Glad to see that pro-lifers still aren’t troubling themselves with actual babies:
Yes, that’s Alan Keyes pushing a Cabbage Patch doll in a Spongebob Squarepants stroller. Because what better way to show your dedication to life than to push around some rag dolls?
In fact, the policies that Obama promotes do more to decrease the abortion rate than anything far-right “pro-life” groups offer. While protestors at Notre Dame push around Cabbage Patch dolls, it’s pro-choice advocates who actually push for things like contraception access and comprehensive sex ed (which decrease the need for abortion in the first place) and social services like universal health care, aid to women with dependent children, early childhood education and affordable childcare (which make it more feasible for women to make the choice to give birth, and which actually help children once they’re out of the womb). Despite how Notre Dame protestors are framing it, it’s not actually about Catholics vs. non-Catholics; it’s about social conservatives vs. social liberals.
As Hendrik Hertzberg so aptly puts it:
Notre Dame planned from the start to confer an honorary doctorate on Obama, as it has done for eight of his predecessors, beginning with Franklin D. Roosevelt. This only heightened the dudgeon of the American Catholic right. The loudest protests have been orchestrated by the Cardinal Newman Society, founded in 1993 and unconnected with the Newman Centers for Catholic students, which are a familiar sight on hundreds of campuses. The group describes itself as dedicated to strengthening “Catholic identity” at Catholic colleges and universities, “many” of which—including Notre Dame, apparently, the Gipper notwithstanding—embrace “a mistaken notion of academic freedom.” It claims to have collected three hundred and fifty thousand names on a Web petition demanding that Notre Dame rescind its invitation and “halt this travesty immediately.” Pat Buchanan chimed in, accusing Notre Dame of saying that Obama’s alleged “support for policies and programs that bring death to more than a million unborn children every year is no disqualification to being honored by a university dedicated to Our Lady who carried to term the Son of God.” And the protests are not just a fringe phenomenon. Sixty-eight American bishops—one of whom suggested that Notre Dame change its name to Northwestern Indiana Humanist University—have voiced their displeasure.
But Obama is not such an easy target. One of his first acts as President was to cancel the so-called “global gag rule,” which denied funds to overseas family-planning organizations that also offer abortion services, or even information about abortion. But because the main focus of such organizations is contraception, cutting off their funding almost certainly resulted in more (and more dangerous) abortions, not fewer (and safer) ones. The President also reversed his predecessor’s ban on funding for embryonic stem-cell research, but specified that the embryos must come from fertility clinics that would otherwise discard them. At his most recent press conference, he rejected the idea “that this is simply an issue about women’s freedom and that there’s no other considerations.” And he noted that his domestic-policy staff “is working with groups both in the pro-choice camp and in the pro-life camp to see if we can arrive at some consensus” on ways to reduce the unwanted pregnancies that are abortion’s invariable precondition.
In any case, the controversy about Obama’s Notre Dame appearance is less about him than about divisions within the American Catholic community. Church teaching holds that abortion, even in cases of rape or incest, is an “intrinsic evil.” Contraception is an “intrinsic evil,” too (as is torture). But a Pew poll prompted by the Notre Dame flap found that more Catholics would keep abortion legal in all or most cases than would ban or restrict it, and a Gallup study found practically no difference between Catholics and non-Catholics on embryonic stem-cell research, which is “morally acceptable” to around sixty per cent of both groups. It is significant that sixty-eight bishops have protested Notre Dame’s invitation, but just as significant that hundreds have not. The real division is between social conservatives, on the one hand, and social moderates and liberals, on the other, not between Catholics and non-Catholics. But that doesn’t make it any less deep, and Obama’s approach—practical, nonideological, “pro-choice” but hardly pro-abortion—is more likely than any of the alternatives to keep it relatively civil.
In Australia we have people complaining that paid maternity leave (minimum wage for 18 weeks – no luxury) promotes having babies when the world can’t support it.
Apparently women can’t have the power to have babies, or not to have them.
Well, shit, babies are only props to them anyway, so I guess it doesn’t matter whether they’re made of flesh & blood or synthetic fibers.
