The Hill to Die On

by

I swear, I have never been able to understand how the loud and proud Capital-F official feminists made the ready availability of abortion the hill (for the pre-born fetal humans, mostly) to die on. Yes, I’ve pondered this in blogposts many a time. The 19th century suffragettes certainly were what we would now cast as pro-life, and so was a modern iteration, IIRC. (I used to get their newsletter.) Why that one single aspect, out of all the others which would have a bearing on the lives of females; extended maternal leave and benefits, quality childcare … practically any other concern other than that of abortion on demand at any stage of pregnancy could be a rallying ground for those affecting an intense interest in matters of a particularly female orientation. This, when birth control in so many forms (and for male and female alike) is readily and economically available. This is not the 19th century anymore, not even the first half of the 20th,. Truly, it is a mystery why this particular cause and no other animates the radical fem-fringe. I can only surmise that many of the radical and early feminists had abortions, felt horrifically guilty about it all and wished to drag other women into that particular hell with them as a matter of solidarity.

I am myself old enough to have known other women – my peers, mostly – who did for a variety of reasons, decide to take that route. I understood that they had reasons they felt were valid and I sympathized without approval. A woman who is pregnant and for whatever reasons, emphatically does not want to be – has a problem, a problem for which all the solutions are painful. I did not judge then – but did feel the weight of their decision to go with whatever they felt to be the least painful. No matter how you slice it, with abortion, you are cutting off a potential life – a viable heartbeat, little fingers and toes, a tiny face with eyelashes and a decided character, even in the womb. So I have always approved of an supported those various enterprises which reached out a helping hand to the inconveniently-pregnant; anyone or any office which offered medical help, moral and actual support and encouragement to a woman who was inconveniently pregnant. That was putting good intentions where they mattered; into actions which would offer an alternative to abortion.
Now, it seems that such crisis pregnancy centers and assistance to uncertain mothers and fathers is a bridge too far for the radical pro-abortion advocates, and one of the more radical fringes of such have declared open war on such centers. Vandalism, destruction of offices, threats of violence, an order to cease operations or else … and it is my judgement that even if such threats are carried out … it will not have the desired effect, as much as the Jane’s Revenge activists may hope. So – My Body My Choice: Just Make the Choice That We Have Autocratically Decided That You Should Make. (Too long to fit on a protest sign or a bumper-sticker, though. But that’s what Jane’s Revenge is essentially saying.)
This is one of those stark moral issues for the pro-life advocates and volunteers, and not one which will be backed down from. Saving the lives of the unborn children, and redeeming the lives of their mothers, one by one – is a moral cause, just as the cause of the abolition of slavery was for active abolitionists was in the America of the 1840s and 50s. It was an issue upon which no compromise could be made, a stand from which no threat would dissuade committed abolitionists of that period.
Comment as you wish, on what might happen next, in this regard.

63 thoughts on “The Hill to Die On”

  1. There is one salient difference between slavery before the Civil War and abortion now. In 1850 half the states of the Union had made slave labor an integral part of their economy. How many Americans today depend on easy abortion to keep themselves alive, or even in comfort? A lot less than half, I suspect.

  2. It is difficult to try to discuss the “pro-choice” crowd without using the term “demonic.” There’s something profoundly wrong with these people, the way they’ve rejected “safe legal and rare” for outright celebration, even sacralization, of abortion.

  3. It will be interesting to see how Althouse reacts. She’s already posted some unhinged stuff about the leaked decision, she’s going to go bonkers if it’s the actual result, and she’s a pretty sane lib, so much so that most people now think she’s a conservative for some reason…

  4. The reason for the reaction is pretty simple: The women reacting this way literally do not want to be told that they did wrong in having an abortion. They’re invested morally in their having been “in the right” when they had their abortions. Drag that into question, and you get the insane reaction to all of this.

    Another reason here is that the left-wing males involved absolutely do not want a situation where they have any restrictions on ridding themselves of the evidence of their sexual shenanigans.

    You can see the outlines for why they’re so invested in this, but actually understanding it or discussing it? Not going to happen. It’s all couched in terms of “Well, what about rape victims…?”, and there is never any consideration at all given to the unfortunate kid created by that act of violence, who had nothing to do with the whole sordid mess.

    The other thing that’s tied up in this is the typical female entitlement mentality: Women can abort whenever and however they like, because “it’s their bodies”, but a male who is involuntarily placed in servitude has no such out, should they prefer not to be a father with that partner or that kid. If he’s got no voice in the abortion, how is the converse just, where he’s suddenly held responsible for supporting a mother and child? You can’t have these things both ways; either both parents have the option of saying “No” to parenthood, or neither of them do.

