Abortion Divide

Point: Kathi Wolf in the Washington Blade:

[I]n January the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services proposed a rule that would allow health care providers to refuse to provide abortion and other health care services to women and transgender people if it went against their religious beliefs. Also, in January … HHS created a new agency called the Conscience & Religious Freedom Division to help enforce laws created to protect religious freedom. … The misogynistic and anti-queer HHS proposed rule and new division are a pathway to discrimination and injustice – a threat to the freedom and health of women and transgender people.

Counterpoint: Michael Walsh writes at PJ Media:

Pace Baudelaire, but the Devil’s greatest trick was not to persuade us he didn’t exist, but to convince women to kill their own children and feel good about it.

30 Comments for “Abortion Divide”

  1. posted by Tom Scharbach on

    Pace Baudelaire, but the Devil’s greatest trick was not to persuade us he didn’t exist, but to convince women to kill their own children and feel good about it.

    You just get wilder and wilder, Stephen.

    • posted by Doug on

      Steven has picked up on Trump’s art of deflection.

    • posted by Tom Scharbach on

      Steven has picked up on Trump’s art of deflection.

      Or maybe (in this post and in his embrace of Kim Davis in an earlier post) we are seeing the beginning steps of Stephen’s conservative Christian identity trumping his pseudo-libertarian identity. Something is changing and Stephen is moving in the direction of the fringe, that’s for sure.

      • posted by Jorge on

        Something is changing and Stephen is moving in the direction of the fringe, that’s for sure.

        Too much exposure to politics can do that.

        I do not believe the issue is Mr. Miller becoming more fringe in ideology. I believe rather he is becoming less ideological and more aligned with and against people. Who is it that sides with him ideologically? Almost nobody. We don’t always meet the effort it takes to create a coalition that advances our unique view of the world. Sometimes we allow ourselves to side with the side that welcomes us the most, or at least welcomes and resonates with us. That has happened to me, too. And almost everyone who pays attention to politics has less humility and cynicism than I do.

        • posted by Matthew on

          That’s because the mainstream media and political parties are acting like the battle for gay rights is over when in truth, it’s just begun on an international scale.

      • posted by Tom Scharbach on

        You could be right, I suppose, Jorge. It may also be that fringe positions have become mainstream conservative positions, and that Stephen has moved along with the conservative mainstream in adopting fringe positions.

        Still, though, it is startling to see Stephen posting links that describe Democrats as in league with Satan. But, whatever. Let Stephen be Stephen.

        By the way, what do you think about the growing sentiment to execute drug dealers, as China does? Shouldn’t we reserve that penalty for women kill their children?

        • posted by Matthew on

          Satan could have gotten a high-speed rail built.

        • posted by Jorge on

          By the way, what do you think about the growing sentiment to execute drug dealers, as China does?

          It sounds like a good idea to me for about two seconds. Then I remember I really do buy into the argument that many drug dealers are really drug addicts who need help and treatment. I think it’s a bad idea for the US.

          Shouldn’t we reserve that penalty for women kill their children?

          I have a soft spot for the mentally ill, and I think no questions-asked abandonment stations are a good idea for stopping infanticide. Oh, wait, you mean abortion?

          Creating a society where abortion is not “necessary” would be very difficult and expensive, and frankly progressives sabotage the efforts of many organizations that work toward such an end. Going after mothers is a copout. Culture wars can’t be won by threatening opponents, much less co-conspirators, with execution or even imprisonment. The exile has to be long, public, and biting, a removal from power while one is still in the community. Then you impose law and order. Gay rights totalitarian activists have it backwards.

    • posted by Jorge on

      “[I]n January the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services proposed a rule that would allow health care providers to refuse to provide abortion and other health care services

      I think “the Devil” is in the details. Like whether or not contraception equates to the killing of children.

      Anyway, I fail to see anything “anti-queer” in a rule that applies equally to women and transgender women–excuse me, transgender men. You want the government to get with the program, it gets with the program, and sometimes the program is “eat **** and like it.”

      Next thing you know I’ll be finding out that Jeff Sessions’s speech to California was anti-lesbian because it’ll lead to the deportation of closeted “aunties” to countries where they will be persecuted. Oh, dear, my keen sensitivity to intersectionality has been triggered: the effects are disparate. That must mean every Republican in government is a hateful little ****. I’m woke! I see the light!

      • posted by Matthew on

        How many gay babies have been aborted since Roe v. Wade? I’ve asked pro-abortion activists this, they said they don’t care. They. Don’t. Care.

        And I don’t care what offends people who think anti-gay hate speech like q***r is acceptable. You can pee in a crystal wine glass; the crystal will still be crystal, but the pee will still be pee. No, I will never get used to homosexuality being described as abnormal. No, I will never call myself by hate speech. No, I will never condone the ritual emasculation of gay men or lesbians in the name of the cult of jenn-durr. Not children, not teenagers, not adults. No, I don’t support rapey heterosexual men in drag forcing themselves on lesbians. No, I will never support sexual orientation selection abortion. They already tried it in China to reduce the number of female births, who’s to say someone won’t try to abort the gay away?

