I went over to Mundabor’s place and he referred me to one of the Patron Succubi of the feminist movement, Ms Amanda Marcotte. Who rejoices in writing stuff like this, and it’s about time someone called her on this.

Just to make this abundantly clear: I am biased here.

Firstly, I’m male, and we have but one reproductive right: to keep our dick zipped up. Because if we have sex, we have zero control of the consequences: there is no male pill, vasectomies have a fail rate (and condoms a bigger one) and… if a woman decides to have a child, we will be hounded to support that child: the licensure we need to earn money will be put at risk, and at times fathers find themselves in prison because we cannot earn the income that we had (because the fucking family court has taken the licence).

Secondly, I was a very inconvenient pregnancy: my mother was a nursing student and the man who impregnated her did what most New Zealand cads of that era did — he left the country (and went to Australia). If it had be 15 years later there would have been huge pressure put on my mother to have a termination.  (Now, the woman always grieved for her lost son, and as soon as it was legal to contact adult children of adoption she contacted me, but the pressure she would have been under I see with young, frightened women today.

Thirdly, there is a simple loss of understanding of medical facts. Amanda Marcotte speaks of which she is not qualified, but for having a uterus. That is like saying a truck driver can perform a prostatectomy because he has a penis.

I feel like a broken record, but this is a point I cannot hammer home hard enough: The difference between “abortion” and “miscarriage” is a social construct and not a biological reality. Which isn’t to say it isn’t real, but it’s nonetheless important to understand that what makes an abortion different from a miscarriage is what part of a woman’s body rejects the pregnancy, her conscious mind or her uterus itself. (To simplify things. Obviously, spontaneous abortion has a myriad of causes, most unknown.) What this means is that you can’t tell if someone who presents to a doctor with symptoms of miscarriage had a hand in it. There’s no blood test you can take, and frankly, a lot of doctors would not want to. The first time abortion was criminalized, getting an illegal abortion meant having to have someone physically perform it. Now there are pills. That’s a game changer.

Of course, one thing that majorly sucks is that a lot of people want it to be just this way. A lot of people, even ones who claim to be “pro-life”, think of it this way: They don’t really want you to never have your abortion, but they think you need to work harder for it. To quote Dr. Minto, “Women are forced to crawl around like goddamn criminals,” and that’s roughly what many people think they should have to do in order to get an abortion. The idea that it’s a major hassle but that you get to have one anyway is the point—a sort of state-mandated penance and shaming period for you. This is the reality of how things play out. We know this because of how many anti-choice policies amount to telling women to work harder and endure more shaming: Ultrasounds, waiting periods, etc. And we know this because this is the logic underpinning clinic protest. They pretend it’s to talk women out of it, but it’s mostly to make sure women can’t go in without assholes trying to shame them first.

Bullshit. Complete and utter crap. Lies, and mistruth.

Firstly. a termination is not a miscarriage. And the level of care required to do this safely has not really been established: a recent meta analysis found but one RCT in two countries (Vietnam and South Africa) with variable outcomes.   A lot of the political noise about providers in the USA is just that: noise. There is no data.

Secondly, the further a woman is into her pregnancy the more meaning the babe has inside her and the greater the grief. Many fertilized ova do not implant (which is why if you are having frequent unprotected sex with a man you are fertile with you don’t get pregnant every month. And miscarriage is common. From a recent review.

The loss of a child is recognized as a very difficult life experience, which can often cause complicated grief (CG) reactions that risk negatively affecting psychological and physical well-being.^1,2 In a population-based sample, bereaved individuals who had lost a child showed the highest prevalence of CG.³ Perinatal loss is a relatively common occurrence which, in this article, refers to the death of an infant due to miscarriage, stillbirth, and neonatal death. In 2007 in the United States the infant mortality rate was 6.9 deaths per 1000 live births.⁴ Miscarriage, generally defined as an unintended termination of the pregnancy prior to 20 weeks of gestation, is the most common type of pregnancy loss. The overall prevalence is 15% to 27% for women aged between 25 and 29, increasing to 75% in women older than 45 years,⁵ with elevated risk for women who have lost a previous pregnancy.⁶ The death of a fetus after 20 weeks’ gestation with a birth weight of over 500 g is referred to as a stillbirth. In these cases, the fetus has either died before or during labour, often unexpectedly or after an uncomplicated pregnancy. A relatively new issue that has emerged in the field of perinatal loss is that continuing development of prenatal diagnostics has increased diagnosis of fetal abnormalities, with relatively high corresponding termination rates. A European survey found average termination rates of 88% for Down’s syndrome as well as in cases of neural tube defects.⁷

Although parents have not built up a relationship with their infant, grief after pregnancy loss does not differ significantly in intensity from other loss scenarios. As has been found in bereavement involving first-degree relatives, grief symptoms usually decrease in intensity over the first 12 months.^8,9 Longitudinal studies have demonstrated that in a normal grieving process, grief declines over a period of 2 years after the pregnancy loss.^8,10 Perinatal losses have also been shown to have a substantial psychological impact on parents and families, and are associated with post-traumatic stress, depression, anxiety, and sleeping disorders.^11,12 Overall, high levels of CG are generally associated with a poorer state of mental health.¹³

[I have left the reference links in that text to help anyone who wants to follow the argument]

Thirdly, the level of guilt and shame that one has when a child dies — as a still birth or a miscarriage is, obviously, from the quote, considerable. This could be made worse when one made the choice to act tn this way: to deliberately induce a miscarriage, a termination of pregnancy, be it by the use of an abortifacient or by a procedure. There is an association with having a termination and poor mental health, which has led to a fairly stern critique, which itself has a clear bias — to explain away the effect. There is an association between women being physically abused and terminations (in Vietnam, at least) but not with sexual violence: having an abortion is associated with worse outcomes.

