Baby Priya’s Bill was about dignity for parents who suffered a devastating loss. Far right politicians claimed the bill would reward those who had abortions.
I can't speak for Australia, but in the U.S., the pro-life crowd's concern for life is primarily directed at controlling women by any means necessary. They oppose universal healthcare, strict gun control laws, they are pro-death penalty and never met a war they didn't love. Their concern for the child ends at birth in most cases.
The same crowd that claims to be pro-life in this country doesn't seem to have a single issue with children and adults starving to death because SNAPs been kneecapped.
Republicans do not care if Americans are sick, hungry or homeless just as long as their donor class is not being asked to cough up a red cent to address those problems.
Their stance is that women must have babies and if they can’t give birth to a live baby, then the women should die. This is why the “pro-life” crowd ignored all the warnings of women dying the last few years, and haven’t been up in arms over the massive increases in maternal mortality rates since Roe was overturned, and have been throwing women in jail for having miscarriages. “Give us babies and die.” This is the underlying message of the “pro-life” movement in the USA. Evidenced by the numerous forced birthers who have told me in this very forum (all the way back to Patheos) that every mother should be honored to die for her baby. Or in so many words. It’s the greatest gift a mother can give is to die in childbirth. They do t want us to actually raise the children they beget, they’ll find another sex slave for that.
Yes, they "honor dead mother's sacrifice and tout the ones that beat the odds while taking stupid risks acting like that is the norm. in that culture. Sick fucks.
They are pro-life. They are so pro-life, that they don't mind removing some current life to make room for even more life. You don't get any more pro-life than that. Also life is suffering. Therefore suffering is life. So if you're pro-suffering, you by definition and the transitive property are pro-life.
Actually the Bible says that abortion if not murder. See Exodus 21:22-25. (Causing a woman to miscarry is punished by paying a fine to her husband, not by "a life for a life.") Fundies not only cherry-pick which Bible verses they fixate on, they violate many outright.
Goddybitch likes to watch humans suffer, that’s how it gets sexually aroused. The more humanity suffers, the more goddybitch reaches orgasm. This is sadistic and cruel deity that allows others to suffer for its enjoyment, I on the other hand would try to stop the suffering of others. Better to be a good human, than a sadistic and cruel god!
If goddybitch were to cross the street and I was driving. I would hit the gas and run the fucking dickwad over, then hit in reverse to run it over again to make sure the goddamm cocksucking scumbag of the champion of assholes was truly deader than a kipper on a cracker. Then I would get out of the car and kick it with steel toe boots a few times just for the pleasure of returning the cruelty than it metes out to humanity. Lucky for it, I don’t drive AND it doesn’t exist.
This IS control of women: it says to pregnant women that if you don't carry a nonviable fetus to term despite the dangers and trauma it entails, the state will withhold a benefit it will give to women who DO carry a nonviable fetus to term.
I call them "pro-reproductive slavery," because of their view of women as brood mares and their male supremacist ideology, but forced-birthers is good too (with the virtue of being more concise).
Heck. They wouldn't mind seeing a black, brown, Asian, or Jewish baby get aborted so that to them they won't have to worry about the Whites getting overrun by blacks, browns, Jews, etc.
On TBT forums, we had a RWNJ try to use a sock puppet with an Australian accent. The problem was that he used the word "statist" in one of the posts. Raskhole was the only person on the forums who used that word. By the way, the forums are back, nowhere near as popular as they once were, and the TBT is using none other than (drum roll, please) ViaShit.
If they actually at any time, supported the fetus, they would vote to fund prenatal care, but that would cost them money in their taxes, so they won't do that. It cost them, nothing however to pretend they support the fetus.
This is a universal thing among the (at least, in the West). The ideology — both the official “abortion is murder” dogma and the fear that women being able to control their fertility would be a threat to the “traditional family” [i.e., male supremacy] — originated with the Roman Catholic Church in the late 19th or early 20th century (not sure which). Around 1980, fundamentalists in the US (who had, like other Protestants, no strong views on the topic prior to this time: the only opposition to 1972’s Roe v. Wade when it was handed down was from Catholics, mainly clergy) suddenly pinched the Catholic doctrine, verbatim. The Republican Party had conspired with the fundamentalist clergy in the South to abortion as a “wedge issue” to win the votes of the white Southerners who had abandoned the Democratic Party after it embraced civil rights. (They had originally wanted to use segregation, but they found that was a non-starter due to the votes it would have cost them in the North. Ronald Reagan pioneered the new racism of dog whistles and stereotypes, notably targeting Black women: “Welfare queens,” “crack whores,” etc.)
When Florida (which is controlled by right-wing extremists and has banned abortion) had a referendum to add abortion rights to the state constitution (which would override the legislative abortion ban), reproductive slavery activists used a disinformation campaign, and voter intimidation & suppression, to prevent it from passing.
Yes, I live there, and they jacked up the percentage of approval to pass a citizen amendment to 60 percent, they wanted to jack it up to 66% knowing what high approval reproductive rights have. Originally abortion was considered a right in our state under the privacy heading. The right-wing state judges overturned it.
By Ciara Torres-Spelliscy
Published: September 6, 2023
Florida was once a bastion of women’s rights in the otherwise conservative South. It even recognized a state constitutional right to abortion. Those protections are vulnerable this year as the Florida Supreme Court, where five of the seven justices were appointed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and the remaining two were appointed by then-Republican Gov. Charlie Crist, is poised to reconsider its abortion precedents.
How many times have we said it: "The cruelty is the point." The ministers who opposed the Baby Priya's Bill demonstrate a marked dearth of compassion and empathy, and a clear desire to impose their ridiculously narrow point of view on all women, and particularly those of child-bearing age. Their inability to consider what is going on with a woman who has to deal with the emotional tumult of a miscarriage tells me that, as Priya's mother suggested, shouldn't be in parliament.
Indeed, they should count themselves lucky to be recognized in society at all.
