By Dave Andrusko
In order to buoy its spirits, the Abortion Establishment and its media enablers insist they are “winning the culture war,” by which they mean the public is more accepting of abortion.
If ever there was an example of “The wish is father to the thought”—aka, they want to believe it because they wish it to be true—this is it.
But just to be on the safe side, they continue to try (so to speak) to rehabilitate abortion. How? By reframing the deaths of unborn children as either a positive good or something beyond evaluation (for a host of contradictory reasons).
What is the common denominator? The centrality of eliminating the “stigma” attached to abortion.
How?
See the above and by also insisting the only reason women are haunted by the decision to take their unborn child’s life (you guessed it) is because of an omnipresent, oppressive patriarchy determined to control women, etc., etc., etc.
So how to excise abortion “stigma”? “Shout your abortion story,” of course. The assumption is that people will begin to change their opinion about abortion either because they are worn down by the sheer power of repetition, or because they will empathize with the stories.
Each is intended to foster a kind of faux familiarity.
The objective is “to disrupt the public shaming that, too often, surrounds the pursuit of what should be a standard medical procedure.” {“Public shaming”?}
That quote comes from Chanel Dubofsky who some time back wrote about how “Abortion Speak-Outs Can Combat Our Own Stigma Too.”
Even though she is “a staunch reproductive rights advocate, a clinic escort, and a feminist,” she realized, “I still have to battle my own internalized abortion stigma.”
Why this is is worth considering.
Dubofsky tells us she’s avoided such settings as “abortion speak outs” because, among other reasons, she feared she would start judging women.
Judging them for what, you might ask?
How about multiple abortions, for example, a.k.a. using abortion as birth control.
Of course Dubofsky manages to ignore that there are multiple reasons besides multiple abortions that a majority of people oppose at least 90% of all abortion which. To name a few, “later” abortions; abortions because women simply don’t care enough to worry about whether they become pregnant; abortions because the child is the “wrong” sex; abortions performed on babies advanced enough to feel pain, to name just a few.
But Dubinsky’s counter would doubtless be that this is the point. There is no invalid reason for an abortion.
In fact, to even talk as if there needed to be a reason is to fall into a trap–that any abortion could or ever should be “judged.”
A woman wants an abortion, end of discussion. It is a “standard medical procedure” which is no more to be evaluated (judged) by others than having an appendix removed or an impacted wisdom tooth (an unintentional ironic simile).
For Dubofsky et al., that is one of the principal reasons to speak out: to reemphasize that the reasons a woman have abortion are matters beyond good and evil.
They are her reasons.
Period.
End of discussion.
End of baby.