Incrementalism: Admission of Futility?

Some time ago, I discovered the Wingnut Wedgie that divides fetus fetishists into abolitionists and incrementalists.

It has never gone away as an issue among them, with some demanding nothing less than absolute forced pregnancy for all and others, perhaps recognizing the futility of their cause, willing to settle for any kind of law at all.

As a first step, note, to a complete ban.

Here we go again with our pal, astroturfer and dominionist Mike Schouten, raising the question and seeming to invite discussion.

Here's a stunning admission. He acknowledges that defunding abortion -- the only remotely possible abortion restriction in Canada -- would affect only poor women. Or, in their preferred parlance, poor baybees.

All pro-lifers support efforts to defund abortion. By doing so, they support a process that would protect some children, but not others. Under defunding, abortion remains legal as long as the mother or the father pays for the abortion. Someone could argue, "I won't support that defunding law because it only saves poor babies while all the babies of rich mothers who can afford the abortion will still be terminated." That may be so, but defunding abortion is a step in the right direction.

Discriminatory as this is -- not to mention a rank violation of human rights -- he's okey-dokey with fucking over poor women and families, as a "step in the right direction."

Incrementalists and abolitionists seem often to line up in the Protestant fundy gang and the Vatican Taliban gang respectively, but that's not quite true.

Over at ProWomanProLie, a few people are discussing Schouten's gambit.

I found a comment by Melissa fascinating (bold mine).

Thank you, thank you, thank you for talking about this issue!! I was starting to think that incrementalism was the elephant in the room that we just were never going to talk about.

I’m an incrementalist myself, (and Catholic too, as if that matters). Truth of the matter is, though, I would bow out of this fight if we got to a certain incremental point (right now, I think that would be if abortion were limited to the embryonic stage of pregnancy, or the 1st trimester at the latest, although I could quite conceivably become so tired of the fight that I would bow out if we were to achieve a considerably less significant victory). I sometimes wonder if that is why the people who are opposed to incrementalism are so adamant–they know that they will consistently lose support as smaller gains are made.

DING-DING-DING! Give that woman a cupie doll!

This is precisely what the totalitarians fear. That if the tiniest restriction is placed on abortion, many if not most of the less fanatic opponents will say "There. Mission accomplished."

Given that legitimate fear, Campaign Lie's intent to focus on RU-486, or medical abortion, for this year's bunfest is a bit perplexing.

Say, for argument's sake, RU-486 is banned in Canada. (Unaccountably, it has still not been approved by Health Canada and sources suggest that the issue won't be decided until 2015.)

Would many fetus fetishists then declare victory and take up sane people's pursuits?

Seems possible at least.

But then the anti-abortion industry would lose a ton of money and political influence (such as it is).

My take: Schouten's raising of incrementalism now and CampaignLie's focus on RU-486 demonstrate that they've (nearly) given up.

The times they are a' changing. (See next blog post.)

Of course, we'll keep an eye on them, but it may be that the end is nearer than we think.

Wingnut Wedgie

While deBeauxOs splendidly spanks the fetus fetishists for their glurge-filled lies, there's more to learn from this survey. It seems that in speaking amongst themselves they reveal more than they think.

Despite being on this beat for more than five years, I did not fully grasp the rift between fetus fetishists when it comes to the incremental (aka 'Fucking Women Over in As Many Ways Possible' [FWOIAMWAP]) and gestational limits strategies on abortion.

Of the nine responders, only four support gestational limits.

The Catlicks and looniest loons don't support them because the instant egg meets sperm -- BOOM! -- there is an itty-bitty proto-person that just needs some more time in the oven. To allow abortion up to some point -- any point -- is to condone murder.

And. Also. They don't work.

European pro-life leaders which have gestational limits have told us repeatedly that gestational laws do nothing to prevent abortion but only assuage the public conscience.

If Woody's Wank passes and a committee of MPs get to hear 'expert' evidence from prebornchildologists from which they conclude that a 'human being' is sufficiently baked formed at some point after the BOOM moment, the loons will not be pleased.

