore. The Religious Right has successfully invaded a secular space to sell their anti-woman message, and in our ranks we have a sizable portion of people who declare that fighting back is too political. Too feminist! Too leftist. Too insular and academic.
Fuck that. If we don’t stand up and defend our values – humanism, skepticism, scientific inquiry – when they are under attack by those who would seek to further limit the rights and freedoms of the disenfranchised, then those values aren’t worth holding at all.
Yeah.
The most vulnerable members of the human race are the profoundly disabled. I’m a family member of a 35-year-old woman who is profoundly autistic and also schizophrenic and mentally retarded. She has the mental faculties and impulse control of an 18-month-old, only she’s nearly six feet tall an strong as an ox. Where are the “pro-lifers” for this woman? She’s been on the waiting list for respite care for 17 years now, and she’ll keep waiting because there’s simply no funding for anything like care of people like her. Her 68-year-old mother has had cancer twice. Her 33-year-old brother had to drop out of high school to help care for her, because all those people who just LUUUUUUV humanity can’t be bothered to provide help for the already-born.
So…nobody told Amy that it was #UpForDebate?
Why should we expect that women will ever be accepted in society as fully equal individuals? #UpForDebate
That sounds reasonable. The goal should be fewer abortions. Except that in their case it’s pure bullshit.
http://www.secularprolife.org/#!contraception/ctdo
Given the obstacles to abortion access in the US, the goal should be more not fewer abortions. Women who want them can’t get them, and that’s a problem.
“You are in front of a burning building. In the building there is a fertility clinic & a daycare. You have time for only one run into the building. Will you save the 5-year old child or the flask of 800 fertilized eggs?”
Make sure there’s an audience for their answer…..
They are not religious. They do not invoke a deity or god, they are therefore secular.
That is not “religious language” just because people think it sounds religious.
I want to pipe in with: ‘Then they are no true secularist….’
That’s not as ironic as it sounds at first. What amazes me, ‘out there’ in public discourse, is the bottomless ignorance, philosophical naivete, and moral cowardice that pass for Normal. We keep getting trickles of information about the proportion of PRACTICING Jews who think it’s OK to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the number of supposed atheists who hold a slew of specific religious beliefs. This space, of course, is rich enough in examples of the incoherent beliefs of those who claim to believe the Bible or Quran.
Biologically, human beings begin at fertilization
Bullshit.
Alison Parker – I didn’t say they are religious. I said “Their rhetoric is religious” and one of their slogans is “religious bullying via sentimentalism.” I also said “I’m sure they think they’re secular, I’m sure they aren’t officially religious, but their rhetoric is saturated in religiion, whether they’re aware of it or not.”
I really think that’s clear enough. I didn’t say they are religious, I said they use religious rhetoric and language and bullying tactics.
WTF? Except, of course, for the ones who do.
Remember “Feminists for Life”? (They’re still around – no link included for the usual reasons.)
In the spectrum of anti-choice arguments, their niche is pushing the (in many cases true) argument that women choose to abort from economic necessity, sothe way to “fight” abortion is by implementing a European-style welfare state.
This leaves FFL with zero support from the major anti-choice political factions, and only a few recognizable feminists gullible enough to sign up. I felt a bit of sympathy for them until I attended a talk by their then vice-president, who in classic “prolife” style lied her damn head off about all “other” feminists while repeating standard anti propaganda.
Secular ProLife looks to be digging itself into a very similar hole, which will at least make it convenient for all the rest of us to piss on them.
You don’t read for comprehension, do you, Alison?
I know plenty of women who’ve wanted abortions. Several have told me it was the best damned day of their lives.
If you find yourself compelled to *always* insert some variant of, “of course, no one likes abortion,” you’re feeding anti-choice rhetoric. And you’re not fully pro-choice. Something deep down in you is telling you there’s something fundamentally wrong with abortion. Something that makes you have to qualify your support for it. Please contemplate what that might be.
I think this is true, but I think that most who say that are projecting.
I know that I don’t like abortion (I believe that abortion should be legal, free and easily accessible for every single woman for any reason at all) and I also believe that the best way to limit the number of abortions is to make contraception legal, free, and easily accessible. But I do not project my feelings about it on others. I know others feel differently. I’m okay with that as long as they don’t try to limit access to abortion, because I believe that each woman has the right to carry or not carry any pregnancy. It is her choice. It must be.
