A committed anti-choice activist takes a stand against abortion by foregoing his daily Coca-Cola.
Well, it looks like anti-choice activists have finally decided to stop fucking around and get serious about stopping abortion. In order to stop the alleged murder of thousands of “babies” in their mothers’ wombs, a site calling itself Until Abortion Ends: A Hero Initiative is encouraging people to send in videos and stories about making sacrifices to end the baby holocaust wrought upon the country by the godless feminists.”Tell us what you are willing to sacrifice for the unborn,” the site’s submission form says. “With your sacrifice you will inspire others to do the same.”
So what kind of sacrifice are the rank and file of the anti-choice movement being asked to make? While thousands of Occupiers are freezing their asses off in harsh winter weather and being manhandled, bashed, and pepper sprayed by the cops, Until Abortion Ends is filling with videos and stories about how people are giving up chocolate, Dr. Pepper, coffee, video games, and ice cream. As one young woman says, with the passion and militancy typical of the site:
As a Sacrificial reminder of all the lives lost through abortion, I am giving up one of my most favorite things in the world. Ice cream. Abortion better end soon, I don’t know if I can do this forever!
It’s always an improvement when the latest innovation in anti-choice activism has nothing at all to do with bombs, bullets, or physical intimidation. But the the triviality of the sacrifices that the site’s supporters are using to symbolize their moral stand really highlights a congenital problem with the anti-choice position: moderate positions against abortion make absolutely no sense.
The idea driving anti-choice activism is that a cluster of fertilized cells is the equivalent of a human life. Anti-choice literature doesn’t talk about zygotes, blastocysts, or embryos; they are human babies from the moment that the sperm meets the egg, and if a woman aborts her pregnancy, she’s murdered a child.
Once you accept that idea, there really is no moral course of action other than the guns, bombs, and intimidation. Look at it this way: What would you be willing to do to stop me from killing a three-month-old baby? What if you found out that I regularly disembowel three-month-old infants in my house? Every day, I bring another child into my house, slit its belly and throat, pull out its internal organs, and toss the whole mass into a pit in my backyard. Sometimes I take money from other people for doing it.
According to the anti-choice activists, this is exactly the scenario that we live with every day in America. That is exactly what happens in abortion clinics every day. Anti-choice activists are not shy about using the word “holocaust” to describe post-Roe America, and at least one group even includes it in their name: Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust. Their home page says that anyone born after 1972 should consider themselves a “Survivor,” and claims that “1/3 of your generation has been killed by abortion in America!”
So again, think about the situation I just described, where you’ve discovered that I’m a baby-murdering psychopath who uses toddler corpses to fertilize the begonias. What would you do to stop me? If you’re like most people, the first thing you’d do would be to call the cops. If the cops couldn’t or wouldn’t help, any decent person would then use personal force to stop me. The moral thing would be to beat me, tie or cuff me, even shoot me through the head if all else failed.
If I had a baby-killing sociopath in my neighborhood, the approach that would never come to my mind is to walk up to the door, ring the bell, and tell them that I was going to stop eating ice-cream until they stopped disemboweling babies.
On the left, an 8-week-old embryo; on the right, an adorable toddler in his onesie. Which one would you kill for? Which one would you give up ice cream for?
If the majority of anti-choice activists really believed that aborting an undeveloped embryo was the same as putting a bullet through the brain of the darling toddler next door, the country would practically be in a civil war. The murder of doctors like George Tiller would be routine, instead of something that happens just often enough to terrorize every other abortion provider in the country. But at some basic level, most of the anti-choicers know that the whole baby-killing spiel is just bullshit. It gives them an excuse to heap shame on everyone else who doesn’t think their genitals are icky. If anti-abortion politics are a bat, it’s women who take the blow to the head, but one of the things that swings the bat is the conviction that male lust is something horrible and shameful that has to be contained in order for civilization to continue. Women who get abortions have obviously failed in their duty to contain the beast. The conviction of anti-choice activists that sex is icky and that sluts have to be punished is disturbingly clear in the fact that they’ve been moving from trying to ban abortion to overt assaults on contraception.
Personally, I’m delighted to see anti-choice activists showing their squeamishness by engaging in stupid publicity stunts like this one. The fewer guns or bombs that go off, the better. But the silliness just reminds me how inevitable bloodshed is when we treat anti-abortion ideas as legitimate. They can’t stay in the middle ground; in the end, they have to either accept choice or start killing the rest of us.
Photo credits:
Embryo — Dr. Vilas Gayakwad, Wikimedia Commons.
Baby — Released into public domain by creator, Cphilp.
Outstanding. This is the blog post I wish I had gotten around to writing. Bravo.
Thanks, Vikki. I’m glad you appreciated it.