That author lost me within a few paragraphs when they promoted the false equivalence of “paying for an employee’s healthcare” with “restricting my religious freedom.” No reason to trust anything they wrote after that. It’s all poison.
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I don’t agree with their POV, but they do have historical citations, which is why I posted the link.
They look cherry-picked, which would be consistent with an author who used cherry-picked anecdotes to reach this conclusion:
The sad truth of the progressive argument is that it has abandoned liberalism — claiming the mantle of promoting liberty while in fact trampling individual rights.
My conclusion: you can’t trust ANYTHING this author writes.
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Again, I didn’t post for the conclusion, only for the citations. While the authors are clearly suffering from the Baconian fallacy, I think they give reasonable evidence that historically some rabbis made statements that can honestly be interpreted as opposing abortion. This is hardly surprising.
The authors then find it odd that modern American Jews don’t find those ancient arguments compelling. Surely it is odder to not understand why in thousands of years people’s ideas might evolve as we gain knowledge.
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“When communism collapsed in Romania in 1989, an estimated 170,000 children were found warehoused in filthy orphanages. Having previously been hidden from the world, images emerged of stick-thin children, many of whom had been beaten and abused. Some were left shackled to metal bed frames.”
That explains it; GOP slave labor pools and opportunities for investors.
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I found the citations, in both lack of number and lack of conviction, to make a good argument against the author’s conclusions. If that’s all she’s got, then, yeah, there isn’t much common ground between even Orthodox Jews and Xtian religious fundies.
When you go to a rally and your “allies” are screeching hate and calling for bombing hospitals; hanging physicians in effigy, and you’re position is, “meh, some rabbis were against it,” you start edging away and looking for an exit.
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I may have been misquoted there, but I’ll respond anyway.
My point was that muddying the waters with communism is the conservative wheelhouse. If you went there, they’d drag you down to their level and beat you with experience, so to say.
Ultimately, abortion rights are something the people of the United States have to decide as a democracy. Other forms of government have nothing to do with this.
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Brainwashing – it’s a helluva drug.
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I don’t think they had to use much soap in this case.
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That film is gutting and required watching.
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If only. Being entirely in the pocket of Russia doesn’t seem to bother them one jot.
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Giving away the rights of others should not be part of a democracy. We have to have a baseline of rights that we all enjoy, bodily autonomy among them. That should not be something that others get to vote away because reasons.
This is just not something that a bunch of white men who will never experience pregnancy should be able to decide is not okay for the people who can get pregnant. If we can’t agree that women are fully human adults, capable of making choices, then we do not actually have a democracy, and pretending like it is, frankly, is an insult to those of us whose rights are being erode.
In addition, once you decide that some people are not entitled to full rights under our system, you start to erode the rights of everyone in that society, when it’s convenient for those in power. If someone in a legislature can decide that I’m not capable of making medical decisions for myself, then any other person in this country can be next, no matter their gender, race, religion, etc.
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I can’t agree with this enough. We were saying the same thing during the fight for marriage equality.
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Which is but one of the reasons I support marriage equality… the main being, though, that it’s just the right thing to do.
Speaking of…
Note in the article, it talks about the right to privacy as part of the Roe decision. If that’s struck down, then we have no right to privacy, and that impacts every last individual in this country. It further opens the door to a larger surveillance state, among other things.
In other words, we fight this together, and we’re all fucked.
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I think Israel even has state funded abortion.
This is absolutely true, and is extra hypocritical and gross, but it does make me imagine a hypothetical day that an ultra-conservative woman rises in the ranks of government and uses the converse to fuel the legitimacy of their own effort to block abortion…
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That’s already happening, though. Women are already involved in banning abortion. I believe that a woman was a key figure in the Alabama abortion bill.
I don’t think that women have to be a monolith, nor should a woman be allowed to legislate away my rights. The people making the argument that women are pro-life doesn’t hold water for me, because it’s still legislating away the rights of others.
This is why this is more about the right to privacy and basic bodily autonomy as a human right that can’t be legislated away.
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Yeah, conservative women are a major driving force behind abortion rights revocation. Maybe not on the legislative end, but certainly culturally.
I honestly believe that the question of life or humanity in pregnancy is one of the only truly compelling and difficult questions in all of politics, but one that can mever be adequately answered beyond “belief”. Since mere belief cannot be a basis for legislation, especially when revoking rights and especially when such dire consequences to revocation are already historically well established, it must remain protected. However, I don’t begrudge women, especally mothers, their deep unease at what they honestly see as the murder of innocents.
I do begrudge cynical lawmakers wielding women’s fear and anguish as a way to punish more and more disadvantaged women. I doubt that the vast majority of them would give a second thought if it weren’t such a powerful weapon.
Edited for clarity
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On the topic of of conservative women:
Staunchly anti-abortion women can often seem confounding. Why would anyone support laws directly harmful to their health and safety? But if you look closely, you’ll find many anti-abortion women have something in common: They’re often white and in a position to benefit from aligning themselves with powerful white men in their lives as a means to consolidate their own political power.
White women play a unique, decisive role in challenging abortion rights and reproductive justice for women of color, lower income women, and frankly, all women. Notably, the majority of women who have abortions are women of color, and women of color are substantially more likely to experience povertythan their white counterparts.
Of course, this is not to absolve the equally—or more—responsible white male lawmakers of blame for the modern, terrifying landscape around reproductive rights. The horrific laws we’re seeing are deeply tied to overrepresentation of white, cisgender men who know nothing about pregnancy and will never understand women’s experiences, but that said, white women are distinctly positioned to play a special role in advancing the anti-abortion movement’s goals.
Their advocacy for cruel, harmful abortion bans that disproportionately impact the bodies of low-income women of color serves to give the anti-abortion movement cover for its sexism. The anti-abortion movement’s male leaders are able to use female supporters as shields to push back on the popular, well-earned narrative that legislation attacking abortion rights is exclusively supported by ignorant white men, and to market their movement as “women-approved.”
With the support of white women, anti-abortion activists can paint the many women who vocally protest their dangerous policies as hysterical and non-representative of all women. Subsequently, they can capitalize on the racial power dynamics that grant white women greater visibility and credibility than women of color to paint their views as universal, speaking for all women.
Yet, who holds leadership roles or poses as the faces of the anti-abortion movement, whether men or women, is ultimately irrelevant. Their gender doesn’t magically mitigate the harm of anti-choice laws on women as a unit, who will experience higher maternal death rates and negative pregnancy and health outcomes as a direct consequence of abortion bans.
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