Right now Republicans across the nation are trying hard to outdo themselves by doubling down on their anti-choice zeal. In Michigan, the leading Republican contender for governor, Tudor Dixon, says she can’t think of a more perfect example of why abortion should be banned than the prospect of a 14-year-old girl being raped and impregnated by an uncle or other male relative. As reported by Cristina Cabrera for Talking Points Memo, Tudor is “all in” on forcing such a girl to carry that child to term. In fact, it seems like it was an easy call for Dixon.
And she’s far from the only one.
Just two states over, another Republican candidate, Matt Birk, running for lieutenant governor in Minnesota, described arguments that abortion care should be permitted in cases of rape and incest as tantamount to “playing the rape card.” As Bess Levin reports for Vanity Fair:
Watch Birk express his appalling sentiments—which also include railing against women pursuing careers, and comparing abortion to slavery—below.
As little as 10 years ago, statements like Birk’s and Dixon’s could alienate enough voters to sink most right-wingers’ political aspirations. Now they are considered by too many as legitimate discourse, and possibly earn a day or two of rebuke or shaming on Twitter before disappearing, lost in the shadows of the next outrage.
In Indiana, Republican legislators are being showered with gratitude for banning abortions in that state while magnanimously allowing exceptions for rape, incest, or where the “life of the mother” is at risk. To her credit, Democratic state Sen. Shelli Yoder characterized the Republican legislation as “irredeemable,” and an “infringement on women’s wellbeing, liberty, and livelihood.”
Yet this is all a process of normalization in action. As described by the misogynistic enabler Aunt Lydia in Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale:
As a practical matter, with Roe gone, so-called “exceptions” for rape and incest or the life of the pregnant person are effectively irrelevant within states that ban abortions. What doctor or clinic, facing criminal penalties including loss of license and imprisonment, would be willing to accept a patient’s word at face value regarding the cause of her pregnancy? What medical practitioner would not, as a matter of sheer self-preservation, insist on a legal determination—one that could take months—before performing such a procedure on a desperate patient?
And which will simply turn such pleas away, firmly shutting the door?
The forced-birth crowd knows this perfectly well; in fact, they’re banking on it. But it’s telling that this movement no longer feels constrained to offer even such fig-leaf displays of compassion toward anyone facing an unwanted pregnancy.
Jess Bidgood, reporting for the Boston Globe, interviewed Laurie Bertram-Roberts of the Alabama-based Yellowhammer Fund, an advocacy group for people seeking abortion:
And in fact there is a concerted, coordinated effort underway right now by the forced-birth legions and their enablers. They’re determined to convince Americans that what is being done to people who become pregnant is no big deal, nothing they should concern themselves with—because, really, nothing much has changed.
As reported by Kiera Butler and Maddie Oatman for Mother Jones:
As Butler and Oatman explain, this wholly false post, which quickly went viral on Instagram and TikTok, “gave the impression of offering a clear path forward,” cynically reassuring thousands of viewers that their lives, should they suffer an unfortunate, life-threatening pregnancy, would not be at risk.
But the post was an intentional lie, knowingly dispensed on social media by the same people who promoted the legislation in the first place.
Other anti-choice groups, such as the Austin, Texas-based Live Action, have deliberately spread disinformation minimizing the devastating impact these laws will have on people needing treatment for miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies. They do so even as it was reported that an Austin pharmacy had advised OB-GYNs in that state that it would no longer fill prescriptions for methotrexate, the only non-surgical treatment for ectopic pregnancies—as well as the only reliably effective drug against the many autoimmune disorders, such as rheumatoid arthritis, for which it is widely prescribed.
Again, the point is to instill a sense of calm, a false reassurance: “Yes, we have taken away a basic right from you, but it really isn’t as bad as you’ve heard.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, some of the biggest purveyors of disinformation regarding the actual effect of these laws are the same people who spread conspiracy theories and lies about the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines. These include self-made “social media” stars operating in tandem with QAnon conspiracists, for them, spreading abortion disinformation is only a small shift from their vaccine lies.
