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You are here: Home / Civil Rights / Women's Rights / Women's Rights Are Human Rights / Viewing Note: Roe v. Wading Into the Controversy, Again

Viewing Note: Roe v. Wading Into the Controversy, Again

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All subtext aside, I may have to sign up for Hulu to watch this. (Thinks about the Netflix account I haven’t streamed in months now… ) Norma McCorvey was never the Sanctified Victim both sides might’ve wished her to be, but she can surely stand as an exemplar for millions of women caught between their own (sometimes misjudged) actions and ‘the rules’. From Deadline:

… In one jaw-dropping part of the Nick Sweeney-directed docu, McCorvey, who was interviewed a few months before her death in 2017 was asked if she was being used as a trophy by anti-abortion groups. “I was the big fish,” she admitted. “I think it was a mutual thing. I took their money and they’d put me out in front of the cameras and tell me what to say. That’s what I’d say.”

She gave an example of what she was told to say as the “former Jane Roe,” then she admitted it was all an act. “I did it well too. I am a good actress,” McCorvey said in the docu as people watched the footage in shock.

The documentary feature follows the true story of McCorvey in the landmark ruling on abortion rights. The docu features interviews with people she worked closely with on the pro-life and pro-choice side of things — including Gloria Allred and Operation Rescue. The conflicting arguments paint the nuanced complexities of McCorvey and a culturally significant part of history that still affects the country today…

Reader Interactions

107Comments

  3. 3.

    ruemara

    I’ve done a lot of things to survive. But I couldn’t do that. Rest her soul and may the devil take his own.

  4. 4.

    Omnes Omnibus

    It sounds like she may have been a less than stellar person.  That, of course, has no bearing on her right to choose whether or not to continue a pregnancy.  Ernesto Miranda was a really shitty person but that shouldn’t have affected his legal rights either.

  7. 7.

    Baud

    I’m sure the focus will end up being all on her and not on the deceit of the people who paid her.

  9. 9.

    Lapassionara

    All the arguments made to dissuade women from exercising this right, the one that said “you’ll be sorry later” is the most pernicious. That easily could become a self-fulfilling prophecy, when the fact is, life is not a controlled experiment. Anyone can imagine a different way any decision could lead, but the gift of adulthood is to be at peace with the past.

  15. 15.

    Emma from FL

    @Omnes Omnibus: Cute. The case has been remanded to the original trial court. James Joyce and he was playing fast and loose with the language.

  18. 18.

    kindness

    I can’t really appreciate how she felt taking money and tossing other women under the bus was OK but I don’t walk in her shoes.

  21. 21.

    Anne Laurie

    @WaterGirl: AFAICT, McCorvey spent her life jumping from bad choice to poor decision to bad choice, because the timeline in her head never went further than the end of the week.

    But since she didn’t have a multimillionaire daddy willing to support every one of her (predictable) failures — or even a Y chromosome — she ended up as a classic Bad Girl Example, not as the occupant of the Oval Office.

  22. 22.

    Elizabelle

    The Los Angeles Times had a long article on this.  Worth a click.  What a piece of work. FWIW, Norma McCorvey never had an abortion. Nor did she raise any of the three children she birthed — her mother raised the first; she adopted out the next two. And she repudiated a long relationship with a girlfriend when she found religion in 1995; came to regret that later.

    The abortion rights movement steered clear of Norma as a spokesperson. She changed her story a few times (said she’d been raped) and lacked “polish.”

    LA Times: The woman behind ‘Roe vs. Wade’ didn’t change her mind on abortion. She was paid

    When Norma McCorvey, the anonymous plaintiff in the landmark Roe vs. Wade case, came out against abortion in 1995, it stunned the world and represented a huge symbolic victory for abortion opponents: “Jane Roe” had gone to the other side. For the remainder of her life, McCorvey worked to overturn the law that bore her name.

    But it was all a lie, McCorvey says in a documentary filmed in the months before her death in 2017, claiming she only did it because she was paid by antiabortion groups including Operation Rescue.

    “I was the big fish. I think it was a mutual thing. I took their money and they’d put me out in front of the cameras and tell me what to say. That’s what I’d say,” she says in “AKA Jane Roe,” which premieres Friday on FX. “It was all an act. I did it well too. I am a good actress.”

