I have not seen any anti-abortion site promote or excuse violence against clinics but if that is happening that’s wrong.

I agree that birth control is a means of preventing abortions but that is not a universal view in the pro-life movement. Many believe that birth control is part of the problem. I also agree that society needs to offer practical real assistance to expectant mothers.

I don’t believe I have said anything false about pro-choice organizations, they’ve been remarkably quiet.

Here, hailey’s claiming that pro-choicers aren’t condeming these abusive asshats (witih the nice touch of pretending to be helpful: no really, guys, it’s just that this would support your side….). S/he magnifies this with the lie that pro-choicers would react very differently if the parents were trying to prevent, rather than procure, an abortion.

The keen thing about this lie is that if you keep your terms vague, it can’t be disproven. How much condemnation is “enough” and when it is sufficently “strong”? And since we don’t have a comparable situation that is identical except the parents wished to prevent an abortion, there’s no way to refer to pro-choicers being just as angry. Even if we did have such an incident, we’d still be hearing the vague terms: ah, but you didn’t condemn it as strongly, as quickly, etc. etc.

It’s just more lying and game-playing. What did you expect?

First off, I feel like we are talking about rape here because this is the same sort of thing people say all the time when women come forward about rapes. Second, there is plenty of forensic evidence to support the woman’s story.

Well, you could try asking me instead of going with a feeling that just accidentally puts me into the same mold as rape apologists, on a feminist site.

Just saying.

Again, IMHO, the parents’ behavior was very consistent with the pro-life movement, although not with the opinions and beliefs of many of its supporters. The pro-life movement as it exists is about controlling women’s reproductive choices, not about preventing abortion. Pro-life groups that wanted to prevent abortion would encourage birth control, lobby for real sex ed, and provide serious help for poor women who are considering abortion for economic reasons. If they were interested in preventing post-conception death, they would stop concentrating on abortion, which causes the minority of deaths between conception and birth, and concentrate on funding research into the prevention of failed implantation and early miscarriage, which cause the majority of such deaths. The fact that they don’t suggests that their interests lay elsewhere–like in preventing women from making choices about their own bodies. Just like the Kampfs wanted to prevent their daughter from making her own choice about whether or not to continue a pregnancy.

That is a good critique, and I agree with you on this.

Seems to me like pro-choicers are condemning this crime very strongly. Take this very blog for example…

And, Dianne, I don’t think that the parents behaviour reflects the values of either the anti-abortion or abortion rights camps. I do, however, believe that it’s a strategic error for the pro-abortion rights movement not to speak out in very condemning tones about this. They’d be all over this if it was a parent abducting their child to prevent an abortion.

Racism makes no logical sense, but it doesn’t follow that assholes who follow an illogical philosophy to its logical extreme are “crazy” as in “not truly in control of their actions.” Maybe I’m even more cynical than usual after ten days of jury duty, but I don’t want these people called “crazy” even in jest. I don’t want them let off the hook on any level for treating their own daughter this way.

ms_xeno, I’m reminded of an article that was required reading in my department in college, J. Z. Smith’s “The Devil and Mr. Jones.” Smith’s basic idea was that if we go, ‘Oh, well, those people were crazy’ when we see something awful, we’re abdicating the responsbiility of trying to understand the action and the structures undergirding it, and in the end essentially excusing it as a fluke, freak occurrence that could never repeat itself. He goes on to argue that if we do that, we may as well hang up any hats related to being scholars or the like and tell the Enlightenment, “well, sorry, I give up. The whole ‘understanding the world’ project was a nice idea, but I don’t want to look at the messy bits.” I think it applies to more than scholars, myself–journalists come to mind–but it’s a helpful reminder for the rest of us, too.

We call these people “crazy,” we’re not just smearing those with mental health problems. We’re removing their responsibility for their actions, and in refusing to go further in explaining why, abandoning the responsibility of understanding and possibly preventing similar situations in the future.

And frankly, I have a problem with calling the parents “crazy”– Fuck that. They knew what they were doing. Racism makes no logical sense, but it doesn’t follow that assholes who follow an illogical philosophy to its logical extreme are “crazy” as in “not truly in control of their actions.” Maybe I’m even more cynical than usual after ten days of jury duty, but I don’t want these people called “crazy” even in jest. I don’t want them let off the hook on any level for treating their own daughter this way.

Ja, und sie kampfen doch mit ihre Kind. Bloedmaenner.

This is just so horrible, and I’m pro-choice too, and in a sense, it’s very much a pro-choice issue in that one faction(the racist parents) are trying to control the woman’s(daughter) ability to reproduce or not and they are by coercision or violence trying to take away that choice. Historically, up to the present, women of color have been also been treated in a similar fashion on a much larger scale in that they had no autonomy over their bodies including their reproductive organs. They were and are coerced into or forcible sterilized or placed on hormone-based contraception against their will, the proponants of contraception and abortion often have backgrounds based somewhat in eugenics and racist beliefs(which some antiabortion groups exploit while doing “outreach” in communities which are populated predominantly by people of color especially African-Americans) not to mention slavery where Black woman could be bought and sold, and raped by White men.

And because “pro-choice” and even “pro-life” philosophies should both encompass many things outside the two they are most often associated with, abortion and contraception. They should also mean clean, safe neighborhoods, good healthcare including prenatal, good jobs, affordable and safe housing, education and many other things that help women feel that they have a real choice to be able to have their children and raise them rather than obtaining abortions(which isn’t always done by choice, but necessity or survival which is no choice at all). Of course, in “mainstream” prochoice movements and just about every form of “pro-life” movement, these issues receive scant or no attention at all. They aren’t seen as “prochoice” or even “feminist” but they are the backbone of both movements.

This woman is White but she would give birth to a biracial child whose father is Black and if her racist parents subscribe to the “one drop” rule or any variation, they will see that child as Black. It’s fairly clear that they do. That is why they are doing this to their own child, their flesh and blood because the prospect of her giving birth to a child that they and others will view as Black is more repugnant to them than kidnapping and forcing their daughter(who appears to on some level, be basically a walking uterus) to obtain an abortion and remove what is or would be her child from existance. This is why they are doing this to what would be their biracial grandchild, which is part of their own flesh and blood but they are so consumed with racism, they can’t see that or it makes them loathe the situation even more. They are also essentially punishing their daughter for having a sexual relationship with a Black man and trying to wipe the “evidence” of it out of existance.

The excuse of the boyfriend being in trouble with the law, is just that, an excuse.

This is racism that’s not at all how many Whites see it, as being “subtle” “not overt” and other similarly used phrases. This is pretty out there, it’s blatent enough to hit people with a sledge hammar and still many White people do not recognize it for what it is. People like Ellen Goodman(who I like but yeah, profoundly disappointing here) and others who see it just as a “gender” issue and either miss the racism entirely or downplay it. So, even the more blatent forms of it are unaddressed, which offers little hope for the more subtle forms that often lead up to the more blatent forms.