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Tuesday, August 19, 2014

Beyond "Choice": Enough With the Serially Failed Post-Roe Shilly-Shallying

Women's health advocates must stop conceding a "yuck factor" to forced pregnancy zealots -- you can respect those for whom abortion is a difficult decision without demanding everybody go on and on and on about how personally devastating it absolutely obviously must be for every single women to have an abortion procedure. Imagine what would result from a comparable moralizing freighting of root canal procedures. Whither mouth health? Obviously there is no woman on earth who engages in "recreational abortions" (I'm reasonably up to speed on kinks on offer) but somebody needs to stand on the principle of the thing and shut these disgusting woman-hating child-hating "pro-life" death-cult shits up for good: Sure, it would be better if commonplace constitutionally protected healthcare were provided in, you know, hospitals, but if it's gotta be abortion malls, let it be abortion malls! Hell, I say bring on the goddamn abortion mall!

Also, women's healthcare advocates must start outing affluent and hypocritical abortion closetcases who deny healthcare access to poor and precarious people that are effortlessly available to themselves and for recourse to which they receive the instant forgiveness of God's Love when "God's Love" otherwise takes the form of horrifying public harassment, legally required medical misinformation, humiliating lecturing of intelligent women by misogynist yahoos, legally mandated vaginal probe assault, organized crime and murder on the part of anti-abortion activists celebrated as free speech, and so on.

Face it, almost every single asshole who says abortion is murder is lying through their teeth on the subject. Yes, lying. Not to put too fine a point on the thing, all too many "pro-lifers" are also advocates of the "pro-life" execution of criminals (including, inevitably, at least some who are innocent), and coo over "pro-life" death dealing private military-grade weapons arsenals, and froth at the prospects of "pro-life" wars on brown civilians over there by armies filled with brown cannon fodder from over here, and declare that the undeserving poor should starve and freeze to death in a "pro life" sort of way and keep your gu'ment hands off my Medicare! But quite apart from these arrant absurdities it is truly rare for an abortion-is-murder forced-pregnancy zealot to really declare they think a daughter, colleague, neighbor securing a conventional early term abortion of a fetal-gumwad should truly be executed for doing so, even if they believe in capital punishment for murder otherwise. This is because it is pretty much only timid respectful pro-choice activists who take these belligerent blowhards at their word, when the truth is that they are all just patriarchal dickcheeses venting their hostility over the fact that there are independent women in the world who are not under their thumbs and that some people have sex lives that are not about self-loathing and subordination.

You know, I'm a big queer who has never been particularly thrilled with an lgbtq politics reduced to fighting for gay marriage (a vestige of human trafficking partaking in bogus bourgeois fantasies of romantic completion in coupling, on all of which I call bullshit even after thirteen rewarding years in a happy romantic relationship with Eric) and gay adoption of awful squalling infants, or the right to kill brown civilians who happen to stand in the way of natural resources our corporations want to exploit profitably as an openly gay gun-slinger -- AND YET, one really has to concede that the lgbtq refusal to accept the straight insistence on queer ickyness and the lgbtq outing of elite hypocritical closetcases yielded pretty much the only successes of note in a long generation of civil rights stasis and backpedaling in this country.

We must not return to the pointless suffering, death, and dread of the pre-Roe utopia of the forced-pregnancy zealots. We must stop playing nicey nice with these ignorant evil lying fucks. We must learn something from the successes of lgbtq politics. I will add, that a true queer politics actually already demands the ramification of prosthetically/multiculturally articulated lifeways anyway, very much including wanted contraception, abortion, ARTs, bodily re-making -- for loveways and for lifeways against sexism, against heterosexism, against cissexism, against racist wars on drugs, against censorship of creative and critical expressivity, against exploitation, against extraction, against war. If consumer capitalism has taught us anything, it is that "choice" is an evacuated husk when it is Freedom that is at stake. 

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