What the fuck do these people think women are? Even if the pregnancy was terminated late in pregnancy, the woman has to have some recovery time, there’s so much damage to her body. Would you refuse a man who just had abdominal surgery time off? Then, do you also accuse the man who had abdominal surgery of doing it just to get paid leave?
Jesus Christ on a cracker! Why is this the only medical procedure, or pregnancy the only medical condition we have these disturbing conditions for? That’s rhetorical, I know it’s all about misogyny and control of women. Men have this habit of wanting babies like children want puppies, murmuring about legacy and such, but they only care about the babies when it suits them.
It’s nice to see there are places where sanity still reigns.
You're making this about abortion? Seriously? Tell me, what is your opposition to abortion based on? It can't be the bible. That book doesn't contain a single condemnation of abortion. I have a suggestion for you: Stay the hell out of the private matters of others.
Hell, the bible gives step-by-step instructions to perform an abortion! Numbers 5:11-31 spells it out completely. Any dumb ass who wants to say that the bible is pro-life is talking out of their sphincter!
They should also read Hosea 13:16 where the biblical cloud faerie sent an army into Samaria to punish it for rebellion. That punishment included dashing infants to death and driving their swords into the bellies of pregnant women, killing both the woman and the fetus within.
I think it's fair to say it's based on Christian theology, even if the bible itself doesn't mention it negatively. Early theologians and later popes added new cannon alongside biblical beliefs the whole time Christianity was being formed. Some priests and religious texts were opposing abortion before the Romans even recognized Catholicism as an official thing (313AD), so the whole 'it has a soul so you can't kill it' idea is not at all new.
What's new starting in the 20th century is that Christians now lie about it. The soul idea would be taken serisouly by courts in earlier centuries, but now they know it'll get thrown out by any court in a secular state. So now they make up fake bullflop reasons to whitewash their clearly sectarian ensoullation objection to it.
Except the pope made a deal with Napoleon to increase bodies for his armies by being against abortion, before that there were individuals who were against abortion but it wasn't canon.
"The history of the Roman Catholic Church’s position—from which all current US anti-choice extremist Christian positions derive—is not what you think. Today’s Vatican denounces even the words “reproductive health” as unacceptable in official UN documents—in case anyone might construe them to include the already deleted word “abortion”—and although the Vatican is a non-voting so-called “State” at the UN, it is a highly effective lobbying force continuously purging all UN documents of such language. It works on this in brotherly coalition with Islamists and Protestant fundamentalists; apparently, convenient patriarchal alliances against women override pesky little memories like, say, the Crusades.
It comes as a shock to most people that the Catholic Church’s fierce opposition to abortion was not always what it is today, because the Church pretends that its position on pregnancy termination has been based on a “right to life” and has remained unchanged for 2000 years. Poppycock. In fact, it has varied continually over the course of history, with no unanimous opinion on the subject at any one time.
In 400 C. E., Augustine expressed the then-mainstream view that early abortion required penance only for any sexual aspect of a sin, not as homicide; 800 years later Thomas Aquinas substantially agreed. (Pssst: the Church made them both saints.)
Between 1198 and 1216, Pope Innocent III ruled abortion as “not irregular” if the fetus was not “vivified” or ”animated”; animation was then considered 80 days for a female and 40 days for a male—male fetuses apparently could develop faster then slow-poke female ones. Oddly, it has never been explained how anyone in the 12th century could tell sex differences in the womb. Or was there some early version of ultrasound back then that historians somehow missed?
Pope Sixtus V forbade all abortions in 1588, but in 1591 Pope Gregory XIV rescinded that order, and reestablished permission to abort, this time equalizing things a bit: up to 40 days for either a male or a female fetus.
Antoninus, Archbishop of Florence (also now sanctified), was a 15th century Dominican who wrote a major treatise on abortion, in which he taught that early abortion to save a woman’s life was moral.
Thomas Sanchez a 17th-century Jesuit, noted that all his Catholic theologian contemporaries justified abortion to save the life of the woman.
It was as late as 1869—only about a century and a half ago—that Pope Pious IX ruled all abortion murder and defined it as excommunicable.
And therein, my friends, lies a tale.
Napoleon III was gravely concerned that the birth rate had been dropping and that France would face a serious depletion of soldiers for its wars and colonizations. Pius IX, for his part, had long yearned to pass a doctrine of papal infallibility—but had faced opposition from within the church as well as from external kings, czars, and the like. But Napoleon was an emperor.
So the two struck a deal.
In return for Napoleon’s powerful support for papal infallibility, Pius would change the Church’s regulation of abortion—which at that time forbade the procedure only after quickening, at about three months. But Pius, a shrewd bargainer, played hard to get. So Napoleon threw in a further inducement—that all teaching positions in French schools would thereafter be filled by the Church.
Done.
Napoléon would get his huge crop of babies to grow into cannon fodder, because the Vatican would outlaw all abortion. In return, Pious and all popes after him would get their infallibility plus Roman Catholic control of French children’s minds (and those of kids in colonies around the world) for generations to come. Women’s deaths, by now in the millions because of this bargain, would pay the price. But hey, the art of the deal.
Interestingly enough, however, and also contrary to popular belief, the prohibition of abortion is not governed by claims of papal infallibility. This leaves far more room for discussion than is usually assumed. Some Jesuit historians have actually been honest about this history.
There’s much richer detail in the book, Fighting Words, but above you have an outline of the abortion chapter. Such crucial history gets buried for a reason. Which could lead us to wonder: if this issue is not governed by infallibility, and if the Church position itself has been flexible, and if there is no mention of forbidding abortion in the Bible or the Constitution, then just how and why does this issue continue to be so explosive in discussing women’s basic human right to bodily self-determination? And, for that matter, to the foundational concept that defines America: the separation of church and state? "
They only focus on Bible verses in Psalms and Jeremiah that says, and I paraphrase, "I knew you before you were born." and "You created me in my mother's womb." while ignoring the verses about King Menaham ripping open bellies of all the pregnant women.
