The Abortion Thread

[lunchstealer]

They are obligated to report a crime if they find out about it. Therapists and other mental health providers typically tell you this at the beginning of treatment.

This is more like questions about whether patients have guns in the house, but I don't know of any requirements that those results be reported to the feds or to state governments.

Agree. I can see a bright line between crime and everything else.

And even then I think it's ongoing or potentially repeatable. Reporting of stuff in the distant past is maybe not required. At least this is what I've taken away from the disclaimer I got when I started therapy.

[nicole]

Right. That’s why I lie to doctors all the time. But not about my abortion history.

[Warren]

Right. That’s why I lie to doctors all the time. But not about my abortion history.

So just the child abuse and assault then?

[nicole]

Kevin Williamson thinks abortion should be treated as premeditated homicide, and women who get abortions should be hanged.

Calling for a quarter of all American women to be executed is not misogynistic, though. Of course not. It's proof of Williamson's deep and abiding respect for life.

https://rewire.news/article/2014/09/30/ ... abortions/

Williamson has been fired.



I found this whole episode bizarre, because to me, Williamson is basically known for thinking women who get abortions should be hanged.

[Highway]

What'd he write, one column?

[Jennifer]

Kevin Williamson thinks abortion should be treated as premeditated homicide, and women who get abortions should be hanged.

Calling for a quarter of all American women to be executed is not misogynistic, though. Of course not. It's proof of Williamson's deep and abiding respect for life.

https://rewire.news/article/2014/09/30/ ... abortions/

Williamson has been fired.



I found this whole episode bizarre, because to me, Williamson is basically known for thinking women who get abortions should be hanged.

One of the most facepalmy aspects for me was Atlanticans trying to defend Williamson on the grounds that hey, at least he didn't write a whole book calling for the state murder of women who had abortions; he "only" said this in a tweet or on someone's podcast or whatever. So, y'know, NBD amirite?

[Fin Fang Foom]

Williamson is a great writer, but beyond that, everything I have read from him is just trolling. I guess that makes him the perfect op-ed writer though.

[nicole]

Yeah that's kinda the thing isn't it

[Warren]

What'd he write, one column?

Yeah, but it was about libertarianism so

[Mo]

I think conservatives fail to recognize that by abandoning all media left of The Weekly Standard, places like The Atlantic are more reliant on their liberal readership and will lean that way. Instead, they will validate their bubble. Also, this is hilarious. It's obvious who hasn't read the WSJ in nearly a decade.

[nicole]

Inside the top-secret abortion underground

[Jennifer]

A hardcore forced-birther is also a white supremacist. Not surprising; not all forced-birthers are white supremacists, but pretty much all white supremacists I've seen are forced-birthers. Apparently, the notion "Let's deny human rights to people solely based on how they were born" applies to people both the wrong gender as well as the wrong color.

Anti-abortion groups are distancing themselves from a prominent writer, activist and thought leader in the movement who has leaned into white nationalism since Donald Trump’s election.

Kristen Walker Hatten, former vice president of the anti-abortion group New Wave Feminists and a contributor to The Dallas Morning News, has spoken at universities and events around the country about the need for mainstream feminism to embrace women who oppose abortion rights. She has written articles for Live Action News, the organization behind the heavily edited “sting” videos that inspired Republicans in Congress to investigate Planned Parenthood, and gained media attention in early 2017 when New Wave Feminists was ousted from a partnership with the Women’s March....

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/kr ... mg00000004

[nicole]

I was just reading that. I thought it was interesting as a story about friends in the Trump era falling out because one of them becomes a white nationalist, since that's apparently a thing that happens now.

[Jennifer]

I was just reading that. I thought it was interesting as a story about friends in the Trump era falling out because one of them becomes a white nationalist, since that's apparently a thing that happens now.

The extra-facepalmy (though utterly unsurprising, if you consider it for more than a couple of nanoseconds) aspect is how very many of these white supremacists feel genuinely oppressed to find themselves losing friends and family members just because they openly advocate the oppression or outright murder of people based solely on their race or ethnicity.

