Ditching "Choice": MSOC, clammyc and I Talk Abortion Framing

It's no secret that progressives are slowly but surely losing the abortion wars: from parental notification legislation to Roe v. Wade sunset laws in many states to the recent Supreme Court decision on late-term abortion, abortion-rights advocates have been playing defense and losing ground for years. And we are losing ground in public polling as well, in spite of overall favorability towards freedom to have an abortion in general.

It is a controversial opinion of mine that part of the reason we are falling behind in this battle is our outdated, ineffective and even counterproductive use of the word "choice" as our crumbling rhetorical fortress. It is an opinion, however, that is shared not only by myself but also by clammyc and even MaryScott O'Connor of MyLeftWing as well.

In a 40-minute audio segment on our new blog Political Nexus, MSOC, clammyc and I discuss the intricacies of why "choice" is such a terrible frame, and what alternatives we might want to embrace in its place--as well as the weakenesses of our opponents' "pro-life" framing and the ways in which we can exploit the rhetorical chinks in their armor.

Unfortunately, I am unable to embed a direct link to download the show here on DailyKos, or I would certainly do so. It can be downloaded directly from BlogTalkRadio here, or streamed from our blog here. If a little bit of slef-promotion can be pardoned on behalf of myself and my good friends clammyc and MSOC, it's a great discussion that delves right into the heart of the issues at hand.

To give everyone some idea of what we are talking about and why we are pushing to ditch "choice" as a frame, allow me to present one of the arguments we put forward: polling on the issue of partial-birth abortion is not favorable for us: at least 69% of the American Public want the procedure banned, with exceptions for the life of the mother. One of the biggest reasons for this is because they believe that women are whimsically changing their minds during the third trimester, choosing to abort otherwise viable fetuses not presenting major risks to the mother's life/health. While it is true that this perception is a product of misinformation, it is also a product of our own framing on the issue: as long as our side is saying that it is a woman's person's "right to choose" what she does with her own body up until the fetus/baby exits the womb, people are going to assume that these decisions are being made irresponsibly and casually. Not to mention the fact that most people would indeed consider a third-trimester fetus viable (without extraordinary measures) outside the womb a living, separate person.

And that is just one of many arguments that can be made against the use of "choice" as a frame.

For a preview of another argument, allow me to excerpt a quote from MSOC herself, an ardent abortion-rights supporter:

MSOC: It's about pro-privacy...You know, when I hear a politician say, "I support a woman's right to choose", I want to vomit! It's a guaranteed kiss-40-percent-of-your-voting-population-goodbye. If a Republican were even considering your positions, your oh-so-nuanced but brilliant positions on the environment, on the economy, on the war, on everything else, you've got them. You've got them in the palm of your hand: "well, this guy's not so bad, he's reasonable, I think I could go for a guy like this." And then the guy like this says, "I support a woman's right to choose." Oooohhhhh God, he's another one of them, one of those idiots who just can't say what he really thinks.

CLAMMYC: Yeah.

MSOC: People are dismissing him because he supposedly supports a woman's right to choose, but I'm dismissing him because he's a pussy.

All of this and much, much more (which I may turn into a diary one of these days) is online and available either at Political Nexus or for download at BlogTalkRadio.

Give it a listen, and let us know what you think, either here in this diary or in the comments at Political Nexus. Thanks!

Orrin Hatch Slanders DailyKos with Lies on Senate Floor

For all the Kossacks out there, this one is hilarious and irritating all at the same time:

I know that most of us were watching CSPAN3 to see Fredo squirm before his questioners yesterday, but an interesting thing happened on the CSPAN2 while few others were watching.

Orrin Hatch (R-UT) was on the Senate floor on CSPAN-2 in the late afternoon, pontificating about the late-term abortion ban, and called out DailyKos, calling it the "online meeting place of the left." In so doing, he once again showed ignorance of the community and the way it works.

His first mistake was to mispronounce the "Kos" in DailyKos with the familiar "kaws" pronunciation--though he quickly corrected himself to say "or DailyKos [correct pronunciation] as I guess it's called."

But his second mistake was far more egregious. Though I don't have the transcript available (it just happened), he said that DailyKos was promoting anti-Catholic bigotry by harping about the Catholicism of a few of the Supreme Court Justices. Mr. Hatch said that this was an example of what he called the "radical, I mean progressive, left" taking extreme positions and acting out of what he called "hysteria" (an interesting choice of words by Hatch in this context, given its misogynistic etymology and origins.)

Needless to say, it wasn't difficult to do a search of diaries on dKos over the last three days for any mention of the word Catholic. And what do I find? JUST ONE DIARY ON THE SCOTUS RULING. One. That particular diary by Sociosam--the only one of hundreds of diaries on the topic to make any statements that could be construed as anti-Catholic--was further peppered with comment after comment after comment after comment upbraiding the diarist for attacking the justices on the basis of their religious affiliation.

Most importantly, though, no frontpagers or "those who officially speak for DailyKos" ever mentioned the word "Catholic" once during discussion of the issue. Not one. It is a flat-out lie to say that "DailyKos" promoted anti-Catholic bigotry--a bald-faced, flat-out lie that has become all too typical of Republicans in Congress.

Amusingly, Hatch then went on to attack another blogger (I don't remember whom) for saying that an anti-choice congress with an anti-choice President and an anti-choice Supreme Court passed this legislation, using the argument that Nancy Pelosi and the majority of Democratic Senators are pro-choice! As if the current make-up of Congress has anything to do with a law passed during the Republican-only one-party rule.

So once again, a prominent Republican lies, makes shit up, slanders this community, and makes himself look like an idiot in the process.

Typical.