Alison Parker @7:
It is, actually, in the same way “intelligent design” is religious. I give that argument in a comment over at Zvan’s.
Biologically human beings do not begin at fertilisation. That is completely false. First there is cell. Then there is a complexity of cells. Then there is a foetus. Then there is a human being. It is therefore a gradual process not an immediate one. Regardless of ones opinion on abortion these are simple facts. Denying them does not make them any less so. And the notion that no woman wants an abortion is also false. Many women have abortions entirely of their own free will. They may not welcome the impracticality of having to make time to have one but that is not the same as having an objection to abortion itself. All women should have the right to abortion for whatever reason before the foetus develops a central nervous system. Because before that it is not a human being as such. So the notion that Secular Pro life is protecting humans as it claims is demonstrably wrong. This is deliberate manipulation by using emotional language where it is entirely inappropriate. For a fertilised egg is not is a human being. It is just a fertilised egg
Sperm cells are alive. Egg cells are alive. A blastula is not “new life” it is a change in form of existing life. To insist that contraception which works following conception is equivalent to murder, as these turds do, is to redefine life in a way not supported by the science of reproduction.
They are in knots because if in insisting that post-conception abortifacents which prevent implantation then they are endorsing the idea that females carrying the product of rape (because they didn’t plan ahead to take contraceptive measures in case they are raped) have no recourse to abortion. Vile.
I can see no reason to support secular anti-abortion arguments, because they are carrying forward from religion the concept of “ensoulment” which is supposed by Catholics to happen at conception. That they claim that they are secularists, or even atheists merely demonstrates that while they may no longer believe in God or the role that religion should play in determining public policy, they still carry the cultural artifacts of religion; and apparently either can’t or choose not to shed those artifacts. So, in a sense, they are still religious despite their claims otherwise.
Sorry, Alison Parker, but you’re wrong. I’ve been poking around the secularprolife website and I can state that for a supposedly secular group, they keep linking to anti-abortion arguments from religious pro-life sites, often repeating flat-out lies from those sites as if they are evidence-based. They state there is a link between breast cancer and abortion (a statement completely at odds with the best available research, but often trotted out by religious right-to-lifers). They claim that more than half of all abortions in the US are coerced based on a religious pro-life misrepresentation of a single paper. They claim that abortion is a dangerous procedure that puts the mother’s life at risk despite it being They encourage Catholics to join if they are ‘weary of having your pro-life position dismissed as “dogma”‘…a very strange statement to make for a supposedly secular organisation.
In short, they may call themselves a secular organisation, but the constant recycling of arguments and falsities from overtly religious sites makes me think it’s really an ID-like front. So I thought I’d check into my suspicions, and guess what? The founder and president of secularprolife, Kelsey Hazzard, is a legal fellow for Americans United for Life, a hard-core anti-abortion legal group with glowing testimonials from such noted atheists as Ronald Reagan, Rick Perry, and Rick Santorum.
Hazzard herself was happy with this description: “Kelsey Hazzard said she strives to mitigate this association of religion and pro-life beliefs by taking a secular position on why she believes abortion is wrong.” Bingo! She’s not a secularist at all. She’s simply “taking a secular position.”
whoops: “…despite it being an incredibly low-risk procedure in the vast majority of cases.”
The risk of a woman dying from a legal abortion is about 0.6 per 100,000, compared with 8.8 per 100,000 for childbirth. (Link: <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22270271"here.) But Secular Pro Life is dedicated to informing women of “abortion risks” (but not, apparently, birth risks).
Oh, and another similarity with the ID movement: Secular Pro-Life doesn’t take a position on the “rape exception”. You might wonder why a vocal advocacy group would decide such a topic is too touchy. Well, fortunately Secular Pro-Life gives the answer on their own website! “The pro-life movement is divided on the issue, with 59% of self-described pro-lifers stating abortion should be legal in cases of rape.”
In other words, it’s the old Big Tent strategy.
Josh, Official SpokesGay, hjhornbeck, chrislawson, I’m sure secular prolifers also put sugar on their porridge.
Seeing the quotes from them here, and in the other blogs about this “controversy” I’m not convinced they’re using religious rhetoric. Most of the arguments amount to nothing more then “I don’t like their rhetoric, therefore it’s religious”.
