The anti-choice movement is not about “life”. Never has been.

Crossposted from DemocraticDiva.com

Monica Potter quote
“Pro-life” leader in a moment of honesty of what this is all about.

Since last Friday when a deranged man murdered three people at a Planned Parenthood clinic and injured several more, even some veteran pro-choice people have been stunned at the response by anti-choice people to it, which has been equal parts callous and defensive.

“After all these years and millions of babies that have gone to their death, violence is to be anticipated,” said Judie Brown, president of American Life League, in a phone interview with MSNBC. “Because it’s acceptable to violently kill a baby, so why isn’t it acceptable to violently kill other people?”

“We never approve of violence against anybody, whether it’s the unborn babies or the clients of Planned Parenthood or anybody else,” Ann Scheidler, vice president of the Pro-Life Action League, told MSNBC. But, she added, “it’s not the fault of the pro-life movement that someone found out that Planned Parenthood is doing these things. It’s the fault of Planned Parenthood for selling the baby parts.”

Planned Parenthood is a villain,” she said. “They undermine the integrity of families and the morality of young teen girls and kill babies on a regular basis, day after day. We’re not going to say, ‘Oh, poor Planned Parenthood, we should never say anything negative about what they call ‘services.’ Because they are a blight on our culture.”

As appalling as it is, this two-step the anti-choicers are doing here – where they “condemn” the terrorist attack on one hand while looking for all the world like they approve of it on the other – is basically how they do everything. If they regularly came forth with their true opposition to freedom and pleasure, as Monica Potter does in the picture above, then anti-choicers would be easily recognized as the nasty, fun-hating fussbudgets they are and relegated to the fringe where they belong rather than enjoying high-level positions in media and politics.

For example, anti-choicers obscure their raging hatred of joy (and of women having it in particular) behind a facade of “religious liberty” and concern for “life” where birth control is concerned. They’ll insist they don’t want to ban contraception and it’s ridiculous that anyone would say so, as rabidly anti-choice presidential candidate Ted Cruz did recently:

“I have been a conservative my entire life. I have never met anybody, any conservative who wants to ban contraceptives. As I noted, Heidi and I, we have two little girls. I’m very glad we don’t have seventeen… Last I checked, we don’t have a rubber shortage in America. Like look, when I was in college, we had a machine in the bathroom. You put 50 cents in — and voila! Anyone who wants contraceptives can access them, but it’s an utterly made-up nonsense issue.”

Well, that’s pretty gross. Look, I never said they were good a hiding their creepy motivations. The point is to distract and create plausible deniability, as they’ve been doing with their “sorry-not-sorry” response to the Colorado Springs shooting. Cruz is counting on his statement about rubbers sowing enough confusion that by the time pro-choicers are able to cite just how often and how vigorously he and other anti-choicers have opposed contraception that it will be a “he said, she said” situation. But the truth is that Ted Cruz has tried to ban birth control at least five times.

(It should not escape notice that the one form of birth control that Cruz has enthusiastically supported in public is condoms, which are less effective and the usage of which just so happen to be controlled by men. It’s important to remember always that anti-choicers, despite occasionally giving lip-service to the ideal of straight male chastity, are primarily interested in punishing straight women (and LGBT people) for sex. This is why, where birth control is concerned, they have the most opposition to the types that are both controlled by women and very effective. The IUD, which is virtually foolproof, is their least favorite form, followed a close second by emergency contraception, which works to prevent pregnancy after unprotected sex has taken place. Again, if they came right out with it and admitted that highly effective female contraception enrages them as it allow sluts to escape consequences, it would be difficult to slip restrictions based on “religious liberty” past the public. Thus, IUDs and morning after pills -falsely – became forms of “abortion”!)

“Pro-lifers” are so divorced from any actual concern for life that they don’t even seem to care much for those babies they’re always prattling on about. They don’t go to bat for prenatal care or social supports for poor mothers very often and have been known to complain about the births they claim to want so desperately to happen being paid for by Medicaid.

We already knew that the opposition to abortion was always more about punishing women for sex than “saving babies” but this remarkable report by Marie Myung-Ok Lee in Salon shortly after the Colorado Springs shooting indicates that anti-choicers will sometimes choose – wait for it – abortion over childbirth for themselves when there’s the possibility of embarrassment before their communities:

What was more surprisingly to me were the patients. I’m not exactly sure what I expected–a bunch of Riot Grrrl type feminists? Young women actively taking control of their sexuality? There was that, certainly, but there was also a lot of older women, married, with kids, who looked a lot like the protesters who’d been screaming in my face.

Indeed, my doctors told me, getting an anti-abortion protester as an abortion patient was actually not that uncommon. It even made a certain kind of sense: protesters liked going to a doctor they knew, one who was reliable and committed to her work. One doctor told me about an unmarried patient who stressed over getting “it” done before she’d start to show, i.e., the people at church would know; the doctor changed her schedule for this woman, who went out to continue screaming from the protest lines afterward. Conservative fathers with “important” careers brought in their daughters…

Such clandestine abortions would not make any sense at all if these activists were truly motivated by “life” or “babies”. Nor would it make sense for Bristol Palin, who did continue both of her unplanned pregnancies, including the second one that happened after she was an abstinence spokesperson, to feel the need to apologize to her fellow conservatives for it.

“I know this has been, and will be, a huge disappointment to my family, to my close friends, and to many of you,”…

It would just be unbelievably sad, that is, if anti-choicers weren’t actively trying to drag others down into their pointless morass.

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