The "face" of abortion that is presented by the anti-abortion crowd is that of the teenager that wants to have sex without care for the consequences. Think rich/middle-class white girl that just wants to 'live it up,' then get an abortion before going out clubbing again, or something. You've also got anti-abortion people that believe crap like, "it's impossible for a rape to impregnate a woman because her body physically prevents it." It's a weird form of cognitive dissonance/stupidity.
Perhaps you are not aware-- that is precisely the same situation as in the United States until Roe v. Wade in 1973. The phenomenon you're describing is pretty common knowledge in our left-wing political circles; on the right, it is deliberately ignored.
Uhm... no. This is factually incorrect. If it's "pretty common knowledge in [your] left-wing political circles", that's fairly pathetic. Roe v. Wade overrode state (and occasionally local)-level laws making abortion illegal, but it did not suddenly switch abortion from "illegal" to "legal" in the entire country. (How could that even happen... from a practical perspective?)
There were 193,491 legal abortions in the US in 1970. Prior to Roe v. Wade, abortion was a state-by-state matter, and the lines were being drawn in fairly predictable ways based on the right/left state-makeup of the time.
Your point is well-taken, but I don't think it actually goes against what I'm saying. Abortion in the US was not Federally illegal, but it was illegal for many women and many women died for that. That ended when Roe established it as an affirmative right-- though perhaps not for good, as we're starting to see again entire states where legal abortions are simply not available.
I do appreciate the correction, though I'd have appreciated it more in a more constructive tone.
Re:What really happened at PyCon 2013
by SallySinep on Friday March 22, 2013 @02:57PM
(#5424863)
Sometimes I think that Romanians (and people who have lived under genuinely despotic regimes) are the only ones who really understand American politics.
> suggesting that abortion should be illegal, which is a mainstream position in the USA, is such a crazy-far-right position in Denmark
Personally I think Americans are spoiled.
In Romania under Ceausescu (so before 1989) abortions were illegal. Hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of women (in a country with a population of less than 19 millions) ended up doing illegal abortions under unhealthy, unsanitary conditions. Many of them had health issues because of that, thousands died or were prosecuted for it.
Many of the women that didn't manage to get an abortion, ended up with unwanted children. Conditions were tough as we were living with harsh austerity measures, many of these parents barely had enough money to put food on the table, many of these children grew up in families that didn't want them, many of these unwanted children were given up for adoption, filling the streets with beggars.
Abortions may be murder, but making them illegal is also murder.
If you are interested in what happens when abortions are made illegal, there's a good documentary movie about what happened in Romania. Search for "Copiii lui Ceausescu" (in translation "Ceausescu's Children")