When pro-abortionists truly go off the deep end, I am reluctant to go after them, in no small part because those over-the-top comments so often come wrapped in obscenities. But on further reflection, I think it’s worth discussing Amanda Marcotte’s two recent full-throated diatribes against pro-lifers in a responsible fashion. They tell us something. Today, Part One.
To be clear, it simply is unproductive to quote/paraphrase Marcotte’s foul mouth. To people like Marcotte—the same ones who tell you how stupid, dull, boring, and repetitive pro-lifers are—the more personal the insult, the stronger they believe their case is.
Or, to put it differently, why from Marcottte’s perspective bother to talk to pro-lifers (the jumping off point, by the way, was whether it made any sense to debate secular pro-lifers) when (a) they are no less authoritarian than pro-lifers who base their case on, or are motivated by faith, and (b) “rational, free discourse is predicated on the understanding that everyone involved in the debate is arguing in good faith, and I can assure you, after years of dealing with this issue, that anti-choicers are not arguing in good faith.”
In other words to “indulge” any pro-lifer by allowing them (us) into a “free-wheeling” discussion is to afford them (us) an honor they do not deserve. We have nothing new to add.
But if recycling old positions is the definition of boredom and “half-baked quackery,” what new argument have pro-abortion advocates presented? One: they are even more extreme than ever.
For example, if “an embryo or even fertilized egg that has no brain,” as Marcotte hisses, then you might think that there is an endpoint somewhere in pregnancy where the unborn has the qualities even pro-abortionists would feel honor bound to recognize.
Not so. At the very same time every medical breakthrough is demonstrating the incredibly complexity and interconnectivity of the unborn child and her mother, the Marcottes of this world are vocally and unapologetically extending the logic of “terminating” unborn life to the very end of a pregnancy.
None of this first, or second, or even beginning of the third trimester limitation. There is no abortion that should be banned. Ever. And, of course, anything that however slightly impedes a race from panicky reaction to a pregnancy test to an abortion can only be still another example of how pro-lifers do not “respect” women.
But the reason our case for the unborn child and her mother has to be (in Marcotte’s words) “a bunch of half-baked, never-changing nonsense that they cling to no matter how frequently it’s debunked” is, in her words, “simple: They don’t want to speak their real argument out loud.”
And—in the interest of saving time–it goes without saying that Marcotte goes up into the attic of her mind where she reaches into a chest now covered in cobwebs to pull out the hoariest of retreaded canards: it’s all about men wanting to control women. If we point out that women are more pro-life than men are, then advocates like Marcotte cite that as “proof” women are brain-washed by the “patriarchy.” So much for respecting women. And, for the matter, so much for originality.
Finally, what really set Marcotte off in her March 14 post was the specter of adoption. (We’ll skip her distaste for children which is a problem more deep-seated than any foolish post.)
Sure, a woman (in this scenario Marcotte) may not want this child—or want the child later—but she’s not going to put her body through all that @#$%^ for nine months “so that some couple I don’t know and probably don’t even like can have a baby.”
You don’t have to know Marcotte well—or at all—to understand what motivates her to say things such as what a woman wants “trumps the non-existent desires of a mindless pre-person that is so small it can be removed in about two minutes during an outpatient procedure. Your cavities fight harder to stay in place.”
She feigns surprise in the next paragraph that having said this (and other oddball rantings) “I’m performing against gender norms so hard that even I recoil a little.” That’s all for show and is just a setup so we understand that her self-hating conclusion is justified.
Marcotte loathes the “training and socialization” that has “bull[ied] women into pretending that they’re more interested in being selfless and eternally nurturing than they actually are, even at great cost to themselves.”
Marcotte believes she is freeing herself from the imaginary chains of oppression by acting as unpleasant as she possibly can, say things that are ugly and hurtful and filthy as she can come up with, and at all costs turn those who disagree with her into mindless automatons who deserve every slur she launches at us.
It’s hard to miss the irony of her final paragraph. Enough of this pointless, vacuous “when does life begin” nonsense. That’s for conformist dummies.
In Marcotte’s world, a herd of independent minds if ever there was one, what truly free-wheeling thinkers talk about is “Gender norms and conformity.”
All that hate for this?
By Dave Andrusko, NRL News
