Walk for Life vs. Roe v. Wade birthday party: Abortion showdown SF
By now the crowd had to swelled to about 1,000, and everyone, including me, was waiting around for the main event, a “flash mob”-style dance performance organized by Code Pink and Eve “Vagina Monologues” Ensler’s One Billion Rising organization, among several other feminist and left-wing groups.
The whole point behind “flash mobs” is that they are supposed to happen “spontaneously,” or at least “pseudo-spontaneously,” in which several hundred people surreptitiously gather in some crowded downtown location and suddenly erupt into coordinated dancing or whatever, to the utter astonishment of all the shocked squares around them. In fact, “shocking the squares” is the only reason why any flash mob exists; there’d be no point in organizing a flash mob in the middle of nowhere with no oblivious witnesses around to observe it.
Similarly, there’d be no point in publicly pre-announcing a flash mob and then performing exclusively for people who know about it ahead of time, all of whom showed up specifically to watch the “show.” That’s not spontaneous, and no one is surprised. But that’s exactly what happened at the Embarcadero: The speakers kept announcing, “The surprise performance will be happening soon! Get ready!” To which the audience would cheer, “Yay, the flash mob! This is gonna be great!” Talk about defeating the purpose.
Further solidifying the artificial feel to the whole thing was the presence of several professional film crews hired by One Billion Rising to create a “professionally filmed street performance” which they will later release as a “viral video” to “the media.” Ever get the feeling you’re being manipulated?
The professional still photographers set up ladders around the performance space to spontaneously document all the organic unexpected happenings.
Costumed professional dance troupes hired by Code Pink waited in the wings for the signal to spontaneously appear.
The video camera operators got into position and the moment had arrived: Time to unleash the taiko drums, announcing the start of the unexpected flash mob!
First up was a large group of teenage girls and young women doing various sexualized gyrations. This seemed like a self-conscious attempt by the organizers to bring back the glory days of the 1960s when the presence of countless “open-minded” girls in the counter-culture made it so appealing to the nation’s boys that it grew into a mass movement and created a social revolution.
The gyrations were interspersed with somber ritual movements focusing on individual dancers holding those paper bags with tragic (but irrelevant) statistics like “Every 9 seconds in the US a woman is battered – My BODY is HOLY.”
Unexpectedly, this was spontaneously followed by a series of ethnic dance troupes, such as this belly dance covey. Note the two camera crews who by sheer chance just happened to be standing right where the dancers materialized!
Then the hormone-powered Estrogen Dancers were brought back to do the Never Again Samba.
Next, about 500 “community dancers” (i.e. random people who signed up ahead of time) did the “Abortion on Demand & Without Apology Polka.”
It was right around here that the absurdity and grotesquerie of what I was witnessing really began to sink in. Whatever side of the issue you’re on, abortion is a very serious and heart-rending subject, and to “celebrate” the 40th anniversary of legalized abortion with joyous dances suddenly seemed like the height of poor taste.
The performance was concluded by some weird culty-looking group doing strange prayers in a circle.
Then they sang a dreary song while their desperate eyes pleaded “Help me! I’m trapped in a cult!”
As the performances were wrapping up, the more hardcore pro-abortion groups started handing out these flyers, encouraging everyone to go confront the Walk for Life directly.
I thought the flyers were a bit unnecessary, because wasn’t this whole dance performance thing just a prelude to the big looming confrontatition against the pro-life march, which was due to show up any minute? Isn’t that the real reason why we’re all here?
But no! I was shocked to watch as, after the final cult prayer, everyone just got up and started wandering off home. The organizers had gathered 1,000 activists together and filled them with righteous pro-choice energy, and rather than using that energy to perhaps win some converts from the pro-life side or at least neutralize the opposing protest, instead the event was called to an end and everyone was dismissed, completely dissipating the energy and losing a huge opportunity.
It dawned on me that the pro-choice side had no interest in confronting the pro-life side — in fact, they wanted to do everything they could to avoid the pro-life side, because the wishy-washy left does not like to have its narratives challenged. We all knew from previous Walks for Life, in which the two sides did come into direct contact, that the pro-choice side came off looking mean-spirited and frivolous, while the pro-life side didn’t conform to stereotypes and instead were silent, high-minded and powerful seeming. Also despite the overly optimistic titles like “One Billion Rising,” the pro-choice side probably knew they were going to be badly outnumbered, so they instead chose to skip town before any direct head-count comparisons could be made. But by fleeing, the pro-choicers just ended up seeming narcissistic and risk-avoidant.
The political cowardice of the wishy-washy feminist left also seemed to infuriate the more in-your-face pro-abortion groups in attendance, and as the crowd drifted away the hardcore abortion advocates used loudspeakers to beg everyone to join them in a counter-march against the Walk For Life, which I was surprised to learn was not even going to arrive at the Embarcadero for another two hours at least, after which all the pro-choicers would be long gone.
Not many people heeded the pro-abortionists’ summons, but I decided to hook up with them since I was heading over to document the Walk for Life anyway. Might as well have an escort.
It’s a sad, sad protest group that has to fake a flash mob and astro-turf a flashmob “audience”.
Actually, about 2/3s of the “audience” were themselves people who had signed up to perform in the flash mob. There were only a couple hundred people there who weren’t somehow involved as performers, cameramen, or presenters. It was more like a film set than a political protest.
Isaiah 5:20
Woe to those who call evil good
and good evil,
who put darkness for light
and light for darkness,
who put bitter for sweet
and sweet for bitter.
To call abortion a holocaust does not trivialize the Holocaust – it trivializes abortion.
thank you for so carefully documenting a near-unimaginable day in a far- away city.
the photo of the crayons and the baby feet- I’m in tears. You have to buy those crayons for kindergarten and for first grade. Putting that child’s foot near what it will never get to be a part of…..that that day could be so close- four years, five years- and it never gets that chance….
Margaret Sanger started as a wife of four of a wealthy architect. She wanted an open marriage. She decided birth control was what made it possible to hide the evidence of infidelity. There are diaries of bohemian New Yorkers mentioning her talks- she was pretty, but empty-headed. She learned- she left her husband, and she grew more extremist and vile. She also became an alcoholic.
What’s frightening was when I tried to back up that research- it really didn’t match the saintly nurse-advocate for poor immigrants. She lied about being a nurse, for one. She shadowed a public health nurse for a few weeks. She never disciplined herself to learn nursing, and never really cared for anyone in a professional capacity.
And for two, even today, swingers have debates about hiding the evidence- birth control, abortion, adoption, living with the random by-blow. It’s still going on- hiding the evidence, or dealing with detachment with a child. Nobody ever talks about loving the child, or being happy that there’s an addition to their family. It sounds like divorced people bickering over custody, rather than a “Honey, I’m pregnant- you’re going to be a Daddy!” joyous moment. It’s a theft of true joy, a stealing of souls. It’s heartbreaking, that they cannot even imagine joy.
Simone de Beauvoir wrote out The Second Sex. She was trained in philosophy by a communist professor. Her take on feminine existentialism is that a woman is either an object- an object of any man at all- or a subject- who has grasped subjectiveness by killing someone. The easiest to hand was a fetus, preferably by a man the woman did not love or respect. The next choice was a favored lover’s other woman. She wrote tons of books like this. Most were never translated. The corollary to The Stranger, where a man kills a random man, is her books, where a woman has an abortion, or kills another woman- but not at random.
Patrick O’Brien, of the Master and Commander books translated some of her books into English. Kate Millet, while in graduate school, brought SdBeauvoir to America, to “lay her hands” as it were, on the sixties femininist movement. This is when it went from an American oddity- extending the vote, changing banking laws- to the murderous, grotesque tradedy you’ve documented here, today.
I agree with you–especially about the stealing of souls.
This guy writes:
The left’s ultimate purpose for making abortion legal is to facilitate promiscuity so as to destroy sexual fidelity and along with it the sanctity of the nuclear family, paving the way for socialist revolution.
Well, somebody some place may support legal abortion to pave the way for socialist revolution; but that hardly implies that the majority of supporters of legal abortion have such a motive. If you read the Communist Manifesto, you’ll find that Marx and Engels made some specific demands. They didn’t call for the legalization of abortion, but they did call for universal public education. Does this mean that modern supporters of universal public education are secret Reds?
Actually, this author’s version of the left sounds decidedly quaint. You can find rhetoric about sexual liberation and Marxist revolution in the ’30s or sexual liberation and utopian politics in the ’60s. These days, not so much.
