The new “feminism”. (Poster by Austin Cline.)
Do women, inferior beings to men in the eyes of Jeebus, have agency? Are we full enough adults to make our own decisions about the production output of our uteruses? Or are we mental children who need a male-dominated government to tell us what to do?
You can guess what the opinion of “Feminists” for Life on the subject of female moral agency is: We don’t have it. The latest email from their “Pro-Woman Answers to Pro-Choice Questions” tackles the subject at the heart of the reproductive rights debate. Don’t you respect women enough to allow them to make a choice? and, as a follow-up to demonstrate that they don’t respect motherhood either, If you don’t trust me with a choice, how can you trust me with a child? The answer to the first one for FFL is simple: In order to be “free”, women have to have our freedom stripped from us.
Most women do not have abortions as a matter of “choice,” but because they feel they have no resources to support a different choice. A coerced decision is not a free choice—it’s a last resort.
My emphasis on that bit of Orwellian language, since they are very much about coercing women into bearing children against our will. But that’s okay, because really, “free will” is an illusion.
In the world of these “feminists”, women aren’t comparable to men so much as comparable to barnyard animals. We can have legal freedom, sure, but what for? Women do not have free will, but are instead instinctual creatures, and if we think that we don’t want to have one child after another, it’s because we’ve been perverted from our own instincts and need the law to set us right.
Do men have free will, in the view of FFL? Absolutely. Prior installments made it quite clear that they think a lot of women have abortions because men in their lives choose to abandon them. They do not assume these abandonments are coerced. So they think that men can make free choices, but women cannot, which strikes me as something that makes them fundamentally incompatible with the feminist movement.
We support nonviolent choices—single motherhood, fatherhood, grandparenthood, marriage and various adoption options—along with practical resources and support.
Except they support the choice of using violence if necessary to force women to bear children against our will. Think I’m overstating the case? Well, remember that all government force is ultimately at the end of a gun.
A society that promotes abortion as a “necessity� or “necessary evil� underestimates women and the violence of abortion and disregards what women really want.
Like I said in the last installment, if I were pregnant, I’d want an abortion. What say these feminists to this evidence that women might really want not to have children right now? I suppose I simply don’t exist, which calls into question how I typed these words.
Now for the second question, If you don’t trust me with a choice, how can you trust me with a child? It’s an interesting question, because while most anti-choicers idealize motherhood, their assumption that it’s to be performed by people they assume have the moral agency of barnyard animals insinuates that parenting is a task beneath real humans, i.e. men, and to be performed by subhuman Uterine-Americans.
If by “choice� you mean abortion, say it.
Okay, the choice to have an abortion if you want, and the choice not to if you want. I guess the whole thing is confusing to them, since they can’t fathom the notion that women make choices. Which makes me wonder, if you showed them a CAT scan that demonstrated that women have actual brains floating around in our skulls, just like men, would they faint from shock? Or just claim that brains were put in women’s heads by god in order to test our faith, much like he put dinosaur fossils in the ground to see who could continue to believe, despite the scientific evidence before them?
All choices aren’t equal, but all people are. We reject violence against women and children through abortion, and promote peaceful alternatives that benefit both woman and child.
But only then, because they eagerly support violence against women who make choices they don’t like, if that’s what it will take to make us have babies we don’t want to have. It’s noteworthy that childbirth is hardly some non-violent process, and if we were in the habit of forcing watermelons up people’s asses to punish them for having sex, we’d be violating basic human rights. But do it to women and suddenly it’s up in the air if it’s wrong, bringing one back again to the inescapable conclusion that anti-choicers don’t think women are fully human.
Feminism has long championed the strength and dignity of women and equality. Women are capable of making the decision to parent or place a baby for adoption.
Man, that’s so cold that icicles formed on my monitor when I opened the email. You get to have a minor amount of control over what is done with the baby you’ve been forced to create at the end of a gun. Makes you wonder if FFL would be cool with putting signs that say, “Arbeit macht frei” over delivery room doors. I know, cruel. They are willing to give you all sorts of pseudo-choices to help bolster the illusion that they don’t completely hate you—you also get the choice of an armed guard at the door or shackeling to the stirrups.
And now for the chilling conclusion of this bit of totalitarian nonsense dressed up as “feminism”:
Don’t women need to control their own lives?
No one has complete control over his or her life.
Indeed, so there’s absolutely no reason for the government not to commandeer complete control over your life and your body. You don’t have complete control over when you’re going to die, for instance, so why do you care if you get to choose where you live or where you work or who you marry or, of course, when you have children?
Once a woman is pregnant, the question is, “What is the best possible nonviolent outcome for her?�
Good question, and luckily, the ones who’ve succiently answered it were pro-choicers, who say, “The woman knows best what is the best choice for her.” Sometimes it’s abortion. But then again, we real feminists think women are fully human.
75 Responses to “Feminists for Life on the subject of choice: Freedom is wasted on women”
Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>
Yeah, but everybody loves Raymond.
FFL support gay marriage, right? Since if women don’t have the choice to marry a woman instead of a man, then the “choice” of hetero marriage is coerced.
And since they oppose violence, they were active against the Iraq war, and the death penalty, right? Right? No?!
And for those who haven’t been there, let me tell you, chilbirth is awful, bloody, violence.
Except for the violence they advocate against women who are pregnant and those of either gender who might help them get unpregnant, these crazies are like a parody of pacifism. I’m sure that opposing the murder of men, women and children in Iraq would be such a violent act (and certainly impolite) that they couldn’t possibly think of engaging in it.
[…] Realizing that the influence of fetal rights is on the wane, antis are now justifying their push for more restrictive abortion legislation on the grounds that such laws are necessary to protect women. Women, it seems, cannot make an informed decision about whether or not to have an abortion. Apparently, our brains are too small to enable to us to take in and digest a lot of information and make a choice that is thought out and not coerced. So women need laws that force them to wait 24 or 48 hours after first visiting a doctor, or they need the state to tell them when they can have an abortion and whom they have to tell (or from whom they have to seek approval) before doing so. Because we can’t trust women to make informed decisions about whether or not they want to become mothers. No, because as Pandagon’s Amanda notes, women don’t have the agency to decide for themselves to terminate a pregnancy. […]
The weird thing is that… ok, I’m a huge commie-sym liberal freak, bisexual, poly, leather, hugs whales, etc. But contrary to the popular image of such people in red states as baby eating (I love children, but I can’t finish a whole one), family hating nosteratu, I would love it if the US had France-style childbirth incentives and maternity/paternity support systems for new parents. France is amazingly generous to people that choose to breed, and I would be all for it here even though I shudder in horror at the thought of becoming a parent and the money will disproportionately flow to Republicans and red states (Brooks’ beloved natalists).