        It makes me sick to think that all the scientific expertise wasted on trying to either covertly reduce the number of gay people and/or make gay people anything other than gay could be used for literally anything else.

        • posted by Jorge on

          How many gay babies have been aborted since Roe v. Wade? I’ve asked pro-abortion activists this, they said they don’t care. They. Don’t. Care.

          Sure they do. You’re just asking the wrong question.

          Ask them how many women have received “reproductive health services”. Watch their bliss.

          It makes me sick to think that all the scientific expertise wasted on trying to either covertly reduce the number of gay people and/or make gay people anything other than gay could be used for literally anything else.

          You’re sick? That’s a public health issue. Your “sick”-ness creates a scandal that makes anti-free countries look bad for encouraging the development of people whose sadness is contagious. Only happy people should exist. It is government’s job to remove sickness and create a healthy society.

          In a free country such shame is not acceptable. Government and individuals of all types share the responsibility to understand each person’s views and best interests.

  2. posted by Tom Scharbach on

    Satan could have gotten a high-speed rail built.

    Not in Wisconsin. Our Most Christian Governor, Scott Walker, looked Satan right square in the eye and exorcised high speed rail.

  3. posted by Tom Scharbach on

    Going after mothers is a copout. Culture wars can’t be won by threatening opponents, much less co-conspirators, with execution or even imprisonment. The exile has to be long, public, and biting, a removal from power while one is still in the community. Then you impose law and order.

    Do you suppose that we should allow women who “kill their own children” to keep/raise other children? Should child protection services remove the still living children from the home and put them into foster care? Would it make a difference if the women “killed their own children” through abortion or just shot them in the crib or tossed them off a bridge? If so, why?

    Obviously, we’ve had this discussion before, Jorge. My point is that hard core abortion opponents — the ones who talk the big talk about “women who killed their own children” — always flinch when I point out to them that killing has legal consequences.

    I’ve never seen one yet who was willing to sentence a women who had an abortion for homicide. I get a lot of mealy-mouthed bullshit, but it comes down to the fact that these people talk big but don’t believe their own rhetoric, or at a minimum are so cowardly that they won’t propose to act on it.

    So now the loudest mouths in the crowd — the man that Stephen quoted, for example — are calling those of us who believe that the abortion decision should be left to personal conscience are Satanists. Yeah, right.

    All toot and no salute. That’s what these people are.

    • posted by Jorge on

      Do you suppose that we should allow women who “kill their own children” to keep/raise other children? Should child protection services remove the still living children from the home and put them into foster care? Would it make a difference if the women “killed their own children” through abortion or just shot them in the crib or tossed them off a bridge? If so, why?

      That battle was fought and lost in the Middle Ages when the powers that be decided that abortions that take place before a certain period are the equivalent of a lesser offense like manslaughter. Then the US ran with it by moving the dividing line way up.

      In a country that bans abortion and where the common law and social tradition are clear that abortion is the same as murder, then yes I do think abortion evinces such a depraved indifference to human life that a mother should not be permitted to care for her other children and a physician should not be permitted to work with children.

      But in the United States, that depraved indifference, to the extent one exists, is a social one, and there need to be social, not personal consequences.

  4. posted by Tom Scharbach on

    Matthew, as long as straight people continue to have sex, about 4% of the children born will be gay or lesbian.

    Abortion does not now change that, because although because less children are born than otherwise might be, gay and lesbian fetuses are not identifiable so abortion is not selective. In the future, it might become possible to identify sexual orientation in fetuses, and if and when that testing is available, then selective abortion might become possible.

    As yet, no genetic markers have been identified that would be useful in sorting out which fetuses will grow up straight and which will not. In fact, the best evidence to date suggests that sexual orientation is not genetically determined by markers in the fetus, but instead (at least in the case of males) are a result of differences in prenatal development, which are much less straightforward.

    If I were going to worry about prenatal efforts to reduce the number of gays and lesbians — and I don’t — I would not look in the direction of abortion. I would look, instead, at the likelihood that it will become possible to “treat” fetuses during prenatal development to tilt the developmental scales in favor of “straight”.

    All that having been said, it seems to me that we should not be focusing on fear, but on hope. Rather than fret about the possibility that parents will someday be able to reduce the number of gay and lesbian children born, we should be working to build a culture that in which gay and lesbian children are welcomed.

    I look forward to the day when a gay high school kid is just another high school kid. I know that will not happen in my lifetime, but we are making progress in that direction. Things are already much better than they were when I was a kid. Gay and lesbian kids growing up today live in a very different, and very much less hostile, environment than kids like me who grew up in the 1950’s. We have a long way to go before a gay high school kid is just another high school kid, but we will get to there in another generation or two.

    • posted by JohnInCA on

      Two thoughts.

      First, since the majority of women that have abortions already have children, the “Older Brother Effect” may mean that “gay fetuses” are aborted disproportionate to their overall population rate. No way (today) to test this hypothesis, and there’s no indicate (in America or elsewhere) that abortions are happening because the child might be gay, but it’s certainly plausible that abortions hit “gay fetuses” slightly harder then would be expected based on population size.

