agh embroiled in a debate on fb re abortion..

[5madthings]

I follow a bfeeding page on fb, its normally pretty nice but today they posted a link that was from a pro life page. IT is a sad story of a woman who had a miscarriage snd had poor healthcate (in the us) but they have comflated it with abortion and are using ot to justify thrir pro life stance.... I pointed out this 'error' snd said yes she had a bad experience but that has nothung to do with abortion.

And now the author of the pro life fb page is on my case wanting to lnoe why i support the 'slaughter' of sons and daughters.... I am trying to be patient and polite but omg!! Thry just are so dogged and obsessed with the 'murder' of 'babies' bolocks to bodily aitonomy and fredom.of choice.... It givrs me the rage!

I shall try and link the page... But rahhhh

[NiceTabard]

Can you block them or something?

I really don't think there's any point in trying to engage with people of that type.

[Startail]

Just walk away, abortion is the one subject that it's never, ever wise to argue about. No one ever changes their mind, publicly.

What happens when ardent pro choices find themselves or their teen daughters PG when they don't want to be who knows.

[BigBlockSingsong]

I challenged someone on fb posting bloody pro life pics ,just after I'd had a threatened miscarriage ,

he actually apologized in the end and a lot of his christian mates said I don't like this! sorry you're not having much luck with yours.

[IsBella]

Prob no point in getting involved with arseholes like this but 2 things:

I'd stop using the term pro-life and use the term that actually describes their POV: pro-forced-birth. That's a startling term and for those who are a bit kneejerk and think abortion is wrong because it's icky, it brings into focus what you want if you are anti-abortion: you want to force women to bear children against their will.

Secondly I've done a couple of blog posts about it and we're now allowed to link to blog posts if it's relevant so I think this counts. You're welcome to use if helpful.

I'm a civilian

Only 9 months

[IHateSafeStyle]

Nothing you say will make any difference, exactly as nothing they can say will change your mind.

[IsBella]

It's not true that people aren't swayed by argument.

I agree that the hardline pro-forced-birthers who are on 5madthings' case won't be swayed, but the other people on the breastfeeding page who aren't hardline pro-forced-birth but don't really like the thought of abortion (because we live in a culture which socialises us to be uncomfortable about it) may have their views hardened or swayed by argument.

That's why the pro-forced-birthers go out there and campaign and argue - because they know people can be influenced by argument. That's why people who believe in women's right to control their own bodies, need to argue against them as and when they feel up to it/ have the time/ can be arsed etc.

[5madthings]

Ooh thankyou for your thoughts. I couldnt work out how to copy rge fb page to herr. I debated with her till 2:30am and she thought i was horrific as i said if my dd ever needs to make the choice to have an abortion for whatever reason she will have my support.

Apparently supporting abortion means i am.not a feminist.... Hmmm

I used tge term.force birth but its only forced birth if ots a woman impregnated through forcebin war conditions for reasons of ethnic cleansing.... It got very odd.


She has posted the usual video links etc.

Thanks for the blog links, i will have to counter her arguments as she continued to post after i went to bed amd she wont change her mind but other people reading might stop and think.

She seems to think women just abort on a whim and goes on about the slaughter and murder etc.

[5madthings]

isbella the blog is great! Thankyou for sharing.

[IsBella]

Yes, behind all the forced-birth rhetoric, is the concept of women as being mindless, frivolous, heartless arseholes who just kill babies at the drop of a hat so they can carry on shopping and fucking.

The idea that actually, women are fully capable functioning mature adult humans with fully developed feelings who are capable of moral agency and have the right to exercise that moral agency, is absent from their mind-set.

[5madthings]

O just typed a big long post on the fb post and it disappeared.

Its called pro-life~beauty from ashes and the post is a photo of a woman.crying called 'not a real baby' and then its the comments on that photo where there is debate and the story of the woman having a miscarriage.


I am always suprised that they have no concept what will happen to all.these babies they want tp force women to have... and basically by having sex we chose pregnancy.

Why do they think so little of women fgs this is a woman herself spouting this rubbish?!! And the video links, i have seen them.before but why do they persist in trying to.horrify and scare people.

