The headline screamed:
The Pagan roots of Democrats’ Abortion Extremism
Democrats, including President Biden, are quickly moving toward the extreme position that a woman alone can, in consultation with her doctor, make any decision at any time on abortion.
thehill.com
…and then the article behind the headline went on to equate Roman infanticide with modern medical abortion practices. Went on to equate the Jewish tradition of life beginning with the first breath with the Christianist demand that we treat every fertilized egg as equivalent to a fully grown human being. Worse than equating apples and oranges, this is more like equating fruit and fish.
These delusional people simply cannot grasp the fact that there is no good reason to believe that a clump of cells inside another person is itself a person that is more important than the person it is inside of.
Rather than being an extreme belief any other opinion aside from deciding for herself on a woman’s right choose represents the denial to women of the same rights that men possess. It really is that simple. If women are people equal to men, abortion is their choice to make.
If there are other, greater, concerns that should take precedence over the woman’s rights, it falls to the believer to prove that these concerns actually exist. Every attempt to prove that these concerns are real have historically failed.
Which is why Alito was forced to fall back on his false history of abortion always being illegal as a basis for overturning Roe. Make no mistake here, Alito lied throughout that opinion. Nearly every conclusion he reaches is false because it is based on that lie.
Women, through the tireless work of midwives down through the centuries, have managed the knotty problem of unwanted pregnancy all on their own. That is the real tradition here, not the illegality of abortion (or the delusion of Roman infanticide conducted by the men of their time being the same as abortion, the laughable comparison made in the Hill opinion piece. -ed.)
The extreme position is the one that Christianists have forced on American women with the reversal of Roe. Women will continue to do what they have always done; decide for themselves whether they will have a child or not. The extremity will be measured in how many women’s lives will be lost because of the delusional beliefs about life in the uterus.
If this opinion makes me a pagan then your definition of pagan is as delusional as your definition of life is.
The author of that Hill opinion piece is accusing everyone who doesn’t think life begins at conception of murder. That is the unstated subtext of the article. This is demonization. The author is setting up the readers that agree with him to see their opponents as less than human. Is trying to make it easier to kill US when the violent insurrection that they are fomenting comes into being. This isn’t about the sacredness of human life, this is about the rightness of their beliefs and their willingness to kill for them.
Twitter – Stonekettle
No, if we truly value LIFE, if we truly believe it to be SACRED, then before it even begins we as a people and as a nation must bend every effort to ensure not only its survival, but that it thrives to reach its full potential.
Postscript
I observed that “the dog didn’t want to catch the car” in A Vaginal Dred Scott, noting that overturning Roe was going to cost the Republican party dearly in coming elections. This has proven to be truer than the equally observable fact that Donald Trump is a loser as a businessman, a politician and a television star. Trump actually picked a few winners in key races to endorse in the 2022 midterms, even as it became clear in the election returns that election deniers were almost universally being rejected.
Trump and his big lie are out of favor; but the more vividly illustrated truth of the election was that women want the right to determine their own futures independent of government supervision. Abortion will be made available again across the expanse of the United States. That was the result that was clearly illustrated in states where abortion was on the ballot. This battle will cost lives; but it will be won by women, eventually.
The Roe in our culture is not the Roe of 1973 Supreme Court decision or the 1992 Supreme Court decision. So if the Supreme Court is telling you, “Hey, guys, this is over, you can go home now, we’re not going to talk about abortion in the Constitution anymore.” History tells us that that’s not going to work.
Mary Ziegler