      Second, I actually know of at least one pre-natal drug (dexamethasone) that pregnant women can take that will make their daughters more “traditionally feminine” and less likely to be lesbians.

      Isn’t science fun?

    • posted by Tom Scharbach on

      JohninCA – I hadn’t thought about the birth order effect, and I didn’t know about dexamethasone. The latter makes it all the more important to keep pushing for cultural change.

      • posted by JohnInCA on

        Basically. To go off on a tangent, it’s sort of like gun control. On one hand, 3D printed guns already exist, and are getting better every year. So the battle over gun laws is mostly a delaying tactic because it’s going to be moot soon enough anyway.

        On the flipside, because gun-owners just aren’t as common as they used to be, and most just aren’t interested in actively carrying (concealed or open), society/culture is becoming more and more hostile to gun owners year after year.

        So yeah. Science and technology go forward, that’s their deal. You can try to slow it down with legislation and funding stop-gaps, but sooner or later someone is going to say “oh yeah, my son is actually a clone of my father. No defects twenty years later, so I think we got it cracked”. If you want to actually stop (or start) something, you gotta change the culture.

    • posted by Matthew on

      “As yet, no genetic markers have been identified that would be useful in sorting out which fetuses will grow up straight and which will not. ”

      Yes, they have.

      And you need to stop calling heterosexuality “straight” because it implies something wrong with homosexuality.

      https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cross-cultural-evidence-for-the-genetics-of-homosexuality/
      https://www.newscientist.com/article/2155810-what-do-the-new-gay-genes-tell-us-about-sexual-orientation/

  5. posted by Tom Scharbach on

    Off topic, but oh gag. No doubt Stephen will soon be complaining that left/liberal gays and lesbians aren’t flocking to this moron.

    • posted by Matthew on

      Project much?

    • posted by Tom Scharbach on

      No, I just know Stephen’s long history — about 30-40 posts in the last few election cycles that I can recall — of complaining that gays and lesbians don’t flock to support “openly gay” Republican politicians.

      • posted by Matthew on

        You’re still projecting, and your denial compounds that.

        Gay conservatism makes sense because gays have a vested interest in conserving cultures that protect our right to life.

        • posted by JohnInCA on

          Right up until you look at their track record and realize that rhetoric aside, they just don’t have many “wins” to their name.

          • posted by Matthew on

            That’s because Democrats cheat.

    • posted by Tom Scharbach on

      You’re still projecting, and your denial compounds that.

      You’re the expert in psychology. I don’t have pretensions in that direction.

      To me, though, the comment seems like a simple prediction of Stephen’s likely behavior based on his past behavior. That’s certainly how it was intended. It doesn’t seem to fit the definition of projection, if for no other reason than that there is no equivalent attribute in my posting. I’ve been posting for close to 15 years now, and I don’t recall ever suggesting that conservatives should support gay/lesbian Democrats, and certainly not on the basis of sexual orientation.

      BTW, Matthew, it is refreshing to have you on IGF. You are an authentic and articulate voice for conservative thinking in the Trump era.

      • posted by Matthew on

        “I’ve been posting for close to 15 years now, and I don’t recall ever suggesting that conservatives should support gay/lesbian Democrats, and certainly not on the basis of sexual orientation.”

        Not in so many words, but the constant whataboutism and false equivalences, implications of bigotry, not to mention long-winded posts using a lot of words to say things that still just don’t hold up to real-world scrutiny, no matter how much you wish them to.

        “BTW, Matthew, it is refreshing to have you on IGF. You are an authentic and articulate voice for conservative thinking in the Trump era.”

        Thanks. You’re finally right about something. And for the record, I have been here longer than you, but I had been gone awhile because I was busy with other matters. I remember when they still called it Independent GAY Forum in the name and the URL. It’s time to go back to those days. It was seeing sites like these that made me feel good about being gay, knowing you could be openly gay without the self-destructive excess. Then and now, gay conservatives and libertarians proved to be the most welcoming.

      • posted by Tom Scharbach on

        Thanks. You’re finally right about something.

    • posted by Jorge on

      I guess I’m late to the party, but imagine framing his objection this way:

      “People already have enough problems with PMS, I don’t think it’s a good idea to give someone going through that type of change a weapon. They might snap and turn it on their fellow soldiers.”

      Taken to its logical conclusion, pretty soon we’ll have to outlaw military service altogether because of how dangerous it is.

      • posted by JohnInCA on

        (A) When the country was founded, one of the things the founding fathers specifically didn’t want was a standing army. So getting rid of the armed forces and relying on citizen militias for defense wouldn’t be out of question for our roots, though there may be some issues with a modern military.

        (B) You do know there remains a lot of opposition to women in combat roles, right? Specifically among conservatives? So I’m not sure who you were trying to aim your re-framing at, but I suspect the slice of folks that might actually be persuaded is fairly narrow.

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