Because I like pain, last night I attended a lecture brought in by the campus Republicans: “The Ugly Truth about Abortion: How It Does More Than Just Kill Babies”, by Kristan Hawkins, the head of Students for Life of America, and a recent transplant to Minnesota…so I guess we’ll be hearing more noise from her in the near future. Lucky us.
It was reasonably well attended, with about 70 people there, most student age, but there were a few grey heads up front — some of our local anti-choice activists. At the end, many expressed their approval of her talk. I couldn’t. It was stupid and dishonest.
In her introduction, she conveniently summed up the entirety of her case in two sentences:
1. Abortion kills a living human being, and
2. Abortion harms women and our nation
She failed to make either case. For instance, here’s one of her arguments, taken directly from a slide:
If the preborn is growing, isn’t it alive?
If it has human parents, isn’t it human?
And if living human being like you and me have rights, then why don’t they?
Setting aside the loaded word “preborn”, of course a fetus is alive. And of course its cells are taxonomically human — but that begs the question. Is it a person? I’d say no, not yet, and that personhood is defined by a very fuzzy boundary. Which makes talking about their rights moot.
The weird thing about her whole argument is that it applies perfectly to tumors, as well. Cancer is growing, and alive; it has human ‘parents’, and its cells are human; so if Kristan Hawkins has rights, why doesn’t a melanoma? We clearly do not simply give rights and privileges to collections of cells because they have human ancestry — we have other criteria, often assumed and unstated, that we use to assign rights.
In the next part of her talk, she dismisses her critics by claiming to address three categories of arguments: biology, circumstances, and autonomy.
She announced that the biology argument was the easiest to rebut. This is only true because being ignorant of biology makes everything simpler. She made familiar arguments: at the moment of conception, a unique whole human being comes into existence, with a unique combination of DNA. To which I say, if uniqueness is the criterion for preserving an organism, shouldn’t she be as vociferous in defending the rights of cows to live? They’re all unique, too. Shouldn’t the anti-choice picketers be out working to preserve unique habitats and endangered species?
One thing that was novel is that she emphasized the claim that a whole human being is created at the instant of conception. She made two arguments along that line. One was an argumentum ad google-um — search for pictures of a fertilized egg, and gosh wow look, it’s not called an egg anymore! It’s a zygote! It’s not an egg, it’s a human, and science proves it.
The other argument was a strange handwavey thing in which she declared that once it’s fertilized, the zygote carries out a complete internal program of development, therefore it’s “whole” and independent of the parent. All it needs is mere nutrition supplied to it. Which is great to hear, as I guess that means we’ll have artificial wombs tomorrow.
I’d flip that argument around, though. The zygote is not “whole”: there is a long series of transformations and interactions ahead of it to yield a functioning autonomous human being. To call a zygote “whole” is analogous to calling an iron ingot a car.
There were other weirdnesses I won’t dwell on, like her announcement that the Father of Modern Genetics had decreed that like begets like, therefore the fetus is fully human. Wait, what? Thomas Hunt Morgan said that? No, that wasn’t who she meant: she’s talking about Jerome Lejeune, the Father of Modern Genetics, who is so important that I’ve never heard him mentioned even once in 40 years of studying and teaching genetics…but the anti-choice movement has elevated him to the status of saintly icon because he was a clinical geneticist who was Catholic and had fully accepted their doctrine.
She also announced that people have intrinsic value, unlike animals, and dismissed the criterion of nervous system function, because if developing a brain makes you a person, then we need to have varying degrees of personhood.
Her arguments against circumstances as a justification were even more bizarre: they consisted of making up strange hypothetical scenarios. If it’s OK for a pregnant 14 year old to get an abortion because it’s going to ruin her opportunities for education and a career, is it then OK if she has the baby, but two years later complains that the toddler is ruining her opportunities for an education and a career, and then has it killed? The problem here is that we’re able to recognize that a fetus and a toddler are not equivalent: one is aware and interacting with the world, the other is grossly incomplete and in a state of total, passive dependence. But Hawkins has an answer for that.
There is no philosophical difference between the adult you are now and the embryo you once were that would justify killing you. There is no difference between you and the embryo!
