New York Times Back On Its Bullsh*t, Finds Some Young Women Who Hate Abortion

In its continuing effort to raise everyone’s blood pressure, the New York Times on Saturday delivered a glowing profile of a hip new counterculture phenomenon: young women who see the end of constitutional protection for abortion rights as a really great thing. Sure, they may be vastly outnumbered by young women who would prefer the right to control their own bodies — but the Times not only reports what these young anti-abortion activists say; it headlines its story on their cause ‘”The Pro-Life Generation’: Young Women Fight Against Abortion Rights” before noting 11 paragraphs down that it’s not that at all.

Here, let us steal a chart for you, which the Times must have forgotten:

,

Why yes, young people who make up “Pro-life generation” are in fact stridently pro-choice, and kids 18 to 29 have never been more pro-choice than today.

How bad is this Times article? We learn that activist Lauren Marlowe, the 22-year-old social media coordinator for “Students for Life of America,”

launched a small line of “trendy pro-life clothes” as an undergraduate at Liberty University. The line touts a T-shirt with the word “pro-life” spelled out in the “Friends” font, and a hoodie with the cheeky slogan “Just a clump of cells.”

And oh, how the libs were owned by having that line thrown back at them!

To be sure, the story does acknowledge that its subjects are outliers, among women overall and in their age range overall, noting a Pew survey from March finding that

Women ages 18 to 29 are significantly likelier than older women to say abortion should be generally legal, and that it is morally acceptable. Just 21 percent of young women say that abortion should be broadly illegal.

But then, citing Daniel K Williams, a historian of the anti-abortion movement, the story suggests that part of the reason these cool young women oppose women’s full citizenship is that it’s just so contrarian and rebellious, because the antiabortion movement is so darn good at framing itself as “countercultural” but also totally in favor of stuff young Americans really like, such as “broadly popular beliefs about the importance of justice and equality for the vulnerable” — the Times‘s language, not a quote from Williams. Heck, in that sense, the story chirps, the effort to restrict women’s freedom regularly cites

Historical touchstones — commonplace within the movement and much-disputed outside it — include the Civil Rights movement and 19th and early 20th century suffragists.

Again, thanks for that “much-disputed” bit for at least the tiniest acknowledgement that most people find such comparisons odious. Similarly, before plunging headlong into fawning over these young rebels, the story does note that

For the majority of American women who support abortion rights, other women’s enthusiasm for stripping away their own constitutional rights can be baffling and enraging, a profound betrayal.

You can smell the “but” coming a mile off, can’t you? Turns out that these young women see themselves as “human rights activists — happy warriors on the right side of history.”

Isn’t that just charming? They’re the real feminists, they say, because women can have it all, as long as “it’ includes an unwanted pregnancy carried to term. One, Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America, explains that

“This is 2022, not 1962,” she said, observing that women’s legal rights to do things like secure loans have advanced dramatically since the pre-Roe era.

Not that we need to keep all those dumb rights, because most of these happy warriors also want to see the Supreme Court roll back the right to contraception, but not all of them do. Hawkins’s group only opposes contraceptives that it COMPLETELY INACCURATELY labels “abortifacients” (IUDs plus the Pill and any other hormonal methods), but it’s cool with condoms and the rhythm method, which it calls “natural family planning/green sex.” We thought that only involved Kermit/Pepe slash fiction.

The story takes great pains to suggest that these kids aren’t really all that extreme, either. Oh, sure, most favor a complete ban on abortion from the moment of fertilization, with no exceptions. But hardly any of them want to see anyone punished for seeking an abortion, just jail sentences for anyone else involved. How moderate!

To give a sense of just how diverse these young antiabortion crusaders can be, the story even suggests that not everyone in the Junior Anti-Sex League has to be a rightwing “Christian,” heck no! Again, the language is so bizarrely chirpy, claiming that non-religious anti-abortion activists “make up a small but boisterous niche.” Take, for instance, 20-year-old Kristin Turner, who is a fan of climate activism and Black Lives Matter, but is also the

communications director for Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising, whose goals include educating the public about “the exploitative influence of the Abortion Industrial Complex through an anti-capitalist lens.”

She even started a “punk band band called the EmbryHoez” which did a song called

“The Hotties Will Dismantle Roe”:

They say it’s empowerment / They say it’s women’s rights / But all I see’s oppression / And might makes right.

Yr Wonkette sought comment from actual punk rock women, but they all died after hearing those lyrics, the end.

[New York Times]

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