The Big Secret of Abortions: Women Already Know How It Works

[lynn82md.livejournal.com]

The campaign, masterminded by 26-year-old anti-abortion crusader and “proud millennial” David Daleiden, is meant to let us in on the fact that abortion is disgusting.

When asked, in an interview with the National Review, what one question he would ask Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards, Daleiden replied, “I would ask her if she knows abortion the way Planned Parenthood providers know abortion.” Proud millennial David Daleiden wants to make sure that 57-year-old Cecile Richards, who has given birth to three children and publicly discussed her own abortion, really understands what abortion is.

Daleiden is enacting a very old strategy, akin to standing outside a clinic with a sign informing women that their unborn babies have fingerprints at nine weeks’ gestation. This approach has taken on new life in recent years, as improving ultrasound technology has offered an ever-sharper view of fetal development, leading those in both the anti-abortion and the reproductive-rights movements to argue that a public, moral, and rhetorical reckoning with the carnal implications of abortion is necessary.

The videos are likely to have an impact: not on public opinion about abortion, which rarely changes meaningfully, but perhaps on Planned Parenthood’s funding, and almost certainly on laws made by state legislatures in the parts of America where abortion has already become so inaccessible — thanks to elaborate facility requirements, waiting periods, parental-consent-and-notification laws, earlier gestational cutoffs, and a dwindling number of providers — that it might as well be illegal.

But as a broader strategy, the notion that educating women in the grotesqueries of termination will be a game-changer is absurd. As Richards could tell Daleiden if he asked her his question, women already know what abortion is. We know more about blood, innards, fetuses, and the babies they may become — in short, about life in reproductive bodies — than anti-abortion activists seem to understand.

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