    In what she describes as a “deathbed confession,” a visibly ailing McCorvey restates her support for reproductive rights in colorful terms: “If a young woman wants to have an abortion, that’s no skin off my ass. That’s why they call it choice.”

    …. Director Nick Sweeney says his goal was not necessarily to stir controversy, but to create a fully realized portrait of a flawed, fascinating woman who changed the course of American history but felt she was used as a pawn by both sides in the debate.

    … Sweeney started making the film in April 2016, frequently visiting McCorvey in Katy, Texas. At first, he says, she was reticent, “but when she realized I was not involved in the abortion debate she was very happy to open up.” Over the course of the time they spent together, McCorvey recounted details of her difficult upbringing — marked by abuse, neglect and a stint in reform school — turbulent personal life, including a short-lived teenage marriage, and a decades-long relationship with girlfriend Connie Gonzalez.

    “I thought she was extremely interesting and enigmatic. I liked that her life was full of these fascinating contradictions,” says Sweeney, who also interviewed figures on either side of the abortion issue who were close to McCorvey, including attorney Gloria Allred and Rob Schenck, an evangelical minister and former leader of Operation Rescue.

    McCorvey comes across as funny, sharp and unfiltered, with a broad performative streak. She rattles off lines from “Macbeth” and jokes, “I’m a very glamorous person — I can’t help it, it’s a gift.”

    The documentary includes scenes of McCorvey on election night 2016 — a few months before she died of heart failure at age 69 — expressing her support for Hillary Clinton. “I wish I knew how many abortions Donald Trump was responsible for,” McCorvey muses. “I’m sure he’s lost count, if he can count that high.”

    “She had a kind of sly wit,” says Sweeney, recalling the many hours he spent with her in Katy, going on doughnut runs or sitting in a park, where she’d make him pick magnolia flowers.

    But there is also great sadness, particularly surrounding her relationship with Gonzalez, which she renounced after her conversion in 1995.

    … Despite her visible role in the fight against abortion, McCorvey says she was a mercenary, not a true believer. And Schenck, who has also distanced himself from the antiabortion movement, at least partially corroborates the allegations, saying that she was paid out of concern “that she would go back to the other side,” he says in the film. “There were times I wondered: Is she playing us? And what I didn’t have the guts to say was, because I know damn well we were playing her.”

    Schenck expresses regret at targeting McCorvey, someone whose vulnerabilities could be easily exploited, he says. “What we did with Norma was highly unethical. The jig is up.”

  24. 24.

    germy

    But since she didn’t have a multimillionaire daddy willing to support every one of her (predictable) failures — or even a Y chromosome — she ended up as a classic Bad Girl Example, not as the occupant of the Oval Office.

    They didn’t even let her host a game show.  Trump was given his own TV show and an invented persona:  “The good businessman”

  25. 25.

    NotMax

    @raven

    Checked out Upload on Prime? You and the betterest half might enjoy it.

    Went in a different direction than I was anticipating but that’s not a bad thing.

  28. 28.

    NotMax

    @satby

    Also on Prime is the strange Irish noir The Hard Way starring Patrick McGoohan and Lee van Cleef. A curiosity which won’t be everyone’s cuppa.

  30. 30.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    not the first unfortunate, unstable person to be used by cynical right-wing forces, and not always right wing come to think of it

  32. 32.

    Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes

    The most magnificent rulings for privacy from any government in history, and it was fucked by a combination of conservatives bleating about their liberty to shit on people in the name of their religion, and a cabal of performative gender theory feminist activists who reframed it as a matter of choice.I

    Imagine what an expansive, appropriate reading of Roe would have meant for blocking enforcement of sodomy laws, not to mention same sex marriage. Shocking theory – there are aspects of life so private, so intimate, that the state cannot intrude, regardless of the religious sensitivities of those in charge.

  35. 35.

    Ohio Mom

    After reading up a little on this documentary earlier today, I recognize that I‘ve known several people who live the chaotic, cash-strapped, rudderless sort of life McCorvey apparently did. I can never decide the direction of the causality arrow between their awful circumstances and their bad choices.

