Anti-Abortion Video Roundup

[filkertom]

In the wake of South Dakota's new law banning abortion in all cases except to save the life of the mother (very carefully not mentioning rape or incest as mitigating factors) -- a law that even Fox News reports is unpopular with a majority of Americans -- and in case you haven't seen them, here are a few items that show the kind of people we are dealing with:

• Anti-abortion protestors asked what the penalty to women should be if abortion is made illegal
• Audio of radio host Andrew Wilkow refusing to answer if he would save a petri dish with five blastulas or a two-year-old child
• South Dakota State Senator Bill Napoli tries to give an example of an "exception" to the new law (around the 3:55 mark)

For supplemental reading, go here and here. And then go here and do something about it. (Thanks to dandelion_diva for the final link.)

Comments

[alymid.livejournal.com]

Ya know Napoli's little scenario sounds more like the sexual fantasy of a very sick man, than the only sound scenario where a woman should be *allowed* an abortion.

How about if she is only a little sodomized . . . or wasn't a virgin before all those things happened . . .

[crwilley.livejournal.com]

Sadly I gather this was a real case. She was, fortunately, not actually impregnated.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Actually, no. From all indications, this was a hypothetical. And a lot of people are creeped out as to how much detail he goes into.

[crwilley.livejournal.com]

I might have been misinformed. Or there might have been (who am I kidding? Given the laws of probability, there almost certainly was) an actual case circumstantially matching the story Napoli was talking about.

If nothing else we're back to that thing where only virgins (and maybe married women who were virgins and have never known the touch of anyone but their husbands, 'cuz that's all sacred and stuff) are traumatized by rape.

[solarbird]

On Smart Bitches, Trashy Novels, they're trying to spread some santorum all over Bill Napoli.

[solarbird]

Everyone keeps forgetting, and I wish they wouldn't, that South Dakota's law also makes no exception for the health of the mother, and that's also very much on purpose. If you get, say, gestational diabetes and it's going to blind you, but not kill you, then that's just too damn bad.

In other words, crippling the mother for life is just fine with them. And this approach absolutely has the backing of the theoconservative leadership, who rail against the idea of including health exemptions on the grounds that they consider them flimsy excuses. Yes, really.

[crwilley.livejournal.com]

Yup. Congratulations, you get to learn to be blind and take care of a newborn and any other children you might have all at the same time!

Or in a case where the woman's future fertility might be compromised. Or in a case where you're carrying an anencephalic baby who might live for a few hours after birth, and that birth is likely to be delayed by the anencephaly on top of that (isn't every woman's dream to be pregnant for 10 months instead of 9 in order to deliver a baby with no chance of survival?)

I also gather that the "life" exemption is being interpreted as "she will die, right now, without an abortion" as opposed to "she has developed toxemia, which will kill her slowly with side effects that become more and more irreversible as time goes on."

[solarbird]

Actually there's been some hinting from the fundamentalist leadership that a health exemption specifically limited to physical health only and permanent crippling only may be acceptable - but they aren't for it, and if they can get a bill without it, they'd rather. The way they talk about it implies they care if it means you can't make any more babies later - in other words, if the pregnancy would damage the incubator that women apparently are supposed to be.

Well, that, and "helpers" to men. That part's not subtext, that part's just text. If you don't know who James Dobson is, I strongly suggest you learn.

Man, I hate these people. Which is fair; as a dyke, they hate me! So there you are.

[kengr]

At risk of getting flamed, I *know* why some folks asre against a "health" exemption.

Before Roe v Wade rich women could easily get a doctor (by shopping around if necessary) to say that the pregnancy was affecting their health. Often mental health was given as a reason...

Doesn't make forbidding abortions for the health of the mother *right*, but does explain why it's something they are highly suspicious of.

[solarbird]

This changes nothing about what I said: they're perfectly happy to cripple women to satisfy their religious agenda. Particularly, it's revealing in that in order to catch a few rich doctor-shoppers, they're happy to let ten times that many women be badly hurt and suffer for the rest of their lives. They condemn the innocent to get at the guilty - but, of course, as far as they're concerned, no woman wanting an abortion is innocent. They're wannabe-murderers. So it all fits together an a nice, evil, little package.

Of course, they want to do a whole lot more than just this, as I've mentioned briefly above and talked about extensively elsewhere.