And that would be the solution to FFL’s ‘women deserve a choice, not coercion’ rhetoric. Women would be able to choose to have kids without the fear that they won’t be able to provide for them, without the fear that to provide for them, they’ll be forced to work as a single mother and be a ‘bad mom’. Women that wanted kids could not feel economic pressure to get an abortion, and women that simply don’t want kids can choose to get an abortion.
That’d be a choice. That’d be real feminism. FFL, on the other hand, believes in a somewhat… simpler set of choices. In fact, the simplest set of choices; you don’t get one. Abortion is forbidden. They sure do trust women to make the right choices when they’re free of outside interference, neh?
Thank you for posting a feminist response to this madness. Honestly, they are so good at disguising their bullshit as reasonable; when I hear these arguments in the moment I often have trouble responding. My brain goes all hazy and I short-circuit when I hear that ‘feminists’ believe all women who choose abortion are coerced, and no women who choose pregnancy have been coerced. Now I can think back to this post and call this argument what it is.
“If you can’t trust me with a choice, how can you trust me with a child?”
Well, they don’t, of course. They trust Teh Father.
As you say Amanda, the women have the moral agency of farm animals in their view.
Sure, they say they support single mothers. But do they do it?
Not that I’ve noticed, as I’ve said before. I’ve heard brave chirpy words, but seen no action. All the single mothers I’ve ever met or heard of support themselves, desperately more often than not, or with the help of “soulless” welfare. I’ve met a fair number of kids of welfare moms, one a successful student at Caltech. I’m proud to support a former single welfare mom as my Congresswoman, Lynn Woolsey.
(Anyone know what committee positions are being offered to Lynn? She’s been a stalwart progressive liberal in Congress for decades now.)
But women or their offspring who owe it all to “pro-life” organizations that supported them and let them raise their child their way? Not that I’ve noticed.
They have been spouting this stuff since Roe v Wade; all the children of single mothers they’d supported if any would be ages 36 and on down now.
Come out, come out, wherever you are…
Chirp chirp chirp….
The guy in the poster really looks like Danny Huston and the woman like Heather Graham.
Wow, the guy in the graphic is creepy…
Is not problem that women have brain size of squirrel?
“[P]romote peaceful alternatives that benefit both woman and child….Women are capable of making the decision to parent or place a baby for adoption.”
They honestly think adoption is an option that benefits the birth mother? Someone needs to do their homework, lest they look like the ignorant buffoons they are.
To be fair, paul, FFL does not endorse clinic-bombing or doctor stalking, to my knowledge. Better to attack them on their actual stances than accuse them of something they haven’t done, if you want your arguments to have weight.
The fundamental disconnect for them is a) not being able to believe a sane woman would choose abortion without coercion or brainwashing (because it is so evil), and b) therefore assuming any woman who does has in fact been brainwashed. It’s a heck of a pretzel of an argument that could be easily dissolved if they just actually talked to women who’ve had abortions. Or in understanding that while no one finds abortions fun, women who have them see them as a better choice than the alternative.
They sort of make that step by acknowledging the pressures of poverty and need that drive many abortions, but the most irritating part is that they see banning abortions as some sort of answer to those problems. And it’s not, never has been, and never will be. You can’t get your low-violence, woman-supporting, low abortion rate society by banning abortions. You get there by supporting contraception research and development and distribution, fighting poverty, and supporting women’s rights–including their rights to abortion. Which ironically, lowers the number of abortions far better than banning it. The research supporting this has been out there forever, but people just can’t wrap their minds around it.
Because deep down there’s still this idea that women have abortions the way they get pedicures.
*mad laughter*
PWN!!!!!
I love it!
So wait. If there is a problem of coerced abortions, the proper solution to this problem is to make abortions harder or impossible to obtain–not to, you know, go to the source of the coersion? Sigh…
As for the other two…FfL really like to give non-answers. They’d be deep, if they weren’t.
Most women do not have abortions as a matter of “choice,� but because they feel they have no resources to support a different choice. A coerced decision is not a free choice—it’s a last resort.
So are these people willing to put their money (or at least their political lobbying efforts) where their mouths are?
If they really believe abortion is a form of homocide (if not, how does the government get off regulating it, except to ensure the safety of the procedure, etc.?) and that women obtain abortion ‘cause they have no support networks to help them carry the fetus to term, why not work to provide women with those resources? As NBarnes points out, a French-style health care system (e.g. for pregnant women and for children, plus French-style family leave, etc.) would be a good start.
Since these groups largely don’t support these sorts of policies, at best one can assume that they, as Atrios puts it in terms of hawks that view any sort of engagement, no matter how constructive, less than war as capitulation, “would rather wave their dicks around than do something about the problem”. At best, these groups would rather condemn abortion as homocide and punish those who seek out abortion than do things that would lower the abortion rate — better to punish the sinner than prevent the sin? Seems a bit odd to me … whatever happened to “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”? Of course, a libertarian might point out a similar thing about environmentalists who would rather pollution be considered a sin and punished than try to figure out constructive ways to reduce pollution even if those ways would necessarily accept pollution as other than a sin … of course (sorry, drifting OT), a lefty-moonbat, as pragmatic as we are (remember the capitol-P Pragmatists tend to be liberal-moonbats), would point out that a libertarian’s market-based solution is bad not because it de facto condones pollution but because they simply don’t actually work!
Anyway, there are certain points at which you gotta make something illegal even if legalizing it would reduce its frequency. But abortion is not one of them: a fetus is not a person as it lives within the body of a person. If you really want to reduce the abortion rate then and believe women are coerced into having abortions (which many pro-lifers believe — many of them think that Planned Parenthood gets money and power and souls or something for each abortion they perform … it’s really freaky and there is a lot of projection in how these people view the pro-choice and gay rights movements as “recruiting people” based on how fundie groups actually operate!), then wouldn’t you want to do something, anything that would allow women to have a real choice to have a baby?
That these people don’t indicate that at best they would rather curse the darkness than light a candle. At worst, it indicates, as y’all realize even better maybe than I, that these groups are not at all interested in preventing abortion per se but in controlling women.
The thing is, if we DID have a French-style support system, then they wouldn’t be able to take the (white) babies away from those sluts and adopt them out to righteous married Christian families.
Then those sluts would REALLY be punshed for having sex.