Not to mention getting their wives and their secret lovers to abort their unwanted babies to keep the affairs quiet and not have to deal with more mouths to feed.
Yep. Both “I knew you before you were born” (laughably ludicrous and impossible) and “You created me in my mother’s womb’ (I do belive that a human male would’ve helped to create a viable fetus and not some figment of the imagination) have absolutely nothing to do with abortion.
Yeah, gawd had decided to make Jerry a prophet, so that makes sense. There is nothing in that verse alluding to gawd "knowing" everybody in their mother's womb.
“The idea that anyone, much less a lawmaker entrusted with shaping public policy, could look at a grieving mother and see only a loophole to be exploited rather than a human being in need of compassion is grotesque.
These conservative men, and the few women who joined them, chose to weaponize grief for the sake of ideology. Instead of sympathizing with grieving parents, they reflexively treated those parents as if they have ulterior motives.”
Well, yes. And your point is…?
Of course I know the point. Because it’s correct. What I see so much coming from religious conservatives is that every accusing finger they point at others has four pointing back at themselves. Every accusation is a confession. Because their God is all encompassing everywhere and everywhen, everything is about their control of others to please their God, who has always remains impressively silent except in translation from books thousands of years old.
It just isn’t abortion. Look at gay marriage. Gay people can’t get married because if they did, heterosexual people would behave horribly, which they have always done anyway, whether gay people could get married or not. They don’t actually care about heterosexual marriage, they care about control. If they cared about marriage, they would understand the truth of this statement: LET US MARRY EACH OTHER SO THAT WE DON’T MARRY YOU.
They progressed to the next part of their argument: if two men or two women can get married, then why can’t brothers marry sisters and fathers married daughters? I’ve always found it very funny that the worst case counterexamples they present are always heterosexual people behaving badly. And of course, the logic fails here as well: if a man can marry a woman, why can’t the father marry his daughter, and what does that have to do with gay people getting married TO EACH OTHER?
We find this kind of obtuseness everywhere conservative religion operates, especially when it comes to matter matters of sex. As I pointed out many times, for decades, the Boy Scouts did not allow gay scout masters. For decades, they had an sexual abuse problem, which they tried to cover up just like the Catholic Church did. They claimed it was about protecting boys from predatory adults. But this was the same kind of “loophole” hemant mentions. Gay people weren’t allowed to be members. So who was doing the molesting? Men who would be considered by their wives, families, colleagues, communities, churches, and above all, THEMSELVES to be heterosexual. It had nothing to do with actual gay people, only with what religious conservatives were projecting onto gay people, which turns out to be…
Look, if God wanted us to be compassionate towards women he would have said so. He could have easily squeezed it in between the chapter on how men should not play women's sports and the chapter explaining how a reduced capital gains tax rate actually benefits the whole society.... Wait just a second, *** flips through the Bible. ***. Holy shit he actually doesn't say that, well there goes that premise. I guess there is nothing left to do but sell my daughter.
Look Holy, what do you expect conservatives to do - treat others as they wish to be treated? Treat the least of these in the way they will be treated by God? Ridiculous leftist socialism. Thank goodness it doesn't appear in the bible.
Can we start defining anti abortion organizations as hate groups yet? It’s past due. These deeply misogynistic folks want an uneducated public to believe “late term abortion” is women snuffing out their own babies shortly after delivery just because they are evil and felt like it. It’s absurd and it needs to end. Even if they don’t buy into that nonsense, they still want to maximize suffering and inflict punishment onto women who have stillbirths or their premature baby happens to die. Cruel and sick.
The same RWNJ don’t seem to notice that flood that goddybitch sent; killed millions of fetus. Nor the fact that goddybitch told his followers to kill everyone in Jericho, including fetus (pregnant women). So why are the same RWNJ not upset about that? Christian=hypocrite is the byword now.
That was the public face of it. These far right Christian ghouls were using their opposition to women being able to control what happens to their own bodies to claim that women would be getting pregnant willy-nilly and aborting just to get an extra vacation.
What they really wanted was control. They wanted to still be able to force grieving mothers back to work so they could continue profiting off of their labor. It fucks up the optics if they were to say that out loud.
And notice it's always men who stand in opposition of abortion. The ones who will never find themselves at risk from an unwanted or potentially fatal pregnancy.
Hemant mentions three women legislators who supported it too. Because yep there are fundamentalist women. And like the men, they are no doubt hypocrites who make up "but this is different" excuses when it happens in their family, because this is as much a class war thing seeking to deny a procedure they can access through wealth, power, and connections from being accessed by poor people, as it is a sexist thing seeking to deny women the rights powerful men would insist on having.
As a general rule though, you're more right than wrong.
You are right about republikkkan women. They are protected. They are taken care of by their peers. They don't have to worry about those yucky people who probably smell bad. Those other women who have sex whenever they feel like it and are too stupid to have married a man who will take care of the abortion that they don't have to think too much about.
They can't think humanely, they're doing something to further their station in life.
Priya's mother should have publicly shamed her company. They would have fired her, but there would be plenty of other companies out there willing to give her work as a show of support. Companies do this shit because they think the public won't care about the plight of a singular employee. They need to be called out for it.
I'd like to agree; unfortunately, in the past women have found out that no, no other company is willing to hire them after that sort of firing. That might have changed, or it might be different in Australia, but would you want to be the test case? I know I wouldn't, and in all truth Priya's mother has already been courageous enough, she shouldn't have to take the risk.
It's by no means certain. There are companies out there who view it strategically; it gives them the opportunity to appeal to other potential employees by portraying themselves as a company with integrity. But the risks are real, as you point out.
I had a baby at 25 weeks. In '83. My baby weighed a pound+ and was hospitalized for 4 months.
With me? Let's fucking go.
I saw many babies die right in front of me. I saw parents who lived many hundreds of miles away from their newborn, drive back 12 hours to the hospital to pick up their dead baby.
The shock and horror of having a tiny baby barely clinging to life, who you can't even hold because they are too delicate, suddenly die is that horror I mentioned.
