...and what little I’ve heard from the pro-choice side is in the vein of “Well, of course we need to make sure women have access to safe abortions.”
This really makes me think someone hasn’t been paying attention. They used to say “safe, legal, and rare,” but really all that was being pushed was “legal.” Gosnell might be an epitome but he’s not the only one. I’ve known pro-life people who voted straight ticket pro-choice because they believed that all the other social policies advocated by pro-choice political candidates would lead to lower demand for abortion in the long run; meanwhile, pro-choice politicians end up compromising with other politicians who may have different goals and who may actually have a lot of the same values but want to follow a different path to the same goal. The only thing clung to and promoted, the only thing there isn’t room for compromise on—come on, nobody really wants to perpetuate poverty, but there is a plethora of opinions on how to alleviate it—is access to the procedure. So the wagons are circled around abortion clinics and the media are mute on the topic of badly run clinics, for fear of handing ammunition to the pro-life movement.
Well, folks, you shot yourself in the foot with that very ammunition, and no amount of “Pro-lifers made us resort to this” whining is going to change that. You talk safety and then refuse to take steps that might even bring you a few allies from the pro-life movement in at least helping to ensure that expectant mothers were treated well, lest the disconnect between respect for women and the abortion culture become undeniably overt—maybe it doesn’t have to be the case that bosses fire pregnant employees for deciding to go to term, or that domineering boyfriends and husbands will insist on not becoming fathers but stay in relationships with women who are willing to become mothers; but all to often, it is the case. More abortion isn't the answer. If it's a symptom of greater societal ills, then we need to cure the greater ills; we need to put a bandage on whatever abortion purports to cure in the meantime, but in taking a stand at abortion, you gather the rhetorical points of choosing lesser goods over greater ones, and you win poster children like Kermit Gosnell.
Might as well put a briefcase nuke in the hands of every person on the planet, on the grounds that MAD worked for the US and the USSR, so it's got to work for individuals as well. A few people set 'em off anyway? Get more into the field, so we can really make our point that more violence means less violence; all this carnage is just a blip. Still more? It's not you, it's them; it should work, and we're not going to stop until they stop. We just need to clap for Tinkerbell harder.
Might as well put a briefcase nuke in the hands of every person on the planet, on the grounds that MAD worked for the US and the USSR, so it's got to work for individuals as well. A few people set 'em off anyway? Get more into the field, so we can really make our point that more violence means less violence; all this carnage is just a blip. Still more? It's not you, it's them; it should work, and we're not going to stop until they stop. We just need to clap for Tinkerbell harder.
I wonder maybe if Moloch is really in the service of Mammon these days. Help build up a controversy, recruit desperate people, offer them an escape to the nightmare of motherhood, and then...start cutting costs. High school dropouts are a lot cheaper than certified anesthetists, and frightened and unsure expectant mothers have low sales resistance, even to snake oil.