    My own position on this crapfest is that it’s the fault of the idiots who’ve sexualized everything everywhere in society. Sex is not a casual affair, much as everyone wants to make it so. So long as birth control is not 100% effective every time, then you’re taking the risk that you might just be starting another life, one that you should be morally responsible for, no matter what. Using sex as a cheap means of self-gratification is something that’s always disturbed me; there’s too much going on with it to make it the casual thing that we have. I don’t think that abortion ought to be used as a means of birth control; it should be reserved for cases where the mother’s life is at risk, or the fetus has no hope whatsoever of a normal life. If you’re so foolish as to have gone out to get your jollies and wound up pregnant or impregnating someone? Too bad; too sad–You had your opportunity to opt out of it all the moment you chose to drop your pants. Once you determined on insertion of Tab “A” into Slot “B”, well… There ya go. It’s on you. Don’t come asking me for absolution after you slaughter the innocent result of that fleeting moment of pleasure.

    Actual victims of rape? Two minds here… One says the resultant fetus had nothing at all to do with the situation, so that killing that fetus is only compounding the crime. The other says “Rapists shouldn’t get a free ride, when it comes to passing on their genes…”

    There is no real justice in any of this. I find it hard to reconcile both of my impulses with regards to the question, and I’d never want to sit in judgment over those who have to come up with their own answer to it. But, I will say this: You simply cannot have it both ways. If you’re going to prosecute people for the death of a fetus in something like an automobile accident, and then simultaneously say that the mother could have gone into an abortion clinic and had that same fetus scraped out of her womb with no penalties accrued…? That is simply not a stable set of rules, and it cries out for a totally different solution than that insane dichotomy. A individual’s choice cannot be what determines whether something is murder or a medical procedure. That’s just completely untenable, impossible to adjudicate fairly.

  6. James the Lesser – that is Budziszewski- has a point.

    Abortion, they argued early on, gives us the freedom men have. I’ve never understood why it empowers to think we are lesser men and if we slip out of what makes us a woman. Denigrating us as “breeders” and mocking woman as mom – neither liberates, empowers or respects us.

    I’d always been wishy washy and certainly understand that raising children is a skill none of us master and is draining at best It seems to me, though, the most strident pro-lifers have the most logical argument. I’d probably vote nearer the consensus opinions that place caveats – first timester, etc. Still:

    Two points:
    The pro-abortion politicians and the PP crowd that celebrate abortion, that throw Molotov cocktails at the Women’s Crisis centers, etc. make us aware of how much closer our feelings are to the Pro-Life group. For one thing, they are creepy (the line between such celebrations and Baltimore isn’t that strong. Janet Yellen’s position is bizarre (and shows no sense – or at least no profound sense – of flourishing human potential.) If I take them more seriously, they seem darkly nihilistic and, of course, transparently eugenic. When a nephew gave as options for wedding gifts donations and those were to the ACLU and Planned Parenthood, I was, well, surprised but it also led me to consider how important I considered marriage and children were to the good of society as a whole and a couple. Of course, it can’t happen. Of course, many a good marriage is without children. But to begin with this vision is disturbing.

    Second point: In the seventies I strongly believed that wanted children were better off. That is probably true. My generation did practice birth control with fervor – we wanted planned children, controlled lives; we also enjoyed sex. Everyone thought that the combination of birth control and abortion would make for healthy and happy familial relationships. Perhaps in some cases. But I have a lot of trouble thinking children are more respected, cared for, important to families post 1970 or so. An earlier post was about red flags; yes, they are likely to lead to many bad consequences. However, they are being considered in part because it is clear some children – and grown ups – have had childhoods that were nightmares, in which they felt unloved and disrespected. That has always been true.

    However, this is systematic in ways I think many people don’t want to recognize: the number of unaccompanied children coming across the border brought by the Mexican drug cartels and sent to addresses throughout America with no check on who or where is a feeder for child trafficking (sexual or indentured servitude, etc). Under Biden this possibility has been blithely ignored. The choices made by the CDC to use children as pawns while their educations and maturation were stunted s shows how little “the system” cares about kids though I’ll admit that sentimentalizing their importance was what let the system get away without studying how many and what kind of children – always few in number – got and were deeply affected by it. Telliing us to consider the children, save the children appears to be said by the left with absolutely no sense of how to consider them or how to save them.
    If you look just at those two “systems” and oppose that priority with those of our youths – which weren’t perfect of course – you are not likely to find 1970 some marvelous boundary children passed into respect, love.

    My personal feeling is that the pill’s disconnecting sex from childbearing robbed sex of a good deal of its power and meaning while abortion made children seem less a weighty gift to somehow be dealt with and more, well, disposable.

    I’m older than Sgt Mom but we were both part of that time that felt charged by the pill and ready abortion. I don’t think that it is an accident that more young people are anti-abortion in the younger groups of today or that we are having second thoughts. Perhaps they don’t appreciate the battles of the feminists. But perhaps they have seen the consequences of those twentieth century wins.
    Actually I knew few who had abortions but I suspect I was never seen as a sympathetic person since I constantly harped on how important childbearing was and therefore how important birth control was. (Well and I’m not very sympathetic.) Probably a sign of my obsession was that taking that pill regularly for the decade before I married was one of the few things in my haphazard life I’ve done with real habitual regularity. I think such obsessiveness was characteristic of those of us who started taking the pill when we were 18 or 19 – having grown up in a time when many of our high school friends married suddenly.

