The Wages of Compromise

Media Czech points us to Amanda Marcotte's great post on the problem with seeking common ground on abortion.

... this assassination needs to be a wake-up call to the William Saletans of the world, and also to Barack Obama---"common ground” is a pipe dream. A great deal of people want to believe that we can somehow come together to agree that abortion is unfortunate and the rate needs to be reduced (even though we can’t talk about how anti-choicers will fight you on any attempts to use contraception and education to actually accomplish this goal), and they hope this will at least temper the abortion debate.

This belief is predicated on a bunch of false assumptions that this assassination should expose, the number one being that we can blame both sides equally for how contentious this debate is. That’s utter bullshit, of course, since only one side stands by the use of force to change individual choices.

SNIP

(The problems with the common ground strategy) The big one is that it compromises the moral high ground that the pro-choice side has, and our moral integrity.

SNIP

While the anti-choice protesters enjoy how their anger scares women seeking abortion services, Dr. Tiller braved the ongoing threat of violence to save lives. We really shouldn’t even concede the ground of calling anti-choicers “pro-life”. They aren’t pro-life. Pro-choicers are the ones who are pro-life. We believe in the value of women’s lives, and we fight for this against a sexist society that treats women’s lives as lesser.

Unfortunately, we do Dr. Tiller and every doctor who provides abortion a disservice when we talk about abortion as a tragedy. It’s obvious that the proper word for an abortion provider is “hero"---someone who risks very real dangers because they feel they have a moral duty to support women’s right to live our lives with dignity and purpose. If we have to avoid saying this to avoid hurting the fee-fees of anti-choicers to get them to talk about “common ground”, then fuck it.

Read the whole thing.

Personally, I think the pro-choice movement lost the fight when it backed away from "abortions on demand." It's been surrendering the high ground ever since. No, not any abortion a woman wants, just the really necessary ones. And just if she listens to a condescending lecture first, then takes another day to think about it. and just if a judge decides the father who raped her is really a threat to a pregnant 11-year-old.

Because, as Anthony Kennedy made clear in the most recent misogynistic Supreme Court decision, women are just wombs, not sentient human beings who can be trusted to make decisions about their own bodies.

Time to bring back abortion on demand, and start calling out the anti-choicers for the women-hating, anti-American, freakazoid, motherfucking terrorists they are.

The Rude Pundit has some excellent suggestions about treating Tiller's killer like the terrorist he is, but Hilzoy explains how fighting the anti-choicers doesn't mean stooping to their terrorist tactics:

The law is not "powerless" in this case. It is not trying and failing to prevent abortion. On the contrary: our Constitution, as presently interpreted, grants women the right to seek an abortion. In order to conclude that killing people is justified in these circumstances, you need to think not just that the lives of innocents are at stake, but that this is the kind of situation in which you should take the law into your own hands, and thereby undermine our system of law and government.

I do not think that it would be OK for people who oppose the death penalty to kill the people who carry it out. I opposed the war in Iraq, but I did not conclude that it would be OK for me to kill soldiers who were shipping out, policy makers with blood on their hands, and so forth. In that case, many more innocent lives were at stake than could possibly have been at stake in Tiller's.

Deciding to start killing people who are doing things that are legal is deciding to go into full-scale revolt against one's government. There are surely times when it is right to do that, the Nazis being one obvious example. But the question when one ought to do so is a lot more difficult than McArdle makes it out to be, since a basically workable system of laws is a very great good, and it's a lot easier to destroy than it is to create.

Read the whole thing.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....