One of the funny things about the politics of sex in the U.S. is that the regions of the country that most loudly denounce abortion and birth control have higher rates of unmarried pregnancy and divorce than the blue states. The daughters of the virtuous South swear purity oaths and get knocked up. The daughters of the evil coasts don’t foreswear sex but they don’t get knocked up either because they want to go to college, have a career, and get married when they are sure they’ve found the right partner. Modern urban mores put a huge value on the family and, for that matter, fidelity. What gets inaccurately identified as some leftist version of free love is really just a different ideal of family life, more egalitarian and less patriarchal but no less strong. Or so the divorce statistics indicate.
If you’re going to quote that sentence, please quote the whole paragraph from which it was taken:
Have you read The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State and any number of other communist treatises which unambiguously call for the dismantlement of the nuclear family through the “normalization of free love”? Just because you yourself (and the average person) is unaware that this has been a key element in the path to total communism doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.
Many of the tropes the Left believe are leftovers from 19th century writings, and most people don’t even know the origins of their attitudes or why they even are following them.
Also, your stats about who gets knocked up more are incorrect. So, girls in big cities on the coasts don’t get knocked up? Fascinating.
Yep, I’ve read Engels on the family—I’ve read most of what Marx and Engels wrote because long ago I was in the intellectual history business. Why is the opinion of a 19th Century radical particularly relevant? For that matter, I could have sworn that communism wasn’t doing so hot lately. Anyhow, I think would think the writings of Margret Sanger or any number of American feminists would be more to the point. At least you’d be on the right continent.
I guess you could claim that 19th Century radicalism was part of a larger trend towards different sexual mores. Or are you really selling the notion that a powerful underground conspiracy with a unitary, unchanging ideology is calling the shots? Rubbish.
… and everything he writes, says or does in one word
“rubbish”
“selling the notion that a powerful underground conspiracy with a unitary, unchanging ideology is calling the shots”??? Wow, does that put the red in red herring. One might think the only Marxists/communists involved with any of these things are the little, useless fringe parties with their book tables. I have noticed, though, that there’s a kind of romance to communism, whether it’s Spanish Civil War/Abraham Lincoln Brigade nostalgia or the ever-present Che apparel.
At one of the women’s open mics I play from time to time, someone had the bright idea, shortly before the recent election, to play a song from the Henry Wallace presidential campaign. This prompted the two featured performers, who have names in the “women’s music” scene, to tout their bona fides so as not to be left out: having sung such songs at communist summer camps in New York.
I once wore my Conservative Shirts “Commies Aren’t Cool” long-sleeve with the iconic Che picture in a universal “No” sign to an event at Dolores Park Zombie really hasn’t had call to cover. Someone accosted me defensively, asking me to show some respect because some of the organizers were communists. I replied that this was not to their credit.
Who needs some international conspiracy to call the shots when there are more than enough useful idiots out there volunteering?
Jim- why were those books even there, then?
“Why is the opinion of a 19th Century radical particularly relevant?”
It’s not particularly relevant to the intellectual footsoldiers or the average Leftist alliance member. Some things are only held in the heads of the leaders, in order to pass results for people to understand only afterwards.
The real question is whether you are a leader of the LEft or merely one of the followers. The context of the issue and what is or isn’t important, changes dramatically based upon the status of the people involved.
Don’t you know that “ancient” stuff is VERY relevant . . . unless it’s not . . . like the Constitution . . . (sigh and double face palm)
“If you’re going to quote that sentence, please quote the whole paragraph from which it was taken:”
I’m not really sure that’s necessary. The whole paragraph includes a description of Engel’s views. The part as quoted (“The left’s ultimate purpose for making abortion legal is to facilitate promiscuity so as to destroy sexual fidelity and along with it the sanctity of the nuclear family, paving the way for socialist revolution. ) implies, intentionally or not, that those are YOUR beliefs about “the left”. So I ask, what on earth is “the left” here, besides a hilarious straw man you’ve constructed? Is anyone that’s pro-choice a member of this nefarious “the left”? If so, I guess I’m a member of it since I believe the government’s got no business being in this fight.
I frequently enjoy your views, and still enjoy your mocking of the loons on both far ends of the spectrum, but come on, that line is illuminati-conspiracy level kookiness. Are you truly suggesting “the left” (again, what exactly you’re intending that to mean in this situation, I have no idea) is part of some sinister plot to promote abortions in order to institute some socialist regime? I mean, why not toss some sharia law references in there, because that’s a level of nuttiness that even Limbaugh or the kooks at Red State wouldn’t descend to.
If what you’re really trying to say is that “this is one of the origins of some pro-choice views”, (key word here being ORIGINS) then I think you need to make that a little clearer. The way it’s written now, it sounds like you’re really buying into the idea of some ongoing conspiracy.
I never implied there was a “conspiracy” — that itself is strawman argument, labeling me as jousting against imagined opponents.
The ongoing long continuation of an ideology is not a “conspiracy,” it’s just a “sticky idea” that gets passed on and on from one generation to the next because it contains some appeal. The existence of communist ideology extending into modern mores is no more a “conspiracy” than saying that Christian values extend into our modern mores from a different direction. But at least Christians frankly admit that their ideology substantially derives from a book, the Bible, while “the left” as I put it does indeed try to deny that there are any written documents from long ago which started the ball rolling of their worldview. They deny it so vigorously (especially since the ’50s) that by now most of the people who hew to the ideology (or some mutated form of it) do not even know where it came from or why certain beliefs are sacrosanct.
(I have resorted to using the generic term “the left” not to identify some vague group of conspirators but rather because the moment one uses any specific term, those on “the left” jump down your throat for getting the descriptor wrong. I only use “progressive,” “communist,” “socialist,” “Democrat,” or whatever when the party involved is indisputably a member of those groups. If the person (or type of person) is just some unidentified Central Casting “moonbat” [as people used to call them for a while] then I just give up and say “leftist” because anything more specific will be dissected.)
That that bookstand was there and was tolerated, I’m sure was most of Zombie’s point, at least as I understood it.
The Leftist alliance is a coalition of the power mad, with sometimes mutually exclusive ideological and political beliefs. Anti gay inner blacks vs pro homosexual gay activists, all in the same organization, working together, but not for the same goals, just for the same power.
One of the ways the Leftist alliance filters out members is through a method similar to cults. Specific language codes must be obeyed, or people get ejected from the Left for being a heretic. Juan Williams, Democrats like Zell Miller, and various other examples exist and continue to exist.
People are part of this organization even if they don’t support it, similar to how merchants must pay the protection tax whether they want to be part of the mafia or not. Americans are involved in their foreign policy wars, whether they support the policy or not. The same is true of Leftist goals and methods.
At the very least, there was Operation Outstretched Hand, in which Communists infiltrated various Christian denominations in the 1930s and ’40s, reaching influential positions in the 1950s and ’60s, where they influenced future seminarians and wreaked havoc. The goal was to replace traditional Christian ideas with ones that would promote the breakdown of the American family, like normalization of homosexual behavior, easy divorce, contraceptives, abortion etc. Bella Dodd alone claimed to have recruited 1100 Communist men to enter the Catholic priesthood in America. (most were homosexual of course, since celibacy is required of Catholic priests. Now the abuse scandals make a little more sense, huh?) It’s quite possible and really kind of probable that this would continue for quite some time and that some serious effort would have to be made to rid a denomination of this influence. BXVI has been doing a fairly good job of it, I think. The Anglican Church is probably fatally wounded and some of the other mainstream Protestant churches. Evangelicals look like they’re in good shape though.
Gah!
Would you mind pointing me towards research/ resources on this?
I think it will answer some questions I’ve got. I’m ELCA, and i have to say, half the time the pastors are amazing, half the time they are getting up about light-bulbs and composting. And, seriously, two years of corporate prayers for the soul of Dr Tiller- as in, how could that happen to such a nice,good man- is two years too many. And, that whole gay priests being allowed, as of two years ago. It was a 49.5/51.5 vote. They usually table votes that are that close, in the name of harmony and further dialogue. What happened, that made this one so important?
I’m not finding much. Bella Dodd wrote a book, available online, Romerstein’s “Venona” book makes small references to it. I’m actively looking for more but for now am reading “Witness” for background, after that probably Gramsci. (I get the sneaking feeling that “AA-1025″ is an SSPX propaganda tract so I don’t have much confidence in it.)
Bits of Manning Johnson’s congressional testimony is here, have not checked validity if this website but there’s some NWO stuff before Johnson’s testimony..
They were trying to copy their betters, on universal education. protestants- Lutherans, who trained the Scottish Presbyterian ministers, among others- argued for literacy so that regular people could read their bibles, and decide for themselves. Gutenberg’s first books were Bibles, not as decorative objects, but as “change the equation” creative objects. It takes about 25 years to get to more than half the population literate, and in the habits of literacy- questioning, proofing, creating different stories. With literacy and the bible’s insistence that everyone is created in the image of God- you’ve got a revolution on your hands. America, in 1776, was the largest concentration of literate human beings at any one place, at any one time, to that point. You can still hear English kings’ opinions on Scottish presbyters (they don’t like them) and Lutheran ministers (they don’t like them) and Americans (they don’t like them).