  8. The feminist movement wasn’t a victim of a hijacking, feminists explicitly embraced Marxism, Marxist goals of class war, and Marxist theories of oppression. If there was a hijacking, feminists hijacked Marxism.

    Only females can put the stake through the black heart of feminism. Every female must stand up in public and renounce feminists and all their works and all their false show. No one can walk that walk for her.

    V. Do you reject feminists?
    R. I do.
    V. And all their works?
    R. I do.
    V. And all their empty promises and feminism?
    R. I do.

  9. When did Marxists hijack Friedan and deBouvier, both Stalinists?
    When modern feminists weren’t hard Leftists (McKinnon,Dworkin,Butler) they were insane (Firestone).

    As to abortion, people have always abused and killed unwanted children. Either your society acknowledges some children die for no good reason, exposed on hillsides or cut to pieces by “doctors,” or it pretends it doesn’t (“foundling homes”).

    I think there’s a religion that offers solace to the tragedy of life. What’s its name again?

  10. “When did Marxists hijack Friedan and deBouvier, both Stalinists?”
    I think the concept would be that pre-“sexual revolution” feminism wasn’t explicitly Marxist and post was. There were definitely extreme radicals among the suffragettes, but the ones who were explicitly anti-marriage, family, etc., were definitely forced to the margins in general.

  11. Kirk
    June 20, 2022 at 9:50 pm
    I think you nail it to a great extent. The only slight change I would make is not to say that you simply risk pregnancy when engaging in sex. I would rather say “The primary biological goal of sex is pregnancy. Attempting to thwart that purpose is never risk-free without extreme measures (celibacy, permanent surgery).”

    Progressivism has a handful of core tenets, and hedonism is one of them. They desire above all else to pleasure themselves – and sex is very pleasurable – without consequences. This is probably the chief pillar of Progressivism, driving its need to do away with morals and to advance its man-conquers-self ideology.

  12. Ginny
    June 21, 2022 at 12:02 am

    My generation did practice birth control with fervor – we wanted planned children, controlled lives; we also enjoyed sex.

    And this is why Progressivism is such a seductive religion. It offers hedonism without consequence and the illusion that you are entirely in control.

  13. I think in our late 20th century quest to be “non-judgemental” we have conflated empathy of the human condition with acceptance of others poor choices.

  14. Speaking of couched language, of all the tortured euphemisms “abortion” is perhaps the most flagellated. “In utero infanticide” seems more apropos. It doesn’t quite roll off the tongue with the same flippant ease, but maybe it shouldn’t.

  15. I think the abortion debate is so vociferous because it’s one of the strongest conservative core arguments. Something alive is made dead, and no big brain take can entirely spin that into palatability. Thus, if you’re a feminist (or any other anti-conservative), it makes sense to attack those strongholds the hardest. It probably makes sense to play dirty, too.

  16. I don’t think most modern feminists consider abortion to be a hill to die on, they think it’s a hill they took a long time ago and will hold without much trouble. Hysterical rhetoric notwithstanding, a de facto ban on abortions in the US is about as plausible as abolishment of no-fault divorce or AFDC. Just not going to happen, and everyone knows it.

  18. }}} My Body My Choice: Just Make the Choice…

    how about:

    Your Body, your Choice: Just Make the Choice I tell you to.

    Shorter, though still a bit long.

    Maybe

    Your body, My choice: Jane’s Revenge.??

  19. }}} George: Just not going to happen, and everyone knows it.

    That’s certainly not their rhetoric.

    That’s not the bill of goods they are selling.

    Jus’ Sayin’…

  20. The thing I find most enraging about the whole debate over abortion is that I feel like I’m being made the bad guy for wanting to protect life, and cast as a male-dominant abusive racist rapist for saying that the life generated by that ill-thought sexual encounter is more important than the right to blithely end it, as though it were some inconvenience.

    I was raised to protect innocent life. That’s the ethos I was taught, the one I absorbed, the one I lived. And… I find myself surprisingly at odds with the women in my life who excoriate me because I took their lessons to heart, and apply them where they find it “inconvenient”. I was rather shocked to find out that many of them feel like the ability to have an abortion at any point is essential to their mental well-being, and that my desires in terms of protecting life wherever I find it are oppressive and male-dominant.

    Funny, I thought I was applying what they told me, growing up.

    It’s really rather bizarre, to me… One of the women in question can’t kill a spider, without calling me in to be the bad guy. But, she’s got zero hesitation about killing a fetus, saying it’s her “right” to end that life. Like, she’s f*cking God, or someone…

    I don’t mind the hypocrisy, but I do mind being taught one damn thing all my life, and then being excoriated for applying that one thing where the parties who taught it don’t want it applied. Seemingly, murder is just fine, when it’s an unwanted fetus. Other occasions, not so much. Apparently. From signs, I’m not supposed to make up my own mind about these things, just act as an extension of the will of others, who “know better”.