[nomaddervish.livejournal.com]

Imagine that I have a severe health condition which will ultimately cripple me. It can be cured by an organ transplant, but there is no other known treatment for it. Imagine further that the only way this transplant can be performed is to kill a live (but not necessarily willing) donor. Would it be right for me to kill that donor for the sake of preserving my health? I know of very few people who would answer "yes".

If you accept the premise that life starts at conception, then abortion for the sake of the mother's health is no different. Both are cases of one person killing another to preserve their own quality of life, which is not normally considered to be justifiable as self-defense. "Evil", "guilt", or "punishment" have nothing to do with it, just the simple logic that killing you to make my life better is not an appropriate thing to do.

From that viewpoint, the possible exemptions if the woman's fertility may be endangered that you brought up should be equally unconscionable and if infertility is treated differently than any other detrimental health effects, then, by all means, open up on them with everything you've got. But don't get down on them simply for being logically consistent in their reasoning.

[solarbird]

But don't get down on them simply for being logically consistent in their reasoning.
I'm down on them because they're theocratic fucktards. Hell, in their world, as a dyke, I don't even have room to exist. Their "life begins at conception" thing is purely a theological artifact and, for that matter, isn't even Biblically supported. (The ancient Hebrews considered death of a foetus via assault to be a matter of a property crime, not a life-taking. They didn't consider it even to be alive until it started moving around.)

Beyond that, there is a situation where letting "logical consistency" override any hint or sense of compassion is, in and of itself, worthy of condemnation.

I also think your analogy is faulty, regardless, as a very similar one applies equally in the other direction. Let's say that someone is deathly ill, but that by having them hooked up to me for a period of several months, they can be kept alive. This hook up affects my life in every way for every minute of every day, and is somewhat dangerous to me, the donor. Is it okay to legally obligate people to make this donation, say, at random? Of course not. No one sane supports making that kind of donation mandatory, yet even if you decide that a single cell is a human being, that's what they're demanding of women.

Further, and you may not be aware of this, but the "life begins at conception" argument is also a direct attack on most forms of birth control. Major fundamentalist political action organisations such as Concerned Women for America list most forms of birth control - e.g., the pill, the IUD, and so on - as drugs which can cause abortions. Now, if you ask me, the fact that 70% or so of zygotes, left on their own, never implant, I'd personally get the idea in my head that hey, maybe Jesus doesn't give a rat's ass about those single cells, but that's a side point.

The bigger point is that it really is about controlling sex, and particularly, women's sexuality. That's why many theoconservative policy wonks oppose HPV vaccination; it prevents women from getting cervical cancer, sure, but it also might, in their minds, make sex less scary, so they have mixed feelings about it at best.

Some of them have said similar things about a hypothetical AIDS vaccine. But we don't have that yet, so it isn't being debated - unlike the HPV issue.

[nomaddervish.livejournal.com]

You've listed a lot of great reasons for opposing the "theocratic fucktards". But my point was that, if you want to engage them, you need to do it at the "life begins at conception" level. If you engage them on "abortion to preserve the woman's health should be acceptable", then you just make yourself look like a monster for suggesting that, in certain circumstances, killing one person to preserve another's eyesight (or whatever) is OK. When a conclusion is logically reached from certain premises, you need to go after the premises or the logic; directly attacking the conclusion is pointless.

Your reversal of my analogy does work, but keep in mind that we live in a country where, right or wrong, the family frequently is legally obligated to make arrangements for keeping the terminally ill alive, even if it ruins their lives, simply due to an accident of birth.

Finally, several of your points really apply more to the head theocratic fucktards, not to the rank-and-file. Most of the people who oppose abortion genuinely do mean well. I've known many of them (and even was one, at one point, albeit for non-religious reasons - yes, it is possible for people to oppose abortion for reasons other than religion¹) and have never once heard anyone express a desire to control women's sexuality, nor to control sex within marriage, nor to oppose any sort of cancer research or treatment. None opposed AIDS research in general, although some did think that it was being overfunded in relation to other diseases. Few opposed non-abortive contraception. While they may support people with the agendas you've described, they're generally misguided, not malicious.

¹ In my case, I was opposed to abortion because I saw no scientific reason to define the start of life as being at any point other than conception (when a complete set of human genes have come together and life processes have begun) and, therefore, there was no reason to treat the zygote/fetus differently than any other living human. I dropped my opposition to abortion over a decade ago, but I can still easily understand that mindset, even though I no longer share it.

