On Tuesday, anti-abortion activist Lila Rose’s group Live Action released a highly edited “undercover sting” video that claims Planned Parenthood is facilitating gender selective abortions.
Live Action claims U.S. census data and national vital statistics illustrate sex-selection is a growing problem in the United States but MediaMatters points out Centers for Disease Control data from 2008 that says 91.4% of abortions were performed before the 13th week of pregnancy, before gender is identifiable.
The following is a statement by Akiba Solomon, Colorlines.com’s gender reporter and columnist:
This sneak attack brought to you by Live Action’s Lila Rose (the female James O’Keefe) dovetails with tomorrow’s House vote on HR3451, the so-called Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act (PRENDA). To understand the timing of this video, lets examine the bill.
HR3451 claims to address the rising “sex-selection industry” and cites gender-based abortion tourism by “citizens of other countries.” As evidence of the “growing threat” of sex-selective abortion, the bill also cites a study by Columbia University economists who analyzed 2000 census data for U.S.-born children of Chinese, Korean, and Asian Indian parents. Because sons outnumbered daughters, the economists concluded that their mothers must have practiced sex-selective abortion. This evidence is thin as hell, but PRENDA authors claim that “it strongly suggests that some Americans are exercising sex-selection abortion practices within the United States consistent with discriminatory practices common to their country of origin, or the country to which they trace their ancestry.”
Taken together, the bill and video are part of the same old right wing attempt to criminalize abortion under the mantle of equal rights and stoke white population anxiety. Instead of using the black genocide trope, PRENDA employs Yellow Peril dog whistles. The video supports this race-baiting legislation.
Live Action and PRENDA supporters are concern trolls. If they were, in fact, concerned about the lives of girls, they would focus on policies that support, say, living wages, jobs, affordable health care, quality public education and safety from gender-based violence rather than ginned up threats of sex-selective abortion.
Live Action isn’t very good at being sneaky about their “stings.” Planned Parenthood knew what they were doing weeks ago.
I just don’t know how you can claim to be working in people’s best interests when your primary strategy is (badly) lying to them.
If you have to lie in order to scare or manipulate people into supporting your ideology, there is something wrong with your ideology.
You shouldn’t have to ignore or deny reality in order to justify something and when you lie that’s exactly what you’re doing.
I’ve never had to make up lies or force myself to believe logically ridiculous things in order to justify why I am pro-choice. I’ve never had to co-opt things like slavery or the Holocaust to justify why I’m pro-choice.
The bottom line is that people will die (along with their fetuses) from illegal abortions if it is illegal. You either want pregnant people to die or you don’t. It’s not about fetuses, they die either way.
Love,
Rabble
Every Planned Parenthood should have Lila Rose’s photo up next to the door with “DO NOT LET THIS PERSON IN!!!” written on it. I went to college with Lila Rose. Her first “sting” was an expose where she went to the student health center and told the nurse she was pregnant, and the nurse - gasp! - told her about abortion as an option. She wrote a whole expose and self-published a newspaper called The Advocate (no, she didn’t know about the gay publication, and I guess didn’t care because I know people told her, including me) to tell the public about the horrible nurse who tried to make her kill her baby.
The worst part? THAT WAS MY NURSE. At my alma mater you had a special ‘team’ of health care specialists at the medical center, and the nurse Lila Rose targeted was the one who swabbed my decks* every year. Of course the school didn’t fire the nurse. At my next appointment, I asked her about it. She sighed heavily. I don’t remember exactly what she said, but it was along the lines of “this girl doesn’t know what she’s doing.”
So yeah. FUCK Lila Rose and her anti-woman pro-fetus agenda and her stupid sting videos that never accomplish anything because GUESS WHAT Planned Parenthood is not an abortion mill.
*PAP smear jokes!
In which Wolf Blitzer, of all people, schools Donald Trump on the air over his position on birtherism. An excerpt:
WB: Donald, you’re beginning to sound a little ridiculous, I have to tell you.
DT: You are, Wolf. Let me tell you something, I think you sound ridiculous, and if you’d ask me a question and let me answer it.
WB: Here’s the question, did the conspiracy start in 1961 where the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and the Advertiser contemporaneously published announcements that he was born in Hawaii?
DT: Many people put those announcements in because they wanted to get the benefit because of getting so-called born in this country. Many people did it. It was something done by many people even though they weren’t born in the country. You know and I know it.