That’s her premise. That’s what generates her absolutist stance: there is no difference between me, a 57 year old man, and a freshly fertilized zygote. Well gosh, since fertilized zygotes are naturally slaughtered in vast numbers all the time, and reality doesn’t seem to have any special regard for embryos, then the flip side of her conclusion must be that it’s perfectly OK to murder people.
Her arguments against autonomy are just as bad: more hypothetical scenarios and anecdotes. Hey, so is it OK for a pregnant woman to take thalidomide then? Is elective abortion of girl fetuses acceptable? Can I get pregnant, abort the fetus, and use its body parts in an art project? This drug-addicted woman refused to get a C-section because it would leave a scar, prolonged her pregnancy dangerously, and when she finally had it done, one of her twins was dead and the other was addicted to crack. That one had me thinking, “Well, she should have had an abortion earlier — it sounds like she wasn’t going to be a fit mother, either.”
I’d have to say that I’d agree that all of her scenarios were awful, but that arguments against them wouldn’t rest on the magical personhood of the fetus. They have to do with consequences to the child, if carried to term, or to society.
Finally, after a series of bad arguments, she gets around to her Ugly Truths. Ugly Half-Truths would be more like it.
Ugly Truth #1: legalizing abortion did not make abortion nor pregnancy safe. In 1950, she said, there were only 263 deaths from illegal abortions, which wsa roughly the same number of deaths seen in hospital abortions. Unfortunately, this was ludicrous cherry picking of the data. Here are some real facts.
One stark indication of the prevalence of illegal abortion was the death toll. In 1930, abortion was listed as the official cause of death for almost 2,700 women—nearly one-fifth (18%) of maternal deaths recorded in that year. The death toll had declined to just under 1,700 by 1940, and to just over 300 by 1950 (most likely because of the introduction of antibiotics in the 1940s, which permitted more effective treatment of the infections that frequently developed after illegal abortion). By 1965, the number of deaths due to illegal abortion had fallen to just under 200, but illegal abortion still accounted for 17% of all deaths attributed to pregnancy and childbirth that year. And these are just the number that were officially reported; the actual number was likely much higher.
She also made a weirdly muddled argument, comparing the legality of abortion to maternal mortality rates in childbirth. She pointed out that the US has the most liberal abortion laws (on paper, but not in practice, I would say) and has high maternal mortality rates, that is, deaths in childbirth, while Ireland has completely outlawed all abortion, and has the lowest maternal mortality rates in the world (which may be a statistical error, but never mind). What those statistics have to do with one another, I don’t know, and she didn’t explain. But again, I’m thinking the reverse of what she does: if normal childbirth in the US is so dangerous, isn’t that an argument for abortion? She also praised Ireland without mentioning Savita Halappanavar.
Ugly Truth #2: abortion is proven to hurt women physically and emotionally. She has an anecdote: a video of a woman named Kelly Georgia, who deeply regrets her abortion. She claims that the suicide rate is 6 times higher for women who have abortions, and that there is increased risk for breast cancer, citing the National Cancer Institute.
This is simply lying with partial statistics and badly done studies. The best evidence says that abortion does not increase women’s risk of mental health problems. You can jigger the stats by doing inappropriate comparisons and inappropriate controls: poor, desperate women are more likely to commit suicide than women in stable, comfortable situations: guess which group is more likely to have problems with depression and illness?
The abortion and breast cancer link is a flat out lie. The NCI says no: the link is that pregnancy before the age of 30 has a protective effect, reducing the incidence of breast cancer, for reasons that are not clear. You could better argue that not getting pregnant increases your risk for breast cancer, which is true, but also means that becoming a nun is carcinogenic.
Ugly Truth #3: Abortion is a big business that profits from her crisis. Planned Parenthood makes millions of dollars! 92% of Planned Parenthood’s business was abortions! Planned Parenthood has abortion quotas. There was a heck of a lot of hate for Planned Parenthood on the stage and in the audience.
