Why?  On the off chance that this is a true story, what does it add to the debate?  One woman feels overwhelming angst over snuffing the life of a six celled organism, so now let’s all outlaw Plan B for rape victims, hurrah!

And on the far more likely chance that this is in part or whole a big fabrication, who cares?  Abortion opponents lie.  Dog bites man.  News at 11.

It seems rather exhausting to continue to debunk these lies, because they tend to traffic most heavily in the circles that serve the strongest kool-aid.  If you’re dealing with people feed bunk about guardian angels and Jesus on toast on a daily basis, what do you gain by engaging these loons?

:-p It just seems so pointless.

Because these lies are effective, and having debunking out there is helpful. 

It is exhausting.  They are hoping we give up.  That’s when they’ll win, because then their lies will become truth by having no truth to compete.

People have a tendency to pay attention to exceptions and not the rule.  The one worker who changed her mind sticks out more than the 99.9% who don’t, for the same reason the person who the psychic guessed correctly on sticks out more than the ones they flubbed.

One thing that my bf and I noted is that she has TWO stories for why she left: one, sudden religious conviction AND two, theoretical change in the business model. One is plausible (as far as it’s plausible that a disciplined and careful organization like PP would accidentally shoot itself in the head), while the other seems tacked on, something to justify the instant and weird reconciliation between a PP director and people who have been harrassing her. So, what was it, Abby? You instantly felt something.?...or PP decided to hew to the stereotypes the right has perpetuated for ages? This feels like a constructed story—two reasons to make her defection water-tight. See! She was doing it for the babeeeez! And also because PP is an eeeeebil money grubbing company!

Which brings up another thing. On Jezebel, people were noting that this particular clinic gives about two days a month to abortion.  How precisely did PP say that Johnson was supposed to get more people in the door? Was it “Get more people in the door so we could roll around on piles of fat loot made from our baby-killing ways!” or “During this recession, more people can’t afford to get pregnant, and we can’t keep up with demand on just two days. Can you schedule some more time?” Because I’m betting it was more like the latter…that people naturally have less resources, and demand for abortions may be up because of that. That’s not changing a business model, per se, but it plays better to conservatives and anti-choicers to frame it in that light. It’s framed as being about the Benjamins, not about increased demand by women themselves during tough times. (Women always get left out of the anti-choice picture.)

Zifnab: I got into a debate with my two Mormon sisters about third trimester abortion, and pointed out several things they had never considered, the first being that any woman who doesn’t want to be pregnant, generally isn’t before the third trimester rolls around. Once my sisters got it into their heads that third trimester abortions (or any abortion really) weren’t about shits and giggles and “convenience” they suddenly saw the murder of George Tiller in a whole ‘nother light. Secondly, I debunked the “they give birth to live babies and then the doctors flushed it down a toilet” thing one of my sisters had picked up from somewhere. I haven’t budged them on ALL abortions, but they’ve reconsidered their previous characterisation of third trimester abortions. (Particularly since one of them has a friend who has been pregnant six times and given birth to two live children in the five years that friend was married. She’s been trying to get her friend to take BC, but the friend has been brainwashed to think that’s just like abortion.) Honestly, I think these conversations are worth having because you never know what little lever will click in somebody’s brain and cause them to “get it.”

Yeah, conversations are definitely worth having. People are anti-choice because they’re ignorant and don’t realize that pregnancy isn’t just happiness and sparkles on cloud 9 and babies are always perfect and free, and the utter hatred of women underlying a lot of the anti-choice memes like the woman who gets a late-term abortion for convenience, the slutty mcsluts who have multiple abortions, and the idea that the man should have final say in whether or not a woman has an abortion.

Love the bit about PP having to get a restraining order b/c Abby was copying confidential records and sneaking them out. 

Do HIPPA laws have any teeth?  Are they prosecuted, or are they just good ideas?  B/c if she did steal patient records, she’s a criminal regardless of her views on abortion.

One wonders if those convictions were in place long before her official ‘conversion’. Does anyone really put it past the anti-choicers to send in a plant?

Last night I had an interesting conversation with a fellow who was active in local politics for a long time. He said that campaigns are successful when you start more fires than the other side can put out - that getting them into a defensive mode so they can’t keep up is a very successful strategy.

It’s important, Zifnab, b/c many of us interact with people who use such a story as evidence (in good faith, b/c they want to believe it and therefore are not inclined to be suspicious), and it’s incredibly useful to be able to point and say, “Not true.”

Pixelfish, if you get in another conversation with your sisters please point out that a third trimester abortion costs about $7,000. That’s not the kind of money average people use for “shits and giggles”. Someone who really, really wants to end a pregnancy is going to do it before she needs to take out a payday loan to finance an abortion. People who don’t want to end a pregnancy but know that it’s best for their health or because the child is severely deformed are the ones who pay the equivalent of five months rent to terminate a pregnancy.