One prominent anti-vaxxer “personality” suggested that the Supreme Court overruled Roe to “cover up” the declining birthrate allegedly caused by COVID-19 vaccines. Others, such as anti-vaxxer Naomi Wolf, have equated the passage of such laws with a twisted sense of feminist “empowerment”: “An American woman does have choices and powers she did not have in 1973,” she writes. “She can buy contraceptives.”
Of course, as Butler and Oatman point out, the same groups that have now effectively outlawed abortion in several states are also targeting hormonal birth control such as Plan B, analogizing its use to abortion. And as Daily Kos’ Joan McCarter wrote Thursday, nearly 200 House Republicans voted against protecting access to contraception.
The callous disregard of those capable of getting pregnant, and their forced regression to a status of mere reproductive vessels, is probably best illustrated in these anti-abortion groups’ rationale for opposing the termination of pregnancies in the event of severe fetal birth defects. Mother Jones:
All of these distortions and rationalizations, whether delivered by cynical Republican politicians, so-called “pro-life” tyrants on the misogynistic Christian right, or by self-promoting “internet doctors” seeking to monetize their social media presence, all share a common assumption: They expect that everyone who can become pregnant will slowly, gradually begin to accept their inevitable status as second-class human beings.; that they will eventually acknowledge this grotesque intrusion on their autonomy as something ordinary; and most crucially, that they will stop their efforts to codify the right to abortion care.
Leaving the gross audacity of that assumption aside, history does suggest that they are wrong. Whether it’s a matter of a Republican legislator’s daughter found face down and dead in a hotel after a botched abortion; whether it’s one of those young, idealistic right-wing women who claim to be part of the “Post-Roe” generation being denied the procedure she desperately sought after fleeing the blows from her boyfriend’s Christian fists; or whether it’s a corporate CEO caught ordering mifepristone online for his mistress, one thing is certain: The horror stories from these horrific laws are going to keep coming, and coming, and coming.
Yet we must never accept them as normal.
These 15 abortion funds are providing financial and practical support to people seeking abortion care in hostile states. Each abortion fund listed works in their communities to remove barriers to abortion access. Please chip in to support their work … and fight back.
And she’s far from the only one.
Just two states over, another Republican candidate, Matt Birk, running for lieutenant governor in Minnesota, described arguments that abortion care should be permitted in cases of rape and incest as tantamount to “playing the rape card.” As Bess Levin reports for Vanity Fair:
Watch Birk express his appalling sentiments—which also include railing against women pursuing careers, and comparing abortion to slavery—below.
As little as 10 years ago, statements like Birk’s and Dixon’s could alienate enough voters to sink most right-wingers’ political aspirations. Now they are considered by too many as legitimate discourse, and possibly earn a day or two of rebuke or shaming on Twitter before disappearing, lost in the shadows of the next outrage.
In Indiana, Republican legislators are being showered with gratitude for banning abortions in that state while magnanimously allowing exceptions for rape, incest, or where the “life of the mother” is at risk. To her credit, Democratic state Sen. Shelli Yoder characterized the Republican legislation as “irredeemable,” and an “infringement on women’s wellbeing, liberty, and livelihood.”
Yet this is all a process of normalization in action. As described by the misogynistic enabler Aunt Lydia in Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale:
As a practical matter, with Roe gone, so-called “exceptions” for rape and incest or the life of the pregnant person are effectively irrelevant within states that ban abortions. What doctor or clinic, facing criminal penalties including loss of license and imprisonment, would be willing to accept a patient’s word at face value regarding the cause of her pregnancy? What medical practitioner would not, as a matter of sheer self-preservation, insist on a legal determination—one that could take months—before performing such a procedure on a desperate patient?
And which will simply turn such pleas away, firmly shutting the door?
The forced-birth crowd knows this perfectly well; in fact, they’re banking on it. But it’s telling that this movement no longer feels constrained to offer even such fig-leaf displays of compassion toward anyone facing an unwanted pregnancy.