Shit. I'm so angry at these evil motherfuckers, I have to stop. My baby is in her 40s and we are great pals.
I’m speechless. Thrilled for you and yours. Saddened for the others and what you witnessed.
Not quite the same: my younger child came down with something at age three that had him on the cardiac wing of Children’s Hospital in DC. He had great treatment and we were out of there in less than 72 hours. Most of the kids on the floor were there waiting for heart transplants. And most probably never got them. I felt guilty that our reason for being there proved so transient.
I hope she is doing well. It can be a shocker. It took me a long time and my baby lived. Having it just be gone before you get to even physically feel the life that runs that tiny human thing that just tore itself from your body, well, it's not something you want to repeat.
Queer Guy hugs are a billion times better than straight Guy hugs. Thank you.
As an atheist, it has long been my contention that we as humans should be good to each other simply because if we aren't, then it won't happen at all. When viewed in that light, many times conservative views and concepts fall apart as worthwhile goals for humanity; conservative ideologies just don't pass muster as being good to one another. The kindness is missing.
No government should have to come down on employers and force them to provide time off for the employees that make the company run. It shouldn't be necessary. It's clear to most sane people that Priya's mom needed the time which should be more than plenty of reason for the employer to give it to her. Conservative whining about how 'but that might mean someone who didn't really need it might get time off' is hogwash at best. Despite what conservatives so often seem to want to claim, 'work' is not a value in need of defense; these days it seems to be a code for keeping people too busy to think for themselves.
Kudos to Australia for getting this one right. Someday, maybe the US will learn something from your handling of the issue.
Damn, the wingnuts must've been creaming their tighty-whiteys over this. I mean, c'mon- they get to attack womens' bodily autonomy 𝘢𝘯𝘥 workers' rights at the same time, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 do it in a way that's as needlessly cruel as humanly possible? They're literally looking a grieving parent in the eye, sneering down their noses at her, and yelling "get back to work, ya lazy bum!"
Torquemada himself would've been envious of such an opportunity for wanton sadism.
It is going to take decades, at least, to tally the death toll to be laid at that asshole's feet. Longer, still, to address the metastatic cancer of ignorance, spread deliberately by the Republican party and right-wing media, that allowed him to come to power in the first place.
Years ago in the USSR, they had the concept of the "vertical stroke". Something goes wrong, you work your way up to the chain of command and shoot everybody who had anything to do with it. Something like that has got to happen once Trump has gone.
Been there done that. The fact that people could think some normal person is going to have an abortion in order to get a year's leave of absence from work is absolutely abhorrent. It speaks to the mindset of these people that they would be so suspicious of people's motives, and thank God there are somewhat fewer of them in the antipodes than there are in the US. Although the Aussies seem to have a number of them in their parliaments that we in NZ don't have. (Or if we do they keep their heads firmly down)
I can't speak for Australia, but in the U.S., the pro-life crowd's concern for life is primarily directed at controlling women by any means necessary. They oppose universal healthcare, strict gun control laws, they are pro-death penalty and never met a war they didn't love. Their concern for the child ends at birth in most cases.
The same crowd that claims to be pro-life in this country doesn't seem to have a single issue with children and adults starving to death because SNAPs been kneecapped.
Republicans do not care if Americans are sick, hungry or homeless just as long as their donor class is not being asked to cough up a red cent to address those problems.
What? dammit, I don't want to read the news yet. What is he going on about?
Like the good Christian he is.
Their stance is that women must have babies and if they can’t give birth to a live baby, then the women should die. This is why the “pro-life” crowd ignored all the warnings of women dying the last few years, and haven’t been up in arms over the massive increases in maternal mortality rates since Roe was overturned, and have been throwing women in jail for having miscarriages. “Give us babies and die.” This is the underlying message of the “pro-life” movement in the USA. Evidenced by the numerous forced birthers who have told me in this very forum (all the way back to Patheos) that every mother should be honored to die for her baby. Or in so many words. It’s the greatest gift a mother can give is to die in childbirth. They do t want us to actually raise the children they beget, they’ll find another sex slave for that.
That would haven't fly with my great grandmother, but the plates and other stuff would have.
Yes, they "honor dead mother's sacrifice and tout the ones that beat the odds while taking stupid risks acting like that is the norm. in that culture. Sick fucks.
They are pro-life. They are so pro-life, that they don't mind removing some current life to make room for even more life. You don't get any more pro-life than that. Also life is suffering. Therefore suffering is life. So if you're pro-suffering, you by definition and the transitive property are pro-life.
There's that bible math again.
Actually the Bible says that abortion if not murder. See Exodus 21:22-25. (Causing a woman to miscarry is punished by paying a fine to her husband, not by "a life for a life.") Fundies not only cherry-pick which Bible verses they fixate on, they violate many outright.
Goddybitch likes to watch humans suffer, that’s how it gets sexually aroused. The more humanity suffers, the more goddybitch reaches orgasm. This is sadistic and cruel deity that allows others to suffer for its enjoyment, I on the other hand would try to stop the suffering of others. Better to be a good human, than a sadistic and cruel god!
the christian god is a vindictive bastard
A violent motherfucker. Cross the street if it comes your way.
If goddybitch were to cross the street and I was driving. I would hit the gas and run the fucking dickwad over, then hit in reverse to run it over again to make sure the goddamm cocksucking scumbag of the champion of assholes was truly deader than a kipper on a cracker. Then I would get out of the car and kick it with steel toe boots a few times just for the pleasure of returning the cruelty than it metes out to humanity. Lucky for it, I don’t drive AND it doesn’t exist.
The fundie and Catholic versions certainly are, anyway.
This IS control of women: it says to pregnant women that if you don't carry a nonviable fetus to term despite the dangers and trauma it entails, the state will withhold a benefit it will give to women who DO carry a nonviable fetus to term.
"but in the U.S., the pro-life crowd's"
Except they aren't "pro-life", they are pro-forced birth.