    I’m not even sure sometimes if you can call their their bad choices “choices” when their alternatives and resources are so limited. And yes, they do grifter things but I think mainly out of desperation, not entitlement. Or maybe not…

    There are a gazzillon Norma McCorveys out there, only one of them was in the right place at the right time to become Jane Roe. To be used by both the abortion rights people and the right-wing anti-choicers. Except she thought she was using all of them.

  36. 36.

    laura

    Men hate women. Not all, but way too many. And there hate takes so many shapes starting with denial of agency. Women aren’t people. Women are property and subjugation and control and demanding all of society agree with this view that it is inseparable from the air we breathe. Even men who do not hate women have been so immersed in the societal hatred of women that they’d choose the least fit shite-bag of a man over the most qualified candidate in the US living, and most of the dead.

    I know far too many Norma McCorvey’s and I wish that women who were not capable of caring for a child – either in an instance or ever incapable had the chance to choose -and because that choice is private, no one should know, could know or mostly nunya business.

    I’m not surprised the conversion was a for profit opportunity and considering her life and circumstances and choices, taking the money may have been inevitable. The Operation Rescue and fellow travellers who paid to use her can all go to the hell they pray awaits others

    And as always when talk of limiting abortion – Becky Bell. I will never forget Becky Bell and what her life may have been. Her and all of the dead women and the men who were murdered to protect womens rights.

  37. 37.

    jl

    Good God. We’re living in a Matrix movie, except the powerful hyper computers running us are super rich vicious nutcases who have become so incompetent at everything except swindles, they are going to get all of us and themselves killed.

    I’m leaving now this blog until tomorrow. You stare into this blog long enough and the spirit of Philip K. Dick stares back. The black comedy Matrix sequel where the machines screw up so bad it becomes worse than when they worked is being made right now in real life.

  38. 38.

    Nora

    @Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: I’ve long said that the Constitution should have an explicit guarantee of the right of privacy.  Period.  We never should have had to pull it out of “penumbras” from other amendments as Justice Douglas did in Griswold v. Connecticut, the predecessor (and necessary precondition) of Roe v. Wade.

    Maybe now that all the right wingers have realized how terrible it is that a government is interfering in their bodily integrity by telling them to wear masks during a pandemic, maybe they will be willing to give women the same respect for their bodily integrity.

    Ha, ha!  I do crack myself up sometimes.

  39. 39.

    Sab

    I had a classmate in high school who had a congenital hereditary heart murmur. Her older sister had it also. Doctors told them don’t get pregnant. Sister ignored them, got pregnant, had a lovely kid, and dropped dead three weeks later.

    So my classmate, her younger sister, decided having kids is not an option. So what is she supposed to do? Have relationships, risk pregnancy and die? Have no relationships? Have a hysterectomy, and then find out with medical breakthroughs kids would have been an option.

    In my brief law career I had a client who married a guy who she thought was a perfwctly nice guy who turned out to be not so nice. On their wedding night he bit open her cheek so badly that she needed 30 stitches to close it. Plus he knocked her up. She had a choice, so she chose to go into hiding and keep the kid. We went to the pro con fully expecting him to turn up and shoot both of us. Nowadays going into hiding wouldn’t even be an option. He would find her and kill them both.

    My niece works in prenatal ICU as a nurse. Every week she is counseling parents with dying babies. It is heartbreaking.

    The antichoice people are ignorant morons who know nothing about the world or life or anything.The older I get, the more I learn, the angrier I become about them. Making a hard world so much harder for people already suffering.

  40. 40.

    geg6

    I never believed her “conversion” and now I know I was right.  That’s the nicest thing I can think of to say about this.

    Otherwise, it’s just infuriating.  And disgusting.  I hate these people.

  41. 41.

    The Moar You Know

    Norma McCorvey was never the Sanctified Victim both sides might’ve wished her to be

    That’s an understatement.  She was a fucking monster with a black hole where her soul was supposed to be.

  42. 42.

    Formerly disgruntled in Oregon

    @raven: So is “Little Fires Everywhere”. That one is so good, I would recommend Hulu for that show alone!

