The right to choose to give life.

JJ writes about the Blob Blogging Wingnut’s most recent post. While BBW might not personally be a white supremacist, she projects the zygote zealots’ own double standard onto those who support the right to choose.
Birth Pangs addressed that slimy sleight-of-hand argument last year, in The Putrid Smell of Opportunism. Here’s the irony: BBW claims higher moral ground with a specious attempt to equate no-choice supporters with abolitionists. Yet, when one reads anti-abortion, pronatalist comments at right-wing discussion boards, one notes their rabid, braying fear and hatred of black, brown and beige-skinned hordes who, it is claimed, breed more than people of pallour.

Here’s one typical racist pronatalist opinion piece:

On the May 11 edition of Fox News’ The Big Story, host John Gibson advised viewers during the “My Word” segment of his program to “do your duty. Make more babies.” He then cited a May 10 article, which reported that nearly half of all children under the age of five in the United States are minorities. Gibson added: “By far, the greatest number of children under five are Hispanic. You know what that means? Twenty-five years and the majority of the population is Hispanic.”

And then, there are BBW’s no-choice allies at Freaked Minions who rant obsessively about the fact that many First Nations and Muslim people have big families while most of European descent do not.

In the comments that follow BBW’s blogpost, Christina shows her bias: “That “clump of cells” is a highly organized and sophisticated organism. Without any input from the outside, it will develop into a fully-formed newborn. Everything necessary for the adult is present in that clump of cells — all it needs is time, nutrition, and a hospitable environment.”

Scientists have attempted to grow embryonic cells outside a woman’s womb, eventually they fail to thrive and develop. A pregnant woman is more than a vessel or “a hospitable environment” for fertilized ova. Pregnancy is complex: a psychological and physiological, synergetic life-giving process. The choice to give life - or the inability to do so - is equally complex.

No-choice says that it is immoral for a woman to refuse to give life.

Pro-choice says that it is immoral to force a woman to bear a pregnancy that was unintended and unwanted or that may in some circumstances, kill her.

Finally, BBW: you keep whining that feminists won’t debate you on your circumscribed playing field, where the term you use to describe the choice to terminate a pregnancy is “murder”. While that’s a belief you have the right to hold, it is not mine. I do not choose to use your subjective, pronatalist and thus racist terms to discuss a woman’s right to choose to give life.

First posted at Birth Pangs.

The putrid smell of opportunism

Abortion criminalizers have a stench about them. It is a curious mélange of sulfurous fire-and-brimstone, medieval dry rot, fear-soaked piety, and the acrid fumes of high arrogance. In order to mask this odour, they crouch under the cloak of self-righteousness by associating their cause with respectable human rights concerns.

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, the anti-choice organizations deliberately co-opted the words genocide and holocaust to lend the gloss of credibility to their propaganda. As you may remember, their exploitation of these terms was challenged by the survivors and descendants of groups who have been historically targeted and subjected to ethno-focused violence or religious persecution. Grudgingly, the abortion criminalizers had to stop mis-using these two words in their publications.

In recent years, they have slithered into the proximity of civil rights activists, hoping that the credibility and legitimacy of organizations that have worked hard to eradicate racism, such as the NAACP, would somehow deodorize their anti-choice rhetorical slime. See Abortion Is Slavery and Poverty .

Observe how smoothly those who would enforce compulsory pregnancy divert criticism away from their goal of controlling women’s reproductive capacity, by proclaiming they are as pure in their thoughts and actions as those white folks who championed civil rights. Fetus fetishizers are draping themselves in the flag of the modern martyr and demanding the same respect as white civil rights workers who were excoriated for the assistance they gave to Martin Luther King and to the descendants of enslaved Black people.Quite the sleight of hand, is it not? Those who supported the civil rights movement did not set off bombs nor assassinate anyone. Given that the murderous strategies used by the extremist fringe within the anti-choice, abortion-criminalizing organizations are the same as those used by the extremist fringe within the anti-civil rights groups, the logical and correct analogy would be that “Fetus-fetishizers are the 21st century’s Jim Crow segregationists”.

If one wanted to draw a parallel between two distinctive social justice movements that are fuelled by similar motives, these are the ones who share a common vision of civil rights.

First posted at Birth Pangs.