As Americans of all sorts mourned the end of Roe v. Wade, a loud minority of abortion opponents spent the day today taking a little victory lap, mocking those who support safe abortion and accusing them of being “sluts” and “whores” unwilling to “take responsibility” for their “degenerate” sex lives.
If you think I’m exaggerating, do a search on Twitter for “women” )or “whore” or “slut”) and “responsibility” and gaze in wonder at the hundreds of vile results that come up.
Keep what in their pants? Vaginas don’t stick out and are not detachable.
Some (awkwardly) worked other issues into the mix:
Some managed to remember that penis-havers also play a rather important role in pregnancy. But honestly their politics aren’t much better than those who focused entirely on bashing women.
How many of these abortion-haters are also MAGA-hat wearing fans of Donald Trump, one of the most irresponsible men to ever hold high political office in the US, a man who can’t open his mouth without letting loose another lie, a wealthy man who pays less in taxes than many much less rich than him, who doesn’t respond to subpoenas, who as a businessman is known for stiffing contractors and lying about donations to charities, and who has declared bankruptcy seven times. Oh, and who is spreading the big lie about winning the election he soundly lost and who has cheered on insurrectionists trying to keep him in office.
How many of these people are supporters of a political party (the GOP) that has devoted several decades to chipping away at democracy, who through racist voter suppression and gerrymandering is trying to engineer a corrupt regime based on minority rule.
These are people who refuse to wear masks when they know full well that masks protect other people more than they do the wearer; their anti-mask, anti-vaccine approach has cost us who knows how many excess deaths in the pandemic. Instead of taking responsibility for the deaths they have caused and are still causing, they would rather invent and spread fanciful conspiracy theories about masks and vaccines that anyone with even the most basic understanding of science would dismiss as nonsense. Instead, they choose to believe lies that many of them know to be lies.
Closer to home, these are people who will refuse to take responsibility for the deaths that unsafe and illegal abortions will cause. Not “might cause,” will cause. Nor will they take responsibility for the violence of the anti-abortion movement over the last several decades — and the deaths they have caused.
I could go on and on and on.
But I guess what I’m saying is that these are the last people on planet earth who should be lecturing anyone about responsibility.
Follow me on Mastodon.
Send tips to dfutrelle at gmail dot com.
We Hunted the Mammoth relies on support from you, its readers, to survive. So please donate here if you can, or at David-Futrelle-1 on Venmo.
@ joaquin
Well the starting point is that there’s no equivalence between having to financially support a child, and having to sublet your body for nine months.
But even if we apply your approach, then the fact is, no-one forces these men to have sex. It’s something they choose to do. Now MRA types are very keen on seeing everything as transactional, and applying economics to relationships. So let’s look at things from that perspective. Let’s say it is just a contract negotiation.
Well the offer is:
I will have sex with you. In consideration of that you agree that if I get pregnant:
(a) it is entirely my own decision as to whether I stay pregnant.
(b) if I do elect to stay pregnant, you contribute to the financial support of any resulting offspring.
It’s then up to the guy whether he accepts that deal. If he doesn’t like those terms then, as with any proposal, he has an unfettered option to refuse to enter into the arrangement.
So your posed problem has a built in solution. If guys want to avoid any financial responsibilities then they are completely free not to expose themselves to the risk of that.
I would add to Alan’s explanation: being pregnant is risky business, even if you’re careful. Even the “simple” complications like gestational diabetes or pedal edema can make life miserable for the patient.
I’m not getting into the more horrific stuff. Y’all don’t need those images in your head.
I get that (and agree no one needs to justify their decisions to anyone), but I also think prolifers need to be reminded that the circumstances leading to abortion are wide and varied and can happen to anyone, not just “those people” who can’t keep their legs closed. It’s easier for them to frame it as a moral issue if they narrow the focus only on women being sexually irresponsible.
We had a similar discussion recently about the use of the phrase “innocent victims”.
One side was that this implied that there were some victims who deserved it.
The other was that innocent was for extra emphasis, not as a qualifier. Like how you can talk about innocent children being bombed in war zones without suggesting some other children were guilty.
But it can depend on context I think. I remember a notorious serial killer case here. He had initially targeted sex workers; but then killed a student. The police commented that even innocent women were now at risk; and there there was definitely the implication that there were two tiers of victim.
@ Allan Robertshaw
If you are referring to Peter Sutcliffe, I was a student at that time and recall visiting a friend at Bradford University, there were strict instructions to stay in the station bar until I was collected by someone I knew, no females to go anywere on their own etc. etc.
@ jazzlet
I was yes. Those were weird times.
One thing that stands out for me from that case is that Sutcliffe’s nickname at work was ‘the yorkshire ripper’.
Reminds me of the Wayne Couzins thing.
But it seems pertinent to some of the discussions here. Like when people dismiss suspect behaviour and joke about it. Or the after the fact phenomenon of ‘how could anyone have predicted this’. When so oftentimes there were clear and blatant warnings.
ETA: This is a police notice from the time; that sort of illustrates my original point.
In my experience, anti-choicers already know that, they just don’t care. The women who die from being unable to abort a non-viable pregnancy are, at best, tragic but acceptable collateral damage in exchange for ending abortion, and at worst assumed to have done something to deserve having god punish them with death by sepsis.
Maybe you’ve gotten more productive results than I have with this tack, though. If you have, then godspeed.
Sure, but generally people don’t argue in favor of children being bombed in war zones (well, not explicitly, anyway. Plenty of folks justify/ignore the deaths of children when it comes to Israel firing missiles at Gaza or when drone strikes murder civilians, but I digress.)
