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The clue to understanding the attitude and actions of the violent anti-abortion right wing is to understand their basic premise: abortion is murder. This is what they believe in their heart of hearts and they are going to speak out and act upon that belief. This single concept is as central to their ideology as a christian's belief that Jesus died on the cross for their sins. It is not subject to explanation or argument or debate. It simply IS.
They are horrified at the continuing slaughter of the unborn. They consider this to be genocide. I'm not arguing whether they are "right" or "wrong."
We would be horrified if there were a law condemning all African American males over the age of 18 to summary execution on conviction of a felony. We would see the courts packed with cases, trumped up by racists to eliminate anyone they found inconvenient, anyone whose music they didn't like, anyone whose attire they found offensive. Some of us might reach the point of deciding that we needed to take the law into our own hands and stop some of the killing -- by killing.
And that is exactly how "they" feel. Abortion, any abortion, is murder of an innocent. It is wrong, under every and any circumstance. There is no reasoning with this. You might as well try to tell them up is down. (I know, I know, sometimes it is with them.)
And that is also why there is no middle ground, no common ground with them. Contraception is murder, if it's a hormone that prevents implantation of a fertilized egg. That zygote is a Human Being, just as much as those young men being killed for playing music too loud are Human Beings. And believe me, there are people in this country who seriously do NOT consider young black males to be human, just as many of us don't consider that zygote to be human.
At the heart of this so-called reverence for innocent life is a lack of reverence for women as Human Beings. The pregnant woman -- whether she is a 10-year-old victim of rape and incest, a healthy young woman who thought her boyfriend was using a condom but he wasn't, a 50-year-old grandmother who thought she couldn't get pregnant again and finds out she's carrying a severely compromised fetus -- is never ever ever more important than the unborn. NEVER. Whether the mother dies because of complications of a toxic pregnancy is irrelevant. It is never a question of the ethics of abortion in the case of rape or incest or a fetus with no hope of viability. The fetus ALWAYS comes first. ALWAYS. Without exception. And this is also part of the ideology. It cannot be argued or reasoned with or rationalized or debated. From the moment of conception, and in some cases even before, the fetus is more valuable, more important, more worthy than the mother.
It is not a matter of debating with them whether it is all right to abort a 6-week embryo but not a 6-month one. They consider either one an abomination, a murder. They will, however, throw out the Bill O'Reilly line of "aborting a healthy baby right up until the last minute before it's born" bullshit, because they know that will resonate even with those who are provisionally pro-choice. They don't care that that kind of abortion virtually never happens. There are laws protecting healthy, viable-outside-the-womb fetuses. Those are the laws doctors like George Tiller scrupulously followed, much to the consternation of prosecutors like Phill Kline.
Our problem is far less with the far rightwing ideologues on abortion than it is with the moderates and the almost-progressives. The anti-abortion, anti-woman movement has plenty of spokespeople. It has its "truth truck" and its Randall Terry and Troy Newman blowhards (neither of whom will ever have to consider whether or not to have an abortion, neither of whom will ever run the risk of actually being pregnant).
What we have are people like Rev. Katherine Ragsdale, who dare to say "abortion is a blessing" and who are so vociferously shouted down that she must remove her opinion from her website because it engendered threats against her. AND WE DO NOT RALLY TO HER DEFENSE. We consider Randall Terry's words incitement to murder, but we do not stand beside someone who is on "our" side.
If you as an individual -- and I address "you" as all readers of this post, not the individual to whose post I'm replying -- but if "you" as an individual are appalled by late-term abortion, then don't have one. If you think first trimester abortions are okay but not second- or third-trimester based on "viability," whose "viability" are you talking about? Remember that as soon as you put any and all unborn children of any particular but arbitrary category as ALWAYS more important than the woman gestating them, you have crossed over into anti-choice territory.
If there were routine cases of late-term, 30-week abortions of healthy, viable babies by women who just got tired of being pregnant, we would be hearing about it in the news. An abortion at that stage of pregnancy is not a simple procedure, and it comes with enormous risks. it simply isn't happening in enormous numbers. There are probably not more than about 2500 late term abortions performed in this country every year, most are second-trimester not third, and most require the second opinion certification that Phill Kline questioned in Dr. Tiller's case earlier this spring.
We need to call out the liars on the right -- the O'Reillys and such -- but we also need to champion our own. We need to champion our women -- our mothers and daughters, our sisters and wives -- to make sure that they retain the right of full personhood, the right to decide when they will bear a child and when they won't. An absolute right under the law.
Tansy Gold
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