Ahh, yay, another Monday, another game of “How Badly Can We Miss the Point?” from
FeministsCamoflaged Antifeminists For Life.Notice how they say “most” but then leave it at that?
And damn, it’s been pointed out every week since you started these, but how can they possibly miss the coersion on the other side?!
“F”FL people? “Last resort” (your words) implies that they go to such desperate measures to AVOID something worse. What could that worse thing possibly be? That’s right, it’s staying pregnant and giving birth. That is why people have abortions: because for whatever the reason, the option you’re trying to force on us is worse than the one you’re trying to protect us from. Ostrich syndrome on your part is doing no one any good, so get your heads out of your asses, the sand, other people’s uteruses, odd doorjambs, and wherever else they might be stuck, and get that reality through your heads. Forcing women to carry/build babies and give birth does nothing to address their concerns, it just forces them to deal with said concerns that they sought an abortion in order to escape. That’s coersion twice over and you are, morally, on a par with anyone who tries to force someone to have an abortion.
If someone’s acting at gunpoint, sweeping in and forcing them to ignore the orders of the figure with the gun, without doing a damn thing about said figure with the gun, including taking responsibility for your intervention, is not anything approaching a decent solution.
You’re upset about the coersion of economics? Deal with the economics. Campaign for a living wage, for universal health care, for paid parental leave, for affordable daycare, for the things that’ll make motherhood doable for these women. Coercing someone to ignore (and therefore suffer the consequences of) other coersion is cruel and oppressive and certainly not feminist.
Yeah? We are also capable of making the decision to have an abortion. Freely, too, so either shut the fuck up about coersion or start acknowledging our humanity sufficiently to accept that we’re not automatically brainwashed or coerced when we make a choice you wouldn’t.
Methinks human birth tends to be rather violent and painful. That said, gently detatching the placenta from the uterine wall at around six-to-eight weeks without touching the embryo, or nonviolently letting the uterus stop passing nutrition through the placenta, would be the best truly nonviolent option, if you’re worried about hurting something without a sufficiently developed nervous system to feel pain. I get that way when I’m slicing up oranges or grapefruit, so I can understand people being squeamish about that.
Of course, if anyone wishes to think of birth as less violent than an early medical abortion, they’re welcome to do so, and if anyone wishes to think of that as the best option for them, they’re equally welcome to do so.
And that they’re even asking the question “what is best for her” is paternalistic. SHE is the only one with any business debating that question. Nobody else is anywhere remotely entitled to a vote.
No. We mean “choce.” As in, choice between abortion and childbirth. By “choice,” we mean “birth” as much as we mean “abortion,” otherwise it wouldn’t be choice, now, would it?
We are not pro-abortion in the way that pro-lifers are pro-life. To compare the two phrases, to speak of them as though they are equivalent to each other, is to accuse the pro-choice movement of being anti-birth, of pushing abortion as the only choice. This is patently untrue and everybody, no matter how deluded, knows it.
The right to an abortion would mean little to a woman who wants to give birth (unless of course she were to suffer complications to her pregnancy that would threaten things that she holds in greater value, such as her life, health, ability to care for living children, et cetera), yes? Similarly, the right to give birth would mean equally little to a woman who wants an abortion. The right which matters is the one a person chooses. Hence, pro-choice. And, we support choice for another reason, specifically that there is one reason having the opposite choice means anything to a woman of either persuasion: the ability to choose has value in itself—even if you’d never consider the other option, the fact that it’s there means you have the ability to make the choice freely, you are not forced to take one option or the other, your choice is free of the stench of force and slavery. Doesn’t pretty much everyone prefer to be asked to do something rather than commanded to do it? The existence of the choice confers status on the person who has it, status of a free human being rather than a slave of any sort, and that is of immense value no matter how worthless the other option is to you.
What’s so often left out of the discussion on choice– and I cannot fathom why, since it is a winning point for pro-choice people– is that in this age of early diagnostic screenings, and married women getting pregnant later in life, the ide of terminating an *unhealthy* pregnancy.
My wife and I have a beautiful daughter, and the experience was so joyful we were trying very hard to get pregnant again. Which we did.
But at our 12 week ultrasound, we found that there was a neural tube defect of pretty catastrophic proportions; the brain was growing outside of the body, and the skull was not closed.
The fetus could not healthily come to term; it would have endangered my wife, as it would most probably die as it developed further, and prove more complicated and dangerous to remove. But beyond the health concerns, my wife was faced with the sudden shift from expectant mother of a joyous and happy baby to the holder of something not-well.
Were there no abortion choice, she– WE– would be forced to wait out a macabre jack-in-the-box scenario, to see how big and developed the pitiable fetus would grow before dying. Or, perhaps, it would go to FULL term, be born, then die. Or even WORSE, live an insensate “life” of tubes, machines, and never know the world around it, to suffer for a few years kept alive by technology before succumbing to being hopelessly malformed.
Even in very “blue” CT, you’d be surprised at how hard it was to find a doctor who was willing to to perform the D&C.
In our case, the “choice” was very little choice at all– for any moral, thinking human being, the course of action was pretty clear. It did not make it any easier for either of us; I do not mean to conflate my suffering fromt the event to be equal to hers– but it was a reasonably terrifying, traumatic and emotional experience for me as well.
Since we DO have a daughter who is (knock on wood, spit 3 times) wonderful and healthy and funny and smart and such a joy, it felt sort of… I don’t know, ungrateful to the Fates… to dwell too much on mourning the loss of what we assumed was a potential life. But there was a loss, and a mourning.
Lucky for me that my wife is a strong-willed, amazing person who perserves as a matter of course. Her strength carried me, or spurred me on to be strong for her.
But in any case, here is an example of procreative agency and soverignty that never gets discussed. We were a married couple, intent on making a baby, who happened to tragically NEED the right for an abortion because it did not go as planned.
The point here is that there are millions of specfic, personal scenarios that could take place, and the anti-choicers would drop an iron portcullis down and ignore all of them.
I think that a frank discussion of abortion rights, with married couples who chose to abort because of early detection of defects, and try AGAIN for a healthy baby, is a winning debate point.
Granted, choice should be available NO MATTER WHAT, because a woman’s body is a woman’s body, but I think that is too idealistic a set of givens to assume the average voter–even the average nominal “christian” who has a kind of default anti-abortion stance, but isn’t passionate about it– would embrace.
But yeah, this blanket assumption that every pregnancy which is terminated would have resulted in a healthy, viable child ready for adoption is infuriating.