    There’s a reason I have such contempt for most humans. This is one of them.

  21. Kirk
    June 21, 2022 at 1:02 pm

    Like, she’s f*cking God, or someone…
    Nailed it, though you might not have composed it as a conclusion.

    This is the end goal of all Progressivism – Woke, Feminism, Trans-, etc. – to make each and every one of us our own gods. So we can set our own morals, our own truths, our own reality.

  22. I think I’ve worked it all out, with some thought and while completely ignoring the cognitive dissonance necessary in order to reach these conclusions.

    See, I’m supposed to go forth and kill in their names, protecting them, and sacrificing my life, health, and mental well-being, in order to protect them. At the same time, I must not treat the fruit of their sexual congress in the same manner, because “…that’s different…” Not entirely sure how you reconcile the two, but this is apparently the thought process–All innocent life is sacred, and must be protected at the cost of my own, yet some innocent life is theirs to take whenever they find it convenient.

    Huh. Go figure. Never knew it was so simple, but now that I’ve got that figured out, I do believe I’ll just write the whole thing off. Ladies, y’all are officially on your own. You cannot and will not have it both ways.

  23. }}} When a nephew gave as options for wedding gifts donations and those were to the ACLU and Planned Parenthood,

    That’s not a gift, that’s a virtue signal.

    A GIFT would be “donation to the cause of your choice, regardless of whether I, personally, support it. It is a GIFT, so YOU get to choose where to apply it”.

  24. Kirk: Rational consistency is not a strong suit for the Left, particularly but not solely Left-Women.

    In actual fact, it’s more an Uno card in the Pinochle deck they are using to play Hearts.

  25. What Rando said: “I think the abortion debate is so vociferous because it’s one of the strongest conservative core arguments. Something alive is made dead, and no big brain take can entirely spin that into palatability.”
    The enthusiasm for abortion as outlined by many of the pro-abortion enthusiasts is just sickening. Honestly, I wonder of some of the worst of them wouldn’t mind celebrating a public sacrifice to Moloch!

  26. }}} Only females can put the stake through the black heart of feminism. Every female must stand up in public and renounce feminists and all their works and all their false show. No one can walk that walk for her.

    Indeed, they should have repudiated NOW, after the whole Lewinski thing, failing to ack the clear sexual harassment of Bill Clinton — not to Monica, to all the other interns who did NOT get a set of “presidential knee pads”, with all the perks thereof — a cushy pentagon job, a ridiculous ghostwritten book contract, a promotional job for diet aids….

    Instead, the NOW president suggested she would happily give Clinton a BJ herself.

    SMH.

    From that point onward, “Feminism” clearly marked itself as a sham.

    Just as the NAACP and ACLU did when it failed to raise hell as the Merdia defamed Colin Powell and Condi Rice as Oreos, Uncle Toms, mynah birds, and picaninnies. two decades ago.

  27. They even get super mad about pregnancy centers, which makes no sense to me. I think they can’t handle the fact that many/most women are only reluctantly having an abortion, which leads to all sorts of questions…

  28. It’s of a piece with the things I’ve noticed over the last few decades, which seem to indicate that today’s minorities and oppressed are doing their level best to become living proof that all the things ascribed to them by the bad old bigots are actually true.

    The women demanding the right for unfettered abortion are, all unknowingly, making the case for the old-time bigots who said that women were incapable of logic or possessed of the faculties to make moral choices. Which is, when you think about it, pretty damn strange. Why would you put your moral degeneracy on display, and simultaneously demand that it be respected?

    Either life is to be respected and protected, or it isn’t. That’s a purely binary thing; you cannot say that this life is special, and worth protecting, and that life is not, while reaching for the abortifacient.

    Women ask men to suffer for them, to protect them. That’s the unwritten, unspoken fact behind a lot of social institutions and expectations; men are the expendable sex. You’re expected to stand between any threat and any women and children there might be; you’re expected to put your life ahead of their, to go running back into the burning building when there are still women and children within, to run to the sounds of gunfire. Yet… At the same time, they want that on a switch; don’t be upset or disturbed when those special people decide to take the lives they’ve told you that you should die to protect. That’s different, when it is their hand wielding the blade.

    You cannot have this shit both ways. You wonder why men stood by when there were children in danger at Uvalde? I don’t understand that, myself, but I can’t help but feel that this kind of injected ambivalence plays a part in it, and women should not be surprised that men hesitate to act in these circumstances. I mean, how are we to tell if those children are really wanted? Perhaps the mothers have had second thoughts, and want their lives ended…?

    Having established that life is not sacred, and can be ended at a whim, don’t be too f*cking surprised when other people start treating yours the same way.

