When it comes to the true-believer imbecile types like this, it’s super simple: “abortion” specifically means a dirty girl sleeps around and then cruelly murders a sweet ickle Gerber baby for her selfish convenience. If you try to talk to them about realities, you’re just being Satanic and trying to confuse a black-and-white issue.
Now you might think, hold on, the anti-abortion conspiracy is powerful and organised; its members can’t be that dumb and emotionally stunted. And you’re right – they’re not. But they’re not the ones testifying. If you got a Koch or a Mercer up there, they’d sound like the cynical living toilets they are. That’s why they weaponise broken people who can give answers like this and genuinely mean it. This woman’s the political analog (and intellectual equal) of a space pod’s sacrificial ceramic heat shield.
Americans United for Life is against abortion, euthanasia, and contraception, but gives no shits about gun control, war, or capital punishment. So they specifically limit their concerns for “life” to controling other people’s choices about their own bodies. If the state murders people, thats ok.
Maybe a name change to Assholes United against Bodily Autonomy might prevent some confusion.
Modern America: religious fascism funded by untraceable dark money – and they call it “liberty”
I’d like to borrow a Method Man quote that came to mind and apply it to Swalwell here:
He’s like that dude that’ll sit back and watch you
Play yourself and all that, right?
And see you sit there and know you lyin’
And he’ll take you to court after that
The doublethink about word meaning also made me remember Bill Clinton dancing around the meaning of the word ‘is’.
In the 1700s and early 1800s, conception was considered a disturbance of a woman’s natural balance. Methods of “removing a blockage” or “restoring the menses” were sometimes necessary to reestablish the body’s balance, even if they induced a miscarriage. Abortions that occurred before quickening, which was understood as the time when a pregnant woman could feel the foetus move (usually around the fourth month), were legally and morally acceptable. Quickening was an indicator based on women’s perceptions, not a medical diagnosis. But in the absence of a scientific pregnancy test, it was recognised as the threshold of human development. Before quickening, no one, not even the Catholic church, believed that a human life existed, notes Leslie J Reagan in her 1996 book, When Abortion Was a Crime.
It’s a set of people who think they can reasonably expect a 1:1 relationship between how the feel about an issue and how it’s possible to legislate for that issue. Plenty of those people in Europe too.
I wonder what it would take to make that happen in today’s political environment. By any reasonable measure our country is far more polarized today than it was in 1992 when the 27th Amendment was finally ratified, and that one literally took two centuries from start to finish.
Americans United for Life have been really successful at pushing “model bills”-- so that every state can have a poorly thought out bill passed in a special session with minimal debate.
You forgot “with someone other than a white male Republican” after “around”. If it came out that Trump (as an example) had paid a woman to have an abortion, they’d twist themselves into pretzels trying to somehow excuse it.
I think if that happened, and someone put a microphone in front of this specific woman, she actually might have strong words for Turmp. Except, she’s not who the GOP serves up in that case. She’s sitting out that news cycle to spend time with her collection of Precious Moments figurines.
That’s the thing with the right; they don’t care about hypocrisy or presenting a unified ideology. They focus on whatever gets them a win today, and count on you to have forgotten it by tomorrow. The only thing they need in common with each other is that they all care more about winning than being on the right side.
