Anti-Choicers Are Communists!

Posted by Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon at 5:24 AM on April 11, 2008.

Jill linked Ema's awesome post about why Leslee Unruh and her cadre of crazy anti-choicers are very Communist in their thinking. I'm reading Glenn Greenwald's newest book, and I have to say that this post really reminds me of his larger points about how right wingers all too often embody the very things they claim to hate. The official right wing reason to hate communism was that it was totalitarian, but the recent embrace of Soviet tactics demonstrates that it wasn't the totalitarianism that was an issue so much at the lefty economics, as you might suspect.

The bill that Unruh and company are trying to pass into law could potentially ban birth control along with abortion, and it redefines biology in a way that would bring a tear to the eye of Soviets who thought natural selection was politically incorrect and had to go. It gives the government panty-sniffing power that would make the Stasi jealous. It redefines women's bodies as property of the state in a way that the Chinese are taking notes.

But when red-baiting the anti-choicers, we mustn't forget to mention the anti-choice communist utopia: Romania.

Now there was a state that Leslee Unruh, Phill Kline and the whole cast of panty-sniffing misogynists could really get behind. Modern American anti-choicers make the same argument used in communist Romania to deprive women of basic rights: We aren't having enough babies to sustain the economy! Under Nicolae Ceausescu, contraception and abortion were strictly banned unless you had already had four children and done your biological duty to the state. In a strong echo of our modern anti-choice community's disconnect between what they actually think and what they say they think, it was widely believed that the contraception and abortion ban of Romania mostly functioned as a way for men in power to get off on controlling women. It certainly didn't do anything to lower the abortion rate -- under this regime, they had one of the highest abortion rates in Europe. Highest maternal mortality, too, which was a direct result of the high illegal abortion rate.

That's the utopia they're looking at with their communist-borrowing strategies. A world where a misogynist's nose is in every panty drawer, and women who run the risk of dying every time they have sex.

Tagged as: anti-choice, communists, leslie unruh

Amanda Marcotte co-writes the popular blog Pandagon.