And we must all keep it up, not just Amanda. Facts have this amazing way of never dying no matter how hard people try to suppress them.

Does anyone really put it past the anti-choicers to send in a plant?

Nope. That was my very first thought at hearing this. I don’t know how long she worked for that PP but like Amanda and a lot of others I thought, “shouldn’t she have seen an ultrasound waaaay before this?” I don’t work and a PP and I’ve seen those creepy 3D ultrasounds quite a bit, as well as the ones where you can’t tell what the fuck it is until someone points it out to you (and even then, meh).

Also, if she started working at PP then she should’ve known that abortion removes a pregnancy. The anti-choicers are also operating off the assumption that when women get abortions they don’t know what’s “really” going on and she plays into that as well. They groom fundies into becoming pharmacists so they can deny women contraception and Plan B, and they’ve already had one anti-choicer go undercover to “expose” the “evils” of PP by pretending to be an underage girl pregnant by her older boyfriend. I wouldn’t put it past them to put plants in the clinics so they can have narratives like this, as well as have direct access to women’s private medical information, seeing as they’ve been thwarted in that department before.

And to zifnab, it’s damn important to fight shit like this because they’ll just keep doing it and getting away with it and people who don’t know will believe it. I was at the gym this morning with they presented this as a Hot Topic on The View and walked out of the locker room shaking my head because the four women were just going along with it, not questioning anything this woman was saying, or, as Amanda pointed out, talking about all the other clinic workers who HAVEN’T walked away.

Debate and critical thinking is endangered in this country and I’m happy we have these blogs to keep it alive.

I’ve never heard of criminal convictions resulting from releasing/stealing medical files.  I used to work for a medical clinic, and my boss indicated that my punishment for disclosing patient information (in addition to getting fired) would be getting sued.  I’m not even sure if this woman can be sued unless individual patients find out their information was compromised and they decide to pursue a lawsuit.

Amanda, your writeup is misdirecting:

Abby Johnson, the director of the Planned Parenthood,

Don’t you mean “A director for Planned Parenthood” and shouldn’t you explain that “director” is not a rank very high in the organization. The way it is written it sounds lik—e you are talking about the national head.

Has to have been a plant. Nobody, I mean nobody, goes from working at planned parenthood to antichoice activist overnight. People can change their minds on issues, but this is a pretty radical.

If someone is under the kind of performance review that has co-workers watching their behavior,  things are already likely to be both hinky and irrational. So I’m betting not a plant but rather deeply troubled in mostly unrelated ways and looking for a way to get back at the people who she believed were about to fire her anyway.

Do HIPPA laws have any teeth?

That perhaps depends on the jurisdiction in question,  but in CA they are taken seriously:

Farrah Fawcett talked to former L.A. Times reporter Charles Ornstein last August about her suspicions that tabloids were being leaked (sold) her medical information by someone at UCLA.

Whenever she sought treatment at the Westwood medical facility, word was leaked to the tabs.

When she went in for an eye exam, “they had to say I was going blind.” When she had a Pap smear, “they had to say that the cancer had spread; I was having a hysterectomy,” Ornstein writes.

Fawcett was sure she was right but needed to prove her theory. So when she found out that her cancer had returned in May 2007, she didn’t tell relatives and friends.

“I set it up with the doctor,” she told Ornstein. “I said, ‘OK, you know and I know.’ . . . I knew that if it came out, it was coming from UCLA.”

Within four days of her diagnosis, the news of her cancer was in the Enquirer. How sick is that?

The leaker, Lawanda Jackson, was paid $4,600 (in her husband’s name) by the National Enquirer. She pleaded guilty in December of the charges but died in March of cancer, before sentencing.

Link

I was a pretty run-of-the-mill, pro choice liberal Democrat until my wife got pregnant.  When we went in for the ultrasound at 17 weeks, that completely changed my mind.  It definitely wasn’t like seeing someone else’s still ultrasound picture.  You spend 15 or 20 minutes watching it move around, and you watch its heart beat, and its pretty moving.

I mean, I’m not strongly pro life.  It certainly doesn’t motivate my politics.  And I don’t think a fetus is a person, or that abortion is murder.  But I do think, as far as moral acts go, it’s as bad as killing a puppy or a seal.  For me, it’s not the morally neutral act I used to think it was.

was a pretty run-of-the-mill, pro choice liberal Democrat until my wife got pregnant

Speaking of not buying it, I can’t think of a single legitimate liberal who has voted for the democratic party who talks about themselves like that - that’s the way right wingers talk about them, which leads me to believe you’re lying to establish credibility.