👆👆🎯
I call them "pro-reproductive slavery," because of their view of women as brood mares and their male supremacist ideology, but forced-birthers is good too (with the virtue of being more concise).
I like "gestational enslavers."
Heck. They wouldn't mind seeing a black, brown, Asian, or Jewish baby get aborted so that to them they won't have to worry about the Whites getting overrun by blacks, browns, Jews, etc.
I speak Australian. Crikey, mate.
How ya goin'?
Mate, I’m risking a Taxi !
On the piss?
Aussie slang for "heavily intoxicated." He was "risking a taxi," meaning he'd had too much at the pub and that it was time to go home.
EDIT I see MrE deleted his comment after I explained what "on the piss" means. I appear to be answering no one. 😃
On TBT forums, we had a RWNJ try to use a sock puppet with an Australian accent. The problem was that he used the word "statist" in one of the posts. Raskhole was the only person on the forums who used that word. By the way, the forums are back, nowhere near as popular as they once were, and the TBT is using none other than (drum roll, please) ViaShit.
If they actually at any time, supported the fetus, they would vote to fund prenatal care, but that would cost them money in their taxes, so they won't do that. It cost them, nothing however to pretend they support the fetus.
They're happy to spend on lobbyists.
Yes, they sure are. Lobbying should be illegal.
Yep, their reasoning being, why should 𝑰 have to pay for the baby 𝑰 forced you to have?
Yeah, that’s some fucked up shit, pure evil.
This is a universal thing among the (at least, in the West). The ideology — both the official “abortion is murder” dogma and the fear that women being able to control their fertility would be a threat to the “traditional family” [i.e., male supremacy] — originated with the Roman Catholic Church in the late 19th or early 20th century (not sure which). Around 1980, fundamentalists in the US (who had, like other Protestants, no strong views on the topic prior to this time: the only opposition to 1972’s Roe v. Wade when it was handed down was from Catholics, mainly clergy) suddenly pinched the Catholic doctrine, verbatim. The Republican Party had conspired with the fundamentalist clergy in the South to abortion as a “wedge issue” to win the votes of the white Southerners who had abandoned the Democratic Party after it embraced civil rights. (They had originally wanted to use segregation, but they found that was a non-starter due to the votes it would have cost them in the North. Ronald Reagan pioneered the new racism of dog whistles and stereotypes, notably targeting Black women: “Welfare queens,” “crack whores,” etc.)
Our nutbars were over in the UK trying to poison the voters when they were passing Savita's law.
When Florida (which is controlled by right-wing extremists and has banned abortion) had a referendum to add abortion rights to the state constitution (which would override the legislative abortion ban), reproductive slavery activists used a disinformation campaign, and voter intimidation & suppression, to prevent it from passing.
Yes, I live there, and they jacked up the percentage of approval to pass a citizen amendment to 60 percent, they wanted to jack it up to 66% knowing what high approval reproductive rights have. Originally abortion was considered a right in our state under the privacy heading. The right-wing state judges overturned it.
By Ciara Torres-Spelliscy
Published: September 6, 2023
Florida was once a bastion of women’s rights in the otherwise conservative South. It even recognized a state constitutional right to abortion. Those protections are vulnerable this year as the Florida Supreme Court, where five of the seven justices were appointed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and the remaining two were appointed by then-Republican Gov. Charlie Crist, is poised to reconsider its abortion precedents.
Using our tax dollars to boot.
How many times have we said it: "The cruelty is the point." The ministers who opposed the Baby Priya's Bill demonstrate a marked dearth of compassion and empathy, and a clear desire to impose their ridiculously narrow point of view on all women, and particularly those of child-bearing age. Their inability to consider what is going on with a woman who has to deal with the emotional tumult of a miscarriage tells me that, as Priya's mother suggested, shouldn't be in parliament.
Indeed, they should count themselves lucky to be recognized in society at all.
They view all women of child-bearing age as breeding stock, not as people. It's disgusting.
Actually RWNJ views everyone not like them as less than human not worthy of basic Human Rights and Civil Liberties.
You said it better than I. GMTA.
I think they view most people who aren't rich as that, but especially women.
What the fuck do these people think women are? Even if the pregnancy was terminated late in pregnancy, the woman has to have some recovery time, there’s so much damage to her body. Would you refuse a man who just had abdominal surgery time off? Then, do you also accuse the man who had abdominal surgery of doing it just to get paid leave?
Jesus Christ on a cracker! Why is this the only medical procedure, or pregnancy the only medical condition we have these disturbing conditions for? That’s rhetorical, I know it’s all about misogyny and control of women. Men have this habit of wanting babies like children want puppies, murmuring about legacy and such, but they only care about the babies when it suits them.
It’s nice to see there are places where sanity still reigns.
The utter disregard these men have for women is positively staggering.
Actually, religion is peer pressure from nonexistent people! Tradition is peer pressure from dead people.
Minor difference there! 😁
"What the fuck do these people think women are?"
Property, goods and chattels.
To the RWNJ in Australia...
You're making this about abortion? Seriously? Tell me, what is your opposition to abortion based on? It can't be the bible. That book doesn't contain a single condemnation of abortion. I have a suggestion for you: Stay the hell out of the private matters of others.
Few people disgust me more than those who claim their religion entitles them to a say in other people's personal choices.
👆🎯Well mine says theirs have no say. Bodily autonomy.
Hell, the bible gives step-by-step instructions to perform an abortion! Numbers 5:11-31 spells it out completely. Any dumb ass who wants to say that the bible is pro-life is talking out of their sphincter!
They should also read Hosea 13:16 where the biblical cloud faerie sent an army into Samaria to punish it for rebellion. That punishment included dashing infants to death and driving their swords into the bellies of pregnant women, killing both the woman and the fetus within.
That Hosea verse should put any caring human being off the bible, if not religion altogether.
It did for me.
The bible is only pro life for men who properly obey the mad blood god. Everyone else doesn't count.
