This afternoon as I left for coffee I had to wade through hordes of anti-choice activists on their way back to their cars and chartered buses from the Supreme Court. There was a big demonstration there today in dishonor of the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, and I work for a nonprofit whose offices are a couple of blocks from the Capitol so we always catch post-demo runoff traffic. (FYI, I refuse to call them "pro-life" because I resent their appropriation of such a loaded word as "life." Although I respect their spin doctors for inserting that word into the national idiom so skillfully.)
I was a little fascinated by them, because they did not look as I would have expected. Most of them were ordinary college kid type people, some of them even a little bit punkass--aside from the giant placards smeared with images of bloody aborted fetuses they would not have been out of place at last weekend's anti-war convocation. Maybe I was just hypersensitive to the protesters' youth and trendiness because I had read an article in this morning's Washington Post about the new generation of anti-choice hipsters.
These kids are interesting because they say things like, "one third of my generation is already dead." Basically, they think that abortion is bad in and of itself, and they say so. They don’t universally mask their beliefs in "public interest" arguments the way many of their elders do. You know, the people who say "abortion is dangerous for women/bad for society/[insert bogus 'utilitarian' argument here]," when really it’s an entirely religious issue.
Ultimately, that’s one of the big problems that I have with the anti-choice movement's messaging--the bogus utilitarian arguments. (That's not my big problem with the movement itself, naturally. My big problem with the movement itself is that it seeks quasi-theocratic control over both body and conscience.)
The point is this: On the Diane Riehm Show today the guests were an anti-choice guru and a pro-choice guru. The pro-choice guru pointed out that the majority of anti-choice groups oppose not only abortion, but also contraception, which of course is absurd because people have sex. The anti-choice guy objected that "the pro-life movement is not a monolith…what you're saying is not necessarily true."
Well, we all know it is true. Why? BECAUSE GOD SAID SO. We all know that anti-choice organizations oppose choice for religious reasons, and oppose contraception for those same religious reasons. Give me a break. Please introduce me to the secular humanist who is opposes legal abortion because it’s "bad for women" or "bad for society."
Hearing that guy spin his web of utter falsehood actually gave me some smidge of regard for the punkass anti-choice kids. At least they don’t give me that Holden-Caulfield-like rage against "the phonies." On the other hand, they do give me a little bit of that pogrom-like fear of militant religious radicals.
Labels: abortion