But some people will be. Both Stephanie Gray of Fetal Gore Tour fame and Mark Peninga of the Association for Reformed Political Action, which is the backer of We Need a Law, support both gestational limits and FWOIAMWAP.

ARPA Canada is convicted that gestational restrictions on abortion can be a prudent and principled means to restrict abortion to the greatest extent possible. Doing politics means working with what is possible. . . . Canada is a secular nation that does not respect God’s standards about the value of human life.

While demonstrating a spark of rationality over Canada's pro-choice stance, he continues to outline the antichoice delusion that Canadians really really really want SOME KINDA LAW DAMMIT.

But of course that won't be good enough.

And if we are blessed with restrictions, we must press on and keep working for more.

It will never be over for them.

All of them, however, are totally behind the FWOIAMWAP approach Here, at least, they are refreshing honest.

Alissa Golob of Campaign Life Coalition Youth said:

I support incremental approaches such as parental notification, complete informed consent, defunding and ultrasound laws; basically any law that would make it extremely difficult for women to obtain abortions.

While the accompanying cartoon shows the usual featureless female incubators, the words 'women' or 'woman' appear just four times in the responses, once in the quote above and these.

Recently we have witnessed our opponents willingness to sacrifice the women of tomorrow to safeguard abortion for the women of today.
. . . incremental measures such as defunding, women’s right to know, medically necessary abortions, conscience legislation and the unborn victims of violence.

One more point made by SUZY here.
http://www.bigbluewave.ca/2012/08/canadian-pro-lifers-need-to-talk-to.html

I only found out about five years ago that Campaign Life Coalition opposed gestational limits.

And to me, the fact that I did not know this salient fact about CLC strategy spoke to a problem I see in the pro-life movement.

We're still a very fragmented group of people with a relatively weak sense of community, and that limits our ability to mobilize. I was involved in a pro-life community for some years and didn't know this point.

So I'm thinking: if I, with my regular contact with Campaign Life, didn't know this, imagine what other pro-lifers don't know...

Yes, just imagine what they don't know. . .

In the continuing wank that JJ calls the Masturdebate, let's ask supporters of M312 if they would be good with gestational limits.

If not, why not? If so, at what point? If it's murder after 12 or whatever weeks, what do you call it before that point?

Let's help drive that wedge.

Going for the record

Guinness World Records needs a new category: Most panty-sniffing abortion-related bills proposed by a state legislature. The current leader would be West Virginia with 35.

There are 35 abortion-related bills pending in the West Virginia Legislature, according to the Legislature's Web site, the Charleston Daily Mail reports. Lawmakers said that the number of bills is not atypical compared with other years and that many of the measures have been introduced before. One bill (H.B. 2302) would prohibit abortions performed solely on the basis of the fetus' gender although neither the co-sponsor of the bill in the House nor the sponsor of the bill's counterpart in the Senate(S.B. 138)could identify any case of a gender-based abortion performed in West Virginia or the U.S. Barnes said, "I can't really say that it happens, but what we're saying is it's not supposed to happen."

Other bills that include restrictions and requirements regarding abortion include: S.B. 76, which would prohibit state funding of abortions, except in cases of rape, incest or a threat to a woman's life; S.B. 135, which would require some medical facilities to administer anesthesia to fetuses beginning at seven weeks' gestation; H.B. 2035, which would require medical facilities to give a pregnancy test and confirm results of the test before performing an abortion; S.B. 33 and H.B. 2073, which would require parental notification for an abortion performed on a minor; H.B. 2094, which would prohibit a higher education employee from assisting or counseling a student to obtain an abortion; and S.B. 38 and H.B. 2303, which would allow pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions used to induce abortions.

Not atypical, eh? At least they're not going for the 'personhood' insanity.

Don't they have other stuff on their plate? Like a major recession? Infuckingcredible.