That isn't actually instructions for an abortion. That's instructions to detect adultery.
If a stillbirth happens during that "test," they then take the woman out and stone her to death.
True, but if she is preggers, even with her husband's child, an abortion will occur.
I think it's fair to say it's based on Christian theology, even if the bible itself doesn't mention it negatively. Early theologians and later popes added new cannon alongside biblical beliefs the whole time Christianity was being formed. Some priests and religious texts were opposing abortion before the Romans even recognized Catholicism as an official thing (313AD), so the whole 'it has a soul so you can't kill it' idea is not at all new.
What's new starting in the 20th century is that Christians now lie about it. The soul idea would be taken serisouly by courts in earlier centuries, but now they know it'll get thrown out by any court in a secular state. So now they make up fake bullflop reasons to whitewash their clearly sectarian ensoullation objection to it.
Except the pope made a deal with Napoleon to increase bodies for his armies by being against abortion, before that there were individuals who were against abortion but it wasn't canon.
"The history of the Roman Catholic Church’s position—from which all current US anti-choice extremist Christian positions derive—is not what you think. Today’s Vatican denounces even the words “reproductive health” as unacceptable in official UN documents—in case anyone might construe them to include the already deleted word “abortion”—and although the Vatican is a non-voting so-called “State” at the UN, it is a highly effective lobbying force continuously purging all UN documents of such language. It works on this in brotherly coalition with Islamists and Protestant fundamentalists; apparently, convenient patriarchal alliances against women override pesky little memories like, say, the Crusades.
It comes as a shock to most people that the Catholic Church’s fierce opposition to abortion was not always what it is today, because the Church pretends that its position on pregnancy termination has been based on a “right to life” and has remained unchanged for 2000 years. Poppycock. In fact, it has varied continually over the course of history, with no unanimous opinion on the subject at any one time.
In 400 C. E., Augustine expressed the then-mainstream view that early abortion required penance only for any sexual aspect of a sin, not as homicide; 800 years later Thomas Aquinas substantially agreed. (Pssst: the Church made them both saints.)
Between 1198 and 1216, Pope Innocent III ruled abortion as “not irregular” if the fetus was not “vivified” or ”animated”; animation was then considered 80 days for a female and 40 days for a male—male fetuses apparently could develop faster then slow-poke female ones. Oddly, it has never been explained how anyone in the 12th century could tell sex differences in the womb. Or was there some early version of ultrasound back then that historians somehow missed?
Pope Sixtus V forbade all abortions in 1588, but in 1591 Pope Gregory XIV rescinded that order, and reestablished permission to abort, this time equalizing things a bit: up to 40 days for either a male or a female fetus.
Antoninus, Archbishop of Florence (also now sanctified), was a 15th century Dominican who wrote a major treatise on abortion, in which he taught that early abortion to save a woman’s life was moral.
Thomas Sanchez a 17th-century Jesuit, noted that all his Catholic theologian contemporaries justified abortion to save the life of the woman.
It was as late as 1869—only about a century and a half ago—that Pope Pious IX ruled all abortion murder and defined it as excommunicable.
And therein, my friends, lies a tale.
Napoleon III was gravely concerned that the birth rate had been dropping and that France would face a serious depletion of soldiers for its wars and colonizations. Pius IX, for his part, had long yearned to pass a doctrine of papal infallibility—but had faced opposition from within the church as well as from external kings, czars, and the like. But Napoleon was an emperor.
So the two struck a deal.
In return for Napoleon’s powerful support for papal infallibility, Pius would change the Church’s regulation of abortion—which at that time forbade the procedure only after quickening, at about three months. But Pius, a shrewd bargainer, played hard to get. So Napoleon threw in a further inducement—that all teaching positions in French schools would thereafter be filled by the Church.
Done.
Napoléon would get his huge crop of babies to grow into cannon fodder, because the Vatican would outlaw all abortion. In return, Pious and all popes after him would get their infallibility plus Roman Catholic control of French children’s minds (and those of kids in colonies around the world) for generations to come. Women’s deaths, by now in the millions because of this bargain, would pay the price. But hey, the art of the deal.
Interestingly enough, however, and also contrary to popular belief, the prohibition of abortion is not governed by claims of papal infallibility. This leaves far more room for discussion than is usually assumed. Some Jesuit historians have actually been honest about this history.
There’s much richer detail in the book, Fighting Words, but above you have an outline of the abortion chapter. Such crucial history gets buried for a reason. Which could lead us to wonder: if this issue is not governed by infallibility, and if the Church position itself has been flexible, and if there is no mention of forbidding abortion in the Bible or the Constitution, then just how and why does this issue continue to be so explosive in discussing women’s basic human right to bodily self-determination? And, for that matter, to the foundational concept that defines America: the separation of church and state? "
https://www.robinmorgan.net/when-the-vatican-thought-abortion-was-moral/
Interesting stuff - thanks.
It looks like the church is, and always has been, a club for liars. Who knew? (apart from all of us, anyway.)
They only focus on Bible verses in Psalms and Jeremiah that says, and I paraphrase, "I knew you before you were born." and "You created me in my mother's womb." while ignoring the verses about King Menaham ripping open bellies of all the pregnant women.
Not to mention getting their wives and their secret lovers to abort their unwanted babies to keep the affairs quiet and not have to deal with more mouths to feed.
Yep. Both “I knew you before you were born” (laughably ludicrous and impossible) and “You created me in my mother’s womb’ (I do belive that a human male would’ve helped to create a viable fetus and not some figment of the imagination) have absolutely nothing to do with abortion.
Yeah, gawd had decided to make Jerry a prophet, so that makes sense. There is nothing in that verse alluding to gawd "knowing" everybody in their mother's womb.
Yet Another reason the Evangelical Fundies are anti-semitic.
“The idea that anyone, much less a lawmaker entrusted with shaping public policy, could look at a grieving mother and see only a loophole to be exploited rather than a human being in need of compassion is grotesque.
