Is "Pro-choice" the best we can do?

Posted by Joshua Holland at 10:20 AM on January 22, 2006.

They call us baby-killers and blood-thirsty perpetrators of infanticide. They harass women trying to get a safe, legal medical procedure with horrific insults. They display disgusting photographs of mangled fetuses - the result of emergency, late-term abortions. They blow up clinics and shoot doctors in the head while they're eating breakfast with their families.

And we call them "anti-choice." Real tough, that comeback. Is it really the best we can do?

I think not. So I, for one, am done with it. The language of "choice" is weak, passive and poorly reflects the true parameters of the debate.

Our opponents are hypocrites, hucksters and snake-oil salesmen and their followers, while perhaps well-intentioned, are ignorant dupes that buy into every straw man argument their leaders spin.

They wouldn't know a culture of life if it kicked them in the ass. They're addicted to the death-penalty; they love the most gruesome of wars.

Writing in the New York Times last week, evangelical Charles Marsh recalled the run-up to Iraq:

Many of the most respected voices in American evangelical circles blessed the president's war plans, even when doing so required them to recast Christian doctrine.

Charles Stanley, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Atlanta, whose weekly sermons are seen by millions of television viewers, led the charge with particular fervor. "We should offer to serve the war effort in any way possible," said Mr. Stanley, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention. "God battles with people who oppose him, who fight against him and his followers."

[…]
For his part, Jerry Falwell boasted that "God is pro-war" in the title of an essay he wrote in 2004.

The war sermons rallied the evangelical congregations behind the invasion of Iraq. An astonishing 87 percent of all white evangelical Christians in the United States supported the president's decision in April 2003.

Pro-life? It's a Christo-fascist death-cult. They're not even anti-abortion; as I've said before, we're dealing with a movement that's about forcing women to bear children against their will. Their sole purpose is to make women who dare to enjoy a good romp outside of the bonds of matrimony pay a steep price for their "wicked immorality."

If they were anti-abortion, they wouldn't fight against reasonable efforts to cut down on unwanted pregnancies.

According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, 50,000 abortions were avoided in 2000 because of emergency contraception. How many more abortions would never happen if Plan B were widely available over the counter? We've been waiting 1803 days to find out, because Bush's FDA is infected with righteous evangelical fury and won't approve the drug. They don't even want rape victims to have access to it in emergency rooms.

They preach "abstinence only."$270 million dollars in tax dollars goes into the movement, led by Wade Horn, a "father's rights advocate" on the far right who Bush appointed to the Department of Health and Human Services. The CDC reported that while abstinence-only programs delayed the start of sexual activity -- by 18 months -- when the kids did start shagging, a third of them used no contraception at all. Researchers at the University of Columbia say those that took abstinence pledges were "much less likely" to use contraception than other teens.

So it should be no surprise that, according to the UN Family Planning Agency--which the administration has done everything in its power to undermine-- our rate of pregnancy for women between the ages of 15 and 19 is 53 per 1000. Canada is at 16 per 1000, and those hedonistic, God-hating Europeans are almost all under 10 per 1000. The ever-permissive Netherlands joins the Swiss at just 5 pregnancies per 1000 teenage girls. Knocked up teens: a consequence of this deranged "culture of life."

And that namby-pamby "choice" frame makes it seem like we're talking about whether to have the salmon or the salad. Most women aren't really making a choice; they're responding to what's going on in their real lives. In a study of over 1200 women getting an abortion in 2004, 73 percent were doing so because they "couldn't afford a baby right now." Three quarters said that "having a child would interfere with education, work or ability to care for dependents (74%)" and almost four in 10 said "they had completed their childbearing" and already had kids to care for.

People are outraged that in China, women are forced to have abortions, but our own crazies want an overarching state to force women to have babies against their will. What's the difference?

Many of these are the same people who have apocalyptic visions of Judeo-Christian societies being over-run by hordes of fast-breeding Muslims. They're not anti-choice, they want to breed Christians. And if you're white, that's just a plus.

It's high time we get off the defensive and start getting tough with these people. So I'm not pro-choice anymore. I'm pro-sanity and anti-fucktard. Why not join me?

Posted in conjunction with Blog for Choice Day.

Joshua Holland is a staff writer at Alternet and a regular contributor to The Gadflyer.