Obama Response on SCOTUS Ruling Totally Out to Lunch

Update: BIG MISTAKE on my part: the law actually allows exceptions for the life of the mother. It does not allow exceptions for the HEALTH of the mother. And that is what is most at issue. Nevertheless, I still believe that "choice" is the wrong framing here: it's about the mother's health--not about her "choice" to terminate an advanced pregnancy.

Senator Obama is to be commended for standing tough in his public response to today's appalling 5-4 Supreme Court ruling declaring the constitutionality of the vicious 2003 Partial Birth Abortion Act.  It is good to see our leaders standing tall and refusing to back down on the basic rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness contained in our Constitution.

But not so commendable is the utterly tone-deaf nature of the response in question.  If the intent is to reverse policy positions and save the lives of mothers facing life-threatening pregnancies, responses like Senator Obama's will fail miserably in achieving our objectives.

The key section of Obama's response is that excerpted by faithfull:

I strongly disagree with today's Supreme Court ruling, which dramatically departs from previous precedents safeguarding the health of pregnant women. As Justice Ginsburg emphasized in her dissenting opinion, this ruling signals an alarming willingness on the part of the conservative majority to disregard its prior rulings respecting a woman's medical concerns and the very personal decisions between a doctor and patient.  I am extremely concerned that this ruling will embolden state legislatures to enact further measures to restrict a woman's right to choose, and that the conservative Supreme Court justices will look for other opportunities to erode Roe v. Wade, which is established federal law and a matter of equal rights for women.

While the libertarian framing of abortion in terms of "personal decisions between a doctor and patient" and "right to choose" has served us well in the more general debate about abortion, this kind of talk in relation to partial-birth abortion/dilation & extraction/late-term abortion is death to our efforts in this arena.  While the vast majority of framing surrounding our side of the abortion debate has long centered around choice, the issue of partial-birth abortion is NOT about choice.  It is, rather, an issue of life or death.  In fact, talking about this issue in terms of choice may be satisfying for many who have been in the trenches on the abortion issue for decades, but it is quite possibly the WORST thing we could possibly do when it comes to late-term abortion/D&E.

The fact is that the American public ALREADY DOES see late-term abortion as an issue of "choice"--and they're repulsed by it.  Americans don't want women to treat an abortion during the fifth or sixth month of a pregnancy as a simple "choice."  Allow me to illustrate this by point to an ABC NEWS poll from 2003:

Still, Americans long have been uneasy with the procedure [abortion] and the reasons it's done - and these doubts remain. Eight in 10 or more say an abortion should be legal to save the woman's life, to preserve her health, or when the pregnancy was caused by rape or incest. A much smaller majority, 54 percent, supports legal abortion if there's evidence the baby will be physically impaired.

However, 57 percent oppose abortion solely to end an unwanted pregnancy - "if the mother is unmarried and does not want the baby." And opposition soars to about seven in 10 or more for so-called "partial-birth abortions" or abortions conducted in the sixth month of pregnancy or later.

Emphasis added

Now think about this logically for a minute: over 80% of Americans think abortion should be legal if the mother's health is at stake, but over 70% think that late-term abortions should be illegal.

Think about that.  What that means in no uncertain terms is that most Americans think that late-term abortions are being flippantly requested by women whose lives are not at risk.  If the American public believed that so-called "partial birth abortions" were taking place to save the lives of mothers rather than being the product of "choice", there would not be such overwhelming support for the bans.

And what is the truth?  The truth is that most of these procedures are, in fact, being done for medical reasons.  As the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada states:

A very small number of abortions occur after 20 weeks of gestation primarily because the fetus is gravely or fatally impaired, or the woman's life or physical health is at risk, or both (Statistics Canada, Therapeutic Abortions, 1995).  Many impairments or health risks are not detectable until after the 24th week of gestation. In 1998 an American Doctor, George Tiller, opposed efforts to ban late term abortions in Kansas, using "statistics and photos of catastrophic pregnancies he had aborted." The images showed fetuses with missing skulls or spinal cords, and in one case twins fused into a single body (Dave Ranney, "Tiller: Abortion Bill an Insult to Women," Wichita Eagle, April 11, 1998, and Colleen McCain and Dave Ranney, "Five Kansas Families share Deeply Personal Stories," Wichita Eagle, April 19, 1998).

Those opposed to abortion rights have portrayed women as having late term abortions out of "selfish convenience" or because they "suddenly can't get into a bathing suit." This misrepresentation of women's decision making with regard to abortion is always inaccurate, but especially so in cases of late term abortion.  Most women who terminate their pregnancies after 20 weeks wanted to have a child, and were forced to consider abortion for medical reasons. Other women may be in desperate social circumstances, such as an abusive relationship, or they may be very young teenagers who have delayed abortion care because they were in denial about the pregnancy.

Again, this issue is not about choice.  Indeed, it MUST NOT be about choice.  This issue is about life and death--and we are on the "pro-life" side.  We intend to save the lives of these mothers from those who would kill them so that non-viable fetuses with little or no chance of survival outside the womb can gestate within them as silent killers like something out of the movie "Alien."

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To me, the answer is simple: since 80% of the American public supports saving the lives of mothers, let us use our Democratic majorities in Congress to send legislation to the president's desk demanding that women be allowed to take the medical steps necessary to save themselves in the case of a life-threatening pregnancy.  Force the villains in the GOP and the White House to oppose legislation saving the lives of mothers.  And if, God forbid, this new federal legislation (and btw, weren't the anti-choice Republicans always all about preserving states' rights?) results in the unnecessary death of a young mother-to-be, let us use the tragedy of that murder-by-legislation to put these SOBs on the defensive and do our duty to defend the Constitutional guarantees of Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness.

We must take a courageous stand on this issue.  But if we value the lives of our nation's women, we MUST stop talking about it as an issue of choice.  It is not, and must not be.  It's a matter of life and death.