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Anti-Choice Dems Receive Death Threats From Pro-Lifers

Jill

Oh the irony.

This isn’t surprising, given the far-right’s habit of threatening and sometimes carrying out violence against those they disagree with; it is particularly predictable given the anti-choice movement’s reliance on violence and intimidation. This is what radicals in the anti-choice movement do — they threaten people, they scream outside of clinics, they yell “babykiller” on the House floor, and sometimes they set things on fire or shoot doctors or kill people. All of it, from the clinic harassment to the death threats directed towards these congressmen to the killings, is entirely disgusting and unjustifiable. There are obviously varying degrees of disgustingness involved, but it’s all reprehensible.

But I’m with David — will the anti-choice lawmakers who are receiving these threats put two and two together and realize that what they’re now experiencing is just a fraction of what women who terminate pregnancies and doctors who provide abortions face? That women who enter abortion clinics are faced with screaming throngs of people, with threats, and sometimes with violence? That their own congresspeople refer to them as “baby-killers”? That doctors who provide abortion services are stalked, harassed, and sometimes killed? That I’d be willing to bet if you got the bloggers from the five biggest feminist websites together, we’d outpace these guys in death threats by a mile?

It’s shameful that these congressmen are receiving death threats. It’s shameful that they’re also part of a movement that has long threatened women’s lives.

17 thoughts on Anti-Choice Dems Receive Death Threats From Pro-Lifers

  1. …will the anti-choice lawmakers who are receiving these threats put two and two together and realize that what they’re now experiencing is just a fraction of what women who terminate pregnancies and doctors who provide abortions face?

    Hahahahaha…no. Because to their minds, they are innocent victims of a bunch of fringe lunatics. Meanwhile, the women who terminate pregnancies and the doctors who help them are evil babykilling minions of Satan who deserve everything they get, and their tormentors are good God-fearing Christians who are just doing the Lord’s work trying to save PWESHUS BAYBEEZ. The word “irony” isn’t in these people’s vocabulary.

  2. Hey! I had an idea that maybe you all could help me fine tune and/or just join me in it… The phrases “pro-choice” and “pro-life” leave so much to be desired and the radical Right has totally dominated the framing of the abortion debate so we need new language.

    What about this…

    Women’s medical freedom.

    I support women’s medical freedom, do you?

    What? You are against freedom? A woman should have freedom in her medical decisions, no?

  3. Medical freedom and personal autonomy, period. There are people who aren’t women with uteruses, too. And nobody should be forced into medical decisions they don’t want (or prevented from receiving procedures or treatments that they do), regardless of their gender or anatomy.

  4. Three words.

    Civil rights backlash.

    People are not happy with a black man, especially a progressive one, especially one who doesn’t fall over himself showing self-loathing, in the White House. They know they’re losing control and they’ll take it back any way they can.

  5. …will the anti-choice lawmakers who are receiving these threats put two and two together and realize that what they’re now experiencing is just a fraction of what women who terminate pregnancies and doctors who provide abortions face?

    No.

    Well, that was an easy question, do you have any more?

  7. I’m listening to some of these phone messages on the Rachel Maddow Show.

    What kind of crack are these people on? Don’t they have anything else better to do?

  8. All I have to say is, as you sew, so shall you reap. Honestly, I LMFAO’d when I saw this article – because as far as I’m concerned, these guys made their bed, and now, they can lie in it. They’ll never know a fraction of the pain women who dare to control their own reproductive organs go through. As far as I’m concerned, the violent right wing movement against abortion clinics and the women who utilize their services is domestic terrorism, and frankly, the only reason more law makers don’t recognize it as such is that it is comprised of white cis men just like the majority of them.

  10. Could you please put the names of the Congresscritters in the main post? Because when I read it, I thought you were talking about Louise Slaughter, who is pro-choice, and who has also been receiving threats.

    She doesn’t deserve to be tarred with the anti-choice brush, even accidentally.

  11. “I’m listening to some of these phone messages on the Rachel Maddow Show.

    What kind of crack are these people on? Don’t they have anything else better to do?”

    I caught some of them last night. I asked my husband to please remind me to prepare a script beforehand if I ever decided to make a threatening phone call. I mean, really. If you care enough to call a politician and wish ass-cancer death on them, you ought to care enough not to sound like you’re trying to do five other things while on the phone.

  13. “because as far as I’m concerned, these guys made their bed, and now, they can lie in it.”

    Eh, I’m not sure that’s the right way to look at it, because the reason they’re being targeted isn’t because they’ve hurt people with their anti-choice stance. They’re being targeted for exhibiting some very minimal standard of human decency.

    Oh, and for supporting a Black Guy’s platform. I think amandaw nailed it.

  14. Any anti-choicer who is outraged by the teabaggers’ behavior needs to look straight in the mirror and say “I participate in this whenever I protest outside of a women’s clinic,” or at least “I condone this behavior when people and organizations I support protest outside of women’s clinics.” I just might send a message to Stupak to remind him that he is facing the death threats that women and doctors receive every day for doing their legal and compassionate work.

  15. Those anti-choicers just made the impossible happen: they made me feel bad for Bart Stupak. I doubt he’ll make the connection, though, and this sympathy is probably fleeting.

  16. They won’t realize it. Because they don’t see themselves the same as us, and therefore they think death threats against them are a moral transgression, whereas we were asking for it.

  17. Three words.

    Civil rights backlash.

    People are not happy with a black man, especially a progressive one, especially one who doesn’t fall over himself showing self-loathing, in the White House. They know they’re losing control and they’ll take it back any way they can.

    I think you’re completely right in you analysis of whats happening as a backlash. I do, however, see it as something of a good sign (at least in the long run). Once a threshold has been crossed it is very, very difficult to uncross it.

    Right now we have a black man in the White House, we have a Latina on the SCOTUS, we have a constitutional right to have an abortion that has stood long enough that its part of the experience of several generations of American women, we have a gay pride movement that convinced the most conservative Supreme Court in living memory to overturn laws against sodomy. The social conservatives can, and will, thrash all they want but I think the likelihood of them actually managing to push anything back into Pandora’s box.

    American social conservatism today is basically a bunch of angry, scared, middle aged white men entering the twilight of not only their social influence but their very lives. Its becoming small, its becoming ridiculous. Money, jobs, and people are flowing out of their communities and they’re responding as if its the end of the world because, for them, it is. In my own experience there are relatively few people in my generation who aren’t pro-choice and even amongst those few the vast majority have bigger problems to worry about then abortion. The Limbaughs, Becks, and Hannitys of this world have a loud and devoted audience, but theres a reason they’re all relegated to a pair of dying media (talk radio and cable news): there just aren’t that many people who care. Let them thrash, soon they will die. In the meantime, we can focus on making the world a better place while they gnash their teeth and make fools of themselves in public.

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