    ”What We Do In The Shadows” is hilarious.

    Want to check out “Mrs. America” and “The Great” soon.

    Hulu is worth it!

  43. 43.

    Mike in NC

    We watched the first episode of “Mrs. America” with Cate Blanchett as Phyllis Schlafly. Couldn’t get into a show about such a horrible person. At least God gave her a gay son.

  44. 44.

    Gvg

    I remember hearing about roe turning against abortion. I didn’t pay much heed to it because to me it wasn’t relevant. It still was my body, my choice, but out of my life and you can make your own choices.  I never needed an abortion, but the very idea of the government having a say has always seemed intrusive and wrong. I have also run across way to many pro life people who I already knew were bully’s and mean before I heard their speil.

    I want the Hyde amendment to go to.

  45. 45.

    Ohio Mom

    Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes @32: I don’t know how I managed all these years to miss the difference between the arguments about choice and privacy, but you have made it very clear to me. Thank you.

  47. 47.

    Nicole

    @raven: I am loving Mrs. America!  I know how it’s going to end, but I’m still loving it.  The performances are GREAT.  And, at least according to Slate, it’s not taking much in the way of liberties with history.

  49. 49.

    Elizabelle

    Thinking about Norma McCorvey, and she’s a low rent grifter and attention seeker who is not that different from all the conservative GOP types who suck up to evangelicals, conservative activists, confederate retreads, and megabucks types.  They’re often hypocrites too.  They often do not walk the walk in their private life, and their families have security (healthcare!) and opportunities denied to their constituents.

    Which does not excuse Norma or any of them.  At least she’s remembered by name.

  50. 50.

    Nicole

    Honestly, I don’t think anyone presented the abortion issue better than… Ayn Rand:

    “Abortion is a moral right—which should be left to the sole discretion of the woman involved; morally, nothing other than her wish in the matter is to be considered. Who can conceivably have the right to dictate to her what disposition she is to make of the functions of her own body?” (1968)

    She hated Ronald  Reagan, and specifically cited his opposition to abortion as one of the reasons.

  51. 51.

    Nicole

    @Mike in NC: It’s not just about Schlafly.  Each episode is named after another major figure in the women’s movement in the 1970s and focus is shifted accordingly.   It’s worth giving it a few more episodes.

  52. 52.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Sab: God no.  That question should never come up.  A person should have the right to make a private medical decision or they should not.  The merits of the person making the decisions are immaterial.

  54. 54.

    Viva BrisVegas

    @Formerly disgruntled in Oregon:

    Loved “The Great”. It’s not history, it’s history+. Great fun.

    Season 2 of “What We Do In The Shadows” has had a couple of dud episodes so far. Not quite as good as season 1, but still worth watching.

  55. 55.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Nicole:

    She hated Ronald  Reagan, and specifically cited his opposition to abortion as one of the reasons.

    gives me some small comfort to know she would have hated Rand Paul and Paul Ryan

  56. 56.

    Sloegin

    McCorvey got close to a half-million to change her story.  On one hand, yes it’s awful that she was a central actor and changing her story at a critical time damaged the pro-choice movement, on the other, she didn’t own the larger movement, and that much money will change a lot of stories of people who have bills to pay.

  57. 57.

    Baud

    Nicolle Wallace. Joining us now, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Madam Speaker, what you said is actually something that can be corroborated in the White House’s release of the President’s last physical, which is that his weight does qualify him as being morbidly obese. Is that what you were saying, or did you know it would elicit this kind of reaction from the President?

     

    Speaker Pelosi. No, I had no idea. I didn’t know that he would be so sensitive. He’s always talking about other people’s avoirdupois, their weight, their pounds. So, I really – I don’t even want to spend any more time on his distraction, because as you see in the last couple of days, so much of the time has been spent on what he said.

     

    Rather than that, I think he should recognize that his words weigh a ton. Instead of telling people to put Lysol into their lungs or taking a medication that has not been approved, except under certain circumstances, he should be saying what your previous guest mentioned, things that will help people.

