Abortion is business as usual
Left-wing Hollywood actress Kerry Washington argued that abortion is a “normal part of women’s lives” in her memoir during a discussion about her past abortion.
“The reality is that abortion is a very real and normal part of women’s lives,” Washington writes.
“It’s just so important to me that abortion is not a bad word,” Kerry Washington said in an interview with People Magazine.
That’s quite a cause to espouse.
The actress – of whom I’ve never heard, but to tell the truth I haven’t heard of most of the younger set in Hollywood – also has plans to “produce a movie centered on abortion.” I bet it will be just fabulous.
Here’s the movie I remember about abortion. Saw it in a movie theater in 1963:
That came out around the same time as The Great Escape. You might call it The Great Escape II.
The most important thing in life for too many black women like ms Washington is the freedom to fuck Mr. Wrong, and murder the consequences. Without that freedom there is only conventional morality, and where did that ever get anyone beside virtually every successful man and woman in the world?
Not that young, she’s 46 but I agree about the really young set of actors in their twenties of whom I recognize almost no one.
She caused a lot of mind arson with her twisted soap scandal an evil west wing
I am “pro-choice with reasonable limitations” although it would be best if men and women were scrupulously careful to avoid unwanted pregnancies to begin with.
But the Left is so celebratory of abortion that I can’t help but see it as demonic.
Why TH are there such massive numbers of abortions when inexpensive contraception is easily available?
Some great acting in that McQueen clip. Particularly the young woman.
It occurs to me that for Democrats their sense of outrage over the 40 dead babies, some decapitated, in Israel is muted because they have been so passionately supporting partial birth abortion for so long. They really do see babies, and human life, as disposable rather than sacred.
Michael Towns:
Yes, Natalie Wood is great there. If you want to see her at her best, which is incredibly good, please watch Splendor In the Grass.
Marisa:
I’d say four main reasons. The first is it is human nature to often be careless about contraception. The second is that contraception doesn’t always work. And the third is that abortions have until lately been easily available and quite common (as this actress in the post points out). The fourth is that religious belief has fallen off in the young.
Funny how you don’t often hear a lot of talk and detail in the MSM about the ideas, actions, and writings of the sainted Margaret Sanger, especially about her views about blacks, where they fit in the scheme of things, and what was to be done to them.
How quickly we have gone from the idea of making early abortion available in difficult situations to insisting that it it good and a routine thing to do, repeatedly, and at any stage of pregnancy.
The truth is that repeated abortions, even drug-induced ones, are not a very healthy idea for women (to say nothing of their dead offspring).
the problem is web dubois shared the same view, along with the penchant for marxism,
The movie about abortion that I remember is Alfie (1966), a British film that made a star of Michael Caine. He plays a promiscuous chauffeur who picks up and discards one woman (some single, some married) after another. When one of his “birds” gets pregnant, Alfie has an abortionist come to the woman’s flat to perform the abortion. In the following clip from the end of the movie, Alfie talks to the abortionist about his surprise about how perfectly formed the child was; he broke down in tears when seeing the aborted fetus, the first time he confronted the consequences of his actions. The only clip I could find of this scene from the film is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ud5a6pDTAYs&list=PL579F6E00D25443D3&index=12&ab_channel=PriscillaBarquet
(The first 2 or 3 minutes are the key scene; most of the clip is the film’s theme song and the credits at the end. Neo might be able to cut the clip to omit the last few minutes.)
Kate says, “How quickly we have gone from the idea of making early abortion available in difficult situations to insisting that it it good and a routine thing to do, repeatedly, and at any stage of pregnancy.” I was able to locate a 2019 “first person” article from The Cut about that very casualness. It shocked me at the time when I first read it. The author is a woman in her 40s who recounts the four abortions she’s had in her adult life: “The year I was 41, I needed two of them. I was no stranger to abortions; I’d had two before, but never in the same year. In fact, 30 percent of the times I had sex in 2011, I got pregnant. So there I was in November, having already aborted 50 percent of that year’s pregnancies, hoping to make it a nice round 100 percent. I just had to decide how.”
The author then recalls her last abortion, performed by a female physician with “an Eastern European accent.” As the title of the article indicates, it was “the best abortion ever” because it was over quickly. Make what you will of the following: “Holy shit,” I said. “That was hands down the best abortion I ever had in my whole fucking life. You’re amazing.” The doctor gave me a look that I interpreted to mean, “Crazy ladies are all the same.” She left. I didn’t care. I loved her.
Link to the full article: https://www.thecut.com/2019/06/the-best-abortion-ever.html
As nearly as I can figure out, the point of this self-centered story is that abortion doesn’t have to be traumatic to either body or soul. No mention, of course, of the trauma to the unborn child.
One irony in the story is the author’s praise of her mother’s casualness in informing her about abortion. On returning home after “the best abortion ever,” the author says, “I thought about my mother, shifting the Volkswagen from first to second, telling me in her offhand manner what an abortion was, in the same tone she’d told me why New Hampshire was the Granite State, or what was in a snickerdoodle.” I can’t help wondering just why the author’s mother was so casual about abortion. Perhaps the author was lucky to have been born?
@RigelDog
At the time of “safe and rare” I would have agreed with you, mostly because I didn’t believe Kermit Gosnell could so blithely happen. My acceptable limitations are now harsh; only health, only catastrophic. I would listen to arguments but I’ll be a very hard convince.
Abortion is NOT a “normal part of women’s lives” and never has been.
“Normal” is not the same thing as being an historical reality, through various agents, in most times and places; it was not ever the NORM as it’s supporters imply.
Lying with statistics is one thing; totally ignoring them is something else.
