The unpopular movement to take away reproductive rights from more than 50% of the country is driven by a belief that “life” begins at conception. Regardless of your opinions on what “life” means and in what context, and regardless of your beliefs in our constitutional rights as citizens of this country and human beings of the world, one thing we can all agree on is that the need for conservatives in our country to demonize the concepts of abortion in any and all cases has frequently relied on the grotesque.
On Thursday Catherine Glenn Foster, president and CEO of Americans United for Life, spoke a real flurry of lies in support of her organization’s forced birther position during congressional testimony. The singular note that any forced birther hits when discussing abortion is that it’s sort of gross. Surgery in general can be bloody and yucky since it requires doctors to go inside of our bodies to fix things, excise issues, and stitch back together what has been damaged. The problem is that the singular note struck by forced birthers always comes back to this: I believe you are killing babies. This is a problem because, for one, most people don’t see it that way, and for two, get your face out of other people’s uteruses, asshole.
As a result, people like Foster must employ increasingly macabre language, violence-inciting language, to try and make their position seem more robust than it really is. During one section of Foster’s testimony, she claimed an aborted fetus is a “human person from the earliest days, poisoned in the womb, and dismembered. Torn limb from limb ...” Surprisingly, Foster’s organization, which has a presence across the country, doesn’t seem to have done anything about all of those children actually being poisoned by lead water. Oh well. Anyway, Foster then launched into a brand-new, utterly ridiculous lie about “the nature of abortions.”
Foster explains that these abortions become “bodies that are thrown away in medical waste bins,” and then she reveals something that no one in Washington, D.C., or anywhere in the world knew: Washington’s electrical grid is dependent on abortions. What, you say? Am I talking about, you ask? Here’s Foster to explain that fetuses, “in places like Washington, D.C., [are] burned to power the lights of the city’s homes and streets.”
Is that possibly true? Had you heard that made-up fact before? Because it’s completely made up. But you know who else believes that liberal cities use incinerated fetuses to light their homes and streets? The forced birther “activist” who was arrested after a stash of fetuses was discovered in her D.C. home. That’s the same woman whose anti-abortion group is now “claiming” that the group got those five fetuses stored in her home off of a medical truck that had 115 fetuses. Where are the missing fetuses? The forced birther group says they buried all but five, and then I guess decided to hide five fetuses, unburied, in their home? Got it. The story is dubious, to say the least. Isn’t there something in a bible or two about not bearing false witness?
Where did this wild talking point come from? It comes from the same misinformation bubble that led Republican Nebraska state Sen. Bruce Bostelman to announce on the floor of the Nebraska state Senate that elementary school teachers were spending money on kitty litter in order to cater to children who identified as “furries.” They weren’t and they still aren’t.
No one is powering anything with biological waste. As Salon points out, this kind of disinformation is in line with general, soggy, right-wing conspiracy theories. This delusion is like a “a janky version of the Matrix” where our society is being powered by abortions instead of people. One of the most pathetic aspects of these kinds of conspiracy theories is how poorly they are written. At least The Matrix retains some logic within its own fictional universe.
For all of the talk about “religious freedom,” the fact remains that the forced birther position is a religious one that’s not supported by many even older religions, and most Christians don’t hold the views on the matter that evangelicals do. You can try and inaccurately describe surgery and medical procedures all you want, but it doesn’t change what most Americans believe are inalienable human rights.
The problem here is that what these right-wingers want to believe is too good to be true in their estimation. When you only can see monsters, you need to find proof, and fast. Otherwise, after a time, you might realize there’s only one monster—and it stares back at you in your bathroom mirror every morning.
"The fact remains that the forced birther position is a religious one that’s not supported by many even older religions, and most Christians don’t hold the views on the matter that evangelicals do."
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