Second of all, I just love people who have the conversion story where they changed their mind on something, for instance abortion, and suddenly rejected everything else they used to believe. Like those pants-shitting cowards who freaked out on 911 and suddenly embraced authoritarianism.

You claim this doesn’t motivate your politics but you just said that you changed your entire political philosophy over this. Which again, leads me to believe your’e lying to establish credibility. Good try though.

Wallace, I personally carried three of those moving, heartbeating ultrasound subjects in my own personal uterus, and two of them were born alive and one was a (mourned) miscarriage.

And those experiences have made my belief in reproductive choice utterly, totally iron.

So nice try blaming your lack of empathy for women on the ultrasound image, but that’s not going to cut it around here, no matter what you tell yourself.

Johnson said she realized she wanted to leave, after watching an ultrasound of an abortion procedure.

Pixel said:

One thing that my bf and I noted is that she has TWO stories for why she left: one, sudden religious conviction AND two, theoretical change in the business model.

I’ve noticed whenever an anti-choice person claims to have a sudden change of heart about abortion they make sure to use the graphic and mainly false images the anti-choice movement uses. She made sure to talk about the ultrasound. Amanda noted this in her article. I’ve also seen this in so called Libertarians like Ron Paul. Essentially his story is about aborting a fetus and sudden realizing it’s bad because he found it icky. That’s the argument these nuts make. That abortion is icky so it should be illegal. Being a medical professional means dealing with a lot of “icky” stuff like vomit, bowel movements, urine and puss. If you can’t deal with then don’t become a medical professional.

Using this “suddenly I think it’s icky” argument, she shows herself as, at the very least, lacking credibility. And more likely, she is a plant.

But I do think, as far as moral acts go, it’s as bad as killing a puppy or a seal.

I may just be an awful human being, but I’d club a seal if doing so would save my life.

And those experiences have made my belief in reproductive choice utterly, totally iron.

What kristin said. (And kristin, I am so sorry for your loss.)

Is an ultrasound pretty moving? Sure is. Do you know what else is living and breathing? The woman carrying the fetus. If you felt abortion was a “morally neutral” act and suddenly got verklempt at a 17-week ultrasound, I wonder how much you really thought about abortion before - perhaps in the way a lot of vaguely liberal guys do, that it’s part of that whole woman-stuff package of subjects (like menstruation) that you don’t need to know much about and kinda would rather leave to the ladies.

Imagine seeing that ultrasound and learning that your baby was profoundly and irreparably deformed, and would certainly die shortly after birth if not in the womb. Imagine asking your wife to carry her dead child in her body and go through an induced labor to expel the corpse. Imagine you having the stones to think that it is your right to overrule a woman’s decision about what to do with her own body because you once saw an ultrasound.

Still feeling that your politics have miraculously changed?

“But I do think, as far as moral acts go, it’s as bad as killing a puppy or a seal.”

...you don’t have any idea how many animals are euthanized due to lack of available adopters in the US alone every year, do you?

“[...] I’d club a seal if doing so would save my life.”

I’d club an adult, male seal if I was hungry and found seal meat palatable.  I’m not sure how it’s supposed to be any more morally loaded than plugging a deer for venison or letting someone else commit bovicide because burgers are tasty.

“I may just be an awful human being, but I’d club a seal if doing so would save my life.”

This. Every time someone says they think abortion is wrong and shouldn’t be widely available, I think “You want my spouse to be dead and my kids never to have been born.”

But if we say they’re misogynists we’re the ones being offensive.

And yeah on calling bullshit about first-trimester ultrasounds. It looks like a newborn guppy or something. If that changes your mind about a woman’s right to choose you have to be in a pretty strange place.

Killing a puppy or seal is a pretty low-level moral fault.  I mean, like abortion, it’s almost all circumstantial.  If you break into somebody’s house and kill their puppy, that’s pretty cruel, like, you know, a forced abortion.  If a family decides they need to have their puppy put down because the cute little bugger crawled up inside the wife’s uterus and lost its ability to survive on its own, and instead requires her to share her blood with it for nine months, well, it’s really putting it down is probably the right thing to do unless she decides she really thinks this is all worth it to have a puppy.

On the ‘she’s a plant’ topic - apparently she’d been employed there for 8 years. I suspect a plant wouldn’t have the patience for that. I think it’s more likely that she had some unrelated issues (hence being under review), and she figured that if she was getting fired anyway, that this was a good way to get rid of the death threats against her husband and child.

Honestly, to deal with the kind of terrorism that abortion providers handle every day requires an enormous amount of conviction in what you are doing. Getting fired from the place after putting your and your family’s life on the line for it for years is probably a pretty alienating experience. I can see how having an Inquisition-esque ‘conversion’ to the side perpetrating the violence would be an appealing option, particularly since apparently it had the side effect of reconciling her with her parents.