These conservative men, and the few women who joined them, chose to weaponize grief for the sake of ideology. Instead of sympathizing with grieving parents, they reflexively treated those parents as if they have ulterior motives.”
Well, yes. And your point is…?
Of course I know the point. Because it’s correct. What I see so much coming from religious conservatives is that every accusing finger they point at others has four pointing back at themselves. Every accusation is a confession. Because their God is all encompassing everywhere and everywhen, everything is about their control of others to please their God, who has always remains impressively silent except in translation from books thousands of years old.
It just isn’t abortion. Look at gay marriage. Gay people can’t get married because if they did, heterosexual people would behave horribly, which they have always done anyway, whether gay people could get married or not. They don’t actually care about heterosexual marriage, they care about control. If they cared about marriage, they would understand the truth of this statement: LET US MARRY EACH OTHER SO THAT WE DON’T MARRY YOU.
They progressed to the next part of their argument: if two men or two women can get married, then why can’t brothers marry sisters and fathers married daughters? I’ve always found it very funny that the worst case counterexamples they present are always heterosexual people behaving badly. And of course, the logic fails here as well: if a man can marry a woman, why can’t the father marry his daughter, and what does that have to do with gay people getting married TO EACH OTHER?
We find this kind of obtuseness everywhere conservative religion operates, especially when it comes to matter matters of sex. As I pointed out many times, for decades, the Boy Scouts did not allow gay scout masters. For decades, they had an sexual abuse problem, which they tried to cover up just like the Catholic Church did. They claimed it was about protecting boys from predatory adults. But this was the same kind of “loophole” hemant mentions. Gay people weren’t allowed to be members. So who was doing the molesting? Men who would be considered by their wives, families, colleagues, communities, churches, and above all, THEMSELVES to be heterosexual. It had nothing to do with actual gay people, only with what religious conservatives were projecting onto gay people, which turns out to be…
…wait for it…
THEMSELVES.
“that every accusing finger they point at others has four pointing back at themselves”
Because they are all AI generated with weird hands?
Why pick on the digitally enhanced?
Sometimes they are dehanced.
Or de-hand-ced?
Da hands is de-hands-ed?
ALL RIGHT!!!!!
Three.
Grumble.
Three is the number thou shall count...
...and the number of the counting shall be three.
Four shalt thou not count; neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three.
Five is right out.
That's a circonvoluted way to say "And Tango makes three" 🤔
I wondered about that.
You’re not being fair here, and I have to remind you of that. They also love power over others and being God’s BFFF.
Look, if God wanted us to be compassionate towards women he would have said so. He could have easily squeezed it in between the chapter on how men should not play women's sports and the chapter explaining how a reduced capital gains tax rate actually benefits the whole society.... Wait just a second, *** flips through the Bible. ***. Holy shit he actually doesn't say that, well there goes that premise. I guess there is nothing left to do but sell my daughter.
Look Holy, what do you expect conservatives to do - treat others as they wish to be treated? Treat the least of these in the way they will be treated by God? Ridiculous leftist socialism. Thank goodness it doesn't appear in the bible.
How much? Asking for a friend.
Just don't pull a Jephthah.
I pulled my Jephthah once, couldn't walk for a week.
How much, and what's your return policy?
I am not sure about the return policy. The last man to try was returned to his maker in series of very small envelopes.
[deleted by self for irrelevancy]
If I deleted my comments for irrelevancy. I'd have no comments at all.
"how much for the the little girl?"
John Belushi in The Blues Brothers.
Can we start defining anti abortion organizations as hate groups yet? It’s past due. These deeply misogynistic folks want an uneducated public to believe “late term abortion” is women snuffing out their own babies shortly after delivery just because they are evil and felt like it. It’s absurd and it needs to end. Even if they don’t buy into that nonsense, they still want to maximize suffering and inflict punishment onto women who have stillbirths or their premature baby happens to die. Cruel and sick.
It’s a glimpse into their psyche, if they could do it or gotten away with it, they would do what they’re accusing women of doing.
Frightening and true
They want to claim that they're protecting fetuses, yet once the child is born, they can't be bothered to notice or care.
The same RWNJ don’t seem to notice that flood that goddybitch sent; killed millions of fetus. Nor the fact that goddybitch told his followers to kill everyone in Jericho, including fetus (pregnant women). So why are the same RWNJ not upset about that? Christian=hypocrite is the byword now.
Life-hating and life-denying in every sense. Extreme weather. Floods, fires, famine - all just fine in their book.
𝑇ℎ𝑒𝑦 𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑒𝑑 𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒 𝑤𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑛 𝑤𝑜𝑢𝑙𝑑 𝑢𝑠𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑏𝑖𝑙𝑙 𝑎𝑠 𝑎 𝑟𝑒𝑤𝑎𝑟𝑑 𝑓𝑜𝑟 ℎ𝑎𝑣𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑎𝑛 𝑎𝑏𝑜𝑟𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛.
That was the public face of it. These far right Christian ghouls were using their opposition to women being able to control what happens to their own bodies to claim that women would be getting pregnant willy-nilly and aborting just to get an extra vacation.
What they really wanted was control. They wanted to still be able to force grieving mothers back to work so they could continue profiting off of their labor. It fucks up the optics if they were to say that out loud.
And notice it's always men who stand in opposition of abortion. The ones who will never find themselves at risk from an unwanted or potentially fatal pregnancy.
Hemant mentions three women legislators who supported it too. Because yep there are fundamentalist women. And like the men, they are no doubt hypocrites who make up "but this is different" excuses when it happens in their family, because this is as much a class war thing seeking to deny a procedure they can access through wealth, power, and connections from being accessed by poor people, as it is a sexist thing seeking to deny women the rights powerful men would insist on having.
As a general rule though, you're more right than wrong.
Yup. But notice I said “always” and not “exclusively” men. Bit of a difference.
You are right about republikkkan women. They are protected. They are taken care of by their peers. They don't have to worry about those yucky people who probably smell bad. Those other women who have sex whenever they feel like it and are too stupid to have married a man who will take care of the abortion that they don't have to think too much about.