Jess Bidgood, reporting for the Boston Globe, interviewed Laurie Bertram-Roberts of the Alabama-based Yellowhammer Fund, an advocacy group for people seeking abortion:
And in fact there is a concerted, coordinated effort underway right now by the forced-birth legions and their enablers. They’re determined to convince Americans that what is being done to people who become pregnant is no big deal, nothing they should concern themselves with—because, really, nothing much has changed.
As reported by Kiera Butler and Maddie Oatman for Mother Jones:
As Butler and Oatman explain, this wholly false post, which quickly went viral on Instagram and TikTok, “gave the impression of offering a clear path forward,” cynically reassuring thousands of viewers that their lives, should they suffer an unfortunate, life-threatening pregnancy, would not be at risk.
But the post was an intentional lie, knowingly dispensed on social media by the same people who promoted the legislation in the first place.
Other anti-choice groups, such as the Austin, Texas-based Live Action, have deliberately spread disinformation minimizing the devastating impact these laws will have on people needing treatment for miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies. They do so even as it was reported that an Austin pharmacy had advised OB-GYNs in that state that it would no longer fill prescriptions for methotrexate, the only non-surgical treatment for ectopic pregnancies—as well as the only reliably effective drug against the many autoimmune disorders, such as rheumatoid arthritis, for which it is widely prescribed.
Again, the point is to instill a sense of calm, a false reassurance: “Yes, we have taken away a basic right from you, but it really isn’t as bad as you’ve heard.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, some of the biggest purveyors of disinformation regarding the actual effect of these laws are the same people who spread conspiracy theories and lies about the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines. These include self-made “social media” stars operating in tandem with QAnon conspiracists, for them, spreading abortion disinformation is only a small shift from their vaccine lies.
One prominent anti-vaxxer “personality” suggested that the Supreme Court overruled Roe to “cover up” the declining birthrate allegedly caused by COVID-19 vaccines. Others, such as anti-vaxxer Naomi Wolf, have equated the passage of such laws with a twisted sense of feminist “empowerment”: “An American woman does have choices and powers she did not have in 1973,” she writes. “She can buy contraceptives.”
Of course, as Butler and Oatman point out, the same groups that have now effectively outlawed abortion in several states are also targeting hormonal birth control such as Plan B, analogizing its use to abortion. And as Daily Kos’ Joan McCarter wrote Thursday, nearly 200 House Republicans voted against protecting access to contraception.
The callous disregard of those capable of getting pregnant, and their forced regression to a status of mere reproductive vessels, is probably best illustrated in these anti-abortion groups’ rationale for opposing the termination of pregnancies in the event of severe fetal birth defects. Mother Jones:
All of these distortions and rationalizations, whether delivered by cynical Republican politicians, so-called “pro-life” tyrants on the misogynistic Christian right, or by self-promoting “internet doctors” seeking to monetize their social media presence, all share a common assumption: They expect that everyone who can become pregnant will slowly, gradually begin to accept their inevitable status as second-class human beings.; that they will eventually acknowledge this grotesque intrusion on their autonomy as something ordinary; and most crucially, that they will stop their efforts to codify the right to abortion care.
Leaving the gross audacity of that assumption aside, history does suggest that they are wrong. Whether it’s a matter of a Republican legislator’s daughter found face down and dead in a hotel after a botched abortion; whether it’s one of those young, idealistic right-wing women who claim to be part of the “Post-Roe” generation being denied the procedure she desperately sought after fleeing the blows from her boyfriend’s Christian fists; or whether it’s a corporate CEO caught ordering mifepristone online for his mistress, one thing is certain: The horror stories from these horrific laws are going to keep coming, and coming, and coming.
Yet we must never accept them as normal.
These 15 abortion funds are providing financial and practical support to people seeking abortion care in hostile states. Each abortion fund listed works in their communities to remove barriers to abortion access. Please chip in to support their work … and fight back.