Trump hosts a fundraiser for Mitt Romney tonight in Las Vegas.
[tpm]
Long done with this issue, admittedly, but there’s a great laugh-out-loud moment six minutes in where Wolf asks Trump what “his people” found about Obama’s birth certificate back in April of last year — he claimed to Meredith Viera that his people “cannot believe what they’re finding” about Obama’s birth certificate. “We don’t have to go into OLD NEWS,” Trump says. “That’s old news.”
“People keep bringing up evidence like it matters or something” - Donald Trump, basically
I’m not gonna deal with the commentary below ‘cause I don’t wanna and I’m on my Bobby Brown. (Late 80s R&B reference—deal with it.) I will say this though:
EVEN IF I were to accept the argument that people of color can be racist against whites (and to be absolutely clear, I do not under any circumstances accept this argument), thus conceding the premise that this type of racism occurs at all, the idea that this type of discrimination is so rampant, so damaging to white people everywhere is simply laughable. Really?
Can you catch a cab in the city? ’Cause I can’t. Have you ever fit some vague description and stopped by police officers? ‘Cause I have. Have you ever been denied housing because, upon meeting the landlord, magically someone else took the apartment not twenty minutes before you arrived? ’Cause I have. Ever heard stories of lynchings of distant relatives drunkenly whispered by aunts and uncles? ‘Cause I have. Ever been denied services, ever had someone grip the bag a little tighter or turn their wedding ring when you’re in their presence or had people feel as if touching you without permission was wholly acceptable because you look “different.” Yes, yes, yes to all three.
This “what about me” pathology is so sickening. How dare you compare being allegedly bullied by the one black girl in your school to more than four hundred years of race-based, systemic enslavement, under resourcing and intentional psychological trauma against peole of color in this nation. The temerity it takes to audaciously declare that your experience and history is in anyway similar or equitably damaging to those of POC is wholly representative of the high level of privilege you possess. How dare you? And I’d seriously like an answer to that. Please tell me how that equates?
You cannot have this, too. Steal and appropriate our cultural artforms, gentrify our neighborhoods, lay claim to historic figures, whitewash us from the broader American culture and there is little we can do stop you. But to lay claim to some false history of racist and disenfranchisement as a means of alleviating one’s self and one’s ancestors to the continued systems of racism and oppression against POC in this nation, is beyond boundary of acceptable.
**steps off soapbox** I’m done. May tumblr become my happy place again.
i erased everything else but this because the rest of the nonsense below makes my blood boil and i don’t need that. but really, this is good. it’s a man’s perspective, but it is 100% truthful in their experiences and with pointing out exactly how even if we were “racist” against white people, how not the same it is as racism towards people of color.
| — | Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (via tonylucero) |
| — |
Young, Privileged, and Applying for Food Stamps | The Billfold (via meganwest) The recession has forced a lot of folks who thought they’d never be one of “those people” to go on government assistance. It’s made many people a lot more humble. But most of us don’t talk about it, because it’s a little embarrassing to admit that, despite having a college education and coming from a “nice” neighborhood and doing everything “right,” sometimes you still end up jobless and penniless. A good friend of mine was on food stamps after we graduated from college because her 60+ hour/week job paid less than $11,000 per year. She was teaching and mentoring inner-city students. My sister went on food stamps after graduating from one of the Seven Sisters. She was waiting tables and studying for the MCATS. When I was unemployed in the latter half of 2010, I took my unemployment and went on a state program that gave me a discount on my gas bill. So, yeah. This stuff is real and it happens. Conservatives love to push the idea that only lazy people don’t work, only bums get government assistance, that these programs only benefit people who don’t want to work. The truth is, these programs are feeding a lot of recent college graduates who are still suffering from the recession. (via stfuconservatives) |
It’s bad enough that Missouri conceded to having a bust of Rush Limbaugh created and then put in the Hall of Famous Missourians. To add insult to injury, they’ve also used state funds to buy an $1100 security camera to make sure no one defaces it.
“On Craigslist, Coal Lobby Offers $50 To Wear Pro-Coal T-Shirts At Regulatory Meeting.”
Bringing out the fake supporters, since they apparently can’t find real ones.
Scumbags.
Hahahahahahahahahaha
Love this!
Needs no further comment, ‘cos pictures are worth a thousand words (maybe a million words adjusted for inflation).
Will always reblog Obama with babies.