Sunday Fetus Fetishist Watch

To continue our ongoing series in the Fetus Fetishist Watch, here is a round-up from the Houston Chronicle on the current state of play in various USian statehouses on mandatory ultrasounds for women seeking to terminate a pregnancy.

Abortion foes have a new tactic: The hope that women can't look away.

Lawmakers in 11 states are considering bills that would offer or require ultrasounds before a woman gets an abortion. The most stringent are proposed laws in Nebraska, Indiana and Texas, which would require a doctor show the ultrasound image of the fetus to the woman, despite legal challenges to a similar measure in Oklahoma.

Sixteen states already have such laws.

This FF gambit falls under the 'informed consent' meme. This is how it works: everybody about to undergo any sort of medical procedure should be given enough information about what it entails, the risks, and so on, so that her or his consent is informed by facts.

No-one can argue with that, right?

So it should also apply to women seeking abortions. And it does.

End of story, right?

Nope. Because, according to the fetus fetishists staunch defenders of frail womanhood, women seeking abortions don't really understand what they are about to do.

So the state will force her to undergo and look at an ultrasound of the insides of her own uterus. And because even that's not enough, some states require the images be described to her. Indiana's law forces her to listen to 'fetal heartbeat'.

Oh, hell, I'll just let the idiocy of this be demonstrated by JJ in the recent and apparently ongoing 'debate' at StageLeft.

JJ quotes SUZY ALL-CAPS and then replies:

“Which refutes your point: people who support legal abortion are not upfront about what abortion does.”

Yes, none of us knows “what abortion does”. When I had one I thought I was just getting a brazillian wax job. Who knew???

Will Zygote Zealots Rule at the Con Con?

Back in July, Le Devoir disclosed that members of the Québec CPC were unanimously opposed to a resolution that was presented in the slate of policy resolutions for discussion and ratification at the November convention.

Some party members from the West have inserted a proposition to integrate Bill C-484 into the Conservative platform. C-484 is a law that would recognise the fetus in a case where a pregnant mother is murdered. In such a case, the murderer would be charged with two murders instead of one. This is, in fact and despite what the bill itself says, a backdoor way to outlaw abortion because it
recognises the fetus as a legal person. It isn’t a far step to go from that to claiming the termination of the fetus in an abortion to be murder as well. And this isn’t just an over-reaction, similar laws in the United States have led to the outlawing of abortion in certain jurisdictions.

From here.

In the interval between then and now, Stevie and his Harpocrites threw Ken Epp and his Bill C-484 under the bus in a miscalculated bid to placate Québec voters and remove any obstacle to their desired majority rule. Now it has been revealed that a modified version of C-484 is among the hundreds of resolutions up for approval next week at the Con Con.

Is anyone actually surprised? I hope that there are fireworks and MASSIVE confrontations between the fundamentalist religious Cons and the pro-choice Cons.

First posted at Birth Pangs.

C-484: Incrementalism Starts Here

Ken Epp on The Current on Monday misspoke or was confused. He said the vote on the Kicking Abortion's Ass Bill (C-484) is this Friday. IT IS TODAY. Or at least scheduled for more debate and vote today.

Lest any of you have lingering doubts whether the Krazy Konservative Kriminalizers are wetting their pants in joy, hop over to Unrepentant Old Hippie and bastard logic for some enlightening screen-shots.

We at Birth Pangs couldn't put it any plainer than the 'Support C-484' group at Facebook:

If passed this bill . . . would be a key step in recriminalizing abortion.

What this is about, fans of freedom, is incrementalism.

We'll leave you with an editorial on the Kicking Abortion's Ass Bill from last year at the Catlick organ, The Interim:

In the United States, incrementalist legislation – informed consent, waiting periods, defunding, clinic hygiene laws, etc. – have successfully reduced the number of abortions. . . . Every restriction decreases the number of babies killed in the womb.

In Canada, there is NO law on abortion. If we let them win on this, it will be just the beginning of a series of incremental steps towards recriminalizing abortion.

Please, if you haven't yet taken action, go to our Activist Page to get started.

(First published at Birth Pangs.)