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| Don't Believe the Hype: Attempting to re-frame a woman's right to choose as genocide against blacks is one of the ways in which anti-abortionists try to persuade. |
Anti-abortion advocates kill me (and not because I am a doctor who performs abortions).
They yell and scream and pray and shout and speak in tongues to protect fetuses, but once they are born and are actually living, breathing children, they no longer give a fuck.
Let's have a look at the evidence provided by The New York Times' Charles M. Blow:
Republicans need to figure out where they stand on children’s welfare. They can’t be “pro-life” when the “child” is in the womb but indifferent when it’s in the world. Allow me to illustrate just how schizophrenic their position has become through the prism of premature babies.
The bad news is that, according to the March of Dimes, the Republican budget passed in the House this month could do great damage to this progress. The budget proposes:
• $50 million in cuts to the Maternal and Child Health Block Grant that “supports state-based prenatal care programs and services for children with special needs.”
• $1 billion in cuts to programs at the National Institutes of Health that support “lifesaving biomedical research aimed at finding the causes and developing strategies for preventing preterm birth.”
• Nearly $1 billion in cuts to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for its preventive health programs, including to its preterm birth studies.
This is the same budget in which House Republicans voted to strip all federal financing for Planned Parenthood.
It is savagely immoral and profoundly inconsistent to insist that women endure unwanted — and in some cases dangerous — pregnancies for the sake of “unborn children,” then eliminate financing designed to prevent those children from being delivered prematurely, rendering them the most fragile and vulnerable of newborns. How is this humane?
It's not.
But in the world of cognitive dissonance, it is very possible to both love fetuses and be indifferent or hostile to the welfare of actual children while simultaneously claiming moral authority. It is utter bullshit, but they do it every day of the week and are unbothered by the contradiction.
They are NOT pro-life; they are anti-abortion, which is, at root, about defining patriarchal power vis-à-vis absolute control over a woman's body.
Don't believe the hype.
Read more.