There are too many kinds of imaginary science in American politics today—climate deniers and economic nitwits aren’t a fringe element, they’re a significant portion of our governing body. Each group is dangerous and potentially devastating, but none is quite as immediately noxious as those members of the GOP determined to legislate away a woman’s right to choose. That’s not to diminish the clear and present danger posed by deluded wonks who truly believe that balancing the budget of a 16 trillion dollar economy can be equated with balancing your checkbook, or that polar bears and citizens of the Maldives simply need to be a little more flexible. But these are problems that will unfold (or rather cataclysmically implode) over the course of years— the strategic dismantling of women’s healthcare in the United States is a problem that is affecting women today.
As the abortion debate continues to unfold, it’s important to understand the difference between this and most other political issues; the Republican war on women isn’t waged with the traditional weapons of a differing viewpoint coupled with the desire to see change. It’s fought with misinformation and propaganda, with no basis in science, logic, or truth. John Huntsman, a Republican notable in a party of Cruzes and Bachmanns, once called the GOP the “anti-science” party—that’s largely true, though I would venture even further. It’s not that the party doesn’t like science; it’s that they twist it into an end product entirely unrecognizable from the original, a sort of un-science. The GOP’s willful misunderstanding of women’s reproductive health isn’t a differing interpretation of facts, owed the respectful evaluation of an opponent’s position. It is the deliberate manipulation of science to further ideology that has no place in the laws of the United States, manipulation that will continue to wreak havoc in the lives of American women if we continue to let it.
There are two key problems with the way in which the Republican party has chosen to approach this particular issue. There is the fact that a significant portion of the party’s member either doesn’t understand the science relating to women’s reproductive health, or purposefully manipulates it to suit their needs. And there is the fact that the foes of the pro-choice movement frequently employ methods that would make the most brazen of Tammany Hall blanch.
The unscience of the GOP is unavoidable as soon as you open a paper or turn on the TV; it seems every 10 minutes we’re faced with a brand-new nimrod gunning for the title of Akin of the Week. There was Celeste Greig, the president of the California Republican Assembly, who noted that “the percentage of pregnancies due to rape is small because it’s an act of violence, because the body is traumatized”, and Akin’s comments themselves, that in the cases of “legitimate” rape pregnancy is rare, because the female body apparently possesses Superwoman-like faculties to “shut that whole thing down.” So we have the clearly outdated and misrepresentative stance on rape; and then there’s the newest nonsensical attack clothed in compassion, the so-called fetal pain movement. The House Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act would have banned abortion at 20 weeks based on the idea that fetuses can feel pain by that age, an assertion hotly disputed by nearly all scientists and flat-out rejected by bodies such as the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the University of California, San Francisco. The effort was partly spearheaded by the Texas Representative Michael Burgess, who asserted that as male fetuses have been ‘known’ to masturbate, they must be able to feel pain. A dozen state legislatures have clung to the coattails of the ideological underpinnings of this legislation–fetal pain bills have been proposed or passed in a dozen state legislatures, like in Arkansas (12 weeks) and North Dakota (6 weeks). The House bill had about the same chance of becoming law as I have of metamorphosing into a gumdrop–the Senate has a Democratic majority, the bill is directly unconstitutional as it contradicts Roe, and the White House made clear that President Obama would veto the thing faster than you can say “mandatory ultrasound.” But it is indicative of the reach of the anti-choice and anti-science contingent at the highest levels of our government; the bill passed with 228 votes.
So there is the fact that the GOP position is grounded in ideologically entrenched pseudoscience; but then there are the tactics it uses to attempt to turn that position into US law. One memorable instance was the former senator from Arizona, Jon Kyl’s, insistence that Planned Parenthood should not be a beneficent of government funding as over 90% of its function was to provide abortions. He overstated his case somewhat, as the actual figure is 3%. Another was Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurt’s attempt to halt Wendy Davis’s filibuster of harsh new abortion restrictions in the state, on the grounds that her reference to state-mandated sonograms of women seeking abortions was outside the filibuster’s scope. And there’s been the strategic effort on the part of the GOP to shut down as many abortion clinics as humanly possible by making their governing policies prohibitively restrictive; more than 50 abortion clinics have closed over the past three years over stringent new laws like ones requiring all abortion doctors to have visiting privileges at the local hospital. Moreover, the closing of abortion clinics and new mandates like the ones in 26 states requiring a 24-hour window to pass between a woman receiving a consultation with a doctor and an actual abortion disproportionately affect the poor. Women with enough resources to travel as far as to another state, who are able to take off 2 days of work and find childcare are allowed access to an abortion; the women who lack these resources, and are perhaps the least equipped to have another child, are not.
The twin evils of misinformation and underhanded tactics have been remarkably successful thus far, and will continue to be, if we let them. The pro-choice movement isn’t about encouraging abortion; as a certain sax-playing Arkansan once said, the procedure should be safe, legal, and rare. Moreover, pro-choice laws do not actively affect anyone who would disagree with the idea that a woman has the right to terminate a pregnancy. The key word is choice; we cannot imagine ourselves to be a nation of individual freedom if we preclude the choices of others when these choices do not pose us harm. If you personally object to the idea of abortion–and the last thing I mean to do is to belittle that position–then that is not a choice you should make. But it is a moral and philosophical question, and a deeply personal one–we can no more legislate a threshold for the beginning of life than we can any other of life’s most deeply personal questions: when death should be or the existence of a God. So let’s start by talking about women’s health in terms of its realities, not the specters of masturbating fetuses and imaginary biological countermeasures. Let’s continue by working to implement the things we believe in a way that inspires emulation, not an SNL sketch. And let’s end by considering how we want debate to function in this country—by grandstanding and sophistry, or by honest, fair discussion of the beliefs we hold most dear.
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