     

    But let’s not dwell on him. What we have to dwell is on is over 90,000 Americans have died, have lost their lives to this villainous virus and a million and a half infected. We don’t really know the full total of it and that’s why our Heroes Act says, test, test, test, trace and treat so that we can lower the amount of people who are dying because we know earlier if they are infected.

  58. 58.

    Martin

    @Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: Yeah, the whole basis for Roe was that if you want to enforce it, the government needs to know things about a pregnancy that is rarely disclosed to anyone, and that is nobody’s fucking business. A pregnancy ends at 12 weeks. The state demands to know whether it was a miscarriage or an abortion. Nothing good comes from the steps that follow. How many women do I know that got pregnant and miscarried and literally nobody except her OB knew? I have to assume it’s quite a lot given how common week 8-12 miscarriages are.

    Once the state has the right to know that, they can reasonably ask for the right to know anything similarly sensitive, and certainly everything less sensitive. That’s intolerable.

  59. 59.

    Feathers

    @Martin: Yeah, when abortion was still illegal in Germany, women suspected of having abortions while abroad could be forced to have a gynecological exam at the border to prove that they had not. Can you imagine handing that power over to ICE? Can you imagine how many forced birthers long to do so?

  61. 61.

    Feathers

    @Sloegin: Didn’t one of the major news outlets have a serious lead on a woman who had had an abortion at George W Bush’s request? And she was willing to talk. But she lost touch. When they tracked her down, she had a brand new, very nice fully paid for house. And she wouldn’t speak to them.

  62. 62.

    Martin

    @Baud: Gotta respect that Pelosi not only knows how to turn the screw, but even when you’re pointing out her turning the screw, she demurs while turning it more.

  63. 63.

    TS (the original)

    Reading the antics of the “men against masks” perhaps they need to be reminded of the way they wish to control women’s bodies – they don’t like having folks tell them what to do while they tell other people what to do.

  65. 65.

    raven

    @Nicole: There are a lot of folks that just made up there minds on it. It’s like when my sister went to protest “The Last Temptation”.  “Did you see it”?  “No” but I know I’m against it.

  66. 66.

    Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    I’m typing on a kindle, something that inaccurately spell-checks me into incomprehensible gibberish. Pardon the previous typos.

    Anyway, I remember conservatives guffawing over notions of penumbras of privacy during the 70s and 80s – that concept needed serious reinforcement but wasn’t getting it from the “my choice” activists.  Had they not been aggressively chasing gender-specific battles, you’d have a far different rhetorical framework and public perception.

  67. 67.

    Nora

    @Omnes Omnibus: I remember having a discussion with a librarian around 2004 about Griswold v. Connecticut, which is the ur-privacy decision.  I said the right wingers were ultimately going to go after Griswold, and she told me I was being paranoid.  Nobody would ever try to stop women from getting birth control, she said.

    Well, we all know how that turned out.

  69. 69.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Nora: They don’t want to go after Griswold solely to eliminate birth control (although they view that as a plus); it’s the right to privacy that they don’t like.  They want the right to poke and pry into every corner of other people’s lives.  They are quite nasty little people.

  70. 70.

    raven

    More than 40,000 National Guard members currently helping states test residents for the coronavirus and trace the spread of infections will face a “hard stop” on their deployments on June 24 — just one day shy of many members becoming eligible for key federal benefits, according to a senior FEMA official.
    The official outlined the Trump administration’s plans on an interagency call on May 12, an audio version of which was obtained by POLITICO. The official also acknowledged during the call that the June 24 deadline means that thousands of members who first deployed in late March will find themselves with only 89 days of duty credit, one short of the 90-day threshold for qualifying for early retirement and education benefits under the Post-9/11 GI bill.

  72. 72.

    Anne Laurie

    @Ohio Mom: I’m not even sure sometimes if you can call their their bad choices “choices” when their alternatives and resources are so limited. And yes, they do grifter things but I think mainly out of desperation, not entitlement. Or maybe not…

    QFT (quoted for truth)!  I’m not sure I’d say the prochoice people deliberately ‘used’ McCorvey; from everything I’ve read, Sara Weddington made every effort, before and after the case became notorious, to help McCorvey.  She didn’t do enough, as McCorvey saw it, which is why the forced-birth advocates thought she’d make a great advocate for their twisted plans… but as it turned out (and I’m hoping to learn more from this new documentary!)  their “religious” assistance couldn’t rescue Norma, either.  Hard cases make bad law, as the saying goes; but often they make riveting stories…

  73. 73.