The stats are not true. Abortions represent about 3% of Planned Parenthood’s contacts with patients; they are more expensive than handing out condoms or doing pap smears, so they are a bigger chunk of their revenue and expenses, but it’s definitely not 92%. Planned Parenthood provides a full range of women’s medical services, and abortion services are part of it.
As I was leaving the talk, by the way, I passed their table where they were handing out literature, and a woman from the audience breathlessly recounted the latest conspiracy theory: did you know that Planned Parenthood intentionally injects young women who visit with hormones to make them fertile, so that they’re more likely to get pregnant and come back for an abortion? The woman from Students for Life of America behind the table said, I’m not surprised, they make millions of dollars from abortions
.
Other half truths that emerged: Hawkins doesn’t like contraception, either, and announced that hormonal contraception is a carcinogen. So it is! Progesterone has properties that would get it classified as a human carcinogen, just like broccoli and beer. And that means, ladies, that your ovaries are trying to kill you, because they’re constantly trickling out a carcinogenic hormone.
The truth, as always, is more complex. Hormones modulate cellular activity; increasing the mitotic activity of cells increases the risk of errors that lead to cancer. So, basically, living is carcinogenic. The NCI has a fact sheet on oral contraceptives.
A number of studies suggest that current use of oral contraceptives (birth control pills) appears to slightly increase the risk of breast cancer, especially among younger women. However, the risk level goes back to normal 10 years or more after discontinuing oral contraceptive use.
Women who use oral contraceptives have reduced risks of ovarian and endometrial cancer. This protective effect increases with the length of time oral contraceptives are used.
Oral contraceptive use is associated with an increased risk of cervical cancer; however, this increased risk may be because sexually active women have a higher risk of becoming infected with human papillomavirus, which causes virtually all cervical cancers.
Women who take oral contraceptives have an increased risk of benign liver tumors, but the relationship between oral contraceptive use and malignant liver tumors is less clear.
See? Reality is always messier than the black & white lies the anti-choicers recite.
Ugly Truth #4: abortion is counter to what feminist founders envisioned. Did you know that Susan B. Anthony, Julia Ward Howe, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Alice Paul, etc. all disliked abortion and thought women’s ability to reproduce was beautiful and wonderful? That’s fine, yes, I knew that sexual and social mores a century or more ago were different. It’s a good thing I don’t hold anyone’s opinions sacred!
Ugly Truth #5: abortion exploits women and enables cover-up of abuse. Here she recites stories of men who forced women to get abortions they didn’t want; of cases of continuing incest which were covered up by the rapists forcing their victims to abort the evidence. Those were truly horrible. The pro-choice position isn’t that women must get abortions, but that it’s the choice of the pregnant woman, so I think we’d all agree that forcing women to abort is wrong. I don’t think that she gets to imply that she’s on the side of the women victims here, though, unlike those wicked pro-choicers who would probably cheer at the idea of rapists compelling abortions (no, we wouldn’t).
And then she brags about how when she’s praying in front of a clinic women, in the midst of those mobs waving graphic placards, cursing women for killing babies, and trying to guilt them into turning around, the women are in tears when they enter and in tears when they leave, therefore they’re all grieving and being given no choice. What? I’ve seen those fanatics at the clinics. They’d make me cry.
And then one more non sequitur: Murder is the leading cause of death for pregnant women. Yes, that is awful, many men are wretched awful creatures with destructive attitudes towards women. That is not an argument against abortion.
Finally, at the end of her talk…it wouldn’t be an anti-choice talk without waving bloody fetuses around, now would it? So she showed a one minute video titled “Abortion: Before and After” with pictures of aborted fetuses. Meh. I’ve seen worse. Surgical procedures can be bloody and messy and produce disgusting by-products. But this was, of course, pure emotional manipulation: people react viscerally to viscera.
There were then a few questions, which I’ll quickly summarize.
Q1: This one was just an odd waste of time. “Which is better? Eternity of boredom or century of ecstasy?” She refused to answer as off-topic. I don’t blame her.
Q2: On what do you base claim that humans have intrinsic value? A: Because we were created. Q: Were animals created? A: Yes, but not in image of god. Who would have guessed she was religious?
Q3: What about nurses, doctors, mother etc. if abortion is illegal? Would they all be arrested? A: Abortionist would be jailed. Mother is a victim.