Showing videos of late term abortion seems irrelevant, its not very nice or palatable but its also not very common or something done lightly. The vast vast majorirty if abortions are bwfore 12 wks. And you know even uf some people do have abortions on a 'whim' its their choice, its their body and i still respect their right to bodily autonomy. It may not be a choice i ever have to make but i wamt the right to do so if i need to and i respect other women having control of their body and their life.


It seems quite simple to me, if you dont like abortion then dont have one yourself but dont tell other women what they can do with their body!!

[NiceTabard]

Much of what they say is irrelevant but they say it because it's harder to argue with "murdered babies" than with talk of miniscule embryos. Hence the pictures of "abortion" which are not representative of abortion.

I really don't think it's worth engaging with anyone who thinks that a forced birth is only when a woman has been raped. I wish luck to anyone who does feel up to it though!

[SolidGoldBrass]

I have yet to find a category of people I despise more than antichoice activists. Though I do have very little patience with wussy whinyarses now you mention it
.

[5madthings]

solid love it! I would share it on the fb page but i discovered that the pro life owrson has a 'profanity filter' and is very quick to delete stuff. As ling as i didnt swear my comments seem to have been left to stand. Others arguing against her have been deleted, so i tried to make sure i wasnt as i think its important someone speaks out.

[chipmonkey]

5mad, I'm afraid you are probably banging your head off a brick wall wrt that person. A bunch of pro-lifers really upset me shortly after dd died. They posted in a picture of a fully-grown healthy baby with a caption "Doesn't he have the right to life" as if terminating a pregnancy were the same as infanticide. It was very lucky for the person who dropped it through the door that I wasn't home at the time they dropped it in because I would probably have pursued them down the drive with a frying pan!
As it was, I was left crying over my baby who had actually been wanted and loved and thinking that she had the right to life but didn't get to live past 7 weeks. And actually most of the time the pictures and captions they use are only likely to upset someone who's miscarried or lost a child in infancy, rather than convincing anyone to keep a pregnancy they don't want.

[chipmonkey]

Oh, and the toerags who posted that through my door did it shortly after the case of Savita Halappanavar became public here, who died after being refused an abortion.

[AKissIsNotAContract]

The irony with many pro lifers is that they are in favour of the death penalty. That I will never understand.

[TeiTetua]

AKINAC, Cheryl Wheeler (not to be confused with Mariah Carey) explains it here:

The words dash by very fast, but here they are:
cherylwheeler.com/songs/mgstm.html

[Ifyoulike]

Just wanted to say that it is possible to jump from one side of the fence to the other (as I did myself), but I don't think it happens overnight.

I was raised extremely anti-abortion, and grew up thinking of it as 'murder' etc, and simply could not understand or stomach the arguments about women's choice, because to me it really was murder, plain and simple.

To me it was like someone arguing for a mother's right to kill her born baby/toddler/child if they were mentally or physically distressing her somehow... because I had grown up believing a fetus was no different (in terms of human rights) from a born child.

It was only after reading many, many arguments, blogs, etc that the real implications and meanings underlying women's right to autonomy over their bodies began to sink in. It was actually an analogy very similar to the 'kidney transplant' one linked to in a blog earlier, that finally made it all click into place.

How far do we go when it comes to insisting (or forcing) a person to put their body on the line for the sake of another?

After that, I pretty much swung completely the other way. I don't personally think its a process to take lightly or flippantly (and don't believe the vast majority do). But I do believe the right to each individual's choice is extremely important, and pretty much none of my business outside of my own body.

[Darkesteyes]

Im pro choice and my DM is pro life (pro forced birth) Its yet another thing we cant agree on.

[chipmonkey]

Ifyoulike, I am similar. I went to Irish catholic schools and was only shown pro-life videos in school. We were never shown the other side of the argument.
(Oddly enough, three years later, in another convent school, my dsis was shown both pro-life and pro-choice videos.)
It was a long time before I realised that things weren't always clear-cut in life and that there might be many reasons why a woman might not want to continue a pregnancy and she should never be forced to.