    HumboldtBlue

    Everything Trump touches turns to shit and he never misses a chance to fuck over someone who can’t answer back.

    In 2017, Donald Trump signed something called the “Forever GI Bill” at his company’s golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey. The law expanded the educational benefits that had been made available under the “Post-9/11 GI Bill,” which was passed in 2008, and which supplemented various benefits that can be traced back to the original 1944 GI Bill. The White House would later tout the “Forever GI Bill” as an example of how Trump was “working tirelessly to provide the benefits and services that our veterans deserve.”
    In late March, the Trump administration authorized the deployment of members of the National Guard to help local authorities conduct coronavirus tests, set up field hospitals, and perform other critical public health tasks that carried a risk of infection. More than 40,000 service members have been deployed in total, but Politico now reports that they will all be recalled on June 24—one day before the first group sent into the field would reach the 90-day active-duty minimum that’s required to qualify for GI Bill education benefits and for a retirement benefit that was also created in 2008. Says the news site (the “official” is a FEMA staffer):

  74. 74.

    LaenCleardale

    @raven: I can say from experience that the army does this fairly often to keep soldiers from getting separation pay and other benefits.

  75. 75.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Baud: The vile Broderist scum of the Village will make sure of that.  The entire “Right to Life” (insert .jpg of “rabbit ears” here) has always been operating on bad faith, intellectual dishonesty, and broomstick up the ass prudery.

  76. 76.

    Patricia Kayden

    Contraceptives and comprehensive sex education come to mind when I read this post. If “pro-life” advocates really want to lessen the number of elective abortions, they’ll support access to free birth control products.

  78. 78.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @laura: No, it’s more than that.  They want to know what is on your book shelves, in your refrigerator, and on your walls.  And they want the right to punish you if you don’t fit their model of acceptable.  If you are poor, why do you have art supplies?  What right do you have to enjoy yourself?  If you are gay and out, why can’t you just go back to living in ashamed silence and satisfying your dirty, dirty desires in secret like you are supposed to?  And so on.

  79. 79.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Omnes Omnibus: Many of these contemptible people are also outraged about virus lockdown orders, saying that its “unconstitutional” for the government to pay any attention to the Preamble of the Constitution.  You know, provide for the common defense and promote the general welfare.

  80. 80.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Patricia Kayden: They don’t.  The issue has always been women having agency over their own bodies, even though the “right to life” seems to begin at conception and end at birth, to paraphrase Barney Frank.

  83. 83.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Martin: The UCMJ can reasonably be construed to forbid any sexual activity by military personnel outside of strait missionary sex between married couples for reproductive purposes only.

    Which means that just about every last soldier, sailor, airman, and Marine could be brought up on charges with that sort of intrusive ability to investigate persons.

  84. 84.

    cain

    @Sab:

    In regards to privacy you’re right. There is no where to hide. Thanks to technology. An aggrieved person can spend $500 and someone can get information from cell phone operators and locate their partner.

    Privacy is more important than ever in this highly online life.

  85. 85.

    NotMax

    @Villago Delenda Est

    The military governor of Hawaii during WW2 forced the brothels of Honolulu to roll back price increases to the previous “five minutes, five dollars” rate.

  86. 86.

    Feathers

    From Heather Ha  Ask Molly newsletter this week:

    I know a merciless church lady who knows everything about everyone. I’ll bet you know her, too. Piety is the most malevolent phantom of all. The sturdy and the devout lead your desire out to the graveyard to decompose. The church lady says she’s helping, but she just wants to imbue her misery with meaning. She’s a vampire. Lose your power and she’ll drop you forever. The more obsessed with sin they are, the more they paint themselves as saintly. At least you’ll be properly entombed, last rites mumbled through a haze of paths not taken. “Too late now,” you announced years ago. “I dug my grave, I’ll lie in it.”

    It’s not a grave. It’s time to grow. Let in some sunlight.

