Anti-abortionists caught by 'murder' trap

Amanda Marcotte
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Liberal Internet scribes opened fire over the weekend when National Review writer Kevin D. Williamson tweeted that women who get abortions should be executed by hanging.

In one sense, the outrage made sense. Three out of 10 Americans will get an abortion by age 45. Hanging them would be a bloodbath unparalleled in U.S. history.

On the other hand, you have to hand it to Williamson: He had the courage to stand by the ridiculous claim that abortion is "murder," in an election year, something lacking among opponents of legal abortion. Would that more of his fellow travelers display such consistency. Instead, we have a bunch of people who are eager to point fingers and call abortion "murder," but who never actually act as if you would if you really thought it was murder.

Williamson is right: If abortion is murder, then women who get abortions are murderers. But instead of accepting their own logic, the mainstream anti-abortion movement instead tries to paint itself as people who care about women seeking abortion, people who even want to protect women who seek abortion.

Women's health?

The recent rash of anti-abortion laws has been justified mostly as attempts to protect women's health. In justifying the signing of a bill designed to shut down nearly all abortion clinics in Texas, Gov. Rick Perry said his intention was to "support the health of Texas women."

Testifying in favor of laws that hold abortion clinics to much stiffer regulatory protocols than similar health clinics, Rep. Diane Black, R-Tenn. said she had women's best interests at heart, claiming falsely that abortion "imposes many serious medical risks to the mother," and that "we must do everything in our power to protect any woman who decides to have an abortion." Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., agrees.

That's a lot of concern for people who, from the anti-abortion point of view, are child murderers. After all, it's not as if abortion happens by accident.

It's a choice

Abortion means calling up a clinic, making an appointment and talking it over with a counselor, at the very least. No one trips and falls into an abortion. It is a deliberate choice, usually made with great care. It's bizarre to claim to want to make it "safe" to commit premeditated murder.

Of course, it's true that these activists aren't, in reality, making abortion safer or protecting women at all. As the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists writes, restrictions done in the name of women's health actually "erode women's health" by driving them to seek illegal abortions or to proceed with unwanted childbirth, something far more dangerous than abortion. So really, anti-abortion laws are more consistent with a desire to punish women than with the desire to protect them.

Why, then, all the disingenuous lip-flapping about wanting to "protect" women? It seems to be an effort to punt accusations from feminists that the anti-abortion movement has nothing to do with protecting "life" but is instead an anti-sex movement that wants to punish women for having non-procreative sex.

Faced down with the toxic accusation that they are waging "war on women," anti-abortion activists try to have it both ways, arguing that abortion should be banned because it's "murder" and that women getting an abortion should be "protected."

Kudos to Kevin Williamson for telling the truth and abandoning the futile effort to ignore the contradiction.

Amanda Marcotte blogs about feminism and politics.

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