Marx was trying to get the literacy without the Bible, to get a revolution started that he could control. He wanted the God-spot, or he thought the State should have the God-spot. You think Lenin in wax, on display, is a show of reason, or faith? Most Christian churches just have a fingernail, or a bone fragment, or a splinter of wood. Communist Russia keeps the whole guy. Evita Peron is floating around, waxed up, too. So it’s not just one place with completion fetishes.
Lee Kwan Yew is trying to keep Singapore literate, and more or less unchurched. He’s talked about how revolutionary the idea of “imago Dei” is to traditional societies. It’s why you can get shot in the street in North Korea, even now.
Oddly enough, another guy tried it in South America- literacy without the Bible- and, well, Cuba: sons of his employees, attendees of his schools- now run the place.
You write “he [Marx] thought the State should have the God-spot.” Marx was as much in favor of the withering away of the state as any libertarian—that’s one of the many reasons I’m neither a Marxist or a libertarian.
You’re quite right that the Protestant church made the initial call for universal literacy, though the first state with near-universal literacy was Lutheran Sweden, not the colonies. The thing about church-sponsored literacy, though, is that it is a rather qualified endorsement of education. The church wanted people to be able to read the Bible. The ministers certainly didn’t want them to start reading other things or start thing outside the faith. The cultural right in the U.S. duplicates this attitude. Hence the endlessly repeated bit about how colleges brain wash kids when the real complaint is that higher education doesn’t brain wash ‘em. It exposes them to all sort of ideas, left, right, and center, which no doubt has its good side and its bad side. Free thinking is sometimes dangerous and usually mediocre. Well, as with so many other things in life, you pays your money and you takes your chance.
Dude, the ministers were the ones teaching reading and literacy to the population in Sweden. That’s how they made their living. They didn’t really expect people to be at church every last Sunday of every week. They still don’t.
The Calvinists were more absolutist about what was right and true, and what was not. Calvin ran his little Swiss region as a theocracy- even murdering people. That’s not the Lutheran/ Presbyterian/Baptist axis of opinion. That’s part of the whole “can we please separate church and state?” And, well, they were in Europe- that whole “freedom” thing was, and is, a lot of theory, not so much practice.
Since Gutenberg and his affiliates went on to print all sorts of everything- tracts on mining, farming, sheep-breeding, true crime stuff, indian adventures- then greek philosophers- math- and on and on- I’m thinking it’s about like the internet- DARPA needed a robust communications network, and then it got used to build Pinterest, PJMedia, and cat videos- all free-speech sort of things that cross-pollinate.
Leftists, they suck at teaching reading. “whole word” anyone? “social promotion”? Detroit, New Orleans? There’s a serious essay asking if “whole word” “progressive” education blighted the base of daily newspaper readers in Boston- the lower-class sorts can’t read anymore. I see it in Texas- the Sunday School teachers who teach in public school run a rigorous phonics program. Kids read by the end of first grade- anything they can get their hands on, while kids transfer in from “progressive” California cities- and they can’t read even in second grade. There’s a NYTimes piece about a Hollywood public school that doesn’t expect kids to read by fourth grade. Detroit- their school superintendent is barely functionally literate.
For that matter, geography- that got canned as “not femininist”- somehow. That’s picture literacy- and progressives can’t even manage “picture literate.” That’s messed up.
Dewey wanted public education for raising plebeians.
And, yes, my kids are in public school, but it’s a conservative region, so teachers are usually competent.
and most historians I’ve read said that colonial America had the most literate population of any population, to that time. they could read, write, send letters, write newspapers, preach, discuss, debate, decide, coordinate, plan, change, negotiate, write laws, write constitutions, write battle plans.
“Hence the endlessly repeated bit about how colleges brain wash kids when the real complaint is that higher education doesn’t brain wash ‘em.”
No matter how many documented cases of propagandizing, indoctrination, and the forceful suppression of politically incorrect speech, comrade Jim will continue to deny the truth, sounding ever more like Baghdad Bob.
“They didn’t call for the legalization of abortion, but they did call for universal public education. Does this mean that modern supporters of universal public education are secret Reds?” Maybe not, but the first nation to legalize abortion was the newly established, Marxist, USSR in 1921. And universal public education guarantees what? A steady supply of rationalityhating, semi-literate leftists.
Jim, I suspect you know this already but just want to support your point of view. The divorce rate is higher in the south because more people get married.
The Census Bureau explained the statistics:
“Divorce rates tend to be higher in the South because marriage rates are also higher in the South,” said Diana Elliott, a family demographer at the Census Bureau. “In contrast, in the Northeast, first marriages tend to be delayed and the marriage rates are lower, meaning there are also fewer divorces.”
source: http://ozconservative.blogspot.com/2011/09/do-liberal-states-in-us-really-have.html
So you guys shack up instead of getting married. Any idea how well those relationships do?
BTW, most divorced males in my state respond they were happier when they were married.
more people break lose Timex watches, than lose Rolexes, right?
Marriage is a luxury state in the North- you’ve got to have it made, to get married.
In the south, you’ve got teenagers gambling it will all turn out okay. Toby Keith married his high-school sweetheart. The owner of Hobby Lobby got married at 19, to a 17 year old girl. They gamble, they win sometimes.
Joe Namath has thrown many more interceptions than I ever did.
Does that mean I’m a better quarterback?
No, it means that I’ve never played football.
Not a fair comparison. If there were more southern women up north, we’d marry them, too.
I like those numbers.
You’ll never admit it, Jimbo – you are too sick and twisted a puppy to do speak the truth – but those grainy black and white images of fetuses with little hands and little feet and little hearts caught mid-beat are working.
The totals were 50,000 to 1,000, not merely 5,000 to 1,000 as your user name says.
I misread.
5 to 1 is nice.
50 to 1 is even better.
Gotta love those ultrasound machines.
Please don’t waste your time and energy on the likes of Jim Harrishmuck a.k.a. Jim Hitlerson. He has venomous opinions on every topic, even ones he knows nothing about. He is simply too ignorant to understand how ignorant he is. However, he thinks he knows everything about everything and thinks he has the solution to all of the world’s problems. The guy is what Thomas Sowell might call a self-anointed messiah. He believes that civilized and successful people and countries are intrinsically evil and he has a vicious hatred of Jews and of Israel. His posts are often incoherent ramblings. He evades questions, he tells outright lies and he throws tantrums. Please don’t waste your time and energy on this immature, malignant, narcissistic, attention-starved, anti-Semitic demagogue.
Everybody, please check out post number 24 at the following link: http://pjmedia.com/blog/who-is-john-kerry-trying-to-kid/ .
I read a recent poll (WSJ/Times I think) which indicated that a majority of Americans now support abortion rights. Perhaps the wording of the questions needs to be looked at because your photo essay/report seems to show a great deal of pro-life sentiment remains. I’m curious, did you get the feel that the pro-lifers were shipped in from out of state or were they local?
They were from all around the Bay Area and northern California. Not from “out of state,” but mostly not from San Francisco itself either. Let’s just say “from the greater San Francisco Bay Area” for the most part. Though I did see a couple groups from southern California as well.
Day by day, ultrasound by ultrasound, your side is losing sympathy, and ground.
Planned Parenthood is changing its tactics. They don’t like the word “Choice” anymore
Too many people know that the Choice Planned Parenthood wants you to make, because they make oodles and oodles of money off of the deadly trade, is to murder a living human being inside of yourself.
If you are in fact Pro-Life, your comment and question obscures this fact.
If that is the case, I apologize for a potentially incorrect inference.
I was just asking a question and didn’t feel the need to identify myself. I was hoping maybe the poll was wrong.
I am, in fact, very pro-life.
Good reporting, Zombie.
if forced to declare sides I’d have to say [most likely to everyone's surprise] that I’m pro-choice.
Do you mean that you think it is a bad idea to send women to jail if they have an abortion or do you mean that Roe v. Wade should never be overturned?
Never mind, I went back and read some more of the text. You don’t think that much different than me and I consider myself pro life.
Like I say, I’m kinda right on the cusp, in the middle, which usually is enough to get everyone on both sides mad at me.
If you’re getting both sides pissed off at you, then you’re doing something right. I’ve been doing that for ages. Conservatives think I’m a red commie because I’m not religious enough, Progressives think I’m a bigoted theocrat because I’m against unlimited handouts and also against “protected identity group” status for all.
I’m not even anywhere within the ionosphere of either of those.
My primary feeling on the abortion issue is pretty much always going to be this : Stop making everybody else pay for it (ESPECIALLY those of us who are asexual or celebate).
