If I die, and I sign an organ donor card, I can save up to six lives. If I do not sign a card, NO ONE gets my organs.

If those in power cannot touch my organs after I die without my express consent, then no one has the right to force me to use my organs in the service of another while I am still living. Therefore, no one has the right to force me to remain pregnant against my will.

Here’s a similar analogy: giving blood. Giving blood once a month can save lives. The Red Cross can try to entreat, persuade, or inveigle me to give blood. However, they cannot hold me down and force a needle into my arm. Even if I am a universal donor (at O+, I’m not quite there), it will save a life, it only takes an hour or so, and my body will always make more. They STILL cannot force me. Likewise, if I am pregnant, you may try to persuade or entreat me to carry my pregnancy to term. However, if you do not have the right to force me to give up an hour or two of my time and suffer a little dizziness, then you have no right to force me to put my health at risk for nine whole months.

In my opinion, it’s all about bodily integrity. I demand the right to control my own body. I do not need excuses or apologies.

Don’t we make a similar argument about free speech? Remember when the ACLU defended the Nazi Party’s right to march through a community of Holocaust survivors? No, I’m not comparing abortion to white supremacy. The point is that it the content of the speech is (and should be) legally irrelavent.

The problem with that line of thinking is the same problem that a lot of pro-choice politicians have had for a long time. There is no good analogy. With freedom of speech we have the first amendment saying “Congress shall make no law.” With abortion we have “emanations and penumbras,” some fuzzy crap based on a judge who didn’t have the stomach to come right out and say what they meant. The fact of the matter is, sad as it is to say, abortion isn’t an enumerated right but an inferred one. That means you have to fight for it. You can’t say “well, its a damn same we’ve gotten to this but we need to draw the line here.” You have to own it, you have to accept it, you have to be willing to go out there and say that you believe a woman’s quality of life is worth more than some trespassing lump of cells. You need to take the moral high ground and say that the rights of a living individual trumps superstition. You have to talk about individual sovereignty and mean it. You can’t hold abortion at arm’s length like its a necessary evil because you’ll loose by attrition.

On a fundamental level this isn’t a pleasant disagreement between rational individuals. This is a battle between people who respect individual freedom and people who are willing to murder to enforce their will and their religion. Let that sink in for a second. The other side of the argument is a group of people who are willing to terrorize and kill in order to enforce their interpretation of a book written by men thousands of years dead. Don’t delude yourself. I know it goes against everything we like to stand for, I know that letting yourself go into an “us and them” mentality is scary, but thats what this is. Abortion rights are about fighting for what is a goddamn human right against theocrats who want to control your reproductive system and co-opt your life for their divine plan. You can’t compromise, you can’t call for understanding, you can’t even depend on justice or a peaceful resolution. All you can do is roll up your sleeves, stand your ground, and hope you’re the one still standing when theres blood on the walls.

Underlying the right-wing discourseblather about abortion is the idea that there are Good Girls and Bad Girls. One of the symptoms of Bad Girlhood is wanting to have an abortion; if abortions were illegal, the theory goes, Bad Girls would have a stronger incentive to repent of their Badness and become Good Girls. Every once in a while, a pro-life activist gets an unwanted pregnancy and seeks an abortion herself–but she doesn’t see that as hypocrisy, because she knows that she is not a Bad Girl.

Of course, as zuzu points out above, the right’s definition of Bad Girlhood is much broader than that. Bad Girls have sex outside of wedlock (that’s, what, 85% of the US female population?); worse, Bad Girls have sex outside of wedlock with contraception. Bad Girls without money accept money from the government so they can support their children (as opposed to…begging from their relatives? giving the kids up for adoption?). Bad Girls with money spend the money on day care so they can continue to work. Etc., etc.

First, as zuzu says, the right’s broad definition of Bad Girlhood needs to be exposed, to make pro-life organizations and right-wing Republicans less sympathetic.

Second, pro-choice Democrats need to be saying: (a) There are women all over the country, of every race and class and family circumstance, people who are loved by their families and respected by their friends, who have had abortions, and they’re glad they were able to do it legally. (b) Even if you think that some women are having abortions for the “wrong” reasons, if you/your mother/your sister needed an abortion, do you want her to have to prove to some faceless bureaucrat that she is doing it for a “right” reason?

The “every abortion is a tragedy” schtick, by contrast, perpetuates the idea that having an abortion is some kind of mark of failure in a woman.

An equivalent would be if we said, “The right to free speech is important, but speech is always a horrible tragic and bad event and we have to recognize that.”

You’re just framing the right more broadly than I did. How about, “Hate speech is fully protected by the First Amendment but it is nonetheless disgusting, immoral, and harmful to others.” I can condemn hate speech in the strongest terms while defending it as protected speech.

Why isn’t this analogous to the abortion debate? It’s important to stress, not that abortion is always bad, but that even if it were, it is protected by the 14th Amendment. This strikes me a fairly strong argument. The Christian conservatives want to talk about the morality of abortion. This argument, though, makes morality irrelavent and focuses on individual liberty. Liberty resonates strongly in American culture – as you said in your post on Sicko.

Oh, wait. It’s because they need to remind us that their calm, clear man-logic is far superior to us wimmin’s hormone-and-emotion-driven pointless weeping and flailing. Right?

so many progressives seem to think that since the right wing revolution is gaining so much ground (ie, they’re winning), the best way to fight them is to adopt their rhetoric and practice. And since that leads to no alternatives, fewer people even engage inpolitical processes, both electoral and other.

That’s kind of the frustrating part: they’re not “winning” in the sense that a majority of the population is on their side. As Isabel pointed out, the attempt to completely ban abortion in South Dakota failed pretty decisively when it was put to a vote by the citizens.

What they’re “winning” is being able to take over control of the political discourse to the point where liberal voices are rarely (if ever) heard, and only conservatives get called up as experts on news shows. They’re “winning” by lying about what they really want (“We don’t want to punish women for having sex, we just want to save the babies!”), claiming to do one thing, and then doing the opposite.

I’m not saying it’s not frustrating that they dominate the discourse. I’m saying that a lot of people overestimate how popular they are because they dominate the discourse.

I think if we hit the “the Republicans want to take away your birth control” good and hard, it might wake some people the fuck up.

I’m attempting to do something along these lines. Feel free to leave me any feedback about my questions. This weekend I’ll post the final wording, as well as my plans for getting as many candidates to answer them as we possibly can.

There is a silver-lining to the post – there were 11 comments in response, not one supported his position.

Well, they certainly don’t make it easy to leave a comment there.

I think the thing that Democrats need to do is start challenging anti-choicers on what they’re doing to prevent abortions. Why, surely you support medically accurate, comprehensive sex ed? No? Well, what about guaranteeing access to birth control without interference from pharmacists? No? How about emergency contraception, then? Prenatal health care? Antipoverty programs? Support for single mothers? An increase in the social safety net?

No?

Hm. Well, gosh, sounds like you’re not at all serious about preventing abortion. Sounds, in fact, like you support policies that actually *increase* abortion.

And as a matter of fact, it sounds like you’re a pantysniffing scold, since you clearly aren’t willing to support things proven effective at reducing the rate of abortion; indeed, sounds like all you really want is to punish women for having sex.

I think if we hit the “the Republicans want to take away your birth control” good and hard, it might wake some people the fuck up.

it’s infuriating.