The third option is that they could claim, since male and female brains have some structural differences, that a key area — maybe a “logic” center or “moral cortex” — is underdeveloped in women, whereas perhaps a “maternal node” is more prominent.
IOW if they’re presented with evidence that their views are in error, they just move the goalposts.
BTW, I have no idea how you make it through those emails without pulling a Linda Blair, complete with spinning head and flying split-pea soup.
Y’know what? They want to talk about coersion, they can try this on for size:
Were I raped, and made pregnant, I would most likely want an abortion. However, it is possible that at some time I would be of a different mindset regarding it, and want a baby.
Thing is, if I were to give birth to a child conceived via rape, the pro-lifers would be able to use me as an example, to try and force the same thing on other rape victims (”she did it, you can too”). The utter wingnuts would be able to use the existence of my child to argue for the quasi-acceptability of rape (”if it weren’t for rape, so-and-so wouldn’t be here” “my grandmother’s rape means I was here, so it’s a good thing it happened”). Parents all over the place would go “aren’t you glad you didn’t abort?” and that would strengthen the pro-birth-after-rape argument, and they wouldn’t get the idea that if one had aborted, one wouldn’t know what one was missing and therefore wouldn’t miss it.
Given these things, I could not let myself be used in this fashion, because it would help lead to rape victims being forced to carry pregnancies to term against their will. The necessity of preventing them from using me to harm other women, I would feel that I needed to have an abortion, because that was the least unacceptable option. That is, by their definition, coersion, and coersion to have an abortion, and it is their doing. Only in a world where abortion was not under attack would I feel comfortable giving birth to a child conceived in rape, no matter how much I otherwise wanted it. I will not selfishly be complicit in the oppression of others, no matter how unwillingly, in order to give myself something I want.
So they can shut up about coersion. Pot. Kettle. Black.
The attitude of FFL is of a piece with that of other abortion opponents who rant and rave about “murder” but stop short of the logical extension of that attitude: charging women who get/seek abortions with murder or attempted murder.
They know that if they did so, their political support would vaporize. So they spin this fantasy about how the poor little dear didn’t really want an abortion, but she was “coerced” by some big bad man/doctor/feminist/”culture of death”/whatever.
Ha! Their spokesfembot is speaking at my university tomorrow night and several of my colleagues and I plan to have a fine old time asking questions of her. Thanks folks on this thread for giving us lots of ammo. I’ll put something up on Wed if there’s a vaguely related thread.
The attitude of FFL is of a piece with that of other abortion opponents who rant and rave about “murder� but stop short of the logical extension of that attitude: charging women who get/seek abortions with murder or attempted murder.
They know that if they did so, their political support would vaporize.
At this point, I have to wonder if it really would. Since the majority of the American public, by the way it votes, seems to be in favor of giving women a choice, most of the “pro-life” contingent is made up of people who already resent and distrust women and would probably happily accept the characterization of women who get abortions as heartless murderers. After all, the women they know would never, ever do such a thing. It’s those liberal commie latte-drinkers who schedule their abortions in between board meetings and nail appointments. I really don’t think honesty would hurt the pro-life cause very much at all, and it might make them feel better to get some of their bile out.
“Mrs. Forlife, I have a Mrs. Serena Joy on line one. She wishes to discuss an novel proposal for reshaping government with you. She says you’ll be very interested…”
“They trust Teh Father.”
But isn’t it odd that they trust the father enough to decide whether the woman will have a child, but not enough to provide her with the support she would need to have that child (since he’s going to run out on her)? The whole fundie argument, in a lot of areas (abortion, homosexuality as “temptation,” a man’s infidelity viewed as the woman’s failure), seems to be “Men should be trusted to make all the rules and all the decisions, even though men can’t be trusted.”
Like I said in the last installment, if I were pregnant, I’d want an abortion.
Or maybe you wouldn’t. The point is, it would and should be up to you to assess your feelings, beliefs, and situation when you find out you are pregnant so that you can decide what to do.
The fuck-all stupidity of Feminists for Life and their ilk is that they gloss over three key realities:
1) pregnancy is dangerous, and life threatening for some and intensely morbid (in the medical sense) for others
2) banning abortion and then turning to the courts for exceptions would not likely change a hell of a lot, but would certainly gum up the courts, and
3)(of course) demean women by having to have the government rubberstamp their good sense judgments in a public exploration of their private lives.
Then again, this isn’t about reality. It is about a specific notion of morality. Like that DARE crap #1 Son brought home that completely avoids the notion of prescription drug abuse (and thus fuels it as taking medicine is OK) because it doesn’t fit neatly with the abstinence concept.
Will somebody please explain to these people that feminism does not equal external groups, forces, governments, or churches deciding what is best for women - feminism means that women decide what is best for themselves!
BTW, that woman looks disturbingly like the one who did in her minister husband with a shotgun in Tennesee last year.
After all, the women they know would never, ever do such a thing.
That’s the thing, tho’, isn’t it? In their tiny, cold little hearts, they know perfectly well that putting out blanket murder warrants on women who’ve had abortions would eventually encompass their neighbors, their sisters, that nice lady down the pew in their church, and probably more than a few of themselves.
How many times have we heard reports from the front lines of pro-lifers coming in for abortions and absolving themselves by saying that their situation was somehow different?
Also, of course, we don’t have that much prison space.
So I was just dredging around the FFL website to see if there was any redeeming value there. For instance a nice *giant* declaration that safe, effective, affordable, and *accessible* contraception the best way to deal with unplanned, unwanted pregnancies. Or, barring, that to see what sort of comprehensive pre-and-post-natal medical, financial, and social support policies they’ve been lobbying heavily for, based on their wall-to-wall insistence that some subset of abortions are based on financial necessity.
There’s nothing there. Amanda’s right. Plain and simple they’re just another arch-conservative anti-abortion bait-and-switch web site.
The kicker? The link to their commerce page is titled “Covetable Stuff.” The mission statement for the page valiantly proclaims: “When you purchase Feminists for Life(r) and Women Deserve Better(r) merchandise, you show your support for women and children to the world.”
In other words if you buy your stuff they keep all the money.
Charming.
figleaf
“But in any case, here is an example of procreative agency and soverignty that never gets discussed. We were a married couple, intent on making a baby, who happened to tragically NEED the right for an abortion because it did not go as planned.”
jdobbin, I am so sorry that you and your wife had to go through such a traumatic time, and I am sorry for your loss.