Q4: Old shouty guy: People just don’t realize what Planned Parenthood does. What can we do to get the word across? A: Planned Parenthood was convicted of double-billing the government. Wants law to prevent government money to organizations convicted of defrauding the government. When we elect a Republican president, Planned Parenthood will be defunded. (Another case of glossing over the truth: Planned Parenthood settled a profit-seeking suit from a former employee, who alleged double-billing. It’s more complicated than Hawkins made it out to be.)
Q5: Older woman: Amen to all that. A friend said they were against abortion, but went to an abortion clinic and learned that women had to go through counseling before making decision. Is that true? I don’t know what they do in the clinic. A: True, but not relevant to whether abortion is wrong. It depends on the clinic. There are conflicting stories — and then she told a set of vaguely sourced anecdotes about Planned Parenthood forcing women to go through abortions even though they’d changed their minds.
Q6: A comment, not a question. The idea that Roe v Wade changed conversation about abortion is not true. States started legalizing it before the decision, so overturning Roe wouldn’t suddenly change the situation.
And then I went home at last, unimpressed. She delivered what I expected: lots of bullshit. Before I went, I had a private bet with myself that she was going to be one of those people who claimed that abortion causes breast cancer, and sad to say, I won. Why am I not surprised that it’s local Republican who brought in such an awful speaker?
“preborn”
I’ve always felt rather sorry for Alia, and Jessica never really had much of a choice.
The Water of Life really should come with a warning label.
Water of Life is carcinogenic, you know.
Harms women and the nation? It harms the nation to allow women to choose whether or not they want to be pregnant? How? She didn’t even elaborate on that! She just threw that “nation” word in for jingoism fodder, I think. Trying to inflate her ethos.
As you heard the conspiracy talk at the desk, did you say anything PZ? I’m typically not confrontational myself but I really see myself getting so angry I would have to say something. I might even just lose my shit and start commenting on their talk with full foul language rage. But in a better moment I would have to immediately confront such remarkably stupid and unfounded statements with some polite commentary on them. Maybe I’m not as jaded. Then again, I probably wouldn’t have attended.
I’ve come across the “abortion was safer pre-Roe” argument before–to people that believe that, Kermit Gosnell is a typical provider of legal abortions. I’ve found you can shut these people up by gushing, “So the reason you want abortion to be illegal is so that women can have access to safe abortions again! How thoughtful of you!”
Oh and if I can throw in my 2 cents worth on the abortion debate…. I will never understand how a zygote’s rights can trump the rights of the woman carrying the zygote. It’s that simple. Why must a zygote have the right to fulfill its developmental program but an adult woman can’t choose to fulfill hers? Why do people (women) lose their rights once they are born? This gets gray at some point, but never in the first trimester were abortion should be available for any reason on demand.
Well, in a sense that’s true, since neither of you have the right to use another person’s body without their consent and against their will. Even if you believe a zygote is a person, it still doesn’t have that right.
The forced birther crowd is excellent at red herrings, and everything in her talk was a red herring. The only issue here is government power. Should the government have the power to force a woman to stay pregnant against her will and give birth against her will? Obviously the answer is no. The government should never have the power to forcibly use a person’s body against their will for any reason, even if a life is at stake. There’s a whole long list of cases proving that bodily autonomy is regarded as absolute. It’s why we have to sign forms to donate organs. You can’t use a corpse’s organs without the owner’s consent, even after death, even if someone will die without that heart or lung. But these people believe they should be able to force a woman to stay pregnant and give birth against her will. We give corpses more bodily autonomy than these people think women should have.
How accurate were the old abortion mortality statistics anyway? Like suicide, one suspects there were cases where cause of death was “adjusted for the family”.
And mortality doesn’t include loss of fertility and other health problems due to complications.
Is preborn like the undead?
Bingo. It certainly makes pulling claims about biological reality out of your arse much easier. In fact, the less you know, the more unwounded and free your arse-born drivel becomes. Mind you, as your levels of freedom grow, so does how stupid you make yourself look.