Though, again, not surprising: if they were capable of empathy, they likely wouldn't be white supremacists in the first place.

[Mo]

This is a long way off from "abortion should be treated like murder" to "abortion should be treated like a mid-level drug crime".

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... story.html

[Jasper]

Oh my god, what a monster.

[Fin Fang Foom]

This is a long way off from "abortion should be treated like murder" to "abortion should be treated like a mid-level drug crime".

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... story.html

It's true that European countries restrict abortions more than the U.S. I think Canada is the only place with laxer laws. I think maybe the argument that a late term abortion should be restricted as the fetus is much more like a baby at that point has merit. That said, I don't entertain such restrictions because I don't trust anti-abortion activists not to sue the hell out of everyone who decides on a late term abortion out of medical necessity. If anti-abortion types stop being cockholes for the next fifty years, I might believe them enough to listen to them.

[Jennifer]

"Rabbis want Kansas state Sen. Steve Fitzgerald to stop citing the Nazis and Holocaust in his anti-abortion arguments. And so does the Kansas Republican Party."

[Mo]

You have to love the supposed “1st amendment absolutists” on the right that believe that think the abortion gag rule is ok, but banning gay conversion therapy is an affront.

[Jennifer]

Pregnancy, entered into willingly, is an act of generosity, a commitment to share the resources of life with another incipient being. Such generosity is in no other circumstances required by law. No matter how much you need a kidney donation, the law will not force another person to give you one. Consent, in the form of a donor card, is required even to remove organs from a dead body. If the foetus is a person, it is a person with a vastly expanded set of legal rights, rights available to no other class of citizen: the foetus may make free, non-consensual use of another living person’s uterus and blood supply, and cause permanent, unwanted changes to another person’s body. In the relationship between foetus and woman, the woman is granted fewer rights than a corpse. But it’s possible that the ban on abortion has less to do with the rights of the unborn child than with the threat to social order represented by women in control of their reproductive lives.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n10/sally-roo ... sh-problem

[nicole]

#HometoVote is legit making me tear up

[Jennifer]

#HometoVote is legit making me tear up

I hope they manage to vote down that evil ban.

[Fin Fang Foom]

It is still surprising how shockingly quick and complete the destruction of the RCC's moral authority in Ireland was. They did a lot of the same stuff everywhere, but there wasn't that big of a shift. I take it to be due to their near Monopoly on religion combined with a vast increase in living standards in Ireland in recent years (and the attendant better education and reasoning skills that come with and precede such an increase). I don't see this happening in Poland or Latin America any time soon.

[Jennifer]

It is still surprising how shockingly quick and complete the destruction of the RCC's moral authority in Ireland was. They did a lot of the same stuff everywhere, but there wasn't that big of a shift. I take it to be due to their near Monopoly on religion combined with a vast increase in living standards in Ireland in recent years (and the attendant better education and reasoning skills that come with and precede such an increase). I don't see this happening in Poland or Latin America any time soon.

I wonder if some of it might also be due to Ireland's extremely close proximity to far more modern nations (namely, the UK)? The article I linked mentions that for all practical purposes, the "only" women affected by Ireland's abortion ban are those too poor to go to the UK for one. By contrast, Latin American countries are only close to other Latin American countries, and Poland is stuck between Russia and the eastern part of Germany (which I gather STILL has not recovered from the social or economic damage of Communism -- it's basically the Mississippi of Germany).

Also, far-right politics are gaining alarming popularity in Poland, too. If various religionists are right about there being an afterlife, first thing I'm going to do is meet the grandfather who died before I was born and thank him for getting out of that hellhole when he could.

[Fin Fang Foom]

Ireland is maybe in a better neighborhood and does have a long tradition of working abroad (which would expose them to more ideas), but Ireland is now a good bit ahead of Britain in terms of general measures of advancement. They sit more with the Nordic, Swiss and Benelux folks nowadays.