With respect to the politics of D&Cs (or other abortion procedures) that take place as a result of severe birth defects, there are a couple of reasons why you do not hear about them. The first is that there is a large group of women who terminate severely deformed pregnancies do not consider themvelves to have had an “abortion.” There are a few reasons for this. One is that they wanted their babies, so they cannot admit that the medical procedure they had was considered an abortion, which they consider to be a rejection of the baby. It’s a grieving coping mechanism, essentially. Another is that some people are plainly ignorant about a D&C being an abortion procedure, and I suspect most doctors who perform abortions on women whose fetuses have major health defects refer to the procedure as a D&C, not as an abortion. So if a woman has a deformed fetus removed through a D&C, she may not feel that the abortion issue is even involved (this is especially true if the fetus is dying or has died but not expelled from the uterus; frankly, I don’t know where the line is drawn in these types of cases). So, I think the pro-choice side is not enthusiastic to bring up women who grieved losses of wanted children — and who may not think they had abortions — and use their losses as a basis for trying to rehabilitate the image of the abortion-having woman.
The second reason you don’t hear about these kinds of abortions is because the pro-life side have been merciless in insulting these women, who have made horrifyingly difficult choices, and equating them with Nazis, Spartans and/or the eugenics movement. The anti-abortion folk are more than happy to tell you how easy it would be for them to accept life in whatever form it came, it being God’s will to send them a life that might only last a few months and be filled with agonizing pain. They have no compassion for the trauma of the choice to terminate a wanted baby when it is so malformed that it will never truly live — especially when allowing that fetus to continue to develop will harm the health of the women. None. Take a look at any of the discussions of the procedure called a D&X (which you may know from the media as “partial birth abortion,” even if the laws that have banned it have been more expansive in their definitions of the covered procedures). The women who needed to terminate a much-wanted baby late in their pregnancy terms, often because of concerns about both the fetus and the woman, came out with stories that made me cry reading about them. But the “pro-life” types called them every name in the book. So the pro-choice side generally tries to avoid having to burden women who made such hard decisions with the specter of being harassed by mercilessly judgmental anti-abortion folk.
Much as the families such as yours should bring people together to understand that the abortion issue is a complex one, where women and their families make decisions that should be understandable to anyone with a heart, the “pro-life” side has so poisoned the issue that it is impossible to bring up the stories that might make people who do not feel strongly about abortion (or limiting it) listen more to the pro-choice argument.
Oh how long must we wait until we get a Foley-like scandal out of this group, so it will be much easier to expose their hypocritical, anti-women’s-rights agenda to the general public, already? Stepfordwives with feminist and pro-woman bumperstickers, to dupe the already easily manipulated masses.
Just find someone in the organization who pressured their daughter into an abortion. Might be hard to find, but I guarantee you one exists.
I think you give this group too much credit when you take their arguments at face value. We already know why feminists for life exist: they are a part of the conservatives very successful campaign to recast issues in terms favorable to them. Unfortunately, it tends to be pretty effective. Most of the feminists for life would never have been feminists anyways, but there are probably people out there sufficiently uninformed or foolish to actually go for this claptrap. So I think you’re doing the right thing by consistently refuting their arguments with a patience that I certainly lack.
But I’m not sure I agree with your attempt to determine their underlying motivations. As I said, I think their motivation is political. You can’t look at their actual argument, you have too look at what they’re aiming to accomplish in the political sphere by making that argument. So when you conclude that they must be interested at the core in controlling women… maybe. I’m inclined to believe that feminists for life are either cynical politicists or genuine pro-lifers drawn in by the nice-sounding justifications.
After all, the women they know would never, ever do such a thing.
Heh. One of my friends was a PPH volunteer, and she used to let women getting abortions know if there was a PPH more convenient to where they lived. For a lot of the people who’d traveled out of their way to get to the one where she worked, the reason they’d done so wasn’t that they didn’t know where a closer PPH was — it was that they didn’t want to go to the PPH where they protested abortion. “There should be exceptions for rape, incest…and me,” seems to be a common ideology.
I know I certainly would. Pregnancy and childbirth are hard. Incredibly difficult and painful and generally not all that fun. Motherhood is even harder. That isn’t to say that I don’t love my kids and all (because I do), but I certainly don’t want to do it again. But any person who thinks that childbirth is not violent is an idiot and any ‘feminist’ who thinks she knows better than I do about what my life should be like can just kiss my ass. Any coercion involved would be if I were forced to actually have another baby. And I would probably resent that child and be a much worse mother to it than my other two, because they are wanted children and I mostly adore them, but any new ones would not be. And I know that probably makes me a bad person, but I know myself and my limitations and I’ve already reached them.
“Men should be trusted to make all the rules and all the decisions, even though men can’t be trusted.�
It’s not that men can’t be trusted, it’s that they wouldn’t want to be trusted, and frankly shouldn’t have to be, by some uppity bitch who thinks she can control her own body. They think it’s only reasonable for men to take their balls and go home when their dominance over women is unjustly taken away. Love and family are supposed to be things that men can take or leave, and the fundaloons desperately need women to believe this, and that the only way to get men to stay with them is to just do whatever the men want.
So when you conclude that they must be interested at the core in controlling women… maybe. I’m inclined to believe that feminists for life are either cynical politicists or genuine pro-lifers drawn in by the nice-sounding justifications.
Well, what do you think their politics are? Just having political power and keeping it? What do you think they want to do with their power?
The fundamental disconnect for them is a) not being able to believe a sane woman would choose abortion without coercion or brainwashing (because it is so evil),
I really don’t think this is it at all. If abortion were evil, they would be doing the aforementioned push for classifying it as a homocide,* and they’re not.
This is gender determinism, plain and simple. It’s the idea that owning a vagina = a fervent desire to push large, squalling objects out of it. If any woman, at any time or for any reason denies having this desire, then she’s been coerced. Simple as that. Actual abortion doesn’t even have to come into the picture.+
* The last few days before the election, the Dem gubernatorial candidate in Iowa ran an ad about the Repub candidate’s promise to ban all abortion, and it asked exactly this question: what do you do with all the women who are now, by law, criminals?
I thought it was a very smart ad. Someone on his campaign is reading the right blogs.
+ B/c then you have to deal with the inconvenient reality some abortions are unwanted but medically necessary.