Regarding the first-wavers and their opinions on abortion: yes, many of them were opposed to abortion. But it’s helpful to look at why they were. Their objections tended to boil down to the fact that abortion, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was dangerous. Due to a lack of antibiotics and many practitioners being unqualified quacks, women were left mutilated, sterile, in horrible pain, and/or with raging infections. Many died.
First-wavers, recognizing this fact, tended to be advocates for contraception and prosecution of the quacks that killed women.
Which is to say that when Anthony, Paul, Stanton, et al, inveighed against abortion, they were reacting to a very different set of circumstances than today.
Of course a fetus isn’t a “person.” It’s nothing more than a collection of cells that might become a person if the bearer chooses to allow it. It’s no more a “complete human being” than my skin cells, each of which also happens to contain the genetic blueprint of a complete human being.
And let’s face it: there’s NO WAY you can grant a fetus full human rights without stripping its bearer of said rights. Plenty of hospitals in Ireland and elsewhere have proven that the hard way. Either a woman has the right to terminate a pregnancy, or she’s reduced from a person to an expendable vessel. There’s no middle ground.
Reality Truth #2: I’m Not Sorry.
I wasn’t sorry at the time, and I’m not in the least bit sorry 40 years later. I was relieved, and that was a very positive and good feeling.
I guess no one asked her why this God person, who supposedly cares so much about every single innocent snowflake pre-baby, performs more abortions (failed implantation, spontaneous miscarriage, etc.) than all of us wicked humans do.
Kristian made some odd points, but OK let us assume for a moment she is right – What does she propose to reduce the amount of abortions??
Well gosh, since fertilized zygotes are naturally slaughtered in vast numbers all the time, and reality doesn’t seem to have any special regard for embryos, then the flip side of her conclusion must be that it’s perfectly OK to murder people.
Not quite equivalent, since murder involves intent. But it does mean that there’s no moral mandate to e.g. improve automotive safety, cure disease etc. Because those deaths are just shit that happens, same as failures of zygotes to implant.
In fact, Libby Ann has a good argument based on this: If the “pro-lifers” believed their own rhetoric, they’d be frantically funding research aimed at preventing all those peri-post-conception spontaneous abortions. Moreover, they wouldn’t be opposing hormonal contraception (on the grounds that it causes some small number of spontaneous abortions, which apparently it doesn’t anyway, but….), because on net it saves baby-lives by preventing a much larger number of conceptions, which would spontaneously abort in the normal course of things.
I’d also like to ask these DNA-makes-a-person advocates:
– Identical twins: one person or two? Why?
– Chimerism: one person or two? Why?
(Bet: the likely answers reduce to something like “Because brain”).
I would suggest that arguing in the reverse direction not only equally valid, but also more compelling. Even if we grant that the fetus is a whole person and having the same rights as the rest of us, that is rendered irrelevant by the fact that even us fully formed people can not lay claim to someone else’s body over their wishes.
#16 Eamon Knight
More like ‘because soul’ rather than brain, followed by ‘people can only have one soul each obviously!‘ No word yet on how to confirm the presence of one or multiple souls per body when they are conveniently undetectable… my suspicion is it sill simply be because the Bible says so.
Her solution is to simply make all abortions completely illegal, and imprison all doctors who give abortions.
geral
Since she applauds the Hobby Lobby ruling, I would say it sure isn’t promoting contraception. She even lies by claiming it gives women more freedom.
http://townhall.com/columnists/kristanhawkins/2014/07/10/the-supreme-court-gave-women-more-freedom-not-less-n1860393
Also: “death panels! omg!” Typical right-wing liar for jeebus.
I don’t know about Anthony, Paul(?) and Howe, but Stanton was a firm supporter of birth control (such as it was in her day), and most of the anti-abortion crowd, especially the RW Catholic bunch, aren’t so hot on contraception, either.
So, Ms. Hawkins, how WOULD you reduce the abortion rate? Oh, wait, it has been going down for years …. http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/study-abortion-rate-at-lowest-point-since-1973/2014/02/02/8dea007c-8a9b-11e3-833c-33098f9e5267_story.html
@Holms
#18: In some cases, yes. But a moderately large fraction of believers realize that theological justifications have limited purchase outside the faith, and so try to couch their arguments in scientific terms (hence also: creationism).