  29. The anger at those centers pretty much blackens any of the claims of the rare but safe kind and certainly of the “choice” kind.
    One of the things feminists did from the beginning was to consider abortion a woman issue -men apparently only wanted to keep us barefoot and pregnant. Every relationship is different and there are millions of people out there, but my impression (from relationships in that period, from movies that dared to include it, from literature like Hemingway’s) was that men more often suggested it for their mistresses and even their wives. I’m not saying men don’t want to be fathers but men are more likely to have had impulsive sex, more likely to not be as connected to the pregnancy (nor the relationship) as women. The effect of the feminist’s argument was to quiet a lot of men – that choice, like birth control, was by the 70’s a choice women made and therefore many held women responsible for it. Therefore, it was a woman’s choice. I’m not sure zeroing out the man’s contribution to the discussion was good for relationships between the sexes and I’m pretty sure it damaged men but suspect they, like women, consider it a great liberation.

  30. janes revenge is the wannabe weatherman group, they hate humanity, brian, and anyone who doesn’t serve up children as sacrifices, is a target, we know their feral reaction to palin, or any publically profession christian,

  31. I would hesitate to ascribe any great meaning to how things were/are portrayed in the media. You have to remember that the majority of the writers in the old days were firm leftists, and so everything they portrayed would have a slant to it. You want to understand things, you have to go looking at what was actually done. Where you begin running into problems with records and people saying things then and now that they thought others would like to hear, vs. what they were really thinking.

    I don’t know what they “used to think” about abortion, on the male side of things. I do know several men who had partners that got abortions back in the 1970s without consulting them, and who regarded the abortion as a betrayal. They hadn’t planned on starting families with those partners, at the time, but they’d have preferred to be a part of the decision rather than being left out of it.

    I’ve got an acquaintance that I’ve known for years. He’s not the wisest of men when it comes to picking his partners, and it’s been amusing to hear him tell the tales of his love-life woes, whenever we touch base with each other. What’s striking to me with regards to him is the evolution his attitude towards women and children has undergone, over the years. His first experience with a partner aborting an unwanted child was devastating to him. He mourned the unborn kid for a couple of years, and it was weird to watch from the outside. You could tell something was wrong, but it seemed to express itself in his becoming even more profligate with his romantic life. I think there were a couple of other partners that did the same thing, but I don’t know for sure. When he did find a woman he wanted to settle down with, they married, and the marriage blew up completely when she chose an abortion because having a kid right then would have been damaging to her career; she was doing her residency as a doctor, and would have lost that opportunity. I don’t know if that decision was made with her knowing his history, but the effect of it was to end their marriage forever, with no hope of there ever being a reconciliation.

    So far as I know, he’s always been fairly cautious with regards to birth control, or at least, has always talked about using it and advised others to ensure that they did, as well.

    Long-term? This guy has formed no real long-term relations with women; he’s gone from putting them on a pedestal to considering them the scum of the earth, and goes out of his way to behave like a bastard towards them. It’s been an interesting arc to watch, and I have to think that the abortions done behind his back played a major and significant role in it all. He was always a “player”, but I think he would have settled down and become a decent father/husband, given the opportunity. That ain’t happening, now or ever.

    If I had to stick my nose out, and blame anything, I think I’d have to say that the approach to treating sex as a casual pleasure has been immensely damaging to both men and women; perhaps more so to the men, in some regards. You start treating things as a commodity, as opposed to a sacrament between loving partners, and the whole thing devolves into a sordid mess that does nothing but desecrate everyone involved.

  32. Kirk – and then there are those guys who, upon being told that their long-time girlfriend is pregnant – are “She’s a lying wh*re and I’ve never even met her!”
    Especially cruel when she thought that their relationship was a sacrament between loving partners.
    Don’t ask why I know this.

  33. I wouldn’t dare.

    The problem is that the assholes of the world never seem to find and inflict themselves on fellow assholes. Professional courtesy, perhaps…?

    I don’t discount the number of cads that there are, I merely point out that there are other perspectives than “all men bad”. Some of those cads got the way they were through encounters with those already within the ranks they later joined.

    To my way of thinking, the whole thing is an unfortunate result of people being what people generally are: Heedless to consequence. I’ve always been cursed with an ability to foresee consequence from action, so I’ve managed to avoid entanglements of this nature on my own account. I’m also entirely untrusting of my fellow man and woman, so… There is that. I’ll go out of this world the way I came in, alone and making my own way.

  34. I have no problem killing, I enjoy steak and I hunt. I trap mice, swat flies and take perverse joy in every “snap” of the bug light on the patio.
    Killing a human being who is doing no harm is another thing.
    That said, I’m ok with abortion through the first trimester.

    What makes us human? What distinguishes us from that mobile steak in the barn? Our brains. The fetus starts producing human brain waves around 15 weeks + or -.
    Prior to that, it’s living, but so is the slug I poison in the garden.

    After that, it’s murder.

