Ben Smith at Politico [15] wrote an article about the way that the anti-choice movement has moved beyond fetishizing fetuses to attaching themselves to an actual person with sentience and feelings: Trig Palin, whose mere existence has turned Sarah Palin into an anti-choice hero, because she chose to have her baby even when she received a Down’s diagnosis.
Indeed, it’s hard to refrain from applauding the anti-choice movement for this brave move towards finding love in their meager hearts for an actual person; usually, they feel safer only expressing affection for the non-sentient, who conveniently have no feelings or thoughts that could conflict with what the anti-choice movement wishes to project on them. However, Trig is still a baby. Perhaps as he grows older and forms opinions of his own, the anti-choice movement will abandon him as a love object. Too risky.
But what Ben Smith fails to note in his article describing this rather silly Sarah-and-Trig-Palin-worship is the deep irony of it. Despite the fact that the anti-choice movement is organized around the desire to deprive women of choice and force them to bear children against their will, to celebrate Sarah and Trig Palin is to celebrate choice. In the world that anti-choicers say they want---a world where women don’t have a right to terminate a pregnancy that’s unwanted for any reason---there would be nothing to celebrate. Without the existence of choice, there is no reason to celebrate someone for making the choice you want him or her to make. In order for Trig Palin to be an object of worship, and Sarah Palin to be a childbearing hero, there has to be a choice. Same story with all the women who die bearing children when they didn’t have to do that become Catholic martyrs. Without access to abortion, death in childbirth is just life, and not some sort of sacrifice to be celebrated by misogynists who see no problem celebrating the unnecessary deaths of perfectly nice women.
It’s easy to chalk up the fact that anti-choicers overlooked this aspect of their stupidity. Maybe they didn’t notice that celebrating a choice a woman makes requires you to celebrate that she had a choice in the first place. But unfortunately, it’s not so simple. While the anti-choice movement does have its share of intelligence blunders, they actually are wise to focus on celebrating choice in this case. It works beautifully to paint them as decent people, and to conceal the fact that they agitate to deprive women of a basic human right.
Let’s face it. Choice is so popular that anti-choicers are pretending they invented it.
Celebrating women who make what they consider the “right” choice is a way of using a genuinely good value---choice---to polish up their fundamentally coercive beliefs. When anti-choicers celebrate choice, in their disingenuous fashion, they give outsiders an easy opportunity for sacrifice-free moral self-righteousness. Judging other women for making choices you consider “wrong”---such as deciding not to bear a disabled child---is an easy way to feel like a good person without lifting a finger. After all, you’re not actually being put to the test by being asked to make that decision yourself. It’s always so very easy to tell someone else they have to have a baby they don’t feel they can raise.
But when the focus is where it belongs, which is on the anti-choice movement’s actual policy ideas, it’s not so easy to get that moral glow off siding with them. When you realize that they’re not actually about celebrating choice, but depriving women of it, then suddenly siding with them means siding with people who want to force women to bear children against their will, force women to die in childbirth, and create maternity homes where teenage girls are chained to delivery tables so the child they were coerced into giving up can’t be snatched by the desperate, sobbing mother. And that makes you less a morally self-righteous person, and more a misogynist monster. But it’s also closer to the truth.
The surest evidence that we have that anti-choicers know being anti-choice is fundamentally wrong is the way they run from their actual beliefs, conceal them, and pretend that it’s the pro-choicers that oppose choice. For instance, this quote Smith runs from Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, on the subject of why feminists “hate” Sarah Palin.
You just can’t escape it — she really is cut from a completely different cloth than most men, but also women, in politics,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, which supports anti-abortion candidates. “She had the audacity in the eyes of the abortion rights world to actually have this child and then has the audacity to bring him along with her and feature him as a centrally valued person in their family.
Except, of course, this is a lie. As much as anti-choicers wish that pro-choicers were the ones who demand coercion, who want to force women to make choices they’re uncomfortable with, the proof is in the pudding, or in the policy. Pro-choice movements do not advocate for forced abortion laws. Pro-choicers don’t say that one should be forced to have or not to have a disabled child against your will. Pro-choicers don’t come out against women who have babies. Most pro-choicers will have children at some point. Pro-choicers don’t have an issue with Sarah Palin’s reproductive choices. We have an issue with the fact that she doesn’t want to allow the rest of us to have those choices.
Unfortunately, the dishonest concealing of legitimate policy differences on choice is an effective strategy at painting a smiley face on a misogynist anti-choice movement. I recently had a Twitter battle with an anti-choicer who refused to admit that banning abortion would equal forced childbirth. She wanted to believe that she was for “choice”, because “abortion is never the answer.” But what happened when I asked what she would do to a woman who had listened to her pleas to bear a child and give it up for adoption and rejected that argument---would she force her under threat of jail to bear the child or would she allow her the choice to abort? She called me a meanie. But meanie or no, the point stands: You can tell more about anti-choicers from what policies they stand for than by their misleading, soothing political rhetoric.
Follow Amanda Marcotte on Twitter, @amandamarcotte [16]