I am baffled at Silverman’s comments causing controversy in the first place. He said there are secular arguments against abortion. He’s right. My reaction to it would be “so what?”, not this complete explosion in the atheistshere.
Yep, that’s a real stumper. I can see why you’re so baffled. A whole bunch of people must have just “exploded” because they missed the totally obvious answer that you see so clearly.
Why, they’re almost acting as if the point of discussion isn’t whether or not it’s theoretically possible to construct a secular argument against abortion, but whether the supposedly secular arguments are anything other than mendacious bullshit meant to disguise religious motivations.
But no, I’m sure that couldn’t be it. Don’t re-examine your premises, just continue to assume that everyone woke up one day and decided to “explode” over something innocuous that Silverman said. It’s far more parsimonious to assume a grand conspiracy or mass delusion than that maybe you’ve missed the point.
Then I’ll add there are also secular motivations to oppose abortions. There are atheists who oppose abortion for secular reasons.
As religion decreases, we’ll see the increase of anti-abortion activists who are atheist and have non-religious motivations.
Alison, Secular Pro-Life (1) links to numerous religious anti-abortion groups as the source for its “secular” arguments, (2) repeats factual errors that are only ever presented by religious anti-abortion groups, and (3) was founded by a legal fellow for a religious anti-abortion group who states that the reason for starting Secular Pro Life was to “mitigate” the religious origin of anti-abortion arguments. Do you still maintain that SPL is using genuine, in-good-faith secular arguments?
I’m not sure there are secular reasons to oppose abortion. I think I’ve been changing my mind about that over the past week. The “secular” reasons all seem to depend on dualistic ideas about human beings: the fertilized egg is a full person because…it has a soul, or some “secular” version of a soul.
Anybody remember The Raving Atheist? He was an atheist blogger years ago who started showing a rabid pro-life streak, to the point where he bifurcated his blog and starting writing half his posts as “The Unaborted Atheist.” That name reflected his motivation for being pro-life — supposedly his mother considered abortion but decided against it. Of course, anything which could have deprived the world of HIM, glorious HIM, couldn’t possibly be legal or moral! Which I suppose is a secular reason of sorts — just a really shitty and vain one. (Presumably if his mother had told him she considered not having sex with his father, he would have ended up pro-rape.)
Of course, he tried to provide some secular justification for his position, but it all dissolved into the kind of “sperm magic” that Ophelia refers to @25. Eventually he started volunteering at those pregnancy “counselling” centers that pro-lifers run, and his inevitable conversion to Jesus came a few months later. (Some commenters implied that he was also dating a pro-life Christian fanatic, but I have no way of knowing if that was true or not.)
Anyway, we can’t generalize much from just a single case, but I always find it telling that he was never able to reconcile the two positions and that ultimately it was the atheism he abandoned.
Wow. Thanks. It’s not like every secularist and her dog have noted this obvious fucking fact about fifty million times over the past week. In fact you are saying precisely what Silverman said, and making the same hurtful mistake: you’re noting the existence of secular motivations to oppose abortion, without also noting that they are, without exception, exceptionally illogical and poorly-reasoned motivations.
Since misogyny seems a far more persistent mind-virus than religion, this is likely to be true. What’s your point?
Alison Parker @21:
You haven’t been paying much attention, then. First, let me pull over my comment at Zvan’s:
I’ve been involved in the pro-choice movement for over two years now. I’m not a major player, by any means, but I’ve organized two protests, counter-picketed against anti-choice groups, debated with them in person and even “debated” them publicly (it was more of a lecture with Q&A, to be honest). I know these groups, and I can back up chrislawson’s points while even going further; “secular arguments” is the “intelligent design” of the anti-choice movement.
Whether Silverman knew it or not, he endorsed religious arguments against abortion by using their terminology.
Anyway, we can’t generalize much from just a single case, but I always find it telling that he was never able to reconcile the two positions and that ultimately it was the atheism he abandoned.
How is atheism in any way related to views on abortion?
Facepalm.
Alison Parker @29:
Called it!
So? Secular doesn’t mean “logical and well reasoned”. There is only a controversy if you think it does. Silverman or I didn’t make that clarification because we didn’t have to.
There are secular arguments that support genocide
There are secular arguments that support universal healthcare
saying there are secular arguments that support something says nothing as to whether they’re rational.