  35. hard rain’s gonna fall, for many things, specially for a nation like ours, which was designed for a special purpose men (and women) know the truth, and deny it, and God leaves them to their delusions, is that not a portrait of 21th century America, same might have been said of nineveh in the 12th century bc,

  36. It’s the the moment of conception: viable DNA and human soul. Without violent or chemical intervention, a human fetus will be a born child human. It’s homocide/infantcide to intensionally terminate the natural process.

    Death6

  37. I really don’t know that I want the line drawn at the position that buddhaha would have us place it. I don’t know if there is even such a thing as a soul, but I also don’t want to be “that guy” who decides where and when that mass of cells crosses the line betwixt “cluster of protoplasm” and “ensouled”. Thou art not God; do not act like him, in his name, and expect mercy in the beyond.

    I think that every life taken, no matter how insignificant it is, deserves some small measure of reverence, some due respect to what you are doing. Snuffing out a mosquito is a different thing entire, than snuffing out a potential sentient. Yeah, I’m slapping the shiite out of the mosquito biting my arm, but at the same time, I’d also hesitate to exterminate the bastards, simply out of a pragmatic knowledge that I don’t know enough about their role in the ecosystem. I rather suspect that wiping out mosquitos would likely result in a whole lot of “unintended consequences” working their way through everything in entirely unpredictable ways. Like, oh, say, depriving bats or other key members of the food web enough nutrition to fill their roles, creating mass havoc.

    I don’t know. Because of that, I’m not drawing any lines. Taking innocent life is bad, and that’s all I can work out, so I’m against abortion, and that apparently makes me a patriarchal son-of-a-bitch.

    You are not God. Do not act in his name. Arrogating any of his power over life and death is something you should only do with full knowledge and responsibility, acknowledging that you might be f*cking it up by the numbers.

  38. Sarge:
    “Now, it seems that such crisis pregnancy centers and assistance to uncertain mothers and fathers is a bridge too far for the radical pro-abortion advocates, and one of the more radical fringes of such have declared open war on such centers. Vandalism, destruction of offices, threats of violence, an order to cease operations or else … and it is my judgement that even if such threats are carried out … it will not have the desired effect, as much as the Jane’s Revenge activists may hope.”

    We are overlooking something that is happening in reference to those attacks. They have been going on for decades, albeit not at the current vocal level. Some questions for everyone.
    1) How often have you heard of such attacks, vandalism, arson, or whatever being seriously investigated by law enforcement, especially in Leftist controlled polities, and including any violation of Federal law as seriously as the same crime would be if inflicted on another entity for say financial gain?
    2) How often have you heard of such attacks being solved and cleared with an arrest, especially in Leftist controlled polities, compared to clearance rates for the same crime inflicted on another entity for financial gain?
    3) If arrest(s) were made [which probably would be hard to find], how often were they prosecuted as similar attacks for the same crime inflicted on another entity for financial gain, with the same effort?
    4) If any such arrests were made, and prosecuted successfully, was the penalty imposed, if any, comparable to the penalty imposed for similar attacks for the same crime inflicted on another entity for financial gain?

    The difference in investigation, clearance, prosecution, and penalties are indicative of the fact that we are functionally two or more hostile peoples and societies inside one set of borders. TWANLOC.

    Two or more nations, peoples, and in fact laws, legal systems, and functionally Constitutions that are irreconcilable. Which leads to, “It was an issue upon which no compromise could be made, a stand from which no threat would dissuade committed abolitionists of that period.”

    We are pretty much out of design margin.

    Subotai Bahadur

  39. My rational brain is screaming at me to remain silent, given the tone of the above comments, but I also think there are two points that need to be made and haven’t been yet.

    The first is that many people – not all by any means, but many – on the pro-choice side (NOT “pro-abortion”, mind you, but pro-CHOICE) defend access to abortion because they see abortion as part of a larger issue: women’s access to reproduction-associated drugs and medical care. It’s not hard to see why – take away abortion, and it’s not really a very large step to taking away the rest of it too. Conservatives use the “slippery slope” argument all the time, and for good reason — well, so do liberals, and it’s just as convincing.

    The second is that no matter what people may think about the morality of abortion, a lot of people have a serious problem with the idea of a government – any government, whether federal, state, or local – having the power to say to a woman “you must bear this child, no matter the cost to you, and you do not get a say in the matter.” I know, if you dance, you should be ready to pay the piper. The question isn’t what’s being said – it’s who is saying it.

    Me? Abortion is not an issue I’ve ever faced directly, nor ever will. But who am I to force my will on the women – and the men – who do face it?

    I guess my point is that while “pro-abortion” people are nuts, and some are downright evil, a lot of “pro-choice” people are well-meaning folks just trying to find an answer they can live with to one of the most difficult moral questions in human history.

  40. She had a “choice” in the matter the moment she used her agency to have consensual casual sex.

    Let me clarify this for you: If I go out and get in my car, drive, and then kill an unborn fetus in an accident, am I liable for that? Yes; yes, I am.