If some asshole was going “I’m glad that orphanage burned down, that kid Pete was a real brat”, then responding with “but innocent children died too” would be a bit of an odd response instead of “why the fuck are you celebrating the death of a child?”
Nothing will ever convince them. I just don’t like the way they erase a huge portion of women from the debate.
<i>I’m not getting into the more horrific stuff. Y’all don’t need those images in your head.</i>
Actually, there’s probably a lot of Americans — of all genders — who really do need “those images” in our heads, to remind ourselves that pregnancy and childbirth aren’t even partially unicorn-farts-and-rainbows.
@Lumipuna
In the US it’s not uncommon for amy medical procedure to be unaffordable to anyone but the wealthy. In the case of abortion, there’s also commonly the matter of traveling to where one can be obtained. Moreover, the person paying the bill is most definitely responsible for the thing happening, so it can’t (in theory) be brushed off as something she did without his knowledge/consent. But mostly it’s because conservative US politicians routinely pressure their mistresses and/or victims into abortions that they pay for.
@Buttercup
They don’t care. They will never care, because they are terrible people who hate women. They are also, as I noted before, really fucking racist. People who aren’t horrible bigots aren’t anti-choice, full stop. Appealing to their sense of decency will accomplish nothing because they have none not yet a better nature.
@Dalillama
Well, and yet we argue with trolls here (or bat them around, anyway), probably more for the sake of lurkers than anything else. Like I said, I don’t expect to change their minds. Thanks to GOP defunding of public education, they have zero empathy, zero decency, and medical knowledge that’s barely out of the Dark Ages. Plus, it’s like arguing with a cement mixer. I just don’t like the idea of letting their straw women and reductive views of abortion pass unchallenged. If nobody ever pushes back on this stuff, it slowly becomes part of the general narrative that abortion is simply a perk that “immoral” women want to have because they’re too lazy/irresponsible/frivolous/etc. to use birth control. That’s completely ungrounded, and they should be called out for it. All women, no matter what, should have access to safe, affordable options.
@Raging Bee
Don’t say I didn’t warn you. If you really want to know, here are two birth defects to google. The image search will not be pretty.
Anencephaly
Anyone here seen Vera Drake?
@Victorious Parasol:
Mermaid syndrome and Cyclopia are a couple more fun possibilities.
Dalillama:
I know. Still, my general impression has been that most Americans live in places where abortion is financially accessible to most people. Otherwise, banning abortion wouldn’t make that much practical difference.
OK, that makes sense.
So, the phrasing about “paying for abortion” is mainly a rhetorical expression for “he definitely supported the abortion at least as much as she did”?
Though even if this sort of abortion does come to light, it’s probably often difficult for fellow conservative busybodies to investigate who exactly paid what, what sort of negotiations took place and so on.
@Full Metal Ox
Yep. There’s a reason why the old medical term for such cases used to be “monster.”
For anyone who needs to discuss elseweb what a “pro-life” Crisis Pregnancy Center can be like, here’s a link to a first-hand encounter with one.
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/steelmagnificat/2022/05/a-word-on-crisis-pregnancy-centers/
The writer is of the ‘abortion is a necessary evil’ group, so she doesn’t like the idea of overturning Roe. And if you do a blog dive on her, be warned that in some posts she refers to a sexual assault she suffered some years ago. While I haven’t actually read the post where she goes into detail of what happened, based on what was mentioned in other posts it sounds like it was a pretty bad one.
Only 53% of Americans can handle a $500 emergency expense. An abortion costs up to $750 if you can raise it fast enough to get it done in the first trimester, $1500 after that. And that’s not including missed work, travel, or lodging for those who have to travel far and/or are forced to stay near the clinic due to mandatory waiting periods.
@ Lumipuna
Donald Trump was born in 1946. If he became sexually active at 18, that would have been 1964, six years before abortion was made legal in New York and nine years before abortion was made legal in the entire United States.
Donald Trump wouldn’t have necessarily wanted a sex partner — or the offspring that he conceived with her — to become forever linked to him, his family, or his family’s wealth. So I’m guessing that he might have paid — literally, with cash — for one or more abortions. This might have meant that he sent a woman to a doctor who performed abortions on the side at a fancy address in New York City. Or maybe he paid for a plane ticket to Sweden and the services of an MD in that country, where abortions were easier to obtain.
Of course, for those in that era who lacked that kind of money, abortion would have been a dangerous, back-alley thing.
Y’all, I’ve just been dealing with a man who is upset that women are “dragging men through the mud” in the abortion debate (not sure what he has in mind when he says this) and hasn’t said anything about the Roe vs Wade thing itself, just that us ladies need to be nicer when talking about men over social media. Oh and we also need to stop “letting” men manipulate us into sex, apparently, it’s our fault if he’s successful.
Is there no topic on earth that the Not All Men types won’t touch?
@sunnysombrera
One thing I noticed with the rise of social media is that women felt safer to voice their actual opinions in virtual space. Eventually the penny dropped for me: In those early days, you could hide your gender if you wanted, but even if you specifically identified yourself as a woman, a man couldn’t intimidate you the way he could in meatspace.
Now, unfortunately, some men learned new ways to intimidate women online, but for one brief shining moment, those sorts of men didn’t have the tools to bully women except through their words, and many of them weren’t very good at verbal bullying because they’d relied on their physical advantages.
@ Redsilkphoenix
Thanks, that was a really good article about a pregnancy crisis center. And the CW material — holy cow! Not for anybody feeling vulnerable right now, but it was okay for me.