    As a fan of old movies and particularly noirs, it always surprises me how crooked, vicious cops and shady preachers were far more frequent in the 40s and 50s than they are now.

    We have made well behaved upper middle class creatives, who have therapists and take medication, the face of mental illness. It isn’t really discussed in other contexts. It’s so easy to talk about “bad choices,” but the reality is most people are doing the absolute best that they can in any given moment. We just don’t want to face it.

    My sister in law went to Falwell’s Liberty University. She said it was a viper’s nest of untreated mental illness. So many desperate teens trying to pray away what medication could really have helped.

  87. 87.

    Another Scott

    @Omnes Omnibus: It’s horrible, and it’s a growing problem.

    Amnesty International:

    Following today’s vote in parliament on a new legislation that bans the legal recognition of transgender and intersex people in Hungary, Amnesty International’s Researcher, Krisztina Tamás-Sáróy said:

    “This decision pushes Hungary back towards the dark ages and tramples the rights of transgender and intersex people. It will not only expose them to further discrimination but will also deepen an already intolerant and hostile environment faced by the LGBTI community.

    […]

    We have to vote the monsters out. Everywhere.

    Eyes on the prizes.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  90. 90.

    cain

    @Another Scott:

    Yes, we do. Looks like Hungary like some others are moving backwards. I would certainly think about sanctions at that point – but these people will thrive on it – but will fall eventually.

  91. 91.

    Miss Bianca

    @Nicole: And thank *you* for that. My particular friend is a bit nutty on the subject of Ayn Rand (tho’ perfectly dear in every other respect), and since I can’t stand any of her works I am glad to know that there is *something* she said that I can wholeheartedly applaud!

  92. 92.

    Miss Bianca

    @Another Scott: Uh huh… : /

     

    @Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:

     

    I’m getting a little fucking sick of sneering references to feminist activists who, when all is said and done, usually have a metric fuckton more of a personal stake in the reproductive choice wars than you could ever possibly have had. Either bring the receipts and name names about who, exactly, these “performative gender” bugbears are and exactly what they said that somehow managed to shift the issue from “privacy” to “choice”, and exactly what it was other than simple tiresome caprice that could possibly have prompted it, or STFU about it.

    Jesus Christ with a speculum.

  93. 93.

    Another Scott

    @Miss Bianca: The Count went further in his second comment than I would have.  I thought his first comment was fine – I took it to be not a “blame women for doing it wrong” but a “imagine if it had been built upon for women and everyone else” kind of argument.

    Sorry.  No offense intended.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  95. 95.

    Feathers

    @Miss Bianca: Not to mention that Judith Butler’s work on performative gender theory wasn’t published until 1988. When Roe was argued, she was still in high school.

  96. 96.

    Anne Laurie

    @Another Scott: It’s like the (performative) outrage over #BelieveWomen — as with #BlackLivesMatter, the “Too” is implied.

    Someone who tries to weaponize it as #BelieveAllWomen or #AllLivesMatter is, at best, confused.  But probably not an ally, certainly not a reliable one.

  97. 97.

    Miss Bianca

    @Another Scott: Apology accepted. It’s one thing to say that feminists should have played the ‘privacy’ card rather than the ‘choice’ card – if only because the concept of privacy would apply to men too, and so even misogynist civil libertarian men would probably have supported Roe v. Wade on those grounds. It’s another to say – or even imply –  “Goddamn those selfish preening feminist bitches for perverting and twisting the beautifully unisex concept of ‘privacy’ to ‘reproductive choice’!”

  98. 98.

    geg6

    @Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:

    So easy it slips off your tongue when you have so few stakes in the game.  Abortion isn’t about gender and making it so hurts me, a man who can see the bigger picture, right?  It’s just about how women being involved just fucks up your agenda.  Jesus fucking Christ.  I gotta leave this thread now, before someone gets hurt.

  99. 99.

    Ohio Mom

    Anne Laurie: You know much more of the history than I do, I only know what I learned goggling articles about the series earlier today. So I didn’t know about Sara Weddington’s attempts to help McCorvey. That’s interesting to know.