The middle is where most Americans are, it’s just that propaganda in academia, popular culture and, especially, the old media, along with a really bad court decision keeps their views from being realized.
Interestingly enough, I’m effectively pro-life for pretty much the same reasons. I just decided to err on the side of caution. I figure it is better to protect something that may not yet be human, than dispose of something that may already be.
On that note, I’m given to understand that the fetus starts showing responses to stimuli as early as 2 months.
On the subject of what to do about abortion, I’ve come to the conclusion that banning it is not going to be effective in reducing it. Rather, we should target the hook-up culture, and promote marriage and fidelity.
I also know that my opinion is just my personal opinion and nothing more, and shouldn’t be forced on the nation at large.
Either abortion is murder, or it isn’t. Either a fetus is a person, a child, or it isn’t. If it isn’t, however, than by what right is anybody a person?
I recommend the various podcasts on the topic at Issues, Etc (a Lutheran Radio show): http://issuesetc.org/archive for last week, especially the interview with Dr. Burnell Eckardt Jr. of Gottesdienst (http://issuesetc.org/2013/01/21/3-abortion-and-infanticide-dr-burnell-eckardt-12113/). He makes a very good point that if you allow abortion on demand, then you have no moral standing to forbid infanticide and euthanasia.
Wrong. Go back and read what Zombie said about personhood and the commencement of brain activity, beginning of second trimester. I’m partial to that definition, too. One could go further and posit personhood at the point of capability of self-sustaining existence outside the womb, but after one trimester tracks with the time during which nearly all spontaneous abortions/miscarriages occur … and they occur in one pregnancy out of three.
I’m not sure you want to open up the can of worms of abortion in the case of a pregnancy caused by rape. Murder? Or self-defense against the ultimate home invasion?
I think Zombie is very brave for being so candid with her thoughts on the subject and her reasoning for them. It is obvious from both her dialog with her own conscience *and* this piece of reporting that she has a conscience.
I’m pro-Zombie, and I vote.
You have a religious standard that is a new DNA and a secular standard that is a heartbeat or active brain. The secular standard is based on history and tradition and must be consistent or no one has equality under the law.
The religious standard should not be discounted as we are all going to have to account to God, but secular (state) policy should be based on secular standards.
Zombie ranks up there with the true legends in exposing vulgarity and moral bankruptcy in some corners of the political debate. Zombie exposes with a camera the sort of thing Solzhenitsyn exposed with a pen. PJ Media is really blessed to have this moving photo essay that softens the heart.
I agree. He is a fantastic guerrilla journalist.
I completely agree.
And I thought Zombie was she?
I agree wholeheartedly. It is a staggering indictment of our ‘mainstream’ media that Zombie has acquired dozens of detailed records of these political demonstrations in the Bay area, while the supposed journalists extract tiny snippets and pretend that their publication – reinforced by the journalists’ opinions – is sufficient to fully inform the public.
Yes, Zombie is an excellent journalist. He’s so much better than those Pullitzer Prize winners at the New York Times.
I too agree. He or she, Zombie deserves our heartfelt thanks.
Regarding your game theory scenario, I can save you some time by giving you the answer right now:
The whole country winds up Mormon.
Strange, considering how that wasn’t even one of the parameters.
This isn’t intended as an insult to Mormons, btw. It’s just an observation that they tend to multiply rather abundantly.
It’s a pretty small church starting out though, and traditional Catholics are outbreeding progressive ones. I wonder what it would look like if you counted the two wings of Catholicism differently?
You can come down anywhere on the legality of abortion and still recognize that Roe v. Wade was a dog’s breakfast of jurisprudence. It deserves to be overturned as a rebuke to the Court’s “emanations and penumbras” nonsense, even if there were no other reason.
One of the judges in Roe v Wade just went with the decision that he thought would save his daughter from legal prosecution and other problems.
The entirety of this country was built upon personal interest. It was just that some people’s interests were in patriotism and honor, and others were in theft and massacre.
Zombie, your proposed simulation was already been run; two thousand years ago in the pagan Roman world. Here is a short essay on the topic. Author: Emmet Scott, Title: The Role of Infanticide and Abortion in Pagan Rome’s Decline.
http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/123665/sec_id/123665
The author is an historian and the focus of the essay is the population decline that took place in the first few centuries AD in the Roman Empire. I think you’ll find interesting his observations about how the Jewish and Christian rejections of these pagan practices played out in the population demographics of that time.
Thanks for the insight. I’ll read the link when I get the time.
Thanks.
Also, that’s an actual, real, open discussion in progressive chats. They bandy numbers like 80-85% of children in conservative families remain that way- close to their family, conservative in outlook. Conservatives also tend to have more children. Liberals do not wish to waste money raising children- but they do want to indoctrinate them. So they encourage each other to become teachers. The debate is-which type of teacher is more effective- elementary, middle-school, high-school, college.
The most chilling discussion I’ve ever read was that there was a group of teachers that had an interest in pedophilia. So they sent a member to pick out vulnerable youngsters in lower grades- they began grooming the children- and then preyed on them in high school, and then college. What was most chilling wasn’t the up-front description of this- it had happened in the 1900′s- but that the discussion was how to replicate it with ideology.
I can’t back-track it, I think it was erased. I hope it was. It was when I was in a rage when a fourth grade teacher used high-school sex ed material in her class. She was removed, the principal and assistant principal were removed as well- but still…..damage done.I was trying to figure out what happened.
Thank you, brave Zombie, for your essays and photographs.
Sorry, bad grammar.
Thank you, WildIris, for such an interesting link.
You said, “Many pro-lifers declare that even a single-cell fertilized egg is already a fully fledged human being with all human rights, and want no exceptions for rape, incest or anything else.”
A “single-cell” fertilized egg contains the complete genetic makeup of the person that will grow from it; in that sense, it is an individual. There is some point at which a fetus becomes a person, and I don’t know of any discrete event, other than conception that marks the creation of a new human being. I can’t say if they are a person or not, but, considering that the designation is literally a matter of life or death, I would tend to err on the conservative side.
I am puzzled by the arguments that a fetus at any stage is not a person, considering that after conception, the distinction is purely one of degree. You use the criterion that the baby becomes human when brain activity is detectable. But even this event is subject to ambiguity. Depending on the instrumentation used, the time period that brain activity can be detected can vary. When more sensitive instrumentation is developed, will an abortion that was legal now be illegal?
I don’t intend to be contrary in any of this, but only to point out that criteria that may seem to be singular may not necessarily be.
It is another of the abortion lobby’s perennial problems that the science is pro-life. The Left always tries to portray Conservatives as red-necked Luddites, but on two of their favorites issues- at least two-, the beginnings of life and climate, all the real science is on the other side.
On this one in particular, life begins at conception. All the genes are in place, there is a unique human life in existence, which if all goes well, will be the same genetically at 90 that he was at conception. At what point does he become a person? Who is fit to define “person”? God, certainly, if we believe in him. We Christians celebrate the Incarnation, Emmanuel, “God is with us”, beginning with the Annunciation. We thrill with the Baptist in the womb at Mary’s visit to Elizabeth, with a Savior in the Womb. Without belief in a Christian God? The State, according to its interests? The mother?
If we arrived on another planet, and there was any doubt whether some bunch of local fuzzies was intelligent, self-aware, what would our rules be? We know what that newly conceived, living creature in a woman’s belly is. Shouldn’t he get the benefit of the doubt, too; and if not immediately, then you’re right, the line should be drawn as much in his favor as possible.
Thanks Zombie. Make we wish I would have participated.
Zombie,
If you look back on all the protests you’ve covered, which group (or sub-group) was the most angry and aggressive (barring violence)?
I’d put a few bucks down on Pro-Choice protesters (particularly middle-aged women). Maybe that’s unfair, but it’s the impression I’ve gotten over the years. I have a hard time imagining them ever being happy. But then again, I’ve never been to a church burning.
Actually, the group that was most angry and aggressive were Muslim pro-Palestinian protesters, followed closely by Black Bloc anarchists. Truly bone-chilling in both cases.
The pro-choice protesters may be bitter and twisted, but they’ve got a lot of competition out there in Angryland.
Old, bitter, and twisted is no way to go through life, Son.
You know you should really come out with the Annual Zombie Awards. Such as:
- Best Use of Nudity
- Most Off Topic
- Lifetime Achievement
- Best New Talent
You get the idea. You choose 5 in each category, and let the readers decide.
Please do, Zombie! Open it up to nominations and votes!
Welcome back, Zombie. We’ve missed you. A great photo essay, as usual.
That news of the march seems (on an internet search) to have only made the Catholic press and Yahoo News.
Still, 50,000 people.