#17: While the woman’s autonomy argument is decisive, it’s also worth addressing the personhood issue. I’ve seen pieces (linked from places like here, IIRC) by people who while they may be pro-choice legal-wise, argue that abortion *must* be this morally-fraught choice for the woman. The reply (which seems right to me) is: No, not necessarily; it’s up to her what significance to assign to it — Big Agonizing Decision That I Will Wonder About The Rest Of My Life, or just another medical issue to deal with — and insisting that it has to be the former is another way of manipulating women through guilt.
If we allow fetal personhood from Day 1, we really can’t avoid the moral argument, but if the fetus is not deemed a person (and there seem no reasonable grounds for such an ascription for, oh, at least the first trimester) then that argument loses its purchase.
Because, silly, women and their wombs are the property of the nation, a resource for pumping out peons to work the economy and cannon fodder to throw into foreign wars (who themselves are also property of the nation). Thus abortion harms the nation as surely as theft from the national oil reserves….
If every fertilized egg turned into a baby, within about 15 years there would be people packed cheek by jowl and about three layers thick covering every square inch of dry land. Is that what they want?
I would totally bet 50 bucks that during her lifetime Kristan Hawkins will have an abortion, but it will be totally different.
+++
Which leads to situations like in El Salvador, where doctors afraid of being prosecuted regularly report women with miscarriages and stillbirths to the authorities and who then get sentenced for murder.
+++
Ireland simply exports large amounts of its maternal mortality. Not only do they not use the same criteria for recording as other nations do, also women with serious health conditions travel to the UK for abortions. For that group of women abortion is way more dangerous than for the general population, but continuing the pregnancy would be a huge risk. And yes, some of these women die, being recorded in the statistics of the UK, inflating it.
It’d be so much fun to bring up the “slavery” issue in a crowd like that – I bet you’d get a lot of angry shouting and defensiveness. If you believe the fetus is a full person, then forcing a woman to carry it against her will is slavery.
This seems like a silly nit to pick. It’s perfectly clear from both the broader context and from the sentence itself that we’re talking about human DNA and not cows, nor tumors for that matter. In fact, I’m willing to concede pretty much all of the anti-choicers’ biology arguments. Yes, that fetus has the potential to become a human being, and that’s a significant thing.
But I’m still pro-choice for the simple reason that I think it’s best for the woman to be able to have children or not on her terms, not fate’s. If the decides to have an abortion now, she might well decide to start a family later when the time and circumstances are better, and a wanted child born to a stable couple is probably going be better off than the unwanted one born to a (probably) single mother.
I don’t find this persuasive, as reality clearly has no regard for adult humans either, and could also be said to slaughter them quite frequently with natural hazards.
That doesn’t affect other arguments, but this one bugs me.
Abortion 101 from the most recent FtBCon
@6 nomadiq
No. No it doesn’t.
So essentially, if a pregnant women can find someone else to carry out the illegal abortion, they would be allowed to get away with murder…
This should be (and needs to be) an argument that any pro-choicer can instantly show to be completely disingenuous. Would a mother be allowed to pay someone to dispose of their unwanted newborn child without being prosecuted for murder? Of course not.
The reality is that the prospect of sending young women to jail for having an illegal abortion doesn’t poll well, and the anti-abortion crowd knows it, so they disingenuously cast the woman as the victim, even though millions of women have freely chosen to have an abortion.
Point of Inquiry had a startling (at least to me) interview titled Penalizing Pregnancy: Lynn Paltrow on the Fight for Reproductive Justice. Women are being prosecuted for things they did while pregnant and at times not having representation in court for themselves, but advocates for their fetus.
tacitus
It’s more from the department of “women are not actually people capable of reason, therefore they are not responsible.”
Unless they’re female healthcare providers.
Or having sex.
There will be a savage free market free-for-all for all the diminishing resources. Afterwards, the survivors will eat the dead.
Then they too will starve, and be welcomed with open arms into the bosom of their god….
Since when is making a profit a bad thing re GOP principles? I thought we were supposed to let the market settle everything.
