The Kind of Courage We Need More Of

I sincerely hope the reaction to her courage inspires righteous anger and commitment to emulate her, rather than more secrecy.

PZ Myers:

I don’t follow the British popular press very closely, but Josie Cunningham must have done something truly evil.

To read Cunningham’s mentions on Twitter is to explore a world of medieval morality I didn’t think still existed in the UK. The "murdering cow" needs "locking up", you see. "It’s a mental institute you need," explains one man. One woman tells her to throw herself off a cliff, while a man named Warren patiently explains that, "someone needs to throw acid on you." "I sincerely hope this woman is flattened by a lorry," prays another. Women who’ve never met her call her an "ugly no good cunt," a "rank slut," who "doesn’t deserve the ability to conceive" and needs "a good hard kick in your piss flaps." Many talk erroneously about murdering babies or children, one woman asking if she can feel the 18-week-old foetus kicking inside her.

What did she do? She chose to state on television that she was pregnant and was going to get an abortion. She had a mix of good reasons — not wanting to be tied to the father, wanting to focus on her career — and bad reasons — her chosen career is to be a TV celebrity — but that doesn’t matter. The whole point of being pro-choice is that women get to make their own decisions about their own bodies. You can also have bad reasons for wanting to have a baby, but we shouldn’t also vilify women for making that choice (it’s a double-whammy: a single career woman who chooses to have a baby can also be vilified for selfishness and not fitting the maternal stereotype sufficiently well).

I don’t know much of anything about this woman, but if she wants to have an abortion, that’s her decision, not mine. And it doesn’t really matter why she wants it.

Again, for all you self-professed "progressives" and "liberals" who go around so smugly proclaiming  "legal, safe and RARE," and "nobody LIKES abortion," here it is again:

Abortion is the most common surgical procedure in the country, undergone safely by millions of women in this country every year.

When the freakazoids finally get it outlawed, there will not be one single fewer abortion; the same millions every year will still get abortions, but many thousands will die from unsafe procedures because of illegality.

For millions of women, gestating a blastocyst is a fucking catastrophe and life-ruiner can be avoided only by excising the invasive tissue immediately, like the malignant tumor it is.

For millions of women, abortion is a life-saver and the smartest decision they ever made.

Because that thing is not a child, it's not a baby, it's not even a foetus. It's a parasite, sucking food and energy from its host.

You want to personally tolerate that for nine months until your body expels it, then spend the rest of your life taking care of it, go for it: that's your choice.

Otherwise, none of your fucking business.  Free, universal, on-demand abortion. Anything less is a denial of human rights.