Well it’s that time of year again where everyone kinda gets cabin fever from staying in because of the frigid temperatures and people start just spewing, the worst propaganda. Like, we expect nonsense from these zygote lovers but, boy oh boy things have gone into overdrive of late. Enter the whole “they’re killing living babies” argument. Yes, you read that right, the other side is saying that we want a baby to be born and then want to kill it. Just like… what??? No, obviously not. That’s OBVIOUSLY not what we stand for.
See, this Ben Shapiro tweet:
Now you’re saying we murder babies outside the womb? Feel like you need to stick on message. Like we all agree born babies are babies. You’re fighting against a nonexistent enemy here.
The trouble started with — well just these guys’ general radical ideology and un-empathetic viewpoint and rigidity to the point of cruelty, but probably specifically with — the Reproductive Health Act in New York and a similar act in Virginia.
So let’s address RHA. Tomorrow on Operation Save Abortion we’ll have a full breakdown of both!
When we kept reading these sensational headlines like “New York Wants You to Be Able to Kill Your Toddler” we were like “Even for them, it seems extreme.” We maybe even kinda wondered if we… read the RHA wrong. BUT NOPE obviously not. As Jia Tolentino pointed out, the RHA doesn’t even GO AS FAR as some people wanted it to. The RHA just means that abortion is not under the criminal code any more (yeesh, a BARE minimum thing) and that providers can provide abortion up to 24 weeks (which is NOT the third trimester, my guys) and “after the 24th week of pregnancy if a woman’s health or life is in danger, or if a fetus is not viable.”
So this brings up an interesting reality of what abortions we choose to talk about and which we choose to be sympathetic too. Basically, a lot of RHA advocates have acknowledged that people can be more sympathetic if they see that like, hey look, a lot of the women who gets an abortion after 24 weeks, USUALLY desperately wants their baby, but have been given terrible news about the fetus’ ability to survive outside of the womb. The stories are often heartbreaking and devastating and you’d literally have to be a monster to not feel sympathy for them.
But guess what, the other side is in fact full of a bunch of monsters that JUST COMPLETELY IGNORE STORIES LIKE THIS! Like you know the idiot anti-vaxxers that are killing kids… that’s kinda what these anti-abortion extremists are like. They’re like “You know, a doctor who has years of medical experience says your baby will live a short extremely painful life, but I, person who knows nothing, believe you can just pray a lot and things will be OK.”
OK OK, so we’ve established, a lot of people are making a crushing decision. But what a lot of advocates also acknowledge is that establishing this kind of story where abortion is the very last option… isn’t always how the world works. And, you know, it’s really a decision between a patient and her doctor, at the end of the day. Like, you can have whatever opinion you want on the subject, but… you’re not the one carrying the fetus or the one taking care of the patient.
This is all to say that although YES a majority of abortions this late are because of devastating diagnosis (and yes it is the majority don’t let the fucking other side try to argue otherwise), we just can’t know everyone’s stories. So that’s why we try to offer some grace, in saying that the laws shouldn’t be designed to rigidly judge what is a “good” abortion and what kinda abortion should be shameful. Because we don’t think any abortion should be shameful.
And that’s where the other side gets us. Because we’re not willing to sell our side out and be like “Ok, in this case, she prob shouldn’t have gotten an abortion” they trap us and say we’re for infanticide.
But again, because they’re so stupid, they don’t realize that we’re talking about DIFFERENT THINGS HERE. And they can never, really, actually trap us. Because again.. there is no world in which a GOOD doctor would help a woman give birth to a live healthy baby and then be like, “You want me to just kill this real quick?” And if the doctor DID do that, OF COURSE WE WOULD WANT HIM/HER to go to jail.
And jesus christ, we can’t believe we’re still talking about this.