    Likewise, if a woman has consensual sex and becomes unintentionally pregnant because of that, is she liable for the rest of the implications, to include 9 months of indentured servitude and risk to her health? I would say that she does, and simply because my similarly unintentional act led to a death, and hers led to a life…? How is that any different? Did either of us intend to do what we did? I don’t intend to kill anyone, driving to the store, but if I did through bad driving or inattention? Am I “let go” from the consequences of my act, because I didn’t mean to do it? “Oh, officer… I was looking down at my GPS… I didn’t see the pregnant lady in her car…”

    Is that going to fly? And, in a world where a woman can kill her unborn fetus, why shouldn’t it? After all, neither of us intended to do what we did… Why does a woman have the prerogative to end a life at her convenience, that she’s inadvertently created, and I bear the criminal responsibility for something that I, too, did not intend to have happen?

    Where’s the difference, there? Is it murder, should I hit that pregnant woman and without intending to do so, kill her unborn child? Is the difference the intent of the mother? How can you even attempt to adjudicate that? What if she was on her way to Planned Parenthood? Am I still guilty of vehicular manslaughter?

    Either there is a sanctity of life, or there isn’t.

    I’ve been taught all my life to respect life, to cherish it, to protect it. Conditioned by society and the cultural input of the women in my life to sacrifice my own, in extremis, should that become necessary.

    Now, I come to find out that more than a few of those women think that it’s A-OK for them, and them alone, to make that decision for me.

    “It’s a woman’s right…” OK, fine… Then, it must be mine to ignore their bleatings about the sanctity and value of (some) lives. Hypocrisy does not wear well. Knew I then what I know now about the actual belief systems of those who taught me…? I’m thinking I’d have made some different choices, back in the day.

  41. It seems to me to be a strange argument that, because some men acted as cads and bounders, that women should be given the same..privileges??…that the ne’er-do-wells employed.
    Supposedly(I haven’t read it myself) a sister of one of the women’s movement founders sat in on the early meetings developing the movement, and Marxist doctrine was being baked into the cake from the start.
    To me, life starts when the egg has been fertilized – it contains the complete genetic makeup of that individual, and only needs food and a safe place to grow into his/her full potential. The same could be said a child of seven as well. I used that age because a co-worker was claiming the fetus was not alive because it could not live on its own. I replied that, using this criteria would mean his daughter, age 7, was not alive as well.
    Grew up as a boomer, and there was a lot of public verbal genuflection to the old morality while at the same time those making those noises were doing their best to destroy the foundations that supported it within our society. So, in later years, you got to see their hypocrisy on full display.
    I tried to make the allure of sex less appealing to my four sons by pointing out the results. When my oldest was in high school a middle school girl invited him over for the night. When he told us, and said her (single)mother was okay with it, I replied that that was because her mother knew he was an honorable young man who would support her(the mother) in her old age. Saw a light suddenly come up in his eyes, so I knew I got the point across. He decided he didn’t want to spend the night there after all.
    I can’t remember all the things my parents used to instill self-control into me, but I do know that being a living example of it was core.
    Still, I don’t think I’d want to be young again. Going through that 150% sex overdrive time, with the resulting foaming-at-the-mouth imbecility, could be considered cruel and unusual punishment.

  42. “They even get super mad about pregnancy centers, which makes no sense to me. I think they can’t handle the fact that many/most women are only reluctantly having an abortion, which leads to all sorts of questions…”

    To the feminists that support abortion on demand up to and past birth, abortion is the first and preferred option. Bearing a wanted child is inconceivable (so to speak), and bearing an unwanted child to be given up for adoption rather than destroyed is rage-inducing.

    They don’t want other options, if they really supported ‘choice’, they’d support counseling and ultrasounds, and all the things that go along with an informed choice. They will tolerate no cracks in their façade, and death for the fetus is the end goal.

    This isn’t healthcare because a pregnant woman isn’t sick. Aborting a healthy pregnancy does not make her well.

  43. What cracks me up the most? Knowing that they’re going to pivot on a dime in the near-term future, and probably start demanding that women do their duty and have their 2.1 children… Or, else.

    Crashing populations are going to do that. The mindset is lagging behind reality, which is that the real “coming demographic crisis” ain’t overpopulation, but population crashing. You cannot operate the Ponzi scheme which is socialism without at least a static population; you really need a growing one, in order to support that. Which is ideologically incompatible with their belief systems, soooo… Here we are.

    Guarantee you that there will be “incentives” to have babies in the future, followed by demands, in turn followed by mandates. And, what none of these bright lights seem to realize is that they’ve set the incentives up so that having kids is an undesirable thing, for the people you want more of, and only desirable to the ones you don’t want reproducing due to their dysfunction. When you set your system such that unproductive wastrels are the only ones having kids, it cannot last.

    Ah, well. At least they’re doing it kinda-sorta differently, this time around. I don’t envy any of the kids, these days; I thought we’d gotten past the “end times” when we managed to not hold what I thought was the inevitable WWIII of my youth, but apparently the idiots want to tear everything down anyway.