[zenturbo.livejournal.com]

There was a case in Poland where a mother went to the European Court to get compensation for that exact same scenario. Three doctors all told her that if she didn't get an abortion, she would be completely blind. The government still wouldn't let it go, so now she is living in poverty with three children and trying to get disability.

I hope she gets some sort of compensation.

[crwilley.livejournal.com]

The BBC was discussing this this morning, and their announcer said, and I quote, "Most of the rest of America thinks the Dakotans have gone barmy." And Scott McClellan had to use his full dodge pool to evade reporters' questions on whether or not the President supported this law.

[nuveena.livejournal.com]

Gotta love the Beeb. :)

Well, it makes a sick sort of sense...

[lizard-sf.livejournal.com]

IF you accept the premises of fundies (which I *do not*, let me be perfectly clear), a rape/incest exception would be immoral. IF you claim a single cell is a human being (and I'll leave trying to justify that idea to minds more warped than mine, a scary concept in and of itself), then, it doesn't matter how it was conceived. If you truly believe that abortion is identical to, say, slitting the throat of a 5 year old child in cold blood, then you will argue, correctly (GIVEN THE PREMISE), that it is wrong to kill someone because of the nature of their parentage. No sane human being would say it is alright to murder an actual, living, child because he was conceived in a heinious manner -- it's obviously not the kid's fault his dad was a rapist.

Now, most sane people recognize that compelling a woman to carry to term the child of rape or incest is an act of unconscionable cruelty. They also recognize that a cell is not a person. The issue of personhood is a very complex one, something philosophers, ethicists, scientists, etc, have been debating for centuries. But it's pretty obvious to all but the extreme loons that one cell does not a person make. Likewise, most people (again with a few fringe exceptions) agree an infant born and separated from its mother is a human being.

So, when does a cell become a person? Sometime between conception and birth, and my gut feeling (based on my own ethics, beliefs, etc) is that it happens much closer to the end of the process than the beginning -- the point at which higher brain functions begin to 'come online', when there is an actual 'self' floating there in the womb. So few abortions occur this late in the process that, to me, it's a non-issue.

But back to the main point -- I think this is going to rebound hard in the so-called 'Right To Life' movement's face. While the average American isn't prone to deep philosophical thought, they do recognize the inherent wrongness of the lack of a rape/incest exception -- however, if a law makes such an exception, it completely blows away the "Abortion is Murder!" argument, because such an exception means murdering someone due to their parentage is A-OK.

Abortion IS murder? No rape/incest exception, and that won't fly.

Rape/Incest exception -- then abortion is not murder, so why the frack are you banning it, except to impose a moral code of exceptional cruelty and malice?

Lose/Lose for the RTL crowd. And win/win for the sane among us.

(A 'life of the mother' exemption still makes sense -- it's killing in self-defense, effectively, which is a pretty solid justification no matter what your morals.)

[nuveena.livejournal.com]

Well said, lizard_sf.

I forget who, but a very good point was brought up on some of the blogs yesterday:

The last time abortion was illegal, there was no such thing as DNA testing.

I do think that fact will make a difference to the type of man who goes around saying, "Not my problem." when the abortion question comes up.

[druidsfire.livejournal.com]

I remember one thing that surprised me on the drive to Chicago and then the ride on the Dementia party van to Minneapolis last weekend... all the pro-life billboards all /over/ the place. They ranged in tone from the 'please don't do it' to the massive guilt-trip 'a baby has a heartbeat 18 days after conception' sorts (and that's a near-direct quote on that latter one). Maybe I just don't get out enough, but it stuck out enough to me cos we don't see them littering the landscape here in Cincinnati... which is pretty solidly Republican.

Bah.

[barbara-the-w.livejournal.com]

What really gets me is
1. Where are the programs to protect the kids *after* they're born?
2. How much money are they wasting on these billboards that they could be spending on feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, etc. kids who are *already* born?
3. Don't they get the fundamental psychosis of that inconsistency?

[druidsfire.livejournal.com]

1) I think your icon answers this.
2) I don't want to know because it would make me very angry.
3) Clearly and undeniably not.

Le sigh.

[barbara-the-w.livejournal.com]

1. .... and I was trying to be ironic, not honest.
2. me, too.
3. obviously not

and 4. Have any of these people adopted? Likely they're just breedin' their own.