I’d even club a baby seal if it were a choice between that and being forced to push it out of my vagina then keep and feed it for 18+ years.  My life wouldn’t even have to be on the line to make that one a no-brainer.

I’m an escort at the Bryan Planned Parenthood—I know Abbey.  I’m totally shocked—I knew she had left, but not why.  She always struck me as kind of flighty but I would never have expected this—I think she must have some other issues going on, to put it nicely.  I don’t buy a religious conversion for a minute, and she was certainly familiar with ultrasounds—she regularly worked with women undergoing abortion procedures.  She and another PP employee even had a conversation with me complaining about having visited that Body Worlds exhibit and how they label fetuses as being younger than they really were, which they knew from their work.

jalmondale, good points (and on reviewing the background she would have had to be a helluva plant). It seems very strange that she would have reacted to the firing by doing a 180, especially because you’d expect a lot of the hassles and death threats to go away once she’d quit. That is, the ‘conversion’ certainly had some benefits, but I’m not sure it was the only possible way to stop the harassment. Something else is clearly going on here.

“That is, the ‘conversion’ certainly had some benefits, but I’m not sure it was the only possible way to stop the harassment. Something else is clearly going on here.”

Well, the degree to which this sort of movement tends to fellate the convert who’s willing to go public with their declaration that 2 + 2 = 5 is pretty staggering.

Mythago:

Three words: follow the money.

Here is a link to the case page, which includes the petition for a temporary restaining order.

The application claims that Johnson signed a confidentiality agreement (which covered, among other things, patient information); that on October 2, 2009 she was put on a “performance improvement plan”; and that between October 2 and October 6, when she quit, she was seen copying confidential documents and gave those to employees.

The application also claims that PP found out she had disclosed confidential information in the following ways:

- A physician whose work for the PP clinic was confidential was told by a “40 Days” protester that they knew this physician worked for PP

- Johnson told a nurse practitioner at PP that Johnson had given the woman’s resume, with her home address and phone number, to the anti-choice group (said resume having been taken from the clinic’s files without the nurse practitioner’s consent

- Johnson told people that ‘something big’ was going to happen on the 40th day of the protest

There’s a hearing on November 10; it will be interesting to see what Johnson and the Coalition for Life come up with in response.

I’m betting book deal real soon.

<i>Johnson said she realized she wanted to leave, after watching an ultrasound of an abortion procedure.</a>

I haven’t yet read Johnson’s account so just as a general comment on the above. Routine abortions are not performed under U/S guidance. So either you have a known anomaly or there’s an intraop complication (meaning, you’re not dealing with a first trimester procedure).

I’m betting book deal, as well. (Though the tiny, non-cynical part of me hopes it will be an expose on the anti-abortion movement.) And while I don’t think I could kill a baby seal or a puppy, even if my life depended on it, I’d have no problem with the extraction of an excess blob of cells from my uterus.

FUCK.

Motherfucking fuckity fuck, fuck, fuck.

The homobigots have won again at the polls… America now only has 5 states in which LGBTs have marital equality.

Same-sex marriage in Maine has been successfully repealed by the wingnut assholes tonight.  It’s fucking Prop 8 all over again.

I’m betting personality disorder.  Borderline?  Histrionic? 

Or is she being blackmailed, maybe religiously?  Religion is in some ways a blackmail operation, after all.  And there is that tradition of “heavenly deception.”

Doing it just for money seems weird but I suppose it’s possible. 

That’s the argument these nuts make. That abortion is icky so it should be illegal.
Comment #20: shakahi on 11/03 at 10:51 PM

Well, it’s their best argument against teh ghey, isn’t it?  And fat chicks.  Behold the male gaze, ultimate arbiter of right and wrong.

from the kbtx article: Johnson said she was told to bring in more women who wanted abortions, something the Episcopalian church goer recently became convicted about.

First of all, is this some fundamentalist jargon? “Convicted”? I’ve been convinced, but I’ve never even been arrested.

Second, how would one bring in more women who wanted abortions? Work on the ones who’ve already decided,  by hanging out near gynecologists’ offices, passing out discount coupons? I seem to recall that most abortions are performed by a relative few who concentrate their practice in that area, which argues that PP already gets the bulk of abortions.

Or would they try to build demand by persuading pregnant women that babies are icky?

You know what else is icky?

Birth.

Lots of blood and guts and the baby is covered in cheesy globs and blood and then the placenta…it’s icky.

Billigham FTW, though.  I’m still laughing over the idea of a puppy crawling up into a woman’s womb and how much that woman must want that puppy!

Puppyz!  BAYBEEZ! 

Wallace, dear, actually being pregnant and giving birth to my children made me MORE pro-choice.