    I’m coming around to the cyclic theory of history. I think the Hindus were on to something… Another turn of the wheel, cranked by idiots and dumbasses that can’t be satisfied with the way things are.

  47. Kirk – that pivot on a dime strategy has worked so well for China, hasn’t it.
    And, if the fertility problems created by the clot shot turn out to be a long term thing, I’m reminded of C. S. Lewis: “We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”

  48. @Frank,

    Statists are gonna do what statists do; every problem created by government, they think they can fix with more government. Trouble is, that is not the way these things work.

    Government is a positive feedback sort of affair; it works only until the loop turns back on itself, and feeds more and more into the loop until the system crashes.

    That’s where we are, today; positive feedback looping, worldwide, and mostly at the same time. Gonna be interesting watching it all play out…

  51. My guess is the Dems are about to find out how out of touch their pro-abort activist base is from normie Americans.

  52. Like, Affluent White Female Liberals already are crawling over broken glass to vote 100% Democrat no matter what. Everyone else is a bit more worried about groceries and gas. Sorry Dems. And by the way “Abortion until the baby is completely clear of the birth canal” is up there with “Black Lives Matter” in “brilliant strategies to move as many Hispanics into the Republican camp as possible”…

  53. And by the way “Abortion until the baby is completely clear of the birth canal” is up there with “Black Lives Matter” in “brilliant strategies to move as many Hispanics into the Republican camp as possible”…

    I’ve found that people don’t know abortion has been legal up to that point and refuse to believe me when I tell them.

    Shrug. Of course, the witless geee ohh peeeeee has nothing to say about that, as usual.

  55. It’s been noted that the previous GOP president before Trump has been deafeningly silent about Roe being overturned.
    His “center” does proudly advertise a speech from Liz Cheney, though.
    Priorities, priorities.

  56. That previous president is one of the most despicable human beings ever to infect this planet.

    However, I am glad that my teeth have finally stopped clenching involuntarily whenever I think of him.

    Small victories matter.

  57. well consider that his grandfather was one of the leading population control activists, in the Senate, and we’ll pass over that whole German banking unpleasantness, his father was with the Company as director, some say he was a client in some capacity,

  58. Speaking of having kids or not, the crazies are starting to share birth numbers for Q1 2022, and they are horrifying:
    https://twitter.com/EthicalSkeptic/status/1540961309222658051
    If these numbers are wrong, you can be sure the crazies will figure it out, because there’s enough of them who seriously want to get these things right, and know their stuff.
    If they’re right, it’s the biggest catastrophe in human history.

  59. Seems kind of odd for Taiwan to be burying these numbers in some random government web page report:
    https://www.ris.gov.tw/app/en/2121?sn=22161405
    2. By the end of May 2022, the total population was 23,196,178 with an decrease of 302,892 compared with the same month last year. The population growth rate was 1.29% which meant that the average daily decreased was 829.8.
    4. There were 9,442 babies born in May 2022 which decreased 23.24% compared with the same month last year. The average showed that a baby was born about every 4.7 minutes. The annual crude birth rate was 4.79‰.
    5. There were 17,409 deaths in May 2022 which increased 15.23% compared with the same month last year. The average showed that there was about one death at every 2.6 minutes. The annual crude death rate was 8.83%.

    Maybe some smart people should be looking into what’s going on?

  60. Here’s an interesting tweet via Babylon Bee:
    https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1540528857186549760
    Short version is that all the bad abortion deniers are in rural areas with negligible police and only volunteer fire protection so they should form mobs to take the fights and fires to these areas. Something tells me this would end badly for them, mostly the nearly 100% gun ownership in most rural areas. Nobody I know wastes their money on rubber bullets.

  61. Sgt Mom:

    I don’t know if you frequent it (one or more other CBoyz main thread commenters does) Neoneocon (recommended, CB and Neo are my two daily “goto” blogs) had an interesting and related question, which, along with the comments, might shed some light.

    Why would pro-abortion radicals in deep blue states be so very angry about Dobbs?
    https://www.thenewneo.com/2022/06/27/why-would-pro-abortion-radicals-in-deep-blue-states-be-so-very-angry-about-dobbs/

    Neo reads quite widely, so she spreads her topics all over the place, and she’s (I gather) trained as a therapist and an attorney. So she also does a great job of analyzing anything she writes on.

  63. Yes, OBH, I do go to Neo – one of my regular reads. As for the fury over Roe/Wade being struck down, I thought that John H. at Powerline also had a good point – the fury is because the pro-abortionists didn’t want to bother campaigning state by state, actually arguing the point with opponents and doing the hard work of politicking. No, no – they wanted Big Daddy Governmental Authority to rule on it once and for all and make all those anti-abortion people shut up and go away.
    And I did see that suggestion by someone glowing faintly in the dark that all those nasty Christianists in the rural areas ought to be taught a good rough lesson. I have to admit that I snickered, rather nastily. Yeah, you go ahead and teach those rural Americans who is really boss. Make out your will before you try it, and bless your heart, sweetie pie.

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