Rashida Tlaib’s vulgar abortion rhetoric sidesteps the truth

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At a pro-abortion rally this week, Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan gave a master class in how not to talk about abortion.

“This past year I realized: My, my, my, are they obsessed with our bodies,” Tlaib cooed, mocking Republican legislators, “how we talk, how we look, what we stand for!”

She repeated a popular talking point about Republicans “policing” women’s bodies, and later added that anti-abortion legislation tries to “commercialize” women or “profit” from them, making them “less than.”

“This obsession with our bodies,” she said, “you know I — in the legislature, in the Michigan legislature for six years — used to say to people, ‘Yo, yo, you know what? You’re so freaking obsessed with what I decide to do with my body, maybe you shouldn’t even want to have sex with me, or with you, or with any women!'”

Well, that’s one way to distract from the human life that abortion aims to end.

Lest it seem like Tlaib’s rhetoric is out of the ordinary, here are just a couple more examples of similarly crude tactics favored by some in the pro-choice crowd.

While Mike Pence was still governor of Indiana, feminists protested his signing of an anti-abortion bill by flooding his phone lines with calls sharing information about their menstrual cycles. A Facebook page called Periods for Pence emerged to encourage women to talk about their periods in protest of anti-abortion legislation. Now expanded to Periods for Politicians, the page’s “about” section says its purpose “is to inform politicians who are concerned with women’s health care about the status of our menstrual health.”

Last year, a Georgia lawmaker tweeted out a “testicular bill of rights” to argue that men wouldn’t like to have their bodies legislated. “Introducing my ‘testicular bill of rights’ legislative package,” Democratic Rep. Dar’shun Kendrick announced. “You want some regulation of bodies and choice? Done!”

The problem with this kind of rhetoric, besides the obvious issue of its vulgarity, is that it completely ignores the issue at the heart of the abortion debate. But then again, all pro-choice rhetoric is an exercise in deflection. This is not a problem of “policing” women’s bodies. The government constantly tells citizens what not to do. No one argues that the inability to rob or kill is inhibiting their freedom to do what they want “with their bodies.”

The abortion debate revolves around the life of the baby in the womb, and whether you recognize it as such. Pro-choice advocates cannot win the debate on those terms, and so they have to ascribe some kind of malevolent or even weird (“commercializing”) motives to those arguing for defending that life. They would rather make the ridiculous assertion that Republicans just want to “profit” from women’s bodies than admit that anti-abortion legislation is also introduced by women, and its aim is to protect both the life of the woman and the life of her baby.

Such an admission would nearly give the argument away. So instead, radical abortion advocates such as Tlaib will breathlessly repeat the lie that abortion is all about women’s rights to their bodies and not at all about the rights of human beings still in the womb.

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