Until Abortion Ends: just a trick to make anti-choicers live a healthier lifestyle?

by Miranda Nelson on December 15th, 2011 at 12:53 PM

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Okay, have you seen this website? Until Abortion Ends features a bunch of anti-choicers declaring they will sacrifing something they love up until a woman's access to abortion unilaterally ends—well, access to safe, legal abortions, at any rate. It's sort of a bizarro Lent for anti-choicers.

However, as Jay Smooth points out in the following video, most of the things that these anti-choicers are giving up are things that are bad for you anyway: chocolate, pop, alcohol, candy, ice cream, dairy, cigarettes, junk food. "That's not really a sacrifice. That's just, like, a diet," says Smooth. "You're just taking another shot at your New Year's resolution and calling it a protest."

"From now on, [pro-choicers] won't just be fighting to protect safe, legal, affordable access to abortion," Smooth says. "We'll also be helping all of these people stick to their diet plan."

Honestly, I'm still trying to wrap my head around this site. It's got to be a joke, right? Not one person who's submitted a video has promised a real sacrifice of any kind. Poor Brady is selling his video-game collection. Jenny's giving up drinking Coca-Cola. Jason will never eat another M&M—not just plain ones, no, he's giving up ALL M&Ms. You see, he has a deep, intense connect to the chocolate, and so that will be omigod so hard for him wahhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Jason, you know what's actually hard? Deciding to have an abortion. Choosing not to eat your favourite snack food is nothing like dealing with the stress of finding out you have an unwanted pregnancy and then agonizing over the decision whether or not to carry it to term. (Oh, and new research shows that it's not the having of the abortion that causes stress in women; it's the unwanted pregnancy itself.)

But I'm glad my support and commitment to women's reproductive health and rights is helping you watch your caloric intake.

Follow the perpetually baffled Miranda Nelson on Twitter at @charenton_.

Comments

8 Comments

Bwaaa

Dec 15, 2011 at 3:16pm

She's gonna be drinkin decaf for a long time.

rr

Dec 15, 2011 at 4:33pm

its shocks me that this whole roe.v.wade pro-choice/pro-life debate is even an issue anymore. I fully appreciate the right to critical debate but i can honestly say i do not know anyone personally that is not pro-choice.

for me at least there appears to be a wide disconnect between the reality of my experience and the reality that is conveyed through the media

Kay

Dec 16, 2011 at 8:14am

The video sums this up perfectly. These people, in an attempt to look like suffering, pious martyrs, are giving up meaningless things as though the agony of having no chocolate or no soda is the exact same level of distress and discomfort as an unwanted pregnancy/legal medical procedure (typically performed in the 1ST TRIMESTER).

If they want to know what a REAL sacrifice is, perhaps they should, oh I dunno, adopt? Better yet, for all the women I see on this joke of a bandwagon, they should give up birth control. Why? Because that would put them on the same playing field they desire for ALL women to be on: constantly at the mercy of their own fertility and whatever penis happens to be inside them whether they want it there or not.

But wait. If I say this, I'm sure they'll get defensive and say "well, I'm on it to space out my pregnancies" or "we're not ready for one/another yet" or "we don't have the money for a baby yet so we're waiting." Guess what? These are the EXACT REASONS why women get abortions, and it is never an easy, fun choice to make.

Pro-life people seem to have this image of women who get abortions: they picture some hot young woman who hates family, hates men, and hates babies, but loves sex and has it with any man she can, forgets that sex makes babies, and then schedules her abortion so that she can have it at the exact last minute because "like uhmahgawww pregnancy is SOOOOO like, ruining my figure!" They want to see women who get abortions as lazy, dumb morons who don't know what fertility means, who don't know where babies come from, who can't make decisions for themselves (but darn do they look cute trying to think for themselves, just like women in 1950s sitcoms!).

But yeah, in a case like this, I"m calling bullshit. Thinking your dumb little sacrifices amount to the suffering women face when faced with an unwanted pregnancy is arrogant and self-righteous. But I'm sure that many of them are taking every single logical criticism and chalking it up to "we're being persecuted for our faith."

Sorry. You can't answer reality with empty platitudes and faux-suffering. Enjoy your diets, guys. Looks like abortion is going to keep you all from developing hypertension, diabetes, and plummetting into the black hole of death called obesity.

Snshine

Dec 16, 2011 at 8:30am

rr,

Never underestimate the power of prayer to promote the irrational.

Coastguarder

Dec 16, 2011 at 11:22am

HI All

First off this sounds it started as` a drunken late night laugh that someone on the anti-choice side overheard and ran with. Only the truly clueless would be involved with something like this. And I would like everyone to stop using the term pro-life to describe these fools. In my 41 years on this planet I have yet to meet another human who isn't pro-life. You like living? Yes, then you are pro-life. You like people who are alive? Yes....that's pro-life too!!! What these people represent then isn't a pro-life position...that is far to broad. It is sort of like saying you are pro-oxygen or pro-nutrients. A better definition of what they represent and want to accomplish is the term "anti-choice". I'd like to see that used more often when this topic is discussed. Anyway, more power to them and their little protest site. it does nothing but minimize their credibility.