Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Jill of Feministe illustrates the difference.

Restricting reproductive freedom is wrong in all directions — and China is a good example of what happens when you allow the state the right to decide how many children women can (and can’t) have.

A STORM of international protest is building over a Chinese ruling that a Muslim Uighur woman who is six months pregnant must have an abortion or lose her home.

Chinese authorities have ordered Arzigul Tursun, who is 26 weeks pregnant, to abort her unborn child because she has two other children.

She is under watch at the Municipal Watergate Hospital in Yining in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region, which is populated heavily with Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim minority. Supporters are concerned a forced abortion at such a late stage could threaten Arzigul’s health.

Health concerns should be taken seriously, but that doesn’t get to the heart of the problem. This would be wrong even if the procedure was guaranteed to be safe.

Read the quote in context here.

In the late 1970s or early 1980s, after Roe v. Wade was handed down, abortion rights were generally accepted, and access to women’s health services including abortion service was well distributed two groups made two market-driven decisions.

Anti-abortion activists, recognizing they were getting very little traction in their crusades, made the conscious decision to rebrand themselves as “pro-life.” They weren’t pro-life at all, of course — they were as absolutely indifferent to miscarriage, stillbirth, life-threatening conditions of pregnancy, labor, or delivery, post-delivery death, maternal mortality, industrially distributed environmental abortifacents and tetrogens, and, say, the continuing employment of Joe Arpaio as they are today. But by lying about it, and by disguising their lies as “concern for the unborn” they were able to reframe the debate in what turned out to be a very effective way. And because they were liars their rebranding made no, zero, none difference at all in their overall outlook and, since they didn’t believe it themselves their label as a concept hasn’t expanded into more ways of saving lives. (Making shit up about ordinary hormonal contraceptives being “abortifacents” doesn’t meet the criteria for “expanded.”)

As a result, just a year or two later, once-complacent abortion-rights activists, who had never wanted people to have abortions in the first place in preference of, oh, say, avoiding unplanned, unwanted pregnancy in the first place, made a marketing decision of their own and began calling themselves “pro-choice. The difference being that since they weren’t and aren’t lying neither effort nor cognitive dissonance is required to oppose forced abortion as bitterly as forced pregnancy.

Taking the concept a bit further, Jill notes a “compromise” suggestion from the “pro-life” camp that again illustrates the contrast.

One of the only comments on the first linked article is particularly telling about the “pro-life” mentality:

Cant she just give the baby up for adoption????????

Because forcibly removing a wanted baby from a new mother is the solution here. The concern for life really does end at birth.

Choosing to have a baby is choosing to have a baby, not choosing to risk your health and life, endure three trimesters of pregnancy and the post-partum “fourth trimester” so somebody else can the baby you wanted? Yeah, right.

Bottom line: “Pro-life” activists were and remain only anti-abortion. “Pro-choice” activists meanwhile, are and always have been pro-choice!

Update: Also via Jill, Jessica of Jezebel says

It’s been less than a month since the staunchly pro-choice Barack Obama has been elected President, and already anti-abortion advocates are reassessing their goals. Some anti-choicers are taking a practical route, according to the Washington Post, supporting legislation that may cut down on the need for abortion, like providing poor women with health care, child care, and money for education. However, the hard core anti-choicers see support for such social programs as “selling out.” “We don’t think it’s really genuine,” Joe Scheidler, founder of the Pro-Life Action League, tells the Post. “You don’t have to have a lot of social programs to cut down on abortions.” In fact, uncompromising abortion foes are actively against these bills, for reasons that don’t entirely make sense.

“You don’t work to limit the murder of innocent victims. You work to stop it,” Judie Brown, the president of the American Life League adds.

Read the quote in context here.

They’re entitled to their opinion that abortion equals murder, but if that’s really the only thing they care about then they’re still liars to claim they’re “pro-life.” And if people like Joe Scheidler and Judie Brown are indifferent to every other single factor affecting pre- and postnatal and maternal death (they are), and if they are in opposition to every effort to mitigate either those conditions or to mitigate any need for abortion in the first place (they are), and if in fact they fund and promote “crisis pregnancy” centers who’s practices actually increase the risks of miscarriage, stillbirth, and maternal and infant death (they do) then they’re liars and worse. (They do, therefore they are.)