Most women do not have abortions as a matter of “choice,� but because they feel they have no resources to support a different choice.
you seem to object to this at a visceral level, but I think there’s a lot of truth to it. if you take out women who were raped and those with medical issues, probably a large percentage of abortion choices fall into the category of “I can’t have a baby right now” where the problem with “now” is the need to finish schooling, continue in a career, wait for a stable relationship, avoid an abusive partner, etc.
in theory, if we could make a *huge* investment in child care, as well as an overhaul of our normative structure, such that anybody could have a child without impeding their other life choices (imagine 24-hour childcare until school is finished, or no-questions babysitting for dates and meetings, and/or support networks for all the things that make single parenting hard), then many of those women wouldn’t feel the need to abort. however, even with significant improvements in the US (non)system of subsidized childcare support, there’s no way we’ll ever get to the point that having a child without worrying about the burdens of parenthood is really practical or acceptible — for the child’s sake, if nothing else — and probably those Lifesters are in the same camp that would oppose that degree of socialization of child-rearing…
also, of course, this argument ignores the nontrivial physical and emotional burden of pregnancy itself (again, even assuming an ideal world where there was no stigma or discrimination attached), and the painful choices that would be required at the other end in either giving up the child for adoption, handing it over for several years to a virtual stranger, and/or modifying your own mental images of how you intended to parent/run your career. but those arguments (central to those of us who place primacy on the “choice” element at all stages) are quite separate from whether it would be possible to decrease abortion rates by increasing the level of “resources” that women felt were at hand — I find that not only reasonble but almost a no-brainer.
I’m beginning to think we need to start attacking the conservative worldview instead of conservative positions, because the real problem is almost always in their assumptions. For FFL types, the natural order is one in which cheerful, blindingly sentimental fecundity is the default setting for women, so therefore they’re co-opting a few progressive positions (child care, subsidies, etc.) and a whole lot of progressive rhetoric to support that assumption; it gains some traction because their view of women, while not necessarily the dominant one these days, is still preferred more often than not. The immediate question for a woman in the early stages of pregnancy is less whether she wants to parent– although that is certainly the biggest long-term decision to be made– but whether she wants to commit to the pregnancy itself. The FFL framing of pregnancy as the less ‘violent’ option is both ignorant and misleading. Hell, Heaton herself had four c-sections, IIRC, the causes of which in earlier times would have presumably pointed to her death, the death of one or more of her kids, or some other natal unpleasantness (of course, it’s also possible that her c-sections were of the ‘too posh to push’ or planning-for-the-tummy-tuck varieties, too)… so she’s a liar or a fool to blow childbearing off that easily.
Back to my original point, conservatism in general assumes that the natural social order is one in which white, Christian men are the benevolent leaders of all other groups and confine their less-civilized tendencies to jockeying for dominance within their elite groupings. Challenging such assumptions has always been one of the primary paths to social progress, and that’s why the right goes to such lengths to deflect any discussion from their base assumptions.
Actually, that wasn’t the violence I was thinking about. They advocate the outlawing of abortion, which means that men and women with guns (and, in most cases, badges) will come for people who perform abortions to seize them and put them in jail. Women who have abortions or attempt to have them will be subjected to similar treatment if abortion is outlawed (either as criminal conspirators or as reluctant witnesses who can choose between testifying or going to jail for contempt of court). It’s government-sanctioned violence, but violence nonetheless. And if you insist that a D&C or a vacuum extraction is violence against women, you don’t really have much room to claim that throwing people in jail is nonviolent.
So yeah, they advocate violence against women, doctors and other medical workers.
(They also don’t speak out appropriately against the shootings, arsons and bombings to which their rhetoric contributes, but that’s another issue.)
“Vagina: It really IS a clowncar”…
KS, I’m with you. I have two children. I love my children, of course. The first I had at a young age (20)and if I knew then what I know now…well. Anyway, for 15 yrs, I’ve put my plans on hold to raise and support my child(ren). Were I to get pregnant now, I would abort. First, because I simply don’t want to be pregnant again, or to be the parent of an infant again. Second, because financially my husband and I could not afford it. Third, because pregnancy makes me sick–I tend to preeclampsia and toxemia, and the post-partum depression was bad with the first, horrible with the second and the third might put me over the line to psychosis.
I put them in that order deliberately.
Most women do not have abortions as a matter of “choice,� but because they feel they have no resources to support a different choice. A coerced decision is not a free choice—it’s a last resort.
This is just silly.
We make decisions every day based on available resources. These are what society generally considers informed responsible decisions. While I do not dispute that some women and girls are coerced (forced) to abort by parents or partners, I would guess that most are making decisions based on available resources.
Perhaps ffl needs to invest in an office dictionary.
“A coerced decision is not a free choice—it’s a last resort.”
You know, I only work because I need the money and didn’t have the choice to retire at 22 like I wanted. Where does FFL stand on this burning issue?
And another thing.
Any group that takes the position that all right thinking people think the way they do and it is their duty to coerce wrong thinking people to obey them are sociopaths. Or maybe they’re just narcissistic asshats. They surely do piss me off though.
Is it just me, or does it look like the smiling woman in the poster just stabbed herself in the abdomen? (Everyone else covered the serious points already.)
in theory, if we could make a *huge* investment in child care, as well as an overhaul of our normative structure, such that anybody could have a child without impeding their other life choices (imagine 24-hour childcare until school is finished, or no-questions babysitting for dates and meetings, and/or support networks for all the things that make single parenting hard), then many of those women wouldn’t feel the need to abort.
Or if women would just stay home like god intended and not compete with men for jobs, we could all be blissfully swimming in manly fundie spooge for the rest of our lives. Problem solved.
What Sniper said.
Trying to frame all abortions as coerced is disingenuous. Why is it anethema to say that choosing whether or not to have an abortion is somewhat like choosing whether or not to buy a sailboat?
Both having a child and owning a boat are very expensive, time-consuming lifestyle choices that don’t *just happen*. They both require some action or inaction on the part of one or more participants to come to full actualization. And they both require significant investments of time and energy once the potential of each situation is actualized.
It should come down to whether or not a person wants to do something. People who want to have a child should. People who don’t want to shouldn’t. And those in the latter group shouldn’t be called “sick” or “pathological” for mere expression of a preference.
Everyone’s basically said what I would have said about the issues, so…
Is it just me, or does it look like that guy is trying to look down her shirt?
Maybe when she notices, she’ll whack him with Jeebus.
Oh how long must we wait until we get a Foley-like scandal out of this group
Unfortunately, medical providers have this confidentiality thing going on, so when a “pro-life” type comes in for her abortion, they can’t rat her out.
I think the rosie-riveter-girl in the picture looks young enough to be the leering man’s daughter. Cree…py.