Hector, they could always try to create more abortions by being like the pro-lifers and denying women birth control.
Oh, hey, maybe she’s just trying to drum up business for abortions after all.

“Oh, hey, maybe she’s just trying to drum up business for abortions after all.”

Seems like it’d be way easier to start something like the Spermatozoa Liberation Front and start doing commando raids on condom factories and pharmacies armed with only piercing guns and their wits.

Reading the description of the siege on the clinic over the last few months I wouldn’t be surprised if the constant anxiety about her and her family’s safety could have inflicted some serious psychological damage.  It sounds like her work performance was in serious decline (hence the performance review) and it could be she just cracked under stress, or is experiencing some form of Stockholm Syndrome.

I remember the Bryan PP.  Sad seeing all the high-school and college-age folks picketing the place multiple times a year.  Couldn’t help wondering how many of the picketers had or will have an abortion at that PP before they had finished college.

I was a pretty run-of-the-mill, pro choice liberal Democrat until my wife got pregnant.

Yeah, well being a woman who actually carried three living, breathing cute lil fetuses in my body who were very much wanted, I was pretty ambivalent about abortion until I became pregnant. And then, I KNEW that no government entity should have the right to tell a woman to sacrifice herself for another. I lost my vision and almost lost my life fighting for my twins. Right now I am 34 weeks pregnant with a singleton and I have pre-eclampsia and am on bed rest. I go in twice a week to the doctor to basically pit my health against the baby’s in a race to find that perfect moment of balance when I can give birth to him at his healthiest before he kills me. This is a CHOICE I’ve made and I have every right to make. Someone else with my history might have seen the cute little ultrasound at seventeen weeks and still made the decision to abort because of a thousand reasons, but maybe one would be to stay alive in order to raise her two existing children. I have nothing but respect for that decision and a woman’s right to make it. I also expect people to respect my decision to take a chance that this singleton pg would be easier (wrong) and fight for this pregnancy. But no way, no how is it a decision any government should be involved in. It is not anywhere near something anyone should be forced to do for any reason.

I’m sure I’m extremely grumpy and sensitive because of my circumstances right now. But you and your cute little fetus stories and your seals and your puppies and your morality which is thinly disguised hatred against women can really just go right to hell.

You’ll have to forgive Wallace ... based on his comments in earlier threads about “pick-up artists” and prostitution, he’s still operating on concepts deeply ingrained in male privilege. But he strikes me as more clueless than malicious (although the hackneyed “former life-long Democrat” line makes me wonder).

Back on-topic, Pennylane’s theory as to what happened at #42 seems the most plausible to me.

I wonder if Wallace is aware of the ingrained male privilege in his little story.  “I was indifferent to abortion but then when it was MY WIFE and MY BEHBEH I gave a shit and thus this experience of mine gives me the right to look down on others who are in situations in no way analagous to my own!”

I mean, I’m not strongly pro life.  It certainly doesn’t motivate my politics.  And I don’t think a fetus is a person, or that abortion is murder.  But I do think, as far as moral acts go, it’s as bad as killing a puppy or a seal.  For me, it’s not the morally neutral act I used to think it was.

Do you know what’s worse than killing a puppy or a seal?  Letting actual people bleed to death.  And yet you probably do it all the time.  You could save lives by donating your blood every 2 months.  It’s a lot easier than going through a whole freaking pregnancy to save a precious embryo.  Of course, I can’t assume that you personally don’t donate blood.  However, it’s statistically unlikely that you do it on a regular basis.  If you do, then that’s great and this is meant as more of a general comment about “pro-life” people.  Of course, you’re the kind of person who doesn’t care about anything until it personally affects you, so you might actually donate blood if a friend or family member needed it.  The simple fact is that most “pro-life” people don’t donate blood, because most people in general don’t do it.  That’s why I hate the term “pro-life”.  I’ve saved actual humans, and yet these people want to claim that they care more about life than I do.

I may just be an awful human being, but I’d club a seal if doing so would save my life.

I’ll go even farther than that.  I’d club a cute baby seal if it were living inside my body and I didn’t want it there, even if it didn’t threaten my life.  And I would still think that’s worse than an early-term abortion.

I don’t know if I fully believe that she was a plant from the start. It says she was a director of the Planned Parenthood for two years: and she worked at PP for eight years total. That’s eight years of setting up and assisting abortion. If you’re a plant, you spend eight years murdering innocent people just to make some weak conversion story? I don’t think so. Yeah, anti-choicers are a bunch of disingenuous liars, but I don’t think that a “plant” could spend 8 years in deep cover “butchering babies” and not only avoid suspicion, but actually be promoted to Director. They just don’t have that level of sophistication in their ranks.

