Reply #88: Bud does anyone really think Coulter is dominated by men? [View All]

[George_S]

Hell no. She makes mince meat of most men who argue with her. If she were on the liberal side, she would be a "strong woman" that "men are afraid of."

What many in this debate don't understand is that this war is more than a century old and is centered around "family values." Before 1860 "some states didn't regulate abortion at all."

"Abortion laws after 1860 were broader and more drastic. Between 1860 and 1880, states passed more than forty antiabortion laws. Over a dozen states banned abortion for the first time; others tightened their existing legislation. Organized medicine led the crusade against abortion. There were a number of reasons for their zeal. One was certainly professional, connected to a general campaign against 'quacks.' The new abortion laws put power in the hands of doctors. Doctors fought hard to medicalize childbirth. They aimed to drive abortionists (many of them women), midwives, and other rivals out of business.

"But there were probably deeper social reasons for the campaign against abortion. Many women who wanted abortions were married. This was, to some observers, a most alarming fact. A woman's highest duty was to bear children, not to snuff out their lives. When middle-class white women killed the life they were carrying, they were not only perverting their own natures and denying their God-given role, they were also helping America commit racial and genetic suicide... James Whitmire, in an 1874 article on 'Criminal Abortion,' blamed abortion for the fact that there were so few 'native-born children of American parents... We are fast losing our national characteristics, and slowly merging into those of our foreign population.'

"Thus a woman who went to the abortionist and got rid of her baby was committing a terrible sin against society... The battle against abortion was tied into the general eugenic madness, the sense of contracting horizons and the image of threatened values so prominent an aspect of the late nineteenth-century cultural scene."*

*Crime and Punishment in American History, Lawrence M. Friedman, pg 229-230.

The battle with Sanger back evolved over birth-control, but was over white middle- upper-class women getting an abortion. I still haven't figured out how this evolved into a war against all abortion. It looks like it was gradual and grew from this eugenics seed into the Comstock Law. Maybe the only way to stop upper class white women was to rail against all abortion. Of course, like today, the war was against "those who prefer to look at life as if it were an immense carnival."

O'Reilly comes to mind.

EDIT to remove implication that Sanger battled in the 1870s.