But, wow, what a quote she gave to Esme E. Deprez, writing about legislation to ban dismemberment abortions for Bloomberg News.
“Abortion care can be, in the abstract, deeply upsetting and the anti-abortion movement using the word ‘dismemberment’ is not an accident,” said Carole Joffe, a reproductive health sociologist at the University of California at San Francisco. “It puts the pro-choice movement on the defensive.”
Before unpacking that statement, let’s go back to 2012 and something Joffe said then about her pro-abortion colleagues. Here’s what I wrote:
Write at Slate.com Joffe said she had “considerable concerns about what calling [transvaginal] ultrasounds ‘rape’ and ‘unnecessary’ will mean for abortion patients and providers.” Joffe totally opposes these laws, but politely denounced the “wrongheaded” rhetoric that abortion rights supporters have been using to oppose ultrasound laws.
“In the short run, the labeling has sent pro-life legislators running,” Joffe said. “But in the long run, it risks turning a benign and routine part of the abortion procedure into cause for alarm.”
So, #1. Pro-abortionists routinely engage in fear-mongering, synthetic hysteria, and the creation of imaginary plots they attribute to pro-lifers.
#2. The question is not that dismemberment abortions put “the pro-choice movement on the defensive”— the “Unborn Child Protection from Dismemberment Abortion Act” clearly has–but why? According to Deprez’s story, which ran today, it’s because (according to opponents) “the bills inaccurately describe what medical literature calls dilation and evacuation”; and because pro-lifers are “deploying grisly language.”
Of the former we need say next to nothing. It’s a rehash of the talk-about-anything-else strategy they deployed against a bill to ban partial-birth abortions. “D&E” abortions are described with accuracy in the bills introduced in Kansas and Oklahoma. We know it and so, too, does the Abortion Industry and its enablers in the “mainstream media.”
What do they mean by “accurate”? It’s when (and only when) a dismemberment abortion is described in antiseptic language, language that is as vague and meaningless as it is misleading and soothing.
To the pro-abortionist, “accurate” means avoiding at all costs what actually happens–pulling a living child apart body part by body part; arms, legs, torso, and head.
Rather to the likes of, say, Tara Culp-Ressler, a dismemberment abortion “involves dilating the cervix and using surgical instruments to remove the fetal and placental tissue.”
That’s right, “fetal and placental tissue.”
We can agree with Culp-Ressler on one thing: nobody would confuse that description with ‘grisly.’
By Dave Andrusko, NRL News Today