There are a whole host of reasons why this woman had her conversion: she could have been so driven to fear by anti-choice intimidation tactics that she developed a sort of Stockholm Syndrome, she could have a personality similar to Norma McCorvey and responded to the promise of attention and love and adulation from the anti-choice groups, she may have had some sort of genuinely mystical aneurysm and decided that the widdle baybee on the tee-vee screen in the operating room was more important than the women right in front of her, and that the most important thing is to flood the world with their preciousness by removing access to contraception and reproductive healthcare.

But I’m dubious that she was a plant from the start. Not impossible, but unlikely.

I agree with Gracchus in #45 that pennylane’s theory in #42 sounds most believable of the theories floated so far.

I have also experienced men who say that once they viewed their pregnant wife’s baby on ultrasound they decided they were against abortion, or felt differently about it. One time when a man told this to me, at a party, I immediately started to defend against what I percieved was an attack on choice, and I started to get into the legal and philosophical reasons why, regardless of how he felt, women have a right to have abortions. The guy seemed non-plussed by this and just repeated that after he saw the ultrasound he felt differently about abortions.

I am not sure to this day how I should have reacted to the guy. He probably decided I was an asshole. That’s fine with me, but I am wondering if there is a softer and more emotional way of talking with such a man so that I could explain why his feeling about abortions might be, while not wrong, an incomplete way of looking at the situation.

Also, my experience talking to people is that when you’re having your first child and it’s wanted, you’re more on the pro-life side of the fence because you’re so self-centered around your own child and being a parent for the first time that you sort of extend those squishy feelings across to all women and fetuses everywhere. Not rabidly pro-life generally, but anything that resembles dead baby talk is not really something that you want to get into.

After a few nights of four hours of sleep after the child is born (or at the latest, when the kid reaches about 2 years old), they usually shake out of it and realize that raising children is a big pile of suck and that people shouldn’t be forced to do it against their will.

“I am not sure to this day how I should have reacted to the guy.”

I suppose you could have asked him if his wife felt any differently about it, or how his wife felt after seeing it, or said that it was funny, you felt the exact same way about abortion before and after seeing an ultrasound, or any of the likely suspects to extend his view past the end of his own nose.  It’s unlikely to have had much of a different effect, though.

Mighty Ponygirl good point about how one feels after actually doing some child raising vs. seeing your baby for the first time. Preying Mantis, yes, it’s hard to see how anything I could have said would have worked.

I have also experienced men who say that once they viewed their pregnant wife’s baby on ultrasound they decided they were against abortion, or felt differently about it.

Which only reinforces my belief that opposition to abortion is rooted in patriarchy, and specifically Sperm Magic.  I can imagine it’s powerful for a man to realize he can do that to a woman’s body with so very little of his own bodily fluids.  But making the leap into believing that his sperm reduces her rights is pure male dominance.

but I am wondering if there is a softer and more emotional way of talking with such a man so that I could explain why his feeling about abortions might be, while not wrong, an incomplete way of looking at the situation.

I suppose you could point out that the ultrasound shows the fetus, but it doesn’t show the living, breathing woman whose body surrounds that baby.

I’m not sure how much you can reach a guy who looked past his wife to marvel at the magic his sperm has wrought, and completely forgets she’s there.

I’m not sure either, but if you’re going for ‘softer and more emotional’ to try to persuade somebody who may be acting out of clueless rather than a deliberate clinging to privilege, it’s probably better than “and I see that you think of your wife as a combination sperm dumpster and Gro-Vat?”

Also, my experience talking to people is that when you’re having your first child and it’s wanted, you’re more on the pro-life side of the fence because you’re so self-centered around your own child and being a parent for the first time that you sort of extend those squishy feelings across to all women and fetuses everywhere. Not rabidly pro-life generally, but anything that resembles dead baby talk is not really something that you want to get into.

I actually had the exact opposite experience.  I thought it would be a very difficult decision to have an abortion, and therefore would never presume to make that choice for anyone else (and I was very careful about BC to avoid as best I could ever being faced with that decision).  Then I got pregnant for the first time.  Even though the pregnancy was wanted and planned, it made me realize that, in different circumstances, abortion actually *wouldn’t* be a hard decision for me.  Because for the first trimester and a big chunk of the second, the pregnancy was something that was happening to my body alone.  There wasn’t a second entity in the equation until that fetus was regularly moving around and would’ve had a decent chance of survival outside my body.  (The old concept of “quickening” makes total sense to me.)

I’m done having kids and will abort at the first possible moment if I get pregnant in the future (though of course I’m back on reliable BC - I <3 my IUD).  Abortion any time before viability?  Absolutely.  When viability isn’t an option?  Without question.

