The New Road

DIY Abortion

Molly Saves the Day has posted an entry on how to perform an abortion. This is in direct response to the South Dakota law banning all abortions. Myself, I skipped the actual posted and went straight to the comments. In the beginning these were generally positive. Then there was a slide to the negative, countered by a positive backlash and at the end there is a mix.

The positive responses run generally this way; It's a bad thing to do, but it's going to be done. This information isn't very good. It's really sad that we need this.

The negatives. generally posted anonymously, run like this; Girls shouldn't be sluts. Women who are raped weren't being abstinent. This is why women shouldn't be taught to write. etc.

What I find most interesting about this is how different the response is today to the abortion ban then it would have been 50 years ago. If Roe were passed, then immediately overturned, you would never be able to get information like this. And I think it's that evolution of information that will upset so many pro-lifers.

Why? Because at the heart of all of this is the want to turn back the clock. It was Bill Napoli who set all this off. And while most people point to his statements on exceptions to his ban, I think the statements that followed those were far more enlightening:

As Napoli further explains, the ideal is getting back to the "Wild West" shot-gun weddings of his childhood, where no couple engaged in premarital sex without "the whole darn neighborhood" forcing them into wedlock. "You just didn't allow that sort of thing" -- that would be extra-marital sex going unpunished by the community -- "to happen...And I happen to believe that can happen again. I don't think we're so far beyond that that we can't go back to that." We're a little closer already this week.

This isn't about the pain of the fetus. This isn't about the trimesters. This is about undoing fifty years of progress in feminism that has occured since Roe v. Wade. These conservatives have two points in time that they look to and say; This is where America went wrong. The first is the "New Deal". Fiscal conservatives believe this is where we became a communist welfare state where everyone lives on handouts. The second sheer point was 'Roe v. Wade'. For social conservatives that's the wellspring from which all our ills rise; divorce, gay marriage, promiscuous sex, women with jobs, drug use, rock and roll, etc. etc.

As Napoli states matter of factly, they want to roll back the clock. In their fantasy land, the day that abortions are overturned, men will be empowered and women will go back to being barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.

It's hokum, there is no going back. There never was a fantasy land in the 50s. And forcing women into back alley abortions isn't going to create a Disney-esque fantasy land. Kids aren't going to stop having sex. Men aren't going to stop raping women.

Getting back to the original point of this post, the DIY abortion article, this is how today's world responds to people like Napoli trying to restrict it. The world flows around him like water around a rock.

Conservatives need to take off the goggles that make the world look like Leave It To Beaver and come back to the reality based community. Government cannot mandate social norms. And having a government dominated by bozos who live in this fantasy land and make incompetent decisions because of it is killing this country.

Oh, yeah, I forgot one last thing. A number of negative posters mentioned that people should have used birth control. But if the conservatives get their way on abortion they will ban birth control as well. Actually they are trying to do both things at the same time. Again. It's all about the control. If you ban birth control and you ban abortions, I guess we won't have sex... Right... Right???