Digital Civil War: Confronting the Far-Right Menace by Peter Daou

Author:Peter Daou
Language: spa
Format: epub
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2019-04-28T23:00:00+00:00

Anti-choicers have also exploited the rare circumstance of abortion later in pregnancy to influence public opinion. Political blogger Ed Kilgore wrote that anti-choicers use “lurid imagery and misinformation about the nature and frequency” of later abortions and that “their ultimate goal is to ban the vast number of abortions that occur earlier, mostly in the first trimester of pregnancy.”17 At Everyday Feminism, Laura Kacere explained that the term “partial birth abortion” was “created by the National Right to Life Committee, is not a medical term, and has been used primarily in political discourse, effectively perpetuating the misconceptions and stigma around late term abortions.” Kacere noted that “due to either fetal anomalies or risks to the health of the patient, a pregnancy that is otherwise wanted/planned may be terminated,” and that “people typically find out about birth defects around 20 weeks, and those faced with this possibility must make difficult decisions as they consider the quality of life for their family.”18

In a Twitter thread directed at Mitch McConnell, Dr. Daniel Grossman, director of Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH), debunked the myths about second and third trimester abortions: “Hi @SenateMajLdr! I’m a board certified Ob/Gyn, clinical and public health researcher, and abortion provider. There are many reasons why patients need abortions after 20 weeks. Some due to the fetus having a lethal anomaly, some for the patient’s own health, and others because financial and logistical barriers make accessing an abortion earlier very difficult.” Grossman added: “One more thing—are you aware that many of the restrictions on abortion that you support are creating barriers to access, thus forcing patients to seek abortions in the second and third trimesters?”

In a fearmongering tweet, anti-abortion activist Devin Sena posted a photo of a pregnant woman with a sign saying IT‘S MY DUE DATE TODAY. MY BABY‘S HEALTHY. I‘M HEALTHY. IN COLORADO, IT IS LEGAL FOR ME TO GET AN ABORTION TODAY. OUR LEGISLATURE HAS FAILED. But the claim was false—and the backlash was severe. “You are a lying sack of authoritarianism,” replied author Thomas Levenson. “You know the claim is not true, and you use that lie to deny women agency over their bodies and the right to take action to preserve their own lives. People die because of people like you.” Student and digital activist Sachi Shastri responded that “if you’re blatantly spreading falsities just to further your ‘cause’ then your position didn’t hold water in the first place.”

The anti-choice movement’s attack on reproductive rights entails a concerted effort to shut down abortion providers, among them Planned Parenthood, the leading provider of reproductive health services in the United States. Franklin Graham, a prominent evangelist and Trump apologist, wrote on Facebook that raising funds for Planned Parenthood “is like raising money to fund a Nazi death camp—like Auschwitz, except for innocent babies in their mother’s wombs!” (Absent from Graham’s inflammatory missive is that more than half of abortions conducted in the U.S. in 2014 were for Christian women, including 13 percent for women who identify as Evangelicals, according to research and policy organization the Guttmacher Institute.

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