I’m not sure how much you can reach a guy who looked past his wife to marvel at the magic his sperm has wrought, and completely forgets she’s there.

I think in the case of a man who loves his wife and thinks of her as a person the majority of the time, he will remember her eventually, and if her vulnerability and the incredible loss of control she now has over her own body and her own person is brought specifically to his attention, it can hit him in the gut the way the sight of “his” “baby” did.

Good point Amanda @ 56 and I agree.  As a teenager I had two abortions; as an adult I faced the prospect of a later second-trimester abortion for a much wanted pregnancy when there was the potential for the fetus I was carrying to have a fatal genetic defect. (The amnio came back fine, and my third child is a healthy hyper 10 year old boy.) I had the support of my now ex husband through the pregnancy, but had he forgotten that the fetus was -inside me-, that I was the living, breathing, conscious entity who had to make decisions about my own body, that would have been it.  I know he had become ambievilent about what would happen should a third pregnancy result in Down syndrome (as our second child has DS) and might not have wanted me to end the pregnancy- but if he could not accept that was what was to happen- not to sound callous or bitchy but it was on me. Not him. I would have wanted his support and approval, a decision as a couple,  but it was not necessary.

If anything my experiences have cemented my feeling that women need to be given the free rein to choose what is to be done with their own bodies. It killed me inside to watch the ultrasound of my now-son, knowing he had a name in my own mind, and know I might have to choose not to bring him into the world. But it would have been infinitely better for him, me, and my family not to prolong the agony and continue to develop a doomed infant. Some women might find closure in allowing the pregnancy to continue. It’s THEIR choice and it must, absolutely must be preserved.

This may be fairly bog standard human swing behaviour.  People who believe verrrry strongly in something can often swing to believing verrrry strongly the other way.  There may be no bad faith involved at all.

Mythago in #55

I suppose you could point out that the ultrasound shows the fetus, but it doesn’t show the living, breathing woman whose body surrounds that baby.

Actually, that’s a really good way to put it, thanks I may use that if ever I have a chance again.

I agree with Amanda’s take in #54, but, given that this is in fact a POV for many men consciously or unconsciously, I think a softer way of answering it might be useful to have on hand.

Which only reinforces my belief that opposition to abortion is rooted in patriarchy, and specifically Sperm Magic.  I can imagine it’s powerful for a man to realize he can do that to a woman’s body with so very little of his own bodily fluids.  But making the leap into believing that his sperm reduces her rights is pure male dominance.

I don’t know. I think it’s less about Sperm Magic than it is about simple privilege.

I had my own moment of wavering at the ultrasound, a brief rush of “ooh squee baby fingers gonna have a kid” which was unrelated to a psychosexual dominance but WAS related to a patriarchal “she’s bearing my son” sense of ownership. It passed right away but I caught a glimpse of how someone very comfortable with male privilege would use such an emotion like Wallace has.

None of which suggests to me that a person who has seen hundreds of ultrasounds would suddenly find that ultrasound number 341 was simply too much.

“On the ‘she’s a plant’ topic - apparently she’d been employed there for 8 years. I suspect a plant wouldn’t have the patience for that. I think it’s more likely that she had some unrelated issues (hence being under review), and she figured that if she was getting fired anyway, that this was a good way to get rid of the death threats against her husband and child.”

This seems sensible. It seems much more likely that, as people have said, working a stressful environment/her owner personality and problems made her flaky at work, her work noticed and sanctioned her and she either decided to strike back or sorta found comfort in the arms of antichoice nuts.

“I am not sure to this day how I should have reacted to the guy. He probably decided I was an asshole. That’s fine with me, but I am wondering if there is a softer and more emotional way of talking with such a man so that I could explain why his feeling about abortions might be, while not wrong, an incomplete way of looking at the situation.”

I think the conventional (here at Pandagon, anyway) answer of focusing on the abstract woman, not the abstract fetus, is right. Chances are he cares about at least a few women and if he can be made to realize that being pregnant if they didn’t want to be would be severe suck, however fetus pictures might make him feel. Speaking in emotional, emphatic terms about whether he’d want his little sister to be pregnant against her will, would be effective against a lot goo goo antichoice feeling and might slide past a general misongyny, too.

And, catgirl at #47, is that really true that people die from a lack of transfusable blood? I hear on local NPR every now and again that there’s a shortage of X blood type, but I guess I never connected it to a for real, ‘we’d like to transfuse this nice lady, but there’s no B positive.’

I suspect she’s finally through her adolescent rebellion now, and going along with her parents and husband.  I’m sure it was hard living a life that your entire family disagrees with, and having death threats on top of that. 