One other confrontation point for the FFL — if abortion is outlawed, abortions will be performed by outlaws, and women will die.
No matter what happens to the state of the law, women will continue to have abortions. If good medical doctors are prevented from performing abortions, women will seek abortions from other sources. This will naturally lead to more deaths and infertility of these women (and, of course, the same terminations of their pregnancies).
Thus, “pro-lifers” are fundamentally anti-women. They apparently believe that a women who wants an abortion deserves to risk death.
Interesting piece of trivia: the country with the lowest abortion rate in the entire world is the Netherlands. Where abortion is not only legal, it’s free on the national healthcare system. However, you can also get birth control free on the national health system, comprehensive sex ed starts at a young age, and for those who get pregnant anyway, there are a lot of financial resources available for poor single mothers and their kids. The second lowest abortion rate in the world is in Germany, where, once again, abortion is legal and the social safety net is tightly-woven.
FFL needs to put their money where their mouth is, or they need to quit bleating their “feminist” talking points. You want to reduce abortion? Hit the demand side, not the supply side. And don’t yip about higher taxes. If you’re really that concerned about the babies, surely you’ll be willing to pay a little more.
Poster girl: Right hand forming fist, elbow already at 90 degrees. One second later and poster man is going to be bent double because she’s given him a hell of a blow to the midriff for his creepy hands on shoulders behavior. Followed by a crucifix to the face.
She just doesn’t look like a fake feminist FFL type to me.
I’m posting from B.C., Canada, where we have not had ANY abortion law for nearly twenty years, with no bad effects I can see. Feel free to use our health stats (x10) to extrapolate for the U.S.
But what I want to post about is the seeming inability of the pro-choice side to get out into the public eye all of the stories of “pro-lifers” who have had abortions — many of them at the same abortion clinics they had been picketing. This is not a small issue — it is huge. Dr. Garson Romalis, one of our local gyn’s, has been shot and stabbed, attempted to be murdered, twice, and he is still performing abortions, amongst other procedures. He was asked recently why he choses freely to continue performing the procedure. His answer (paraphrased), “Because I have provided abortions to so many pro-lifers, some of whom my staff and I were familiar with, that I am convinced that abortion, as a choice, MUST be available to pregnant women.” It seems that when abstract, philosophical objections to “baby-killing” meet real life — a pregnancy from an affair, a pregnancy in a fifteen-year-old, a rape-pregnancy, etc. — real life gets the nod. And these people MAKE A CHOICE.
Now getting back to the real question — why so little publicity about these things, as opposed to, say, the publicity surrounding Mark Foley, Ted Haggard, et al? Because the doctors who provide needed abortion services to desperate hypocrits are required by law and tradition to keep the medical choices these women make private. Catch-22 isn’t it? You are allowed by law to protest abortions vigorously, and sometimes with disgusting tactics; but you are also allowed to have an abortion yourself and keep this hypocrisy hidden behind the strongest legal walls.
I think there’d be a lot fewer protesters if all prominent pro-lifers were required to submit all of their medical records (but that would be a disgusting tactic, wouldn’t it?)
Here is one suggestion which my wife and I were victimized by when we chose to abort a dying, chromosomally-defective fetus (thank god for amniocentisis). My wife at five months pregnant had to go the hospital and walk through the prenatal-counselling waiting area filled with happy expectant women. I took the doctor to task about this, quite naturally, and the doctor’s answer were telling. He said, “If we had a special door or entrance for women who came to our hospital for abortions, that entrance would be picketted by screaming, sign-waving pro-lifers. We have every sympathy for your wife, and we would rather not have her walk through the prenatal counselling area, but by doing it this way, the pro-lifers cannot picket because they simply do not know which of the dozens of women walking into the centre every day is there for an abortion.”
One final point to the story: Once we had the abortion, no less than FOUR friends, couples we had known for up to 20 years, came to us privately to tell us about medical abortions (abortions for medical reasons only) they had gone through. The privacy of the doctor-patient relationship, plus the unfair and irrational shame attached to the procedure keeps people from knowing how many abortions actually do happen, and how many women are personally knowledgeable about the issue. As an older doctor told me, “The old-time mortality rates of women dying from childbirth are basically a memory because of the availability of safe, medical abortion.” He then added, “Fuck the ‘good old days’; they were terrible!”
Hairhead, it’s really like mythago said. We can’t out anti-choicers who have abortions, because it violates the right to medical privacy we support. That said, I did find it interesting that Kitty Kelley got some evidence, but not enough evidence, that George W. Bush paid for an abortion back when it was still illegal in Texas.
Every time I hear “Feminists for Life”, I hear “Vegetarians for Veal”.
Makes about as much sense.
Kitty Kelly claims the woman was afraid and refused to have her name put to her story.
Most people do not have chemotherapy as a matter of “choice,” but because they feel they have no other way to save their lives. Clearly a last resort, so the solution is to outlaw it.
Most people do not have amputations as a matter of “choice” — et cetera.
Do these people really think that forbidding major surgeries and nasty drugs would cure cancer?
Why yes that’s a rhetorical question. (Can’t be too careful about specifying that nowadays. Real life can’t keep up with satire.) Might be useful to someone somewhere.
Wouldn’t you be afraid too? Look at the kinds of things that were done IN MAINE to the guy who outed W’s drunk driving arrest.
These guys talk about assassination of Tush/Beaney for a reason - projection!
Ron Sullivan - “Do these people really think that forbidding major surgeries and nasty drugs would cure cancer?”
No, of course not. But it would be in line, with their desire for women to be punished for having sex, to also (eventually) extend the same curtesy to cancer victims.
I mean, after all, if they hadn’t done something wrong, God wouldn’t have punished them with cancer, right?…
It’s all about the “Culture Of Life”…
A hackneyed, and obvious, point but if birth control and the morning after pill/plan B were more readily available this wouldn’t be so much of an issue. At least then the right-wingers would be able to gripe at women getting abortions with a little bit of leverage. How can you argue this point on any level without considering the realistic consequences of an anti-abortion law (yeah, I guess I know the answer to that one too)?
I’m as repulsed by FFL as anyone here, but I must, as a mother of two, take issue with the universal characterization of childbirth as “violent”. Painful, yes, undeniably so. Bloody, sometimes (1 out of 2 for me). Violent? No. I think there is a line between pain and violence. If anyone here has had a truly violent childbirth, I’m really sorry to hear it. Not all birth is violent, though. Violence, to me, implies a mercilessness, a willful decision to cause pain through trauma. My daughter’s birth was more painful than my son’s, but it was certainly not violent to me, and anyone who watched the tape would never get the impression of violence, either.
