This is what passes for the “pro-life" position on the right.
Of course, there’s nothing pro-life about this. There isn’t even anything pro-birth here. But there’s an accidental exposure of truth here. And the truth is that abortion laws are just another form of slut-shaming. It’s behind so many of the arguments. Remember Foster Friess, Rick Santorum’s billionaire backer? Yeah, he got a lot of unwanted attention for this little exchange with Andrea Mitchell in 2012:
MITCHELL: Do you have any concerns about some of his comments on social issues, contraception, about women in combat, and whether that would hurt his general election campaign would he be the nominee?The subject here was contraception coverage, but the underlying argument is the same: women who have sex, but want to avoid pregnancy, are sluts. The issue is their fault — not the fault of the men trying to regulate their bodies. If these gals would just keep their legs together, why it wouldn’t be an issue, now would it? The same reasoning was behind Rush Limbaugh’s slut-shaming of Sandra Fluke.
FRIESS: I get such a chuckle when these things come out. Here we have millions of our fellow Americans unemployed; we have jihadist camps being set up in Latin America, which Rick has been warning about; and people seem to be so preoccupied with sex. I think it says something about our culture. We maybe need a massive therapy session so we can concentrate on what the real issues are. And this contraceptive thing, my gosh, it’s [so] inexpensive. Back in my day, they used Bayer aspirin for contraceptives. The gals put it between their knees and it wasn’t that costly.
MITCHELL: Excuse me, I’m just trying to catch my breath from that, Mr. Friess, frankly.
Pregnancy is seen as the consequence of a moral crime. Abortion laws, like the arguments against contraception coverage, are about punishing dirty little sluts — not about saving lives or protecting women somehow. Erick-Erick gleefully imagines sluts paying the ultimate price for their round-heeled ways. He sees coathanger abortions as women getting what they deserve and completely ignores the fact that the “unborn baby" he’s supposedly so interested in saving goes to the grave with the mother. He clearly doesn’t give a damn about the fetus; this is about getting the woman with an unwanted pregnancy to take what she’s got coming to her.
If you check his twitter feed, you’ll see Erickson’s since tried to weasel out of his tweet by pretending he was mocking people who used coathangers to protest the bill, but this makes no sense, since the protests have already happened. And why would protesters who already had coathangers need to bookmark a site selling coathangers? And in what way would this be mocking them anyway? What could the punchline possibly be, exactly?
No, Erick Erickson was celebrating a victory in the Republican War on Women by telling pro-choice women to go die like the sluts they are. It’s impossible to take it any other way. The rest of Erickson’s anti-choice crowd have to be pretty angry with him right now. He let the cat out of the bag. None of this is about “saving babies," it’s all about hating women.
"Pro-life" my ass.
