Despite charade, abortion proponents still running from A-word
Recently, abortion proponents decided if you can’t beat, join ’em, and began urging their people to counter post-abortive stories of regret with post-abortive stories of relief.
They launched the 1 in 3 Campaign and began writing articles explaining the importance of coming out.
Even Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards finally admitted to having an abortion skeleton in her closet, claiming it was easy peasy, even if something about it kept her from sharing the good news beyond her inner circle for years and years.
Abortion proponents now say it is wrong to connect abortions with sob stories, which further stigmatize the deed as something sought only in dire circumstances or for catastrophic reasons.
So they exalt the “freedom to f*** up,” lauding those like post-abortive Merritt Tierce, who bragged about not one but two! abortions in the New York Times, one garnered after an affair in which she was unsure of paternity, and the other sought after her attempt to trap a man via pregnancy failed. Tramps trump tragedy.
But do they practice what they preach? Only when convenient.
Despite the charade, the industry knows everyone but them thinks abortion is skanky, to say the least.
So, while Planned Parenthood committed nearly one million of the three million U.S. abortions of the past three years, it continues to use math gimmicks to insist abortion accounts for a minuscule portion of its business.
And in a Cosmo puff piece a few days ago, “How to get hired at Planned Parenthood,” Senior HR Officer Gaitre Lorick failed to ever bring up the a-word. It came up only once, in the article’s intro. Abortion is obviously not an employment magnet.
Lorick wrote candidates are expected to have “a basic understanding” of the organization, and to check out Planned Parenthood’s website for details. But there is no a-word at the supplied link. Lorick also touted Planned Parenthood’s internship program, but that link omits the a-word as well.
At the Washington Post, 16 “influential” feminists submitted what they hope to accomplish in 2015, and again, the a-word never came up. The closest was one invocation of the vague term “reproductive rights.”
Everyone knows you can’t be a feminist if you’re not pro-abortion. It’s the litmus test.
But the feminists listed just about everything but abortion as important agenda items for the new year – living wages, gender equality, police brutality, domestic violence, LGBT justice, digital dualism, online harassment, hate speech, rape, quality childcare, queer and trans people of color in media, campus violence, immigration, incarceration, and even women in online game development.
Is abortion that secure? Hardly.
Amanda Marcotte blames the “anti-choice movement’s relentless propaganda about ‘abortion regret'” and the “ever-misogynistic gossip press” for a stigma against abortion that just won’t die.
Marcotte needs to talk to her own, for instance, Michael Odenthal of Highbrow Magazine.
Odenthal just wrote a laudibly pro-abortion piece (“Conservative America’s dangerous war on abortion”) wherein he promoted the a-word 21 times, except, strangely, within the three paragraphs where he sympathetically told the story of a now incarcerated Pennsylvania mother who illegally ordered pills online to “terminate” her pregnant 16-yr-old daughter’s “pregnancy,” which landed the hemorrhaging girl in the hospital.
“The daughter had a miscarriage,” wrote Odenthal, “as the pills were intended to induce.”
Um, no. The daughter had an abortion. Why not say it straight? Because in this case the a-word doesn’t play well?
Mixed messaging from abortion advocates, often subconscious, betrays the reality they may not even realize they know… this because abortion stigma is inborn, pardon the pun.
Abortion is unnatural. Abortion is violent. It is inherently abhorrent to kill one’s own offspring.
The fact is, abortion stigma will never die… simply because of that which does.
Jill Stanek is a nurse turned speaker, columnist and blogger, a national figure in the effort to protect both preborn and postborn innocent human life.
digital dualism…what on earth is this?
“Odenthal just wrote a laudibly pro-abortion piece”
Laudibly? Sure you didn’t mean to say laughably?
“digital dualism…what on earth is this?”
It’s a thing, apparently.
http://www.techopedia.com/definition/29046/digital-dualism
I had to look up “digital dualism” too!
We need to encourage women to tell their abortion stories. Even the pro-choice women who say they have no regrets — there is an honesty in their stories that other young women need to hear.
The abortion industry wants puff pieces and advertisements…. they want positive stories, but they also want to control the dialogue.
We want the dialogue to be wild and honest.
It’s also worth pointing out that neither Planned Parenthood nor NARAL (which, it must be noted, no longer officially calls itself by its full name – the National Abortion Rights Action League) had anything to say about the Emily Letts video.
I actually found the WashPo piece very encouraging. They weren’t quoting the “menopausal militia,” they were quoting young women of color, and that likely accounts for their emphasis on legitimate feminist concerns like affordable childcare instead of abortion. Young people obviously have a better understanding of how their own generation views abortion (negatively). Even if they aren’t pro-life feminists themselves, maybe they’ve concluded that they can’t get anywhere without pro-life support. If the feminist movement as a whole gets that message, we could begin to see some real change.
That’s it, the stigma will forever exist because of the undeniable humanity of the unborn child, no matter how many tools of death, insults or euphemisms are used. Propaganda can paper over reality, it can never change it.
@Kelsey… Thank you for pointing out the positive in the WaPo piece.
A few of the women represented still support whacky old ideas (such as affirmative action), but most of these young women activists have niche areas of real enthusiasm.
Authentic feminists ought to be interested in things like fair wages for domestic workers and equal opportunities in the male-dominated field of software game development. And authentic feminists lead where they see the need.
To borrow a lesson from Pope Francis, the old feminist movement is too self-referential. The old feminists talk about “feminism,” lacking an outward purpose. These women have real goals, and protecting abortion is not high on their list.
Even the sole woman who mentioned “reproductive rights” (whom WaPo listed first, in case the reader only read that far) wants to see abortion activists pay more attention to women’s racial concerns and LGBT concerns as well. She wants PP and NARAL to stop focusing so much on their business models, and start to really helping women.
“She wants PP and NARAL to stop focusing so much on their business models, and start to really helping women.”
And I want to win the lottery.