NY Times Editorial: The Campaign of Deception Against Planned Parenthood

[DirkGently]

39. Thinking maybe we should force women to give birth is "facile at best."

It's not a moral quandary as to whether you have the right to order a woman to give birth or not.

There are kinds of willful stupidity that are okay, and then there are the ones where people want a woman to perhaps die giving birth birth to a rapist's child.

If you find yourself sitting around contemplating whether, as anti-abortionists propose, we should conduct a criminal investigation to see whether a woman's miscarriage may have been "murder," or that a 12-yr-old just may have to die giving birth to the spawn of a child molester, you do not have "deep concerns." You (the hypothetical "you," not you the poster) are a dangerous fool with a distorted idea of your rights vis a vis other people's lives.

Edit: Look, this topic makes me angry. I am incredibly tired of the great levels of respect accorded to people who are pushing an agenda that would quite literally kill women. I have had it with the idea that, if we don't carefully watch them, women will "abort" a fully developed child moments from being born. That "abortionists" sell fetal body parts and trick women into making "a terrible mistake."

I understand that some -- and I would say less than the majority -- of those seeking to limit or ban abortion believe their ideas are in good faith; that there is a serious moral hazard to women making the same decisions they have been forced to make for all of history.

But they are beyond wrong, and every time we have acceded to this idea of good-faith "concerns," we find a new cheat. A new ban. A new demand for a new restriction. First it was "partial birth abortions," a dishonest name for a rare procedure typically employed only to save a woman's life. We gave them the benefit of the doubt that even though that entire notion is ridiculous, they "meant well."

So now look where we are. Forced counseling, with scripts for doctors to parrot. Forced ultrasounds. A nationwide push for shorter and shorter windows for abortion. An unending river of lies and pseudo-science, and no particular outcry when the lunatics on the fringe of this thinking -- and it's quite a broad fringe -- stalk, harass, and kill people over it.

I am beyond giving the benefit of the doubt at this point. I'm taking it and giving it to the women.