Being wrong, or irrational, or making unscientific claims isn’t a religion.
hjhornbeck, I’m curious what do you call somebody who lacks a belief in god and opposes abortion? Are they not an atheist?
Alison,
If you want me to take your opinion on this even remotely respectfully, you really ought to address my comments @24.
Hooo boy. I just stumbled on their debate over pregnancy via sexual assault. [CONTENT WARNING]
It turns out secular anti-choice side is divided on the issue. Here’s one side:
Which is interesting, because one of their key arguments around bodily integrity is that people implicitly consent to pregnancy via sex. This obviously fails in the case of sexual assault, as no consent was obtained.
So which is it? Do they think right-to-life trumps bodily integrity, and endorse non-consentual organ harvesting and forcing people to pay child support to their rapists, or do they think implied consent trumps bodily integrity, in which case they must grant an abortion in cases of non-consent like sexual assault and contraception failure?
Or, do they reject both and become pro-choice? [Emphasis mine]
Goodness, such powerful arguments these secular anti-choicers have!
Alison Parker @33:
Uh, I thought that was obvious:
Alison Parker @ # 29: How is atheism in any way related to views on abortion?
By a great cosmic coincidence,* Greta Christina has just answered your question quite comprehensively.
* or could it be – Satan!?! /churchlady
Call me skeptical, but I would like to see how the sample of that survey was gathered. I saw PZMyers promote it on his blog which is fine, but where else was it promoted? In other words, it has to do it’s best to eliminate selection bias.
I found one from gallup from a few years ago.
http://media.gallup.com/POLL/Releases/pr060403ii.gif
from:
http://www.gallup.com/poll/22222/Religion-Politics-Inform-Americans-Views-Abortion.aspx
Oh, and I know that no religion =/= atheist, however, I chuckle at the fact “other religion” are more likely to support abortion than “no religion”
I’m sorry, I misread your definition, but that does bring up an interesting point. What do you call a christian, who “rejects that social system or privilege”? Since atheist is either somebody who lacks a belief in god OR somebody who rejects the social system of privilege?
Have you tried looking at their website?
Apparently not, as then you would have seen the instructions for participating. There are issues with sampling via the internet, admittedly. For instance the strongest skew is over income, with wealthier people more likely to participate online. As wealthier people also tend to vote Republican, the Secular Census may be skewed to the right.
Maybe. These demographic trends are tough to weigh unless you have the microdata in front of you, and I don’t. You might want to send them an email.
alison parker@7:
Ophelia@10
In addition to what Ophelia says here, I’m just going to call your post bullshit, unmitigated at that. The “secular” pro-life people are just as disingenious as the Discotute in pretending that they aren’t religious. While I suspect many of them have left the church (officially or otherwise, they are clearly still influenced by religious thought, and I wouldn’t be shocked to find that some of them attend or tithe still). Anyway, the arguments used are pretty much the religious arguments (and many are flat out lies) without the reference to god. That doesn’t suddenly make them not religious.
I see several others have made the same point. =) Late to the party as usual.
And sallystrange nails it in a single line!
Hrm, I see Alison has replied several times, but still not addressed the fact that the ‘Secular’ anti-
Ophelia Benson: “The “secular” reasons all seem to depend on dualistic ideas about human beings: the fertilized egg is a full person because…it has a soul, or some “secular” version of a soul.”
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I would say the opposite is true. “Not a full person” is an insipid concept that I shall tap after the following:
‘
The fact of business is that from conception forward, we meet the criterion for being living organisms (growth, metabolism, reaction to stimuli, reproduction). Zygote, embryo, fetus are stages of development, and the human does not stop developing until their mid to late teens. A stage of development has nary a thing to do with belonging to a species (an acorn is not a tree, but it’s still an oak), so we are only left acknowledging that we are human being from conception forward, and being human you are owed the rights that come with being human.
‘
That is my position steeped in our understanding of biology, and when the pro-choice side says “but the zygote/embryo/fetus isn’t a person” they are going into the realm of subjectivity. Our slave population was considered 3/5ths persons. Corporations are considered persons. So you have an example of human beings being classified as partial persons and an example of a non-human entity having personhood. Saying you have personhood is about as insipid as saying you have a soul.
‘
SallyStrange: “Since misogyny seems a far more persistent mind-virus than religion, this is likely to be true.”
