The Truth About Pro-Choicers

Amanda straightens out misconceptions about pro-choicers, celebrates Women on Waves, and interviews the editor for Sadie Magazine. Also: The money's still in women bashing women.

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Links in this Episode:
Women in politics
Digg RH Reality Check
Vessel
Chris Matthews spreads misinformation
Mob Logic on abortion

Transcript:
This week on Reality Cast, I'll be interviewing the editor of a new teen girl magazine called Sadie. Also, a documentary about Women On Waves, misinformation about pro-choicers in the mainstream media, and more woman-bashing on MSNBC.

 

Thanks to Shireen Mitchell for posting an MP3 of a recent appearance she and I made, along with Kim Gandy, on San Francisco's KPFA to talk about Hillary Clinton and women in politics.

 

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So I get to occasionally do non-podcast radio. But I like the podcast stuff best, and wanted to take a moment to ask you to help out the show. You can either go to iTunes and leave a review or go to Digg and Digg our podcast page. Links should be available on the podcast page of RH Reality Check.

 

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Oh this is awesome. There's a movie coming out called Vessel, about the Women on Waves project.

 

• insert women on waves 1

 

The trailer has a great quote from Robert Burns: "Every generation gets the pirates it deserves." Unfortunately for anti-choicers, pirates are still pretty hip. Lady pirates are really sexy, too. I know that this is a clinic and you have to be very conservative to set at ease the more nervous women, but it would be awesome if the security people working the boat were sporting bandanas and eyepatches and feathered hats. Actually, some do wear bandanas, so there's that.

 

The trailer is absolutely fascinating, and I bet the movie more so. The boat goes to countries where abortion is banned and loads women up on the boat, takes them 12 miles from shore, aborts their pregnancies, and drops them off at home. It's basically legal. But because legal abortions are not known in these countries, the boat landings turn into a 3 ring circus much of the time.

 

• insert women on waves 2

 

I had heard of Women On Waves before, of course, but until I saw the visuals from this trailer, I didn't have a really good grasp of how effective they are in translating the feminist viewpoint into visuals that anyone can grasp and not misinterpret. Here you have this boat with women getting on of their own free will. And around the boat, mobs of angry men screaming in anguish that this is happening and it's not in their control. It'll take a lot of bloody fetus pictures to erase the blatant truth captured in that moment. This is what this is about, and it's ugly. It's men thinking women belong to them. It's them using the state to declare that right.

 

Here's the founder, Rebecca Gomperts, talking about some other symbolic value to this project.

 

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I tend, as a rule, to be hostile to the idea of just symbolic activism, because it's easy for it to devolve into a time for people to express themselves, and they lose focus. In order for a public protest to work, it needs to be focused. What's interesting about Women On Waves is they avoid the problem of focus entirely because they have a mission and they do it. They provide abortions. With actual abortion provision at their center, the symbolic games play out on their own.

 

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The critical combination of focus, concrete action, and creativity is powerful. Women On Waves tried to dock in Portugal, and was stopped. So Gomperts went on TV and instructed women on how to do safe abortions at home with medication. The message was clear and to the point: Women will have abortions no matter what, and the debate is whether or not they should be safe or dangerous. The result is that Portugal has legalized abortion in the years since.

 

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I'm so sick of all the misinterpretations out there about pro-choicers. Why do people believe such weird things about us? I have a theory, and I think it goes back to the fair and balanced thing. It's hard to be fair and balanced between pro- and anti-choicers because one side, the pro-choice side, unfairly is the reasonable and fact-based side. So, to even it out, the media pretends that anti-choicers are more reasonable than they are. The media hides how many of them want to ban birth control and the links between abstinence-only and the anti-abortion movements. And then, to even it out even more, they say crazy things about pro-choicers that aren't even remotely true. Like Chris Matthews, of course, on June 12th.

 

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I'm going to assume he's conflating "Democrats" with pro-choicers, which is in itself a misleading statement. There are pro-choice Republicans and anti-abortion Democrats, though to be fair, there's not any Democrats in Congress that I know of that are against contraception and education. To make it worse, Matthews said that right on the tail of admitting that Obama is speaking frequently about increasing funding for family planning and education.

 

You know who's against contraception and education and you know, reducing abortions?

 

• insert more babies

 

Yes, that's Leslee Unruh of Abstinence Clearinghouse, arguing famously against the birth control pill, which prevents abortions, on Fox. Unruh is a major player in the anti-choice movement, and like most leaders in the movement, would like to see the abortion rate skyrocket by making it nearly impossible to prevent unplanned pregnancy. And then they want to ban abortion so that you have to get it in a back alley. All this to maximize your punishment for having sex.

 

It's they who are shutting down discussions about birth control and education. They who pushed abstinence-only into the classroom against the will of pro-choicers. Matthews couldn't be more wrong. Not only are pro-choicers talking about the means to reduce the abortion rate, we're the only ones talking about it.

 

This kind of misinformation seeps out and infects the minds of people who should know better. Lindsay Campbell at Mob Logic put together a video where she seems a bit self-congratulatory about being so different than most pro-choicers, but she's basing her opinion on some wrong information. She says she's pro-choice and then adds:

 

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Actually, her opinion is the mainline pro-choice opinion. Lindsay is bashing a strawman to make her point. The central argument of the pro-choice movement is not based around fetal life so much as it is on the points she brings up in the video---it's too personal and private a choice to be left to the authority of anyone but the person who is pregnant.

 

• insert Lindsay 2

 

Once again, blame the anti-choicers. The pro-choice movement wasn't spawned from an esoteric desire to prove that fetuses aren't people. It came out of the women's movement. It was and always has been about women's rights, period. Our opposition tries to make it about fetal life because they know that stating their true intentions to oppress women would make them a lot less popular. Agreed, it's a distraction. But disagreed that pro-choicers created the distraction.

 

Okay, one more strawman. I don't want to make it seem like I'm bashing Lindsay Campbell, who put together a good argument mostly and is probably reaching people I'm not. But she constructs her argument against mythological pro-choicers.

 

• insert Lindsay 3

 

When people say this, they mean, "I don't want abortion to be used as casually as contraception." Again, credit where it's due and she admits that defining casually is hard to do. But it's still a misinterpretation of reality. I'm about as adamant a pro-choicer as they come. I don't think it's a baby in any meaningful way until it's got a functioning brain. I think "life" really began 4 billion years ago in the primordial swamp and thus philosophical questions about conception are silly. I think we mourn miscarriages not because it's a baby because we're mourning the potential lost. If we thought it was a baby, we'd have funerals.

 

But even though I'm as radical as they come, I fall far short of the pro-choicer she constructs in this video to argue with. I don't think having an abortion is casual. I'm religious about contraception for that reason. Most pro-choicers are more conservative than me. But who's to blame Lindsay? She lives in a world where the mainstream media critically distorts the debate to make it seem more fair than it is. She's just working with the false information that she's got.

 

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Now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts. MSNBC's Hardball is still pushing the idea that women are these inferior creatures that probably shouldn't be allowed to vote, much less run for office or have reproductive rights. This time the offender is talk show host Heidi Harris.

 

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There's a lot of money to be made if you're a woman willing to bash other women like this, because it just sounds better coming from a woman. But it's so illogical, because if women are just stupid, then doesn't that mean that Heidi Harris is also stupid and shouldn't be listened to? Huh, listen to me using logic, which is supposed to be againt my nature or something.

 

 

 

Follow Amanda Marcotte on Twitter, @amandamarcotte