Either abortion is morally wrong or it is not morally wrong. This idea of regrettable , ” safe and rare” is just a farce. If there is nothing morally wrong with abortion, what is the point of limiting it? If there is something morally wrong with abortion, why should it be justified under the banner of ” safe and rare”?
Jon Baker:
Thing is, some people think it’s morally wrong and some people think it’s not, and some people thinks it’s somewhere in between depending on the reason for the pregnancy, the health of the mother, and the stage of the pregnancy.
That’s why many people advocate compromise laws.
In denying the right to life of the person within… they forfeit their own claim of a right to life.
Using the standards and knowledge – social & science – of the time we live in, there is very little chance of finding a western citizen that supports Slavery.
And many wonder how our western ancestors could have done so: How could they do that, How could they not understand, How could they believe, etc.
In the future – with different standards and knowledge – the same will probably be said of Abortion: How could they do that, How could they not understand, How could they believe, etc.
I hope I am not being a bore, but I grew up on the back side of Hollywood. Lots of experiences by just standing around. I am mentioning these things to help keep the light side of life visible–if from some distance.
Soo, here is my Steve McQueen story. I could show you on a map where a major freeway cuts through the mountains by Forest Lawn(Hollywood) and Griffith Park. There was a road there that led into Hollywood. It cut through a bit of a canyon. On one side of the canyon was a gas station/garage. On the other side of the canyon up in the hills just a little bit is where Steve McQueen lived. He used to go over to that garage and work on his cars and motorcycles. This was before he became really famous.
My high school sweetheart was a little bit like him–red hair, angular face and a passion for taking cars apart. The high school kids who were serious about “hopping up” their cars (1953-56) could be found at that garage working on that which was the most important thing in their lives-souped up cars. The fact that some new and upcoming movie star would drop in to work on his didn’t mean anything to us, because the young and upcoming actors lived all around us–James Darren, Tab Hunter, Dale Roebertson, etc. One day, my friend showed up outside the house in a really “sweet” convertible. I looked twice because both the driver and my friend looked so much alike. After a minute of staring out the window, I realized it was in fact “Steve”. He gave my friend a lift to our place because my friend couldn’t get his car running in time to get home!
Maybe it was just my high school hormones, but even from that window there was something special about him.
I suppose when you’ve had an abortion, it would indeed be “so important” that abortion not be a bad word. Otherwise it calls your decision into question in a very profound way.
I’m lucky; I never had to decide whether to have an abortion. I had one close call – very close; I tested positive in the early stages of a relationship, and then, probably serendipitously but it made me and the man sad nonetheless, I had a miscarriage, within days of the positive test. I still don’t know what I would have done if Providence hadn’t taken the decision out of my hands.
I was at least supposedly using contraception. But it was a barrier method with a failure rate of up to 10% even when used perfectly, and I wasn’t close to perfect – not nearly as careful as I should have been. I changed methods after that.
I suppose technically there was one other decision point in my life: when I found myself pregnant at 37, after having already had the two children my husband and I had planned. But there was never any question that that child was going to be our third, God willing, once we knew he was in the offing.
More to the point, with both our second and third children (as I was considered “elderly” at that point), we turned down amniocentesis, because as my husband said, what would we change if we found out something bad? We were already in it for the whole banana peel at that point. But we were in a stable, lifelong (by intent, anyway, and now I can confirm also in fact) relationship.
I wish there were a foolproof, easy to implement way to keep women – and the men who love them – from ever having to face such a decision. No matter what Ms. Washington says or thinks, abortion takes a dreadful psychic toll on most women. But there’s no such way; abstention is very hard these days, sterilization has lifelong consequences, weird sexual practices carry their own price, contraception can fail, and people’s desires can be very powerful.
A melancholy addendum to the grim ‘Alfie’ abortion sequence is that Vivien Merchant, the accomplished actress who won multiple awards for her role as the pregnant woman, was married to playwright Harold Pinter, a flagrant philanderer whose sexploits finally drove her to alcoholism and early (53) death.
America has wasted 50 years on abortion States rights will bring it to the same position as Western Europe in the next 50. By which time that will be an Islamist he’ll hole
Forgive me for generalizing, but it occurs to me that I can only two major population groups currently in existence that share the same pathological behaviors and outlooks on life: American Negroes and (so-called) “Palestinians” (more correctly identified as a conglomeration of various Arabic-speaking moslems living in the Levantine area called “Palestine” as a result of of Emperor Hadrian renaming the Roman Province of Judea “Syria Palaestina” in his effort to blot out even the memory of those pesky Jews). Both groups seem to hold that premeditated killing is a virtue; the Palestinians when applied to non-moslems and especially Jews, and Negroes when applied to their own offspring, both in the womb and later, especially during late adolescence and early adulthood. In regard to Palestinians, the killing results from their pathological outlook and reliance on Islamic teachings, whereas in the Negroes, it is the result of an unreflective and visceral instinct for violence in general. No society can persist if it adopts such views or welcomes those who hold them into its fold. The inevitable outcome is destruction. Can anyone persuasively disabuse me of this notion? I would welcome examples to the contrary, inasmuch as I can think of none.
Steve (retired/recovering lawyer):
Poor analogy.
Abortions – even if you think they are a form of murder – are very different from what terrorists do, and although black woman in the US have a much higher abortion rate than white woman do, white women certainly do not shun abortion.
As for black-on-black killings in the US, the black community overwhelmingly condemns it, as opposed to the response of cheering and applause from Palestinians for terrorist attacks against Israelis.
And read some Thomas Sowell on the idea that black people have some innate propensity for violence.
A very good movie about abortion politics is Citizen Ruth. It stars Laura Dern, playing against type as the unlikeable pawn of pro- and anti- abortion activists. At a certain point, things get real and the message deepens. One of those rare movies that uses farce effectively to make a serious point.