‘
This is a canard tactic. It’s like saying: “You would take that position because you hate America.” or “You would support that because you’re a racist.” It adds nothing edifying to the discussion, but puts someone on the defense, making them guilty until proven innocent of being anti-woman. It’s a red herring, and while those who fall to these dirty tactics are defending their patriotism or trying to recall having a black friend, it does all it was designed to do by stifling the momentum of an argument’s merit.
‘
And I can argue that abortion isn’t always about the woman’s choice, but the man’s. There are many times where it is the man that doesn’t want a child or doesn’t want to pay child support or have discovery of having an affair. Many times is it the man who coerces the woman into having an abortion, who schedules the abortion, and takes the woman to the clinic to ensure she goes through with it. There are cases where abortion has been used to conceal and continue the sexual abuse of minor girls. Under China’s One Child Policy, abortions were often performed after the gender of the child was determined to be female with parents preferring born sons to continue the family name. Yes, there are many ways abortion has done the opposite of elevating the status of women.
I’d like upvote your comment a million times if I could Douglas. Thanks for adding a little bit of rationality into the echo chamber of thumping chests.
Crimson Clupeidae: “The “secular” pro-life people are just as disingenious as the Discotute in pretending that they aren’t religious.”
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I think you’re woefully misinterpreting terms.
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You can both be religious AND be secular. These are not contradictory. Although all atheists are secularists, but not all secularists are atheists.
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An example would be that many of the Founding Fathers or Framers of the Constitution were religious with varying levels of devotion; however, they came together and created a secular charter of governance. A charter that ensured there will be no religious tests required for public office and that government shall make no law establishing religion nor prohibit the free exercise thereof.
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Another great example can be found in the abolitionist movement. Abolishing slavery was a secular cause that had a lot of strong support from the religious. Anglican preacher John Newton, known for penning the song ‘Amazing Grace’ was a notable abolitionist figure. And the irony is there’s nothing redeemable in the Bible on the morality of slavery, being harrowingly codified in Exodus and Leviticus and with Paul in his letter to the Ephesians telling slaves to obey their masters.
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When it comes to being prolife, you need not be religious to hold that violence is not an acceptable way to deal with unplanned pregnancy.
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Crimson Clupeidae: “While I suspect many of them have left the church (officially or otherwise, they are clearly still influenced by religious thought, and I wouldn’t be shocked to find that some of them attend or tithe still)”
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Absolutely not the case with me. I possess a growth mindset and am open to new patterns of thinking should they have merit. Whereas I was on fire for Jesus, I now disbelieve. Whereas I was once an ultra-conservative, Republican blowhard, I am now a political orphan. This leopard can change his spots.
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Coming from a fixed mindset, this is experiencing a personal renaissance. And I know I have made this transformation from a fixed mindset, to a growth mindset because I no longer fear the discovery of new information that calls into question my box of preconceived foundations the way I feared it when I had a fixed mindset.
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I used to dread information like the fused human chromosome that shows we share common ancestry with chimpanzee or that there are buildings older than 6,000 years. I used to fear examples of how limited government can be ineffectual or data that showed more unemployment after giving tax cuts to the highest income earners. I am glad I no longer have to do verbal gymnastics when I’m shown a Bible contradiction or find a desperate explanation to excuse immoral, indefensible content in scripture. I’m relieved I no longer have to figure out how to blame liberal obstruction when we didn’t become the lassiez-faire, free market Shangri La we, in theory, should have been when Republicans dominated Congress and the White House or spin how the Iraq War was necessary for our defense or best serves our national interests (though I can still be proud to have volunteered and try to be a solution to a serious and complicated problem).
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Whereas I used to make information fit my presumptions, now I seek knowledge domination, I am ready to embrace different patterns of thinking if they have merit, and I’m eager to see if there is any way I can make myself wiser than I was yesterday.
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And it’s no different when it comes to the discussion on abortion. I’m not scared to find new information that should cause me to reject my position on abortion or discover I’ve made some bad categorical fallicies. Of the archaic beliefs I’ve raked out of my attic, my prolife position remains resilient because the status of the preborn’s humanity is steeped in our understanding of biology and that abortion (lacking medical necessity) is an antithesis to our system of human rights that I feel very loyal to and feel we have woefully disregarded in this issue.