That said, I would never, ever wish even the most tranquil of births on anyone who didn’t want to have the baby. Having children made me far more pro-choice than I had been before (my mother’s insistence that being pregnant would certainly make me pro-life to the contrary).
“A hackneyed, and obvious, point but if birth control and the morning after pill/plan B were more readily available this wouldn’t be so much of an issue.”
Predictably, but very disappointingly, the FFL website had no information about contraception and/or Plan B.
figleaf
On one spot, if you look hard enough, they kind of vaguely say that some of their members support it. However, there’s no indication of anything but official opposition to contraception.
Bewilderness, it’s hard to distinguish the two, because sociopaths and megalomaniacs tend to almost always be narcissistic asshats. To be fair, N.A.s are not necessarily sociopaths, but they’re still annoying.
Mezosub, I disagree that choosing to have an abortion is like choosing to buy a sailboat. I tend to agree with the person who said that a woman chooses to have an abortion the way a fox caught in a trap chooses to gnaw off her own leg.
FFL, of course, would want to spare the poor vixen such a choice, and would humanely sedate the poor creature until the trapper can arrive.
After all, besides the horror of losing a leg, such a choice would also spoil the hide.
Do these people really think that forbidding major surgeries and nasty drugs would cure cancer?
No, but the example of people dying screaming in agony would serve to dissuade people from smoking. The application of this to abortion and another of life’s little pleasures is left to the reader.
so, did I miss the bit where FFL are advocating universal free daycare/healthcare for 18 years for all mothers, plus 100% tuition & bursaries for all mothers doing college degrees? Isn’t that the minimum resources necessary to support a different choice as they’re advocating?
(and no, I don’t agree that would be sufficient ground to make any sort of abortion illegal - but it would be a marvellous step towards making it less necessary for some women).
I am suddenly so grateful for living in Sweden, where we have essentially free abortion (I think you pay about $30), around a year of parental leave on 75 or 80% of your previous pay, and subsidized child care.
The religious right here is pushing for a very small (read ‘not possible to live on’) monthly payment for those parents who choose to stay at home with the kids after the first year, thus neatly placing stay-at-home parents in economic dependence on their spouse - right where subsidised child care was supposed to get them out from…
Once a woman is pregnant, the question is, “What is the best possible nonviolent outcome for her?�
In descending order of nonviolence: (1) resorbtion of pregnancy, (2) lithopedion [WARNING, graphic pic]–pregnancy calcifies and remains in situ permanently, (3) abortion [no labor, controlled delivery], (4) natural labor and delivery.
Any thoughts on FFL’s assertion that many suffragists and abolitionists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were anti-abortion? By today’s standards, they wouldn’t be considered feminists by NOW, NARAL, etc., yet they were instrumental leaders in the women’s movement in 19th century America. Thanks.
To concern troll question mark:
You left a fake email address, coward. Here’s the reply I emailed you:
Actually, Feminists for Life’s claims of anti-choice sentiments
prominent early feminists are made up.
http://pandagon.net/2006/10/13/would-suffragette-city-have-a-planned-parenthood/
It’s a stretch and a half to claim that someone like Anthony, who had
no children, agreed with FFL that women were supposed to spend our
lives pregnant. Stanton was also adamant that she *chose* to have 6
children because she loved them so much. No where is implicated in
there that she thinks everyone should be like her.
I know you’re just a concern troll, because otherwise, you could have
done a quick search in my bar. But hey, thanks of reminding me I need
to tag that post about how FFL is lying about Anthony!
1. A woman who is coerced into having an abortion is NOT vindicating her rights - she is every bit as victimized as one who is raped.
2. How is abortion less violent than continuing a pregnancy? If you read about the actual procedure, it’s utterly gruesome.
3. To say that abortion is a necessary evil is really sad. FFL makes an excellent point here, which is utterly warped by the agenda-driven ladies who cannot concede even the most rational and feminist of ideas, should they be held by their detractors.
The point: that the presence of women who desire abortions in 2006 is just sad. There’s birth control. (70% of women seeking abortions haven’t used it.) Women who abort for lack of other options - financial and social support - should, in any reasonable society, have such support. Women who don’t want any more kids should have the options to not have more kids - i.e. husbands who get vascetomies or doctors who will perform a tubal ligation (which can be very easy if performed concurrently with a Caesarean section). Health insurance should cover the Pill. Host of other choices for not becoming pregnant in the first place!
The fact that about 3 million women in the US have unwanted pregnancies every year says something really sad about our society. We can provide abortion, but it doesn’t stop the unplanned pregnancies. Abortion treats the symptom… and is much like taking an Advil for the headache caused by a tumor. Treat the underlying social problem and the abortion issue will take care of itself.
As I said, though… acknowledging this involves not skewing FFL’s position to suit your own needs.
4. Ladies, outside of rape, you aren’t forced to create a baby at the end of a gun. Baby-making happesn when you have the sex. Of course, being hip, intelligent, pro-sex-ed young women, you know that. It’s just more convenient to say that you’re forced to make a baby at the end of a gun.
5. Finally…. in case you guys missed it… the essence of civilisation is that we don’t do what we want to do, all the time, without consequences. If a man didn’t want his girlfriend to be pregnant and kicked her in the stomach, feminists would be up in arms. He can choose to not be a father, but battering his girlfriend for this end is not socially acceptable. Likewise, not being a mom is a very valid life choice, but that doesn’t mean that all methods of acheiving that end are legal and moral.
FFL is merely pointing this out. The pro-abortion side does like to pretend that, when it comes to women, all methods are equally valid. A condom is just like a seventh-month abortion. Maybe y’all should consider that some methods are better than others, for all invovled. A woman who “chooses” abortion would, most likely, have preferred to not be pregnant in the first place. A woman who “chooses” to abort, even though she would love a child but lacks the financial resources, doesn’t see that as the best end for her.
I came upon this quite by accident but how sad. It never ceases to amaze me how “tolerant” people can be so mean-spirited when everyone doesn’t agree with their opinion espeically when you talk about abortion.
RE: what France is providing for support - it has to - they are no longer reproducing themselves as most countries (particularly in Europe)are not and will face critical social and economic problems within the next 20-40 years.
There are also many pro-life groups to numberous to mention that help young woman have their children and then support them by helping them gain an education, shetler and all the necessities of life.
My last question to you - are you glad your Mother chose life for you? Any why is an unborn child’s life any less important than your own.