They can't think humanely, they're doing something to further their station in life.
^^^Ever so much this, and their abused spouses.
Priya's mother should have publicly shamed her company. They would have fired her, but there would be plenty of other companies out there willing to give her work as a show of support. Companies do this shit because they think the public won't care about the plight of a singular employee. They need to be called out for it.
I'd like to agree; unfortunately, in the past women have found out that no, no other company is willing to hire them after that sort of firing. That might have changed, or it might be different in Australia, but would you want to be the test case? I know I wouldn't, and in all truth Priya's mother has already been courageous enough, she shouldn't have to take the risk.
It's by no means certain. There are companies out there who view it strategically; it gives them the opportunity to appeal to other potential employees by portraying themselves as a company with integrity. But the risks are real, as you point out.
I'm gonna tell a story unless it is too much.
I had a baby at 25 weeks. In '83. My baby weighed a pound+ and was hospitalized for 4 months.
With me? Let's fucking go.
I saw many babies die right in front of me. I saw parents who lived many hundreds of miles away from their newborn, drive back 12 hours to the hospital to pick up their dead baby.
The shock and horror of having a tiny baby barely clinging to life, who you can't even hold because they are too delicate, suddenly die is that horror I mentioned.
Shit. I'm so angry at these evil motherfuckers, I have to stop. My baby is in her 40s and we are great pals.
Virtual hug.
Thank you friend. That cruelty and depravity are weapons in the hands of power infuriates me.
3 weeks premie, back in 1980. I weighed barely 2kg.
That's less than 1/2 of me. I need to give more than flowers next Mother's Day.
I’m speechless. Thrilled for you and yours. Saddened for the others and what you witnessed.
Not quite the same: my younger child came down with something at age three that had him on the cardiac wing of Children’s Hospital in DC. He had great treatment and we were out of there in less than 72 hours. Most of the kids on the floor were there waiting for heart transplants. And most probably never got them. I felt guilty that our reason for being there proved so transient.
Yeah, it's hard to walk away knowing that some kids don't. Most do though, like yours, and that's a happy ending.
I hope she is doing well. It can be a shocker. It took me a long time and my baby lived. Having it just be gone before you get to even physically feel the life that runs that tiny human thing that just tore itself from your body, well, it's not something you want to repeat.
Queer Guy hugs are a billion times better than straight Guy hugs. Thank you.
As an atheist, it has long been my contention that we as humans should be good to each other simply because if we aren't, then it won't happen at all. When viewed in that light, many times conservative views and concepts fall apart as worthwhile goals for humanity; conservative ideologies just don't pass muster as being good to one another. The kindness is missing.
No government should have to come down on employers and force them to provide time off for the employees that make the company run. It shouldn't be necessary. It's clear to most sane people that Priya's mom needed the time which should be more than plenty of reason for the employer to give it to her. Conservative whining about how 'but that might mean someone who didn't really need it might get time off' is hogwash at best. Despite what conservatives so often seem to want to claim, 'work' is not a value in need of defense; these days it seems to be a code for keeping people too busy to think for themselves.
Kudos to Australia for getting this one right. Someday, maybe the US will learn something from your handling of the issue.
Well put. Sadly when greed becomes too much a part of business SOP, the government is left with the responsibility to legislate fairness and kindness.
Problem now is that the current administration is just as greedy and self-serving as the CEOs are.
The current administration is more concerned about serving its monetary donors than the country at large!
“ Conservative whining about how 'but that might mean someone who didn't really need it might get time off' is hogwash at best.”
It’s telling that the one person that might be gaming the system is their big concern, and not the hundred people who actually needed it
Consewertives are pack animals. If you are not a member of their pack, their attitude is you should eat shit and die.
Damn, the wingnuts must've been creaming their tighty-whiteys over this. I mean, c'mon- they get to attack womens' bodily autonomy 𝘢𝘯𝘥 workers' rights at the same time, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 do it in a way that's as needlessly cruel as humanly possible? They're literally looking a grieving parent in the eye, sneering down their noses at her, and yelling "get back to work, ya lazy bum!"
Torquemada himself would've been envious of such an opportunity for wanton sadism.
"If you're pre-born, you're fine. If you're preschool, you're fucked." George Carlin
OT- Trump doesn't give a fuck about anyone unless they can write him a fat check... as conclusively proven by how he treats his own voters: https://apnews.com/article/black-lung-coal-miners-trump-doge-7c2258181a73f650d138faf07fc4517b
It is going to take decades, at least, to tally the death toll to be laid at that asshole's feet. Longer, still, to address the metastatic cancer of ignorance, spread deliberately by the Republican party and right-wing media, that allowed him to come to power in the first place.
Years ago in the USSR, they had the concept of the "vertical stroke". Something goes wrong, you work your way up to the chain of command and shoot everybody who had anything to do with it. Something like that has got to happen once Trump has gone.
Pedodent tRump didn't give a fuck when someone passed out right in front of him. Look at that psychopathic bag of blubber:
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/guest-collapses-trump-oval-office-weight-loss-drug/story?id=127271387
Oh, he cared alright, if that pouty expression on his upper ass is anything to go by.
He cared that 𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘦𝘭𝘴𝘦 was hogging all the attention that was rightfully 𝘩𝘪𝘴.
Once again we have proof that conservative is the antonym of compassionate.
After Tuesday’s U.S. elections, politicians from other countries trying to mimic American Republicans should rethink that strategy.
Been there done that. The fact that people could think some normal person is going to have an abortion in order to get a year's leave of absence from work is absolutely abhorrent. It speaks to the mindset of these people that they would be so suspicious of people's motives, and thank God there are somewhat fewer of them in the antipodes than there are in the US. Although the Aussies seem to have a number of them in their parliaments that we in NZ don't have. (Or if we do they keep their heads firmly down)
It's because it's how they would game the system.
Every conservative accusation is a confession.