Obama: abortion is never a good thing
Barack Obama is getting on my nerves. First he gave that asinine interview in The Advocate where he pretty much told the gay community that explicitly fighting for equal rights via marriage was a bad political move that could upset the bigots on this side of the sexual identity fence. Now he’s went and decided that those of us who have the weird idea that women are entitled to make their own reproductive decisions have made a “mistake”.
“It may be that those who have opposed abortion get a sense that I’m listening to them and respect their position even though where we finally come down may be different,” he told reporters at a news conference.
“The mistake that pro-choice forces have sometimes made in the past, and this is a generalization so it has not always been the case, has been to not acknowledge the wrenching moral issues involved in it,” he said.
“Most Americans recognize that what we want to do is avoid, or help people avoid, having to make this difficult choice. That nobody is pro-abortion, abortion is never a good thing.”
This is total bullshit. We do acknowledge that individual women have their own opinions on abortion and that there are women who consider abortion to be a serious moral issue. We have never made the mistake of not acknowledging that.
What we do not acknowledge much to the dismay of the anti-choice gangs is that their gangs have the right to practice their opinion on the bodies of women. In a fact a lot of us have had the audacity to publicly repudiate this made up right .
The dispute over abortion is not about “wrenching moral issues” and it never has been. It is about the very humanity of women. “Respecting” the view that women should be treated, both legally and socially, in the same manner as our pets is a slap in the face to every woman on the planet.
As for his remark that “abortion is never a good thing” - what planet/reality does he live on/in? This is yet another slap in the face to the women of the world. It might blow his mind, but women do have abortions because they consider them a “good thing”.
His statement completely repudiates their opinion that they made a good decision and buys into the anti-choice/faux-choice framing that only irresponsible sluts who want to avoid the consequence of sex get abortions and call them “good”.
Kate Harding said Obama is not a progressive and this is true, but I swear it seems that every time the man open his mouth in an unscripted situation he comes off not as a liberal with conservative leanings, but a conservative with liberal undertones who merely comes off as a liberal because the GOP has been hi-jacked by the worst of the worst.
And for those of you about to screech about this post - Barack Obama is running on the Democratic ticket. The last time I checked the Democratic Party was a liberal party thus making it completely acceptable to hold any politician running for office under it’s banner to liberal standards which includes the “wacky” idea that we women are entitled to make own reproductive decisions without interference from the state or the public.
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Yes, we do. We are not a collective. We are individuals and we have our own opinions. We may share an opinion or not on any subject, including abortion. Denying that we do differ in our views is denying the voices of the women who have had abortions and do consider them good decisions.
And no, pointing out that there are women who are not bothered by abortion is not the same thing as saying women who are bothered by abortion are defective or something.
As for your analogy, one of my greatest fears is immobilization. I’d rather be dead than immobilized. You disagree obviously as you’d choose amputation over death, but that does not negate my opinion that there are things far worse than death.
And that’s not a problem. The problem starts when either us wants to pass laws forcing our opinions on each other.
And as I said above - no one is denying that some people consider abortion to have moral implications. What’s being denied is that those same people have a right to take their moral implications out on the bodies of women which is where these discussions always end up - telling women they can’t abort because Person X thinks abortion is bad.
“As for your analogy, one of my greatest fears is immobilization. I’d rather be dead than immobilized. You disagree obviously as you’d choose amputation over death, but that does not negate my opinion that there are things far worse than death.”
Then by your own reasoning your death is a “good thing” since it is the option you would choose. However, I doubt that you would look at it that way. You would consider death the better option, but not necessarily a “good” option.
Has there ever been a woman who unambiguously looked forward to an abortion? I doubt it. The decision to terminate an unwanted pregnancy or carry it to term is a difficult decision either way.
This may be an issue of semantics, but you focused on Obama’s description of abortion as “never a good thing.”
I think it’s clear that he meant that an abortion always has negative effects on the woman. Those effects may be substantially less than having a baby, but they exist just the same.
I just saw your about page. Hello from Austin!
I just thought of another way of looking at Obama’s remarks.
Imagine if the topic had been euthanasia. I can see Obama saying, “That nobody is pro-death, losing a loved-one is never a good thing.”
Nothing in this statement says that euthanasia should be outlawed or that is not the best option in some instances.
If you want to get technical, yeah, Obama’s not a progressive. You’d have to vote for Gravel or Kucinich to get a real progressive. But Hillary isn’t exactly a progressive, either, if Obama doesn’t fit the bill.
I think what you are missing with all this is that Obama is not saying he’ll legislate any of his values, which is all I care about.
As for the remark about abortion never being a good thing, I think he means that in the sense that most people who get an abortion aren’t going to feel terribly happy about having the procedure done, not that it is morally wrong. The context that gives this away is his focus on the side being called pro-choice rather than pro-abortion. Pro-lifers frequently call pro-choicers pro-abortion, and most would not agree with this label. It isn’t the abortion that’s the good thing, but the fact that women are free to do as they please with their own bodies.
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“It might blow his mind, but women do have abortions because they consider them a ‘good thing.’”
No, they don’t. They consider them the lesser of two unpleasant choices. If my choices are death or having my leg amputated, I will choose the amputation, but that doesn’t qualify it as a “good thing.”
A person can be fully supportive of a woman’s right to choose but also recognize that an abortion can be almost as terrible as carrying an unwanted baby to term.