I took the liberty of copying this page’s URL as a comment on the Kristan Mercer Hawkins Facebook page.
@ #36, at you taking bets on how long that URL stays there?
No, no it wasn’t, because that doesn’t actually happen.
PZ writes:
Ah, but you have heard of him PZ: He’s THIS douche, the one who stole Marthe Gautier’s credit for discovering Down’s syndrome, I learned about him from your post last year.
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2014/03/01/marthe-gautier-another-woman-scientist-trivialized/
The insincerity of people never cease to surprise me. Abortion is immoral, that is Hawkin’s only case. Making up false arguments about health and economics does not support it.
Last winter I had an argument with someone who refuses to vaccinate his children for religious reasons, and he was using the same false arguments the anti-vaccine movement does: mercury, allergies, autism.
They could just say: “I’m against it, because God” but they don’t. Clearly they realize it’s not an argument at all.
Dalillama
While forcing women to undergo c-section actually does happen. Yes, congratulations, USA, in your great country it is legal to take a woman, tie her to an operation table, drug her and then cut her open, i.e. performing major surgery on her against her will.
Yep, total respect for the woman here…
The phrase “preborn” reminds me of when someone “corrected” me online when I said my son was going to be a father. This person posted “he already is! He just hasn’t met his baby yet!”
Giliell
Note which part of the quote I bolded. That’s the part that doesn’t actually happen.
Did anyone ask her to take a pregnancy test, right there right then, in front of witnesses, to prove that she wasn’t already pregnant and planning a secret abortion of her own? If she has nothing to hide, she has nothing to fear. When’s the last time she had sex? The only possible reason she could have for not answering is that she knows she’s pregnant and is planning a secret abortion of her own. True, she can’t be forced to take the pregnancy test — not yet, anyway. But the entire audience has to be shown the importance of the test: if you don’t know who’s pregnant, you can’t stop them from getting secret abortions.
Then go through the audience and get the names and addresses of every other woman in attendance. If they have nothing to hide, they have nothing to fear. If they tell you that they are pregnant, then congratulate them, and tell them you’ll see them at their daily sonogram, to make sure the pregnancy proceeds normally.
If they have nothing to hide, then they have nothing to fear.
And, of course, I borked the bold tags in my #43.
“Planned Parenthood makes millions of dollars! 92% of Planned Parenthood’s business was abortions! ”
Argument from percentage of Planned Parenthood’s revenue?
Huh. That’s a new one. Let’s see how it works in practice.
“Abortion (allegedly) makes up high percentage of Planned Parenthood revenue! So abortion is bad!”
“Bank robbery makes up zero percent of Planned Parenthood revenue! So bank robbery is okay!”
Hmm. I’m thinking she’s better off sticking with bloody fetus photos.
This. Gilliel is correct: this traces back to their inability to actually see women as people rather than ambulatory incubators. But, I also think that they would happily throw women in jail for getting abortions, and would also say so if it weren’t for the fact that that this sort of thing is extremely unpopular.
As a conservative and one who is pro-birth, I presume she is also in favor of the death penalty (those who claim to be “pro-life” are anything but.) So I have some questions for her:
If it’s OK for the state to kill people for their crimes, is it OK if we perform open brain surgery on them without anesthesia to slowly scoop out their brains with a melon baller? Is killing only black people acceptable? Can we convict someone of a crime, kill him, and use the body parts in an art project? This guy was scheduled for lethal injection but it was horribly botched such that he writhed on the table in agony for hours before finally dying of a heart attack.
I get the feeling she’d come up with a reason for why that wasn’t the same thing…and completely miss the obvious point that the same argument exists with regard to abortion: That we can come up with monstrous scenarios that we all agree should not be allowed doesn’t mean it is universally unacceptable.
[Please, let’s not get into an argument over how the death penalty is always wrong…I personally don’t believe in it. Not because I don’t think there aren’t people who “need killing,” but rather because I don’t think we’re ever in a position to carry that sentiment out in a way that is just and equitable 100% of the time. When you say that it is OK to kill people, you need to come up with a way to separate the innocent from the guilty and that process will never be perfect and thus, you guarantee the fact that an innocent person will be killed. The point is that I’m sure she thinks the death penalty is at least some times acceptable but cannot comprehend that abortion may be some times acceptable, too.]