In addition, late abortion is associated with an increase in PTSD symptoms, at least in one US study, from a very high baseline.The most concerning table is the one I’m extracting below: regardless of what you think of PTSD as a diagnosis or construct when you look at the rate of symptom report they are very, very high.

Now, before I quote this Finnish paper, I need to give the raw figures: 2% of finnish women who gave birth and 5% of those who had a termination were taking a psychotropic medication. But when you look at the group on medications you get this.

Among women having used psychotropic medication before pregnancy, 30.9 out of 100 pregnancies were terminated, giving a 2.5-fold risk compared to women not using such medication (. Pregnancy termination and use of psychotropic medicine shared common risk factors, and the adjustment for background variables explained slightly more than one third of the excess risk. Even after the background standardisation, however, the risk for women having used a psychotropic medicine before pregnancy to end in a pregnancy termination was significantly increased (adjusted OR = 1.94, 95% confidence interval 1.87-2.02)

Now, I hope by doing a little bit of a search that I have demonstrated one thing: Abortion is not the same thing as a miscarriage. The consequences to the woman are different. The women are different. And that is putting it as neutrally as I can: I consider every abortion is a tragedy, every life important, and I cannot see any net variation in the value of one life over another.

It’s better so see Amanda as pushing an evil polemic. And for that, she does use a aervice. as a certain Dallas Catholic points out:

Amanda Marcotte proves once again that nothing in the universe is more important to her than the continued murder of millions of fellow humans, in this case, likening babies in utero as being akin to bacteria. I won’t import the “tweets” into the page, but some of Marcotte’s statements, instead:

Taking antibiotics terminates more life than an abortion. One organism < the billions you kill with antibiotics.

Well, I oppose the use of antibiotics for everything. Bacteria are innocent and have a right to live. [But human babies do not. Thus, the apotheosis of feminist baal-worship, offering human sacrifice to their dark god willingly, but finding in bacteria something precious and possessing great sanctity.]

If you can believe an embryo is greater than a woman, I can believe bacteria has a right to live. [Yes, the old “embryo” canard. Babies only spend a short time as embryos. Virtually every abortion takes place well after the embryonic stage, and occurs when the child has developed to the level of fetus. And many of these babies are very capable of feeling the horrific torture of surgical or chemical abortion. But bacteria are much more worthy of life.]

As Robert Stacy McCain said:

So, babies are bacteria and abortion is like antibiotics. This nonsense conclusion is where the syllogism leads, which tells you there must be at least one flawed premise to the pro-choice argument.

Amanda Marcotte simply hates babies and wants them dead. Her thinking is so perverse, she has so twisted her “thinking” around radical leftist feminist ideology, she can’t even see what a moral monster she has become. I think she’s possessed.

Surprisingly – or maybe not – she grew up in a very isolated part of West Texas in a very conservative family. Then she went to Austin, got her mind filled with leftist lies (but, she was apparently open to them before she even left home. I know a couple folks who have met her, and she seems to have rather substantial……issues. Major daddy issues) and the rest is sad history.

In reality, Marcotte has done us a favor, she has simply, and rather foolishly, revealed the true nature of the feminist ideology. It’s not pro-woman, it’s anti-baby. It’s most frequently anti-men. A psychologist might say it is the outward manifestation of a deep-seeded inner loathing.

This man says we should pray for her soul, and he’s correct: for while a person is alive there is hope that the spirit may intervene. But he’s also correct in that we should be grateful for Amanda.

• She had moved the feminist argument to an absurdity. By choosing to see as the highest good the current feelings of women, defending abortion or any other action that minimizes the in inconvenience convience other people cause woman leads her to defending abortion, in all circus circumstances , regardless of what the moral question is. That has led her to a radical form of equalitatianism that denegrates human life (such as a growing infant, or a sick child) as akin to bacteria. Any person with senstivit sensitivity or  ju judgment will be repelled by that. It denies humanity: we are one with pond slime. And we are without any moral responsibility, or the ability to effect change or argue, because like bacteria we ha have  no moral agency.
• She has demonstrated the moral inadequacy of the feminist narrative.  If there is no moral agency, there is but emotions. Emotions change. And an argument from emotions is a weak argument. There is no sense of utility — in fact the data would suggest that a utilitarian argument would be against abortion. The religious premise that all lives are precious, that we are all equally loved by God, would argue against abortion. Her argument is we are monsters, it is our right to be monsters, and we will be upset if you call us monsters.That is not an ethical statement: that is a tantrum.
• She refuses to see any evidence, or nuance.  Now, I don’t have nuance here: I think abortions, even in cases of abuse, are wrong: doing an evil does not correct for another evil. A child is good — and there are women who crave for the child they cannot have. As an adopted child, I think adoption rocks. But I can understand a need to have rules around how any procedute is done, to monitor adverse consequences, to consider that there could be adverse consequences, and to warn any young woman — who is frightened, worried and concerned about being pregnant — that although she may have no surgical complications (but they still exist) that she could have psychological sequelae. That is called gi giving veing people informed consent. That is part of medical practice.

Every abortion is a tragedy. It is the death of an unborn babe, and a grief to the woman carrying the babe. To simply assume it is as simple as taking paracetamol or aspirin shows two kinds of ignorance: the fist is that the relationship between a woman and the infant in her womb is complex and when things go wrong there can be grief, the second is that things can all to easily go wrong phsyici physically ally, and the third is not not understand that aspirin and parace paracetamol , in the wrong circumstances and the wrong dose, can put you in ICU or even kill you.

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