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September 13, 2007
Wow.
Brilliant YouTube Video of Interviews with Pro-Forced-Birth Protesters.
They all think abortion should be illegal, but most of them haven't thought about what the punishment for having an abortion should be if they were illegal. Most of them say that nothing should be done to the woman, because her conscience will be enough, or it's between her and God.
I find it fascinating that these people, who say they've been protesting abortion for years have never thought about what should happen to women who get an abortion once it's made illegal. This tells me that the pro-forced-birth folks are not acting out of a rational, logical determination but are acting from the gut. It also tells me that they are not thinking critically about the possible ramifications of the things they are demanding.
Good stuff. I would love to see more interviews in this style, asking questions that push folks to think about their stances from a logical, critical point of view.
EDITED TO ADD: Here's an interesting article about the video from Newsweek. A great snippet:
"They never connect the dots," says Jill June, president of Planned Parenthood of Greater Iowa. But her organization urged voters to do just that in the last gubernatorial election, in which the Republican contender believed abortion should be illegal even in cases of rape and incest. "We wanted him to tell the women of Iowa exactly how much time he expected them to serve in jail if they had an abortion," June recalled. Chet Culver, the Democrat who unabashedly favors legal abortion, won that race, proving that choice can be a winning issue if you force people to stop evading the hard facts. "How have we come this far in the debate and been oblivious to the logical ramifications of making abortion illegal?" June says.Perhaps by ignoring or infantilizing women, turning them into "victims" of their own free will. State statutes that propose punishing only a physician suggest the woman was merely some addled bystander who happened to find herself in the wrong stirrups at the wrong time.
File under: Political Schtuff
Posted by Ealasaid at September 13, 2007 03:28 PM
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Comments
You know, it's surprisingly difficult to find any conclusive statement regarding what the punishment was for abortions when they were illegal (not that long ago). The closest I could find in a quick Google search was a statement that some early laws punished the woman--which implies that most didn't.
The conclusion is obvious, that (most of) those who scream "abortion is murder" don't really believe it themselves, and never did.
Posted by: Alex Summers at September 14, 2007 01:29 PM
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