The Dangerous Lies of Anti-Choice Extremists

By Amanda Marcotte, RH Reality Check. Posted June 4, 2009.

This casual disregard for women's lives is acknowledged as a credibility-wrecking problem in another section "Women Will Die in the Back Alleys with Coat Hangers."  It's clear that Justice for All activists have convinced themselves that making abortion illegal actually doesn't hinder access to safe abortions (!), but followers are instructed to pretend to concede that illegal abortion is dangerous, to gain credibility. (Which means they have to pretend to believe what they don't, but ironically what they don't believe is true.  It's a rabbit hole of deceit and misinformation.) The important thing is creating the illusion of concern for women's lives, apparently, and the manual even offers a small section titled "Sound Bites For Showing Concern," which the activist is supposed to use to soften up the target before comparing an elective abortion (most commonly performed in the first trimester) to shooting a toddler.  One does wonder when reading this section if Justice for All offers role-playing classes so you can practice your "concerned" face when someone brings up the problem of women who are mutilated and die due to illegal abortion.

Shocking as all this is, perhaps the most shocking is the section addressing what Justice For All believes about the motivations of doctors who perform and women who obtain abortion, in a section titled "Abortion Isn't Genocide!"  Yes, they believe that abortion is genocide, and their rationales for this belief depend on a bunch of out-of-context quotes suggesting that terminating a pregnancy is exactly the same thing as targeting a people for elimination.  People commit genocide because they hate the group in question, so the implication (barely implied, and almost directly stated) is that doctors and women who have abortions do so because they hate fetuses.  Not because the woman can't go through a pregnancy for a myriad of personal reasons.  Not because the doctor is trying to help the woman.  No, because pro-choicers hate fetuses.

This is the sort of vicious lie that led to Dr. Tiller's assassination.  Realistically speaking, Dr. Tiller was a good man who loved children enough to have four of his own, who joyfully celebrated the pregnancies of women who wanted to be pregnant, who opened his home to women who wished to give their babies up for adoption, and who mourned the loss of very much wanted pregnancies with his patients who had to terminate. In the eyes of his detractors, Dr. Tiller was a genocidal monster who killed fetuses because he hated them.

That is why every person who trots out this nonsense about how abortion is "genocide" played a part in Sunday's tragedy.  You paint good, moral, righteous man who lived by his principles, even in the face of grave danger as an irrational monster who gets his kicks by killing babies, and the people who believe you will feel they have to do something.  Even if that something is murder.

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Amanda Marcotte co-writes the popular blog Pandagon. She is the author of It's a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments.

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