The Pro-Life movement is growing in strength.
What is also sad is that it took Roe v. Wade and more recently the move by the Obama administration to force Catholic and Christian colleges, universities and hospitals to go against their stated doctrine and provide birth control to employees to wake the Church and the churches to the fact that the government is not their friend.
Stop the KILLING!
Looks like life to me! : Twins Fighting In Womb Video New MRI Technique Reveals Early Double Trouble (VIDEO) By Ron Dicker
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/30/twins-fighting-in-womb-video_n_2219407.html?ncid=webmail3
All I see in the photos are a herd of Sheepole! Government schools at there very best!
Excellent article. So glad you wrote it, so glad I read it.
Rare Sighting of Sandra Fluke with Her Legs Together
Jun 16, 2011 Produced By: Magdalene John: An abortion survivor, Melissa Ohden shares her remarkable story of survival
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdm-i62hRdc&feature=related
Page one featured a hideous old bat demanding that the world keep inanimate objects out of her private parts when no one this side of a drunken crab louse would get near that thing. Then there was the gay guy named Wiener warming up the crowd before Sandra Fluke offered to pull the train for any and all comers. The topper was a lunatic dressed up as either a part of the female anatomy, a rare rain forest plant or a radish demanding we make love not war. I think I’ll make a sandwich instead.
The crayon is there for size reference. Other photos use coins for the same reason.
They could use value-neutral items, such as a ruler or pencil. The crayon was meant to be a commentary as well as a size comparison.
I am Mr. Amish Beard, and I approve this message. Was I patriarchal enough? Remember, the appropriate term for such glorious facial growth is ‘Abrahamic.’ Lol
Zombie, I want to say three things:
1) Thank you so much for your documentation of the day. Obviously I think this because you painted my side in a decent light (lol). Seriously, I appreciate your fairness in evaluation of what was going on that day. Thanks for coming out.
2) In the interest of answering just one last person’s argument
, I’d like to take you to task on one thing you said:
“Don’t get me wrong: I’d be just as opposed to any law or ruling that banned abortion nationwide as I am opposed to the current ruling which legalizes it nationwide. To me, the content of a law or ruling doesn’t so much matter as the principles under which it is enacted. And in this instance, the legality of abortion one way or the other should be decided for each state by the citizens of that state, and should not be imposed by an all-powerful central government.”
Being something of a paranoid decentralizationist myself (lol), I’d still like to challenge you on this point. I agree with this principle to a significant extent, but I’m timid with it on a few issues. For example, was the amendment to the constitution (which was done, obviously, constitutionally) prohibiting slavery a bad thing? If it is good (and especially if it is necessary to end the unjust practice), would there be any reason to oppose such an amendment in the case of abortion?
Basically, I do think there are SOME issues which must be addressed federally. It just comes back to why one would oppose abortion in the first place. If it is some neural-ensoulment business that gives us societal worth, sure. Just remember that slavery was also justified because they thought the black men didn’t have souls (whatever a soul is in the first place, anyway). I think these matters come down to human rights. Ie. by virtue of being human you have such rights. And I derive this from the (Biblical, even dare I say ‘patriarchal’) fact that the God of the universe dignified the embryo by becoming one in the womb of a poor, unmarried woman who had used the most effective birth control she was aware of. That embryo was God, that embryo was man; that embryo was King Jesus.
3) I don’t know if it’s the ONLY thing this debate is about, but I’ll give a shout out to this:
“In the end, neither side openly acknowledged what I think this battle is actually all about — whether or not we should encourage casual sex so as to undermine the nuclear family, or discourage casual sex to affirm the nuclear family”
I agree they’re related issues. Check out this poster for a good summary of what I would think:
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=452455021487184&set=pb.146273698771986.-2207520000.1359585229&type=3&theater
Peace from Norman, OK,
Josh
P.S. Just remember: Rape and abortion are wrong for the same reason. They are both violent acts of aggression on someone else’s body.
Oh yeah, that’s not even to mention the importance of federal intervention such as whether the NIH should be allowed to legitimately fund research which destroys or maims humans in the process. You know, Nuremburg codes and all that. “No experiment should be conducted where there is a prior reason to believe that death or disabling injury will occur; except, perhaps, in those experiments where the experimental physicians also serve as subjects.”
That happens in America with embryos.
Peace,
In reply to your question:
It’s all about the Constitution.
If America successfully goes through all the steps to make a Constitutional amendment banning abortion, just as it did to make a Constitutional amendment banning slavery, then there’d be nothing left to argue about. We’d have done it the right way. The bar is set so high for a Constitutional amendment for a reason: if you can get basically over 75% of the population to agree on a point, any point, in America, then whatever they agree on is essentially “local community standards” for the entire nation.
I am not opposed to all federal government activity and all centralization in principle: only when it violates the Constitution do I oppose it. If you change the Constitution itself (change it legally and properly, by the overwhelming will of the people, that is), then the nation should and would get exactly what the nation wants.
I am not enough of an ideologue on this issue either way to oppose or complain about a Constitutional amendment banning or allowing abortion.
Souls were not in question when it came to slaves. Everyone was well aware that slaves were people. While there may have been some later attempts at rationalization, overall, the fact that slaves were human beings with souls was never actually in doubt. Weirdly, slavery arose initially out of a humane impulse–that of not killing your enemies women and children.
Here is the problem with abortion. It is not whether we’re dealing with a human or a human in potentia–the destruction of either is not a good thing. It is that this particular genie is out of the bottle. Making it illegal will not stop it–all that would do is drive it back to the much less safe black market.
The way to eliminate abortion is to make conception completely volitional. The question then, of course, is how?
I hate to be completely persnickety, but no, people did not have agreements that everyone has a soul. I hate to say it, but the evidence usually works backwards. We agree that someone has a soul, and then we treat them as if they have a soul, and then their physical appearance changes.
Robotniks? Asimov is trying to be clever, but he borrowed a word for Polish workers.
I’ve read books about serial killers and teen killers, even by secular psychologists, where the diagnosis is that these people do not have souls. These are not people who go to church, where the care and feeding and healthy growth of souls is topic #1, but still…behaviorists have ideas about souls, even if its an absence of light- a privatio bono. The question isn’t ” do they have sick souls? do they believe an alternative morality?” I mean, to me, Columbine was a pretty obvious berserker ritual-
Like, did women have souls? To us, seeing women walk around free, upright, healthy, long-lived, vigorous- this is fairly obvious- of course they have souls. Well, to Athenians- keeping women indoors (no Vitamin D) underfed, overworked, with weak childbirth remedies, and, really, heinous midwifery, short lives, and such- weak, fragile, smelly (fistulas), illiterate, emotional, and so on- that’s not a strong argument. The argument about women being creatures, walkiing incubators, a necessary evil, basically, it had observation on its side. It continued through the middle ages- men had Genius- women had what? Genius is a masculine word.
Did infants have souls? Before christening/blessing/presentation? before being accepted into community? What happens if they die before christening/acknowledgement/ getting painted team zeus/team apollo/team jesus?
Did barbarians?
Did East Asians? They certainly weren’t spouting natural law “obvious” truths- if someone thinks they die and go on to some undifferentiated karmic happiness, or whatever- do they think they have free will, do they sin, are they capable of grace, all that?
Indians, African blacks, Caribbean Islanders? They certainly look different- were they sporting the mark of Cain- which, presumably meant things like issues with having a soul. Caliban- we always dress him up as some hideous monster- while he’s based on Caribbean Indians. He had debates, onstage, if he had a maker and a soul. That wasn’t a frivolous speech, on his part.
Women….people really did not invest in their education until there was a hope that they might last out their late teens/ early twenties. For Europe-that meant nuns. For America, that meant soap and water and not-cities. Then it meant the guy who figured out anesthesia, cesearian sections, fistula operations- which got figured out right before the Civil War- the guy experimented on female slaves, about like we test makeup on rabbits. I am very glad that the best fistula hospital in the world is in Africa. We owe them, bigtime.
It’s not obvious. I’m not Catholic, but I trust them when they talk about souls, more than others, because they’ve been grappling with it for longer than others, and they have proven themselves correct, so far. Mr Instapundit links to stuff about singularity- I’ll believe it when the Pope says a machine has a soul.
OTOH, I attend a congregation that has prayers for Dr Tiller- he was gunned down in the lobby of the church he was a member of good standing with. Nobody in the church heirarchy seems to be saying “hey, maybe we have a problem akin to the drunken, corrupt sons of the high priest, who got killed in front of the altar, as recorded in the old testament.” It gives one pause. I don’t understand it, I don’t know how to talk about it, or change it, or anything.
“Horse Latitudes”: we call the regions in the Atlantic with calms where one might throw ballast overboard as “horse latitudes” not “slave latitudes.” They are the same latitudes.
