Saturday, April 9th, 2016
Stephan: More than anything the anti-choice Theocratic Right movement seems to me a study in nastiness, intimidation, and violence. This report tells that story.
Anyone who studies this trend on the basis of data quickly sees this is not really an issue about unborn babies because if babies were their concern they would be passionate advocates for early child care, ending child poverty, child hunger, and augmenting child education. And they would be strong proponents of contraception and family planning, so there were no unwanted or abandoned babies. In fact, of course, they don't work to advance any of those issues; they work against them.
So what is anti-choice about? First and foremost I think it is about controlling women. It is all of a piece with the Quiverful movement, wifely submissive and the rest of the late Bronze Age, early Iron Age values so cherished by the patriarchal right. And I think there is a second racist trope as well: the drive to create more White babies in a U.S. that is increasingly racially diverse and on the verge of becoming majority minority.
Missouri Capitol Building
While major anti-choice activists and politicians are rushing to microphones to disingenuously declare, contra Donald Trump, that they would never try to punish women for abortions, their true punitive and frankly creepy side is coming out in Missouri. State legislators there are threatening to arrest Mary Kogut, the president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region and Southwest Missouri, because she won’t turn over a list of names of women who got abortions to them. Kogut’s lawyers are citing federal law protecting patient privacy to keep this list out of the hands of Republican legislators.
To be more specific, a list of consent forms signed by abortion patients has been subpoenaed by the interim Missouri State Senate Committee on the Sanctity of Life. (Yes, that is their name. I preferred the original name, the State Senate Committee of People Who Are Definitely More Moral Than You Sluts.) It’s part of the ongoing witch hunt started when
anti-choice activists released a series of hoax videos falsely accusing Planned […]