As anti-abortion activists seem to get more and more extreme in their tactics, reasoning with them has seemingly become an exercise in frustration.
For example, you may recall that Planned Parenthood clinic director turned forced-birther Abby Johnson danced a jig when wind from Hurricane Harvey knocked a tree down in Austin, cutting off access to an abortion clinic. I asked her if she was okay with other businesses potentially being inconvenienced as a result of this downed tree.
Um, @AbbyJohnson? Here are some businesses close to that clinic. Was it worth it for them to be closed if that clinic was shut down? pic.twitter.com/3a4zMIHEG5
— Darrell Lucus (@DarrellLucus) August 30, 2017
Her response?
If it means innocent lives were saved, then yes.
— Abby Johnson (@AbbyJohnson) August 30, 2017
Well, a prominent sci-fi writer may have found a way to cut Johnson and other forced-birthers down to size with one simple question.
You may know Patrick S. Tomlinson as the author of the Ark Trilogy. But Tomlinson has also dabbled in political commentary; he has written op-eds for The New York Times, U. S. News and World Report, and The Hill. His most recent foray into politics came on Monday, when he fired off an epic tweetstorm about a question he’s asked abortion foes for years.
https://twitter.com/stealthygeek/status/920085535984668672
https://twitter.com/stealthygeek/status/920085907125960704
https://twitter.com/stealthygeek/status/920086366540718081
https://twitter.com/stealthygeek/status/920086917043097601
https://twitter.com/stealthygeek/status/920087543315619840
So what is it that seemingly has abortion foes reduced to essentially saying “homina, homina, homina” after facing Tomlinson?
https://twitter.com/stealthygeek/status/920088083768446976
https://twitter.com/stealthygeek/status/920088595653955584
https://twitter.com/stealthygeek/status/920089167765426179
https://twitter.com/stealthygeek/status/920089651376947200
Ben Shapiro tried to answer the question on Tuesday.
That @stealthygeek thought experiment is dumb, and here's why (and I'm a pro-lifer who would save the 5-year-old) https://t.co/VYU7D4Y6rd
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) October 17, 2017
While his main rebuttal took four points, it basically boiled down to one thing–he claimed that abortion isn’t really a case of saving a child over a fetus, but “a case of killing a fetus, by itself.”
And yet, he conceded that he would save the five-year-old–thus unintentionally proving Tomlinson’s point. Apparently Shapiro didn’t get the latest memo from a large sector of the forced-birth movement–little girls shouldn’t be allowed the option of an abortion, even if carrying the fetus to term could be fatal.
Two years ago, a 10-year-old girl in Paraguay was raped by her stepfather. However, she was not allowed to have an abortion, since Paraguayan law only allows abortion to save a mother’s life. Never mind that medical opinion is almost unanimous that girls younger than 13 are at significant risk of dying if they carry a pregnancy to term, and girls younger than 15 risk serious complications if they do so.
But that doesn’t matter to a number of abortion opponents, such as Mike Huckabee. He actually said with a straight face that allowing an abortion under those circumstances wouldn’t really solve the problem. If anything, forced-birthers have gotten even more extreme on this matter. When a 12-year-old girl in Alabama was raped by a male relative, a pair of forced-birth activists wailed that she would be a murderer if she had an abortion.
Cliff Notes version: it looks like what passes for mainstream in the anti-abortion movement seems to be moving toward effectively choosing to save the embryos rather than the five-year-old. After all, they don’t seem to care that forcing a little girl to keep a pregnancy risks preventing that girl from being able to have more children–if she survives at all. Sounds like Tomlinson is on to something.
(featured image courtesy Tomlinson’s Facebook)