    Can I assume that relationship turned out to be a class/culture clash and chasm? I think a sociologist could have lots to say, contrasting the interactions between McCorvey and the lawyers who first engaged with her, with the relationships the church groups cultivated with her. I suspect the latter group really knew how to tune into her wave length.

    It seems to me this might be as much a story about social divisions on the U.S. as it is about anything else. I hope I eventually get to see it.

  100. 100.

    Ohio Mom

    Miss Bianca: It is certainly true that it has always been women who have fought for, and continue to fight for, the right to abortion (I expect this to always be true). And how can anyone be free without sovereignty over their own body?

    There is nothing sad or tragic about the idea of abortion, there is no reason to wish it was rare. Yes, proclaim it is a choice that belongs only to the woman who does not want to continie her pregnancy for whatever reason — there are no bad reasons.

    But I think there is also something profound in the idea that there are things so private that government should not be allowed to know about or intervene in. That cuts across sex/gender and is also essential to individual freedom.

    I would say it is ironic that the group which screams loudly for limited government wants no limits on government intrusion into private matters but we already know it is all about their misogyny, and that they are hypocrites through and through.

  101. 101.

    Lyrebird

    @Baud: Oh that interview you linked to is a beautiful thing!!!

    and Nancy SMASH! is indeed a national treasure!!!

    And we have a responsibility to be better, to better respond to it in ways that the scientists are telling us are necessary, rather than the President being a notion monger about what, for one reason or another, he thinks will work.

    But putting him aside, because we have to put him aside. He’s not serious about what we really need to do to go forward.

    We need to honor our providers. We need to test, trace and treat, and we need to do so in a way that’s unifying to our country and respecting the dignity and worth of every person because this is assaulting people in a very disparate way in terms of communities of color as well. So, they need to be tested; they need to be traced; they need to be treated. That’s what The Heroes Act does.

     

    @geg6: If you do peek back at this thread, keep setting the main misery aside and read NDP’s smackdown…  Better than chicken soup!   I think I also mean “come sit here by me” but I am not aware of all internet traditions so I might be saying this all wrong.

     

    link from Baud won’t link when I paste it in with Edit and the link tool, here it is:

    https://www.speaker.gov/newsroom/51920-0

  103. 103.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Miss Bianca: I have always been partial to these two definitions of libertarians – one from from college and one that is more general.  The first – a libertarian is a Republican who wants to sleep with liberal women.  The second – a libertarian is a Republican who smokes pot.

  104. 104.

    HumboldtBlue

    @Ohio Mom:

    There is nothing sad or tragic about the idea of abortion, there is no reason to wish it was rare. Yes, proclaim it is a choice that belongs only to the woman who does not want to continie her pregnancy for whatever reason — there are no bad reasons.

    I remember being taught that lesson (far too recently to my shame) in a conversation with my sisters and cousins.

  105. 105.

    jnfr

    @raven:

    I have watched Mrs America as it has played. It’s very well done, but as the episodes roll on I find it kind of depressing.

    At first I was sort of exhilarated to see on screen events that mattered so much to my life. As it went on, I felt how much we’d lost. Very mixed experience, for all that it’s really well done.

  106. 106.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @Omnes Omnibus: Libertarians may accept Justice Holmes’ dictum “The freedom to swing my fist ends at your nose” – but you have to read the fine print:

    And not a millimeter before. And if I sometimes swing too far and punch you, well, you just have to accept that as the Price Of Freedom. All in good fun, heh heh heh? And if you flinch back when I swing my fist toward your nose in fear that you’re going to punch me, that’s your problem, scaredy-cat – and next time I get to swing my fist even farther!

    Oh, and don’t you dare think of swinging your fist at my nose! My freedom trumps your risk of injury but it doesn’t work the other way around!

    Brings to mind a comment I saw in another venue, comparing going out in public without masks or social distancing to drunk driving:

    It’s my right to drink and drive, and if you’re afraid I might injure or kill you, then you should just stay off the roads, ‘cuz it’s my right!!

  107. 107.

    Boris Rasputin (the evil twin)

    @hells littlest angel: I can think of many people of whom the best thing one can say of them is “Thank God that bastard’s dead!” Stalin comes to mind, as does Nixon, and I’m sure you can add to the list.

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