Huh, funny that he would use a Cabbage Patch doll – with all the associated mythology of them just springing wholly formed from asexual cabbages. Another convenient way for them to forget that women even exist in this equation?
I guess the cabbage patch dolls are supposed to represent aborted “babies”?
I find the “I regret my abortion” signs absurd. That statement is not meant to in anyway downplay the emotional torture that can accompany abortion. However, I think it is ridiculous to say “well, I made a mistake and I wish someone had told me I wasn’t allowed. I should have carried it to term. Oh, and since I made a mistake, I think I should be able to decide for all of you.” If we applied that logic, we should also outlaw adoption, because there are many women who regret giving up their child to adoption.
*sigh*
Seriously, ebsith. Regret is simply a consequence of making a decision. If you don’t want to regret anything, then give away all of your rights.
And carrying around those plastic babies reminds me of something I saw on BBC America about women who collect these lifelike baby dolls and treat them like real babies.
Thanks for making the distinction between faith and politics. It’s nice to see someone doing it.
To complicate the idea that this is about Catholicism I might also add that the majority of Catholics who attend mass every Sunday are Hispanic, not white. And they overwhelmingly voted for Obama.
I know many many pro-life Catholics who voted for Obama because the strategy of voting for people who wanted to make abortion illegal clearly wasn’t working and they sincerely hope that better support for the poor might at least reduce the abortion rate. I’m not sure that any of them own Sponge Bob Sqaurepants babydoll stroller, though, so they might not count as “real” Catholics.
On talk.abortion (where I honed my mad abortion-debate skillz), I dealt with someone who was upset that the legality of abortion was forcing choice on her. I pointed out that no one was requiring or demanding that she do anything: it only meant that she had the choice, and the legal right to make it. But her complaint was actually, “Yes, exactly! They’re forcing me to have the right to choose! I don’t want to have that right, and they’re forcing it on me!” All I could do was roll my eyes. (This was before I ran across the Prairie Muffin types who want to renounce the right to vote — and want to renounce it for me too.)
If we applied that logic, we should also outlaw adoption, because there are many women who regret giving up their child to adoption.
Not to mention reproduction, since it’s by no means unknown for women (and men) to regret having had children.
Obama’s approach—practical, nonideological, “pro-choice” but hardly pro-abortion—is more likely than any of the alternatives to keep it relatively civil.
The only thing that’s going to make the abortion debate “civil” is if the obnoxious “pro-life” jerks get a clue. As long as they think their opinions are so important that they need never take anyone else’s rights and feelings into account, they’re going to go on being obnoxious jerks. Regrettably, I don’t see that changing.
In any case, this issue really isn’t open to compromise. Either you believe pregnant women should be forced to bear children against their will, or you don’t.
“On talk.abortion (where I honed my mad abortion-debate skillz), I dealt with someone who was upset that the legality of abortion was forcing choice on her.”
Every so often you will run across someone who’s pissed that the world expects them to act like a fucking adult for once and have either the chutzpah or lack of self-awareness to admit it. Unfortunately, the people who have a potent cocktail of narcissism and belief in false dichotomies are quite a bit more common.
At the risk of sounding like an insensitive raving lunatic – just a matter of perspective – I have long ago decided that sexual identity politics are all about power and subjugation. Which means you are right to to incensed : but likely not going to make any headway against dishonest appeals to ‘spiritual authority’ and mass marketing of unadulterated headbanging mind control. I’m thinking Moonie-style, no less.
It isn’t a ‘debate’ in the sense of the other party having to make sense : it’s all emotional appeal to dishonest cant and repetitive programming via Fox and pulpit for the disdainfully-named ‘Base’.
After a visit to Wikipedia to review the concept “Moving the Overton Window’ check out this old post from daily Kos : http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/5/9/205251/2950 I have listed this and other articles on my Links page for years but don’t seem to get the message out – any more than Needlenose could.
At least you will ‘know the enemy.’
And yes, that’s a busy place. The section is on the Links page in the right hand column and well down – but fairly extensive.