It’s about like the Disney movie ‘coming home.’ The kids are more upset about losing their dogs and cat, than losing their biological father.
or, say, in the Star Wars universe- Geo Lucas invented clones- who have “genetically” less free will, less culpability, and apparently, no souls. His lowly minions- aka employees- have spent the last few seasons having “rebellious” clone troopers assert that they are individuals with free will, identity, culpability- you know, souls.
Actually, the vast majority of pro-lifers allow for rape/incest/and life or death of the mother. Though, you’re right, most of us count a fertilized egg.
“And you will be hated by all for my name’s sake. But the one who endures to the end will be saved.” – Jesus.
I’m so sick of it. It began 50 years ago. Exactly when, I don’t know. But it was so fashionable to be “free”. Recall that “genius” John Lennon blabbering back in the 60′s about how Christianity is doomed. Well, it’s all developed into sick, sick, sick, sick, fallen, evil people who celebrate a man who murdered over 5,000 children in the form of third trimester “abortions”.
All battles are spiritual. The evil one has never stopped working tirelessly. His soldiers are those around us. They want abortion because they hate God and wish to harm Him by killing the smallest, most helpless of his creation….they want communism because they want to play God….they want to take your guns because it will then be easier to dominate you, pervert your children, and murder you. I’m beginning to hate, and I must not…….
Those who do not hate evil are not on the side of justice. Those who are not angered by the sight of injustices, what is done to others as if it was done to you, does not possess a character of virtue and strength.
What matters is whether one’s methods achieve the goal or whether it furthers more ruin and corruption. What matters is behavior and results, not emotion.
Zombie man, it is a good set of photos. Molte grazie.
Knowing a little bit about free speech activity in all kinds of settings, I can tell you that the WLO World Life Organization method, with the “Hard Truth” images on jumbotron display was a VERY effective free speech operation. You are right that those images are tough to see, but the WLO managed to get them viewed by the exact people who need to see them, the pro-abortion type. A few WLO people got all those pro-abortionists to view it. And they were prepared in Abolitionist t-shirts for one-to-one talk, as well, e.g., the guy with the James Harden-like beard. Plus the “cute girl” speaker.
A very good operation.
Related: the “1/3 of my generation” skeleton signs you thought were effective are simplified drawings of “Hard Truth” images. I like those signs, too.
Also, your view of the race genocide angle is accurate. There is a minister in Milwaukee who also had a radio program, maybe 20 years ago. He referred to the Margaret Sanger operation as the Klan Parenthood. Not sure if he is still on the air, but you could check it out. That is the essential way to view them, Margaret Sanger’s Klan Parenthood.
If you don’t get to see my comments or respond, still, I have to say thanks again. Good work.
You have given us a false analogy with the neo-Nazi booth at a conservative demonstration and the Bolshevik booth at the liberals.
Neo-Nazis are not conservatives. Assuming they have any coherent ideology (a leap), neo-Nazis would have to be socialist, nationalistic fascists. Conservative nationalism is patriotic, but not fascistic. Neither is conservatism racist by nature, although that is the impression the MSM want to give and the impression you leave with your analogy.
Agreed, but it was the “simplest” comparison I could make that would make sense to the average reader. If you can think of a “conservative group” that is so ultra-conservative as be to offensive to everyone, then I’ll change the caption, but I couldn’t think of one off the top of my head.
Anarcho libertarians like Adam kokesh lmao
Plz change I want to see his reaction
Wherever you fall on the abortion debate, I’ve always thought that the best retort to those who describe themselves as “pro-choice” I’ve ever heard was “I am too, but you made the choice when you had consensual sex with inadequate birth control”.
Good report, Zombie (as always),and I’m glad to see you back.
me im pro choice, but the pro choicers here make me sick. seriously, all arrogance no brain. Reproductive choice is a natural right, just as self defense is. but i dont want to pay for their abortion, or their brat. These people are not about control over their bodies, but the advocacy of no responsibility over their own actions. the left continually tell us we have no say in their lives but demand we pay for them. they tell us to mind our own business and proceed to air everything about their private lives. They tell us how much smarter they are than us, and yet they cannot seem to control themselves or their actions. they want a walt whitman life with nerf consequences. sorry that dont fly.
OH and Zombie..good job man! missed ya alwayes like your stuff here.
Hey Zombie,
We see the same sort of lopsided activity in Austin, TX, the “blue pimple on the butt of a red state”. Lots of loud liberals, but then a huge turnout at the Rally for Life: https://picasaweb.google.com/TALCommunications/2012TexasRallyForLife?feat=flashalbum#5703957921671416882
BTW, concerning your inner struggle currently “settled on the compromise that a baby achieves “ensoulment” when its neural system develops to such an extent that brain activity can be detected — somewhere around the fourth month”, this was adjudicated 4 years ago in 2009 by the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. They upheld a North Dakota state law saying “an abortion will terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being”.
http://ndcatholic.org/archives/2009archives/hb1445senate/index.html
Roe v. Wade’s days are numbered. What we’ll have after it is overturned will be a new battleground, where most likely each state will have to discover how it will legislate around this issue.
I personally think the Abortion Issue is the next great civil rights movement, and one day we will lump abortion in with slavery and genocide where it belongs.
–
Q
Or the next Demoncrat President will merely issue an executive order and make law from whole cloth.
Zombie, always love your work, and though I admit I would be greatly conflicted if my daughter was impregnated via rape, I did an about-face on abortion when my pregnant niece was diagnosed with terminal cancer. 30 weeks pregnant, she was given a choice of aborting or foregoing treatment until the baby was viable. The day after diagnosis we went to her OB/Gyn for her ultrasound. She calmly asked the ultrasound tech: “so, if not aborted, what does this fetus become, a dolphin, a kidney, a toaster oven, a kite? It becomes a BABY of course”. That precious baby will be celebrating a 7th birthday soon.
Awesome as always! Funny bit about the vagina costume, but it just makes me crazy that women have gone full circle: from “women are too stupid to vote, they think with their girl parts” to “Woohoo, women vote with their girl parts!” Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton are rolling over in their graves…
I think you’re dead-on about Roe (the decision, of course; both Doe and Roe themselves are pro-life now). I do believe that life begins at conception, but I understand that people aren’t ready for that; the culture itself needs to change, to where abortion clinics just go out of business because everyone recognizes that they’re as self-destructive as “hit you upside the head with a ballpeen hammer” clinics would be. But when one of the most common answers to “why did you have an abortion?” is “I didn’t think I had a choice”, there’s something wrong. When women freak out years later because they see an ultrasound and realize 12-week-old fetuses aren’t just clumps of cells, there’s something wrong. When doctors, hospitals, employers can’t “choose” not to provide abortions or pay for them, there’s something wrong.
And thank you for the Engels quote! I’ve been looking into that kind of stuff lately and was wondering what to read after I finish “Witness”.
I have a biology degree, yet I was totally shocked when I went for my first ultrasound at 6 weeks and saw there was an actual heartbeat. I expected a little lump of cells. Something wrong, indeed.
The Left has a SOP of hijacking popular movements. The leaders of 1st generation feminism woke up one land to discover their movement to be almost wholly populated and led by radical socialists and eugenicists. That was a surprise to them, but they had no military or economic power to over turn it, because their organization had already been corrupted.
I know you have a lot of arguments to be in and a lot of comments to read, Zombie, so I’ll be brief… I wanted to thank you for one of the must succinct and clearheaded descriptions of modern Federalist principles I’ve ever heard. The “laboratory of states” has been, more and more, a lodestar for me in my political thought. You made me immensely happy by articulating my exact thoughts on this application of philosophy.
I do disagree with your personal stance, but the longer I live the more I feel that that’s of no consequence between free people.
The opinions of people on the street or the net would matter not all to me, if it wasn’t for the government backed by the same people pointing a gun at my head telling me to obey or die.
We’ve missed you Zombie. Good to hear from you again
Fightin’ the Left and Doin’ it Right!
You’ve been missing almost three months. I missed you Zombie.
Even zombies need time to inhale now and then.
I’d like to point out that the images and videos of aborted fetuses and embryos are featured on, and, correct me if I’m wrong, Josh Malone, obtained from abortioninstruments.com. The website features The Grantham Collection, a collection of instruments used throughout history for abortion and their functions. WARNING: graphic video content on the first page.
The crayon(s), as someone mentioned already, are not for dramatic purposes, but for size reference; other images and videos use coins for the same reason. I BELIEVE (and I could be wrong) that the videos are done by the doctors and nurses at the clinics. One of the reasons I think these videos are made by the doctors and collected by pro-life activists like the Grantham Collection and the Center for Bioethical Reform is because the Grantham Collection also features videos of abortions in progress, which were certainly created by the clinics and hospitals. (This is sometimes done for training purposes, I believe.) That is all.
