Pro-Choice Anxieties

South Dakota, among other states, as we all know, is working on a bill to make abortion illegal within its borders -- of course, abortions might as well be illegal in most counties of the United States anyway, since no clinics exist within the economic reach of the women who need them.

But this is not good enough for the "Pro-Life" folk -- such a funny name, that, as Amanda over at Pandagon points out.

http://pandagon.net/2006/02/23/either-this-is-about-male-dominance-or-its-about-female-inferiority/#more-2260

Anyway, I especially like the comment made by Dorothy as to how you can tell these Pro-Life folk are fucking liars (my paraphrase -- Dorothy's a lot more polite than I am):


Dorothy Feb 23rd, 2006 at 11:51 pm

Nick,

Amanda’s point, judging from her other posts here, is that if concern for life or for “the innocent babies” were truly the emotion behind the movement, we should expect to see more actions consistent with this impetus. For example, I’d expect them to work for:

1) Broad sex education and easy access to barrier contraceptives. (I won’t get into the arguments over birth control pills and “Plan B” as aborticficants, but there is no doubt that barrier methods can’t possibly be “abortificants”.) These would reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies, and hence the number of “dead babies”. Illogically, most abortion-restriction groups actively attack sex education or promote abstinence only types.

2) Better pre-natal and neo-natal health care and financial assistence for poor women and children (WIC immediately springs to mind), since studies show that over 50% of women who abort do so strictly out of financial hardship. However, most of the abortion restriction groups also promote cuts in Welfare, Medicaid, and other “waste of government money” programs.

3) Government funding for daycare up to middle-income levels, so single women and two-job families have some method of raising the child without losing necessary means of support.

4) Alternative high schools for pregnant teens and teenaged mothers that have medical and child care on site.

5) No restrictions on specific abortion procedures used on already-dead fetuses or fetuses whose continued development will seriously endager or kill the mother (ectopic pregnancy, encephalitis, etc.). The “partial birth abortion” ban is one such procedure: it is primarily used to drain the excess brain fluid from a brain-dead encephylitic fetus that would otherwise require a C-section for removal.
(Interestingly enough, every single one of these proposals is a “liberal” idea…but all liberals hate babies and want to abort them.)

6) A ban on all in-vitro fertilizations methods, since every procedure destroys 10 to 50 fertilized eggs for each pregnancy.

7) Serious government regulations on fertility drugs, and the potential on many of them which encourage the woman to ovulate more than one egg per cycle. Also, the medical procedure of “reduction”–where some of the fetuses in a multiple preganancy (that usually results from these drugs) are removed to increase the chances of the others surviving.

8) No exceptions that allow abortion in the case of rape and incest.
When I see the abortion-restriction groups adopt even half of these positions, I will certainly consider their argument that “it’s all about the babies” to have more validity.

*Disclaimer: I am a former president of a Youth For Life chapter. I left the movement when I discovered that it wasn’t really about the babies.