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We Are Trapped in an Anti-Choice Shitbox

By Mike Redmond | Politics | February 7, 2019 |

By Mike Redmond | Politics | February 7, 2019 |


pro-god-life-guns.jpg

It happens every time without fail. I can literally sense it coming, and with a minimal amount of patience, it arrives right on schedule.

Let me walk you through it: A news article is shared on Facebook, and within moments, the fish are in the barrel. The article can be about any awful event, a school shooting to the local KKK chapter spreading pamphlets that unsurprisingly align with the president’s politics. In other words, reality reared its well-known liberal bias, and the blame lies squarely on right-wing shoulders.

Enter our hero.

“Y’all worried about that but not this,” (Actual quote) he or she bravely proclaims as “this” is revealed to be Planned Parenthood, an organization that clearly murders MILLIONS of unborn babies every year, but the fake news won’t cover it because it’s too busy tearing down the president. In Cletus’ mind, he just laid down the ultimate Trump card: How can anything possibly be worse than abortion, the ultimate liberal sin? And that’s the anti-choice shitbox we’re all trapped in for a very long time.

Case in point, during the State of the Union address, Donald Trump capitalized on the recent rash of misinformation surrounding the abortion bills in New York and Virginia. To the surprise of no one, the president talked directly out his orange ass.

From The Cut (Emphasis mine because this phrasing will come up later.):

He began by taking up what is usually a subtle suggestion — the dividing of women up to the good mothers, who have their babies, and the bad ones, who don’t — and spelling it out. “There could be no greater contrast to the beautiful image of a mother holding her infant child,” he said, “than the chilling displays our Nation saw in recent days.” Then he shifted to the politicians, the “lawmakers in New York” who “cheered with delight upon the passage of legislation that would allow a baby to be ripped from the mother’s womb moments before birth,” and Virginia governor Ralph Northam, who “basically stated he would execute a baby after birth.” These are each lies, of course: The New York law, intended to bring the state in line with Roe v. Wade’s standard, allows for abortions until 24 weeks or if “there is an absence of fetal viability, or the abortion is necessary to protect the patient’s life or health.” As for Northam, he was talking about end-of-life care “in cases where there may be severe deformities, there may be a fetus that’s non-viable.”

If Trump’s rhetoric sounds familiar then, unfortunately, you spend as much time as I do on Twitter and caught this odd flex from a smug little elf who won’t disappear even after I tweeted his name backwards. How did that not work?

Just so we’re clear, the actual, honest-to-god, right-wing talking point surrounding late-term abortions is that women are waddling into a doctor’s office and going, “Hey, would you mind popping this live kid out and stabbing it in the neck?” And that doctor who took a Hippocratic oath just laughs and says, “Coming right up!”

That’s not how any of this works. But don’t take my dumbass word for it. Here’s OB/GYN Dr. Jen Gunter explaining just how horribly disingenuous these anti-choice nutjobs are in a must-read blog post that I recommend you keep handy because I never once considered this angle:

For 3-4 of the 6 years that I practiced in Kansas there was no gestational age limit. I could let you put two and two together, but as there is so much abortion misinformation I’m going to spell it out. That means I could have done an abortion at any gestational age — even right up to the due date.

No one ever called me to terminated a healthy pregnancy or even a pregnancy with minor abnormalities. First of all, with no indication insurance won’t pay so it is $20k cash.

Also, WTF people? Do some of you really think women wander aimlessly through pregnancy wondering what they have forgotten and then at 37 weeks finally figure out why their pants are so tight and say, “Oh, THAT’S what I forgot to do 29 weeks ago. Pregnancy brain, Duh!” Then grab $20k from their mad money jar and head off the local abort-and-go?

The only case I know of was a 12 year-old girl raped by her brother. She had to travel from another state and I believe she was about 32 weeks (I did not do her procedure). It was done that late because it took that long to get the court order. If the legal system were actually protecting her she could have had the procedure at 8 or 9 weeks. If her parents were actually protecting her should would not havebeen raped. If this is the case that is going to put you up in arms then you are a terrible person. No 12 year-old girl should be forced to give birth to her 17 year-old brother’s baby.

Ever.

Again, I cannot recommend Gunter’s piece enough. Along with the above passage, it dives into the recent rhetoric surrounding the 24 weeks mark, and she makes an irrefutable case for those who are ignorant about the medical realities of third term abortions to immediately shut the hell up. She also hurls the same advice at doctors who are either poorly trained or straight-up liars, and I’ve been on the receiving end of the latter when a first attempt at a child ended in a miscarriage, which we unfortunately learned at a Catholic hospital.

Let me tell you something, there is nothing more infuriating than asking a doctor what we should do in the moments after having our world crushed and being told, “I don’t know,” as she literally bolts from the room. Why didn’t she recommend a D&C? At the time, and I’m assuming still today, the child-raping organization known as the Catholic Church considers that an abortion even with no fetal heartbeat. It’s almost like their feelings are more important than facts.

Wait…

As this debate rages, I’m sure you’ve come across social media posts like the one below, and seriously, thank you to these women who are reopening these wounds because they have the compassion and empathy to make sure someone doesn’t have the choice they did in the middle of a god-awful ordeal. You might say they’re doing unto others as they would have them do unto them. Where have I heard that before?

Except this is where the shit happens: Just like I can count on someone to fly in and start deflecting to Planned Parenthood on any news article that makes Republicans look bad, there is almost always some white lady who swoops in and says, “Okay, this one particular situation is awful and God bless this woman for doing what she had to do, but induced labor is totally different than these new abortion bills where babies are ripped out limb by limb!”

No, Becky who probably falls for pyramid schemes, these situations are not different. Induced labor is abortion. (Thank you, Dr. Jen.)

On the one hand, it’s encouraging to see that when faced with the grim fact that late-term abortions are not a liberal, Sex and the City fun time, anti-choice zealots will actually pause for a second and think, “Wow, that is some shit.” For a brief moment, reality punctures the hard, Jesus-y membrane that prevents inconvenient truths from seeping in.

On the other hand, that membrane almost instantly closes back up, and it’s right back to “How dare you liberals rip off baby limbs?!” Which, by the way, is not how abortion works. But Tammy, who fully believes there’s a Mexican gang stealing kids at Walmart and trafficking them through an Amazon warehouse (Actual Facebook rumor bouncing around my town right now.), has the righteous wisdom of the Lord on her side, and it’s a very simple equation:

If x = pro-life, x can do whatever the hell it wants without question.

Welcome to the bricks of our anti-choice prison.



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