Well, you may be right, but it is still very peculiar that of all the objects in the world to use for a size comparison, they’d use a crayon. I mean c’mon, that must have been chosen for its emotional impact. Can you think of any other kind of scientific photograph in which a crayon was used for size comparison? Why not a ruler or a coin, as is standard?
You’re absolutely right about the emotional impact of using a crayon, but is this any worse/more emotional than the pro-choice’s use of impregnation as a result of rape to defend abortion? I can’t imagine that rape accounts for even 1% of the abortions performed, but it is easily one of the most gut-wrenching scenarios (along with the cancer diagnosis case mentioned above) for needing an abortion.
Since we’re on the subject…
you said, “mid-term and late term abortions” when talking about the pictures. I should point out that the little foot next to the crayon, amid what looks like intestines and organs, is not from a mid- or late-term abortion. That’s very early term. An embryo has 90% of the structures of an adult, including the brain, before they leave the embryonic stage (8 weeks). Those body parts are far too small to belong to a mid-term baby. That’s the foot of an early first-trimester fetus or an embryo. You may have already known that, maybe I just misunderstood the sentence.
Excellent journalism, by the way–fantastic article.
Zombie, you went to the event and took pictures and wrote down what’s going on? But that’s like actual journalism! Hasn’t that been banned yet?
Seriously, though, bravo! I really enjoyed reading your first-hand account.
And btw, on “spontaneous” flash mobs – how can they tell us it’s spontaneous if nobody brought an RPG? Amateurs.
Keep it Legal, and Regulated, so it is Safe. But only those who have knowingly consented to being involved are involved. That includes paying for abortions.
That way, if an abortion HAS to happen, only one life is lost. The mother has the opportunity to have children later.
Why this compromise is a good idea is because Abortion was going on before Roe v. Wade, and were Roe V. wade to be reversed or made moot in the state legislatures (as has happened in Mississippi, where the last abortion clinic has just shut down), would still happen. Only in the shadows, where if you didn’t have the money, you got the shoddy care.
The sad truth is that although some on the Pro-Life side have rejected the idea of Legal & Safe, it is mostly the Pro-Choice crowd who rejects the idea. They want government funding. They talk up how the Accountants say Planned Parenthood segregates the funding, but anyone who has ever read an Annual Report knows how easy it is to lie with numbers.
I fall on the side of Probity. Here we must avoid even the Occasion of Sin. Planned Parenthood has plenty of supporters. Like NPR and PBS, they really should not need the federal or state funding.
The Pro-Choice crowd has won as much as they can win. They want more, and may just tumble because of that.
Which would be tragic, because Abortion, like Gambling, is a much worse problem when it is in the shadows
fwiw, the Mississippi abortion clinic shut down because it wasn’t safe for either the child or the mother. It was a Gosnell/Hodari kind of place that we’ve been told isn’t around anymore now that abortion is safe and rare (oh wait, they ditched that phrase, along with pro-choice.
Ok, I’ll say it since no one else has.
The pro life women were prettier.
Nothing worse than a grizzled old hippy, man or woman. But most of the pro-abortion women are the last ones I’d wanna….
You’re being very charitable there Tex. Yes, the anti-death women are pretty as you say, and probably very friendly and intelligent. They are ladies. But there are no pretty, and no women (and definatley no ladies)in the pro-death cult. They’re all just hags and nags: shrill, boring, and desperate. Very sad life they lead.
Thank you Big Tex, it’s about time someone said it. I know which side I’m on.
Thanks for covering this and so many other crazy CA protests (loved your Slut Walk coverage and analysis).
I’d never known that the Left’s use of vulgarity was an explicit tactic used to destroy the innocence of non-Lefties. This explains so much – from the inexplicably lauded “Vagina Monologues” (embrace the word c*nt, ladies!)and the recent “dress as a vagina” protests. They debase femininity so effectively it’s unsettling (score for them, eh?). Guess I need to read more Lefty literature to further understand their goals and tactics.
The real disconnect with the whole thing is that the vast majority of those women will never need to worry about abortion as pregnancy is a requirement to have an abortion. And it appears there is little chance of that for most of them any time soon.
“Whatever side of the issue you’re on, abortion is a very serious and heart-rending subject” NO, NO, NO!!!
Pro-abortion believers cannot say that! That’s why the whole “safe, legal and rare” is a farce. If it’s not wrong then it’s NOT WRONG! But of course it is.
Do you want to throw a monkey wrench in most pro-abortion activists? Offer cat and dog abortions and see how they respond.
PETA, a Leftist ally of PP, already executes all the animals they free. It’s not like they pay to house them or find humans to adopt them.
But they would blame the abortions on anti green capitalists, and get more money/power out of it. It’s how the Left works.
Interesting that the term “flash mob” has two uses.
One a kinda neat and basically harmless display of dancing.
The other start with the intent or lead to the destruction of private property, rioting, violence, and personal injury.
There aren’t words strong enough to express how much it pisses me off that the legal abortion supporters keep saying that the prolifers are “killing women.”
1. There is absolutely and utterly zero evidence that legalization did diddly-squat to reduce abortion deaths. Improved health and hygiene and medical technology had led to a massive plummet in abortion deaths long before anybody started legalizing abortion.
2. Prolifers don’t do abortions, duh, so any woman who DOES die from an abortion must, by definition, have been killed by a prochoicer. Blaming abortion deaths on prolifers is akin to insisting that the candlelight vigil folks outside a prison are the ones executing the prisoner.
3. There is abundant and frankly incontrovertible evidence that prochoicers don’t just sit still for other prochoicers killing women (see #2, above), but that they bend over backward to ensure that nobody else can stop them from killing women. The case of Kermit Gosnell is the most flagrant, in which prochoice bureaucrats knew for years that he was running a filthy, dangerous abortion mill but chose to look the other way and allow him to kill Semika Shaw and Karnamaya Mongar. The National Abortion Federation was even allowing him to start illegal third trimester abortions in one of their clinics, collecting his fee for him. He’d finish those abortions in the “house of horrors” in Philadelphia. (http://kermitgosnellcrimes.wikispaces.com/How+Did+This+Go+On+So+Long%3F) It should come as no surprise that supporters of abortion permit legal abortionists to commit quackery without let or hindrance. They’d been doing the same long before legalization. How else were dangerous quacks like Lucy Hagenow allowed to ply their trade?
Regarding supposed staged photos of aborted babies…Thousands of stored preborn aborted baby bodies and body parts were found several years ago in an abandoned storage unit in southern California. It was necessary to open the containers and attempt to assemble the parts, placing them all in virtual original order in order to determine how many babies and at what stage of development they were when aborted. Many of the re-constructed bodies showed their advanced uterine age. The use of rulers and, apparently, crayons were employed to show the size and, therefore, the approximate age of the preborns. This was all photographed and recorded as evidence following the arrest of the abortion clinic owner.
Wonderful photojournalism.
Tiniest of quibbles. The Amish wear beards, but not moustaches. An “Amish beard” features no hair above the mouth and very often at least some shaved area directly under the mouth. Take from it what you will …
Yeah, I know that, but the beard itself is very Amishish, even if the rest of the facial hair isn’t.
I’ve often wondered how seriously the pro-abortion activists take their own rhetoric. If they truly believe that a fetus, even a conceptus, is not really human, would they be willing to eat it? If it’s not human then it wouldn’t be cannibalism.
Perhaps the pro-life side should provide sausages and sloppy joes under a “Planned Parenthood/Reduce-Reuse-Recycle” banner one of these day. See how many people indulge.
On an unrelated not, given the pro-abortionists lionizing of Tiller, perhaps a few posters of Kermit Gosnell might not be amiss (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kermit_gosnell).
More about Kermit Gosnell here (with videos).
Have you ever noticed that all leftist “Women’s Issues” basically center around making women sexually available for (presumably leftist) men, with no need for courting, commitment, or consequences?
I mean, talk about objectifying women! And the biggest scam is they’ve managed to convince them that it’s somehow in their best interests.
THIS is perhaps the smoothest, smarmiest, and sickest example of that.
About the secular pro-life sign: Pew Forum statistics show that around 24 percent of secular people in the United States oppose abortion (I.e. said they believed abortion should be illegal in either most or all cases). I was very surprised when I first discovered this–I had never seen explicitly secular pro-lifers at rallies and such. I was afraid that maybe their louder, more religious counterparts had scared them into silence because they did not want to be associated with those who have become known as extremist Christian theocrats. It is very nice to see secular people who support the rights of the unborn expressing their views publicly.
