Focus On The Fatuousness
by digby
Beware of Theocrats bearing gifts. It’s never worked out well:
Focus on the Family president Jim Daly on Friday said he will bridge a great divide by asking abortion-rights advocates to work with his conservative Christian ministry to make abortion less common.
Reproductive-rights supporters say they want abortion to be legal, safe and rare, Daly said, and so his Colorado Springs-based media powerhouse will try to walk that common ground with them — lessening demand for abortion.
The “let’s talk” offer to reproductive-rights groups signals a sea change in Focus’ uncompromising approach to the abortion issue. It is bound to engender controversy about whether detente advances or hinders Daly’s ultimate goal of making abortion illegal.
However, it is in keeping with his makeover of the house that James Dobson built. Daly has said he wants the ministry, which it says reaches 220 million listeners worldwide with its daily broadcasts, to have more conversations and fewer fights.
And Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains said it is willing to listen.
“As I think about this,” Daly said during his Friday broadcast, “I think about the babies that we’re losing right now because we cannot sit down and say, ‘You want to make it rare — tell us how.’ We won’t agree that (abortion) is safe. We certainly will fight for the day that we can overturn Roe vs. Wade, because we want every life to be sacred.”
In the meantime, Daly said, he wants to work with people who may disagree with Focus but with whom “we can eliminate 10,000, 20,000 or 30,000 of 1.2 million babies lost every year.”
This would be the “good guy” to the House anti-abortion “bad guy” team who are trying to destroy Planned Parenthood, the group that dispenses birth control to vast numbers of American women. I think we can easily see what constitutes common ground, here don’t you? I can see the outlines of a deal that spares Planned parenthood’s birth control function but requires that they no longer perform abortions. After all, we now know that it’s “tradition” for the right wing to dictate how their tax dollars are spent so it’s only right that pro-choice people agree to a compromise that exchanges “common ground” on birth control with codification of that fine tradition which says that no federal dollars can be spent in any way that even touches a dollar spent on abortion. I don’t know exactly when it was decided that this was “tradition” but at some point the political establishment seems to have assumed it.
This is all nonsense. Women always have and always will have abortions. And even if birth control is offered as part of the school lunch program and free at the DMV, many will still get pregnant and go through whatever they need to do to get them. It’s the nature of human sexuality that there will be more pregnancies, regardless of birth control, than women who are in a position to carry them to term. Access to birth control is essential, as pro-choice people have proselytizing for decades. But it will never completely eradicate the need for abortion. Indeed, there is some evidence that free access won’t even result in a major reduction in abortion — after all, birth control doesn’t always work and the urge to have sex seems to be more powerful than reason at least some of the time. (Surprise!) So unless you consider bearing children a just punishment for “irresponsibility,” you should reconsider this notion that once birth control is made more accessible then we can all agree that abortion can be banned — which is the implicit deal in “common ground” politics. The only thing that will happen is that abortion will go back underground, although if you consider it a matter of personal responsibility alone, you will probably think the women who die from illegal abortions deserve it.
Pregnancy and childbirth is far more than just a nine month “inconvenience” or a temporary health complication, regardless of whether one raises the child. It affects one’s entire lifetime. Control of one’s reproduction is fundamental to liberty, which is one reason why women have historically been second class citizens whose lives have been circumscribed by biology. That is what Focus on the Family believes in, that’s what the conservative zealots in congress are trying to do and that is what the Democrats who continue to enable this assault on women’s rights are letting them do.
As Ta-Nahesi Coates writes in this fine post, pregnancy is a unique and complicated human endeavor and decisions about it must be left to the discretion of the individuals who experience it. In a world in which women have equal rights, there is simply no other choice.
Update: Fred Clarkson at Talk To Action has more on the FOTF “outreach.” Suffice to say that it is less than meets the eye.
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