Denial is strong with them
While I assembled Thursday’s post featuring second thoughts of a former anti-abortion preacher, this video clip of 12 year-old Addison Gardner speaking out against a West Virginia abortion ban went viral:
“I don’t think what happened at the Court in Dobbs or what is happening among the Republicans now in Congress or especially on state levels, is conservative. It’s radical, it’s fascist,” said Rev. Rob Schenck. Addison Gardner might agree.
Maya Yang reports at The Guardian:
Despite speeches from Gardner and other abortion rights activists, the house passed the bill by an overwhelming vote of 69 to 23. Shortly after Gardner delivered her address, house members adopted an amendment that would allow abortions in cases of rape or incest.
However, the amendment, which passed narrowly with 46 to 43 votes, only allows for the procedure to be performed up to 14 weeks of pregnancy and only if the rape or incest is reported to the police.
Michelle Goldberg wonders, given the steam of horror stories of pregnancies gone wrong since Dobbs, how many others on Team Pro-Life, like Schenck, might have second thoughts about the secondary effects of their hard-won Supreme Court ruling: “delayed care for traumatic pregnancy complications.”
Too few, likely. Denial is strong in this crowd. As is, one suspects, overlap between them and Trumpist denials about their political savior’s truthfulness, integrity, and suitability for any elected office.
Goldberg sees among them “frantic and sometimes paranoid deflection.” They dismiss the shocking stories, including the one of the rape-impregnated 10-year-old from Ohio, because they distrust the motives of the messengers:
I’ll cop to wanting to undermine anti-abortion laws; I believe they put people’s health at grave risk, but that’s far from the only reason I oppose them. But dismissing an argument because of the motive of the person making it is a classic logical fallacy, the sort of thing you resort to when you’d rather not deal with the argument itself.
Members of the anti-abortion movement, including DeSanctis, often claim that abortion is never medically necessary. If they can’t bear to look clearly at the world they’ve made, maybe it’s because then they’d have to admit that what they’ve been saying has never been true.
Team Pro-Life has yet to address the question posed by Addison Gardner: “Does my life not matter to you?” They insist a pregnant 10-year-old be forced to bear a rapist’s child while averting their eyes, as Goldberg puts it, from the “discomfiting gap between intentions and effect.”
Would you let a 10-year-old babysit your newborn? Or hers?
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