If I understand correctly, those who do not identify with any religion are under-represented in government. Because of this, the only pro-life politicians are outwardly religious people. Maybe if we had more secular politicians, and assuming some of them were pro-life like almost a quarter of American secular people, maybe everyone would stop framing abortion as a purely religious issue.
http://religions.pewforum.org/pdf/comparison-Views%20About%20Abortion.pdf
Doesn’t surprise me, I’m in that 24%. Maybe we tend to be more quiet about it? Or that while we’re opposed to abortion and wouldn’t have one, we don’t get involved in the rallies for whatever reason?
I’d like to see more of an emphasis on secular science-based arguments; while I understand the religious reasons to oppose abortion and I understand that most of the leaders of the pro-life movement are religious, the problem becomes that the pro-abortion side has an easy out to not even debate or think about anything. “Oh those pro-life people are just a bunch of Christians, screw ‘em…”
Most of the leftists and pro-abortion radicals have already rejected Christianity so they won’t listen to anything the pro-life movement has to say because they already define it as an invalid position.
Not that I think it could or should be reduced just to science-based arguments without the moral aspect, just that it seems that whatever science-based arguments are presented tend to get filtered out, at least in main seam coverage. It may well be that in the long run things like Discovery Channel specials showing fetal development that official take no stand on the issue might do a lot more than we think to win the hearts and minds part of the battle.
About the “abortion hurts women” slogan: I’m not 100% sure since I’m not involved with any organized pro-life groups so I don’t know the official logic behind it, but it seems to me it’s an attempt to reframe the issue to get pt the “screw you, it’s just a clump of cells and it’s my body so it’s all about me” attitude of the pro-abortion crowd.
After all, if their minds are closed to the possibility that a fetus is any different than a fingernail and they have the right to cut either off at their convenience, then it seems like turning it back and saying that abortion is something that will hurt the woman and haunt her might just have a chance of opening a crack in that armor.
At least that’s my guess. The pro-abortion protestors might scoff at it, but maybe it bypasses the rhetoric and appeals to their selfishness, albeit it seems more something that would be more impact full on later reflection.
You’re back! Thank you for returning, and for the continued good work. Hope you had a restful break.
Looking at the World Life abortion pix I was thinking “this needs scale” to be able to get a sense of what you’re looking at. Embryos/fetuses are very small, proportionate to how far along they are.
And then i noticed the crayon. I think that’s what it’s there for, to provide scale. Yes, the fact that they used a familiar childhood object to provide scale made a point of its own, but often pro-choice rhetoric says what’s the use of making a big fuss over something that doesn’t look like anything without that intrusive vaginal probe? A wee bit of research revealed that fetuses don’t have fully formed fingers and toes until the 12th week, or the end of the first trimester. So for those who say abortion is ok in the first trimester, these pictures show what a 12 week fetus looks like. That’s already when the first trimester is over.
But i think the picture is sort of fake. The foot next to the crayon has fully formed toes, so it’s at least 12 weeks, sort of borderline first trimester at least. It probably was from a later abortion than the other stuff in the picture, which may well be from embryos at an earlier stage. Before 12 weeks the embryo’s parts aren’t all fully formed yet.
i found this link helpful:
http://www.mostlybabies.com/pregnancy.html#first
The point is that the pictures are real & show enough to get upset about, but in addition to being “staged” as Zombie said, they are manipulative. But that’s what propaganda is. So the pro-life side had better quality propaganda than the pro choice side. Not a surprise. But I think the purpose of the propaganda was to get women to think about having an abortion. Probably most women who have abortions try hard to avoid thinking about it, or they’d never do it. The purpose of images like this is to make it harder for them to do that, & not have that abortion.
I’m sure World Life makes this info available in other, more neutral sorts of venues as well. This link was helpful too:
http://www.worldlife.com/what-we-do/
Thanks Zombie. Anybody who does not call me a Christian Facist is my friend.
http://www.walkforlifewc.com
Well, technically, I did call you a Christian Fascist (in the caption to the first photo), but it was in ironic quotation marks, so it doesn’t count.
Dear Zombie, i really enjoyed your honest article. I was tickeled by your astute leftist commentary. As a girl who was a kid here in S.F. in the sixties, I appreciate it. The hippies were always funny, (in a sad sick way). Even though I grew up going to Dead concerts and later to punk shows, I never drank the koolaid. Whrn I got pregnant at nineteen , I did not have an abortion, because it was wrong. Women don’t kill their children, it is not natural to do that. Life is tough and we make mistakes, no one is perfect. But, saying there is any justification in killing gestating children is worse than barbaric. It is evil. It was my 9th walk. There 500,000 in D.C. in sub freezing temps. I appreciate that you are looking for the truth. You will find it, and march WITH us next year, maybe. Dr. Bernard Nathanson had a change of heart, and so did Jane Roe. It is happening every day. The lie will not last forever. The truth always prevails. So does science and reason. And so we walk : the people of truth, science , reason, and most of all, LOVE. God Bless You
A legal-eagle friend of mine coined the term “retrospective abortion” as a very black euphemism for killing someone.
I ranks up there with “pre-emptive euthanasia” for Orwellian new-speak points.
I suspect that the sort of people touting “late-term” abortions as “routine and normal”, would be quite happy to arrange “retrospective” ones for their opponents.
Zombie
Great article–as usual.
Thanks for posting!
Interesting article espcially considering the normal perception of SF would be that the crowds should have been opposite ratio.
I think that your “states rights” conception of this issue is a total cop out.
Either you think that people should have autonomy on how to lead their lives, and therefore abortion, birth control, and related matters should all be legal and are nobody’s business but the individual involved. Or you believe that government should be a tool of the kind of social engineering that religious traditionalists and authoritarians prefer. The former results in a pro-choice viewpoint, while the later results in a “pro-life” one. Period.
I think that the reason that you and other conservatives take the “states rights” cop out is because you are stuck between a rock and a hard place. If you take the side of freedom and autonomy and declare that you want abortion to be legal, you alienate the authoritarian religious fundamentalists that you rely on for votes. If you take the side of those cultural authoritarians and declare that you want abortion to be illegal, you are starkly revealing the central hypocrisy about modern American conservatism – the claim of favoring “small” government while at the same time advocating for government to intervene in peoples’ most private lives and situations.
So what do you do? You just punt on actually declaring. I have seen it over and over. But if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. Me, I come down on the side of individual autonomy and freedom in all cases, and if that means that I am liberal on some issues and conservative on others, then so be it.
If you re-read what I wrote on the topic, I say than in my opinion I would oppose any national law either universally allowing abortion (as is now the case) or universally outlawing abortion (as some social conservatives want).
I see no hypocrisy in that at all.
A fallacy in modern American political life is that everyone presumes that their own opinions ought to be applied by force to everyone. I think that’s an effect of contemporary narcissism in which everyone thinks they’re so special. I seem to be one of the few people in this debate who declares that my opinion isn’t that important — why should I have the power to dictate what people far away from me can do?
Where is the hypocrisy in the notion of “local control” and “community standards”?
Let’s just say there is a town in Vermont that is 100% liberal and they want to make abortion 100% legal and 100% free. And then let’s say that there is a town in Texas that is 100% social-conservative and wants to make abortion 100% illegal.
Now, who am I to dictate to either town either way? And why should the liberals of Vermont get to say what happens in Texas, and why should the conservatives in Texas get to say what happens in Vermont?
The flaw in your reasoning is the presumption that making abortion completely legal is the same thing as being on the “side of freedom.” But a central argument coming from the pro-life side these days is that the “unborn child” is a human being and therefore has human rights and legal rights, and if we kill them en masse, we are denying them their freedom, and thus that legalized abortion is being against freedom.
Therefore, you are presuming the correctness of your position as part of the proof that your position is correct. A well-known and very common logical fallacy that people seem to fall into over and over, unwittingly.
You declare, with a decisive “Period”, that those whose believe “that government should be a tool…of social engineering” are inherently authoritarian and conservative and inevitably anti-abortion; but one could just as easy argue that completely legalizing abortion is the most extreme kind of social engineering, designed on purpose to facilitate and openly encourage promiscuity and consequence-free sex. And it’s authoritarian as well because it dictates to conservative people what they may and may not do in their own communities, and commands them to violate their own consciences.
You are so drunk on your own viewpoint that you do not allow the opposing viewpoint to cloud your thinking. But just try for a moment to put yourself in the shoes of a social conservative, and see how it feels to be forced to violate your own deepest-held beliefs.
I’m not running for office, so I don’t need to gets “votes” from conservatives. I say things all the time in my essays that piss conservatives off (I’m pro- evolution and anti-creationism, I’m pro-choice, I’m an environmentalist, I voted for gay marriage in California, etc.), so you basically have no idea what you’re talking about when accusing me of hypocrisy for political reasons.