She must not be all that mentally stable or a mature thinker, and might recently have had a med change.  It’s odd, but people do odd things all the time.  There’s definitely something more going on than what she says.  And she definitely is a liar- I don’t know when she started lying, and exactly what she is lying about, but she played both sides for at least a month, and I think it would be wise for both sides not to trust her for a while.  If she was a stronger person, she could be a plant in the pro-life group at this point.  I doubt it, given her family, just as I doubt that she was a plant at PP.  She seems s deeply conflicted person, and I doubt she’s worked it all through yet.

Are there any stories of people who went from anti choice to prochoice?

I was anti-choice as a stupid teenager, not sure if that counts.

Her story has too many too-too elements to be a conversion based on stress, and it’s definitely not all of a sudden. I doubt she was a plant, given her tenure, but given the amazing willingness of Christians to lie when it suits their purposes, I think it’s reasonable that she converted within the last few years, and stayed undercover until she got caught trying to steal documents, then “converted” in a way that diminishes the credibility of her former employer just as they were about to can her for violating their policies and the privacy of employees and patients.

“Are there any stories of people who went from anti choice to prochoice?”

Sure, but they don’t usually get shopped around too much, if only because a lot of them involve needing an abortion, which gets you tagged as an active baby-killer by your former cohort. 

Also, a lot of the mileage the anti-choice set gets out of the conversion narrative is the idea that just you wait, someday you’ll be sorry for what you did.  Same appeal as the Rapture narrative—you’re wrong, and eventually you’ll see that you’re wrong, but then it’ll be too late to do anything about it, neener neener neener.  Being freaked out about something that you think is totally horrible and awful and gross and so forth only to find out that it isn’t actually a big deal in most cases and, in any event, it’s best to let the people personally involved sort it out for themselves, is pretty much how every big developmental process in our entire lives shakes out.  It’s got as much narrative cachet as “More people get sick during flu season.”

To Wallece: I’ve heard mothers say they were more Prochoice when they were pregnant, esp. if it was a difficult one. It’s not your body. No woman should be forced to carry a fetus. We aren’t incubators. Maybe if men were forced to keep something alive at the cost of their bodies,(e.g. forced organ donation, a case went before the SCOTUS in the 70’s over that.) they would understand/not be so damn eager to pass anti choice legislation.

Hey, wallace had an emotional reaction, not a religious transformation:

You spend 15 or 20 minutes watching it move around, and you watch its heart beat, and its pretty moving.

He has not started carrying pictures of fetuses in front of Planned Parenthood. He says he’s still pro choice. Let people have their emotional reactions if they harm no one else.

I was anti-choice as a stupid teenager, not sure if that counts.

Teenagers are notoriously self-centered, it just takes different forms depending on ones’ environment.

If we were to judge teen-agers on the opinions, clothes, and people they hang out with,  none of them could get above the level of a day manager for a burger stand as far as career choices go. 

Everyone’s saying eight years is too long.  But.  She volunteered for six years.  That could be just one or two days a month, as a patient escort. 

She wasn’t actually hired until two years ago.  Maybe they got to her just before then, and suggested she become a mole.  Getting the fulltime paid job there might have been at the instigation of the 40 days people.

Two years undercover, building trust and getting access to medical and professional records.  Two years making money, too; can’t forget that the prolifers probably didn’t have a paid position for her. 

The “director” title is confusing, and it’s been compounded by the press release sent out by the 40 days people who say she actually ran the PP center.

This story just makes me sad, and angry; she could have walked away from the job without repudiating the people who she supposedly knew and had respect for while she was there.

As far as anti-choice to prochoice, I don’t get in the news, but I actually founded an antichoice group on my college campus, and it was all about the babies, and also about the fact that I’d never been pregnant and had no idea what I was talking about.

My conversion story (ha) isn’t so dramatic, though, mostly a long process that started with “Ok, I get that we’re against abortion, but why are you people not passing out condoms and why are you acting all weird about birth control when that would really prevent lots of abortions?” to where I am now, which is completely pro-choice.  But that took years of thinking, reading, searching, and knowing real women (and having a kid of my own), and thus would be boring to read about.

Hector, if you finished reading all of Wallace’s post before your knee jerked, he stated that he now feels differently about abortion: “For me, it’s not the morally neutral act I used to think it was.” That’s not exactly the fleeting emotional reaction of the sort Auguste describes.

(And really; 15-20 minutes? That’s a goddamn long ultrasound at 17 weeks.)

Yeah, Hector said he now views abortion as the moral equivalent of killing an already-born, independently-existing puppy or seal. Which I think reasonable people can agree would be a bad thing to do, so besides being utter bullshit, it’s harmful to women who had and have abortions, they are now selfish people who did the bad deed of killing something independently alive. He gets no free pass from me.

Dammit. I need to take a posting break. WALLACE said he views abortion as the moral equivalent of killing a puppy or a seal.