#39: Oh, I’ve heard of him, but otherwise…nope, not mentioned in any of the genetics texts I’ve used.
#44: She was pregnant — she mentioned it a few times. She has 4 kids, and she’s fairly young. At least she practices what she preaches!
“And if living human being like you and me have rights, then why don’t they?”
Such an excellent question! I make a slight change:
And if living human beings like Kristan Hawkins and me have the right to vote, then why don’t they?
As soon as she starts a campaign to grant unborn living human beings voting rights I am with her.
If zygote=baby then we’ve got a much bigger problem than abortion here: up to 80% (or as few as 50%, depending on whose numbers you use) of zygotes fail to implant or fail to develop into a “clinical pregnancy”*. In other words, if all zygotes should be treated the same as babies then we are ignoring a fucking pandemic going on around us. Ok, so murder is bad and all, but if 80% of actual, real, born babies died within the first two weeks of life, would you REALLY sit around and say, “Eh, so what? God’s will and all”? I would expect there to be outrage, an NIH branch dedicated to finding a cure, multiple private foundations searching for a cure, etc. Cancer? Feh. Heart disease? So what? We need to spend our money on the real killer of most of humanity! Or we would, if anyone really believed that zygotes were babies. Which they don’t.
*Which means that you can, in fact, be a little bit pregnant.
Oh, she is pregnant? How nice. I hope she’s getting daily sonograms to make sure everything goes well.
At the very least these fetus=baby people should be protesting funeral homes for not willing to have funerals for them all, and hospitals for not properly respecting human bodies in their disposal of them.
Dalillama
Sorry for not being clearer. I understood you and am in agreement, I’d thought I had expressed that using the “while” to contrast their fictional crack baby scenario with the reality of forced c-sections.
+++
I hope the forced birth movement pays well. I’m wondering how her kids are feeling about being deprived of resources* time after time again because every zygote is a baby and must be brought to term.
*Even if you have enough money, time is a very limited resource. I doubt that god gives quiverful parents a few extra hours a day to care for the emotional needs of all their children.
+++
Sally
Yep, in their worldview women never actually want an abortion, ignoring of course the millions of women who have made that decision and fought for it. Women are only talked into abortions, forced into abortions by abusive men* and rapists.
I think it would only be a matter of time before they start criminalising women. Once you have convinced enough people that abortions murder babies people will also support prosecution of the women. And by women I mean poor women, because rich women always have options.
*While this horrible scenario happens, it happily glosses over the fact that the opposite is much more common: Abusive men manipulate contraception because leaving while pregnant or with a small child is much more difficult, especially if he’s the legal father of the child and therefore always in your life.
Except when you get identical twins or human chimeras. Details details. How the hell do these people reconcile the facts with their position again!? wtf.
Some of the “pro-life” (read: “anti-woman”) crowd have co-opted social justice terminology. Can’t recall when or where or who, but the specific phrasing* was “born privilege.”
Much *headdesking* and Angrish ensued because what the actual fuck did I just read.
(Dear Maat, I wish I had a link to this spectacular bit of dipshittery, but I don’t.)
OMG, never mind, I found it!
Check Your Born Privilege
Oh goodness, that list!
It completely erases the fact that, yes indeed, the zygote/embryo/fetus is inside another person. Really, there’s no difference between a toddler asking for a PB&J sandwich and a fetus using your organs.
And then right before they start their hilarious list, there’s this gem:
I’ve bolded the important part. Without detecting a hint of irony, they establish that this is about experiences, something a fetus hardly has and an embryo most definitely doesn’t have due to lack of central nervous system.
Funny thing is that many of their points can also be made about dogs, stones and kale.
Yep. I don’t know whether to laugh, cry, or say “fuck it” and get drunk.
The term “pro life” is very clever from a PR point of view. It makes us the “anti life” movement. Though “pro choice” is a more accurate description for us (and “anti choice” for our opponents) for some reason it seems less catchy.