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Yglesias knows it would be, uh, awkward for a man to directly state such a sentiment. Lucky for him, Theda Skopcol gives him a post to hide behind.
“FEMINISTS” who are pushing on abortion-funding limits rather than supporting American women need to examine their consciences. NOW’s obsession over abortion is, in effect, betraying a long tradition of American women’s advocacy on behalf of the wellbeing of families and the poor.
Yglesias: "What Theda Skopcol said." Presumably he also likes the way Skopcol put "feminists" in quotes.
Oh, those crazy bitches are at is again, wanting their rights and shit.
But then Yglesias knows where his bread is buttered. This Iraq-war supporting free-trader didn’t become the Village’s favorite blogger by not telling them what they want to hear.
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Until Matt Yglesias has spent fucking months in a fucking horrible pregnancy, he should keep his fucking mouth shut! I don’t buy that any woman can take away the rights of other women, too. It’s like the annoying coworker who had easy pregnancies constantly telling me how wonderful it was to be pregnant when I was throwing up constantly, barely able to get out of bed in the morning because of nerve inpingement and praying for the months to be over. I followed through with that pregnancy and even had another child, but that was my choice. We don’t make anyone, even a parent, take a bullet for a child, even if we think they should, yet some people want to make people like my cousin whose kidneys were failing give up her life and leave her two other children with the scars of having their mother die. It needs to be the choice of the person who will pay the consequences. And people need to get the idea through their thick black and white thinking skulls that there are a lot of people like me out there who are very much anti-abortion while also being very much pro-choice.
How is it that so many can say with a straight face that they might hate what someone has to say but defend to the death their right to say it, but reject that no matter how much you might hate a woman’s choice, you will defend her right to choose? Is speaking somehow more important than actual suffering? Because I don’t know many women who have even an uncomplicated and wanted pregnancy without a lot more suffering than it takes to listen to some idiot say things you think are repulsive. What do you want to bet that Yglesias would be dead set against someone taking away his right to write whatever he wants in his blog for the sake of getting insurance coverage for more Americans? What do you want to bet there’d be a huge screed about how important the right to free speech is and must be protected at all costs? Women’s rights to their own health and welfare? Not so much.
I agree! He should keep his fucking mouth shut! He’s putting the electoral chances of his party ahead in priorities of basic rights for women! He can take a long walk off a short pier!
I’m amazed at so-called “progressives” arguing that we need to pass a healthcare “reform” bill, that will all but eliminate access to abortion for many American women, especially poor women.
This is an outrage, but all I hear is crickets.
I am opposed to any bill that restricts access to legal medical procedures, and that includes abortion.
That should be the end of it for progressives, but many act as if these restrictions are not in the bill and that even if they are — oh, well. I truly can’t understand where these people’s heads are at.
I agree! It’s an outrage! All the last 30 years of Democrat officeholders promising women and womens’ groups just how zealously they would protect abortion rights, in exchange for support, just turned out to mean nothing! Not if abortion rights get in the way of having health care “reform” that enhances corporate profits! And the last 30 years of elite national womens’ groups telling working women that, in exchange for donations and memberships, these groups would pressure DC politicians to zealously protect Roe v. Wade … meant nothing either! How many woman officeholder endorsed by NARAL are about to vote for health care “reform” legislation that prioritizes corporate profits and attacks reproductive freedom for women? Plenty!
I too enjoy a nice rant delivered from the supposed moral high ground.
Of course, afterward, I also like to spend a moment wondering whether the nice zealotry has been delivered to the right address.
Zealotry? Weird choice of words.
Anyway, Yglesias’s comment in no way mitigates his endorsement of Skopcol’s chastisement of those silly feminists.
He doesn’t agree with the “discrimination of abortion services”? So what? He urges women to get over their “obsession with abortion” and get on board.
try reading (and writing about) Yglesias more carefully. then argue over what he did say.
Here’s what he said. He said:
“What Theda Skopcol said.”
Which means: he agrees with what she said, and because the part you pointed out in no doubt contradicts what Skopcol said, it wasn’t necessary to quote it.
Do you always reflexively defend Yglesias or do you also agree with what Skopcol said?
no, I quite often disagree with what Yglesias writes.
where we differ is that I try to disagree with Yglesias when I disagree with Yglesias.
when you simply dismiss his conclusion as not part of what he’s saying, what the heck are you doing?
I didn’t “dismiss his conclusion as not part of what he’s saying.”
It’s certainly part of what he’s saying. It just doesn’t mitigate or excuse Skopcol’s post, which he endorses. If anything it makes his view that women should get over “their obsession with abortion” in the context of the health care reform debate a little bizarre, since he acknowledges that “discriminating against abortion services is indefensible.”
So it’s indefensible but not sufficiently important to object to. Got it?
Now that you mention it, I wish I had included his conclusion, because it makes his position even weaker.
From the mouth of the blogger that is supported by the lobbyist John Podesta…
I can now see the need for abortion rights to be extended, in particular, to his mother- so she can have one preformed retroactively.
http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/06/your_reductio_is_my_dystopia.php
Well, well, well, I think Matty comes by his narcissism honestly, from his father Rafael Yglesias who lost his wife to terminal metastatic cancer.
D.G. Myers writes
Meyers does some digging to ferret out who the characters are in real life, but finds more of the same in regards to how the author Yglesias’ views these people, or his personal relationships with them. He finds little in the novel to recommend.
and a comment:
I guess It’s all about Matty, like it was all about Matty’s daddy.
shek, she wouldn’t have been happy to read what you suggested she might have done.
it would not have been her choice.
The retroactive abortion recommendation for matt’s mom was snark.
My second point was that if he values women as egotistically as his father does, that they matter only in relation to his existence, not as a separate and whole person. They are a mere appendage or an attachment that he screws on the bed to get the housework done, or meet his narcissistic emotional needs. His statement is no surprise in that light.
I understood that it wasn’t serious, but I’m hoping that somewhere along the road a light might go on and you’ll understand that Yglesias is a real live person and not just some words that the author of this post failed to understand.
The real Yglesias ain’t the caricature being painted here.
For the last time, tell me how I misunderstood and/or misrepresented his words.
How does the graph you cite in any way negate his endorsement of Skopcol’s post? (I have no doubt that she too opposes discriminating against abortion services. You can hold that view and still write the dreadful post she wrote, just as you can hold that view and endorse the post she wrote, as MY did.)
And yes, I’ll stipulate that Yglesias is real live person. I apologize for not capturing his depths in a two hundred word post. Maybe I’ll base a novel on him.
Start by trying to understand the difference between right to abortion and abortion funding.
You try understanding it, for a change, instead of expecting everyone else to agree with whatever your undoubtedly-conservative view might be. (Which you also haven’t given us.)
I know you enjoy trolling here, but you seem to forget that we’re real people too.
my “view’ on what Yglesias was saying is in my first comment @3, which quoted his conclusion.
Understand that?
Yeah, that’s like the difference between the right to health care, and health care funding. The right to education, and education funding. The right to … And … Funding.
We can all agree that respecting rights doesn’t mean there is a requirement that the public policies enacted actually fund the agencies, etc, that make the rights real.
Yes, sarcasm is completely intended. You seem to be arguing in favor of unfunded mandates with respect to our rights. In other words, lip service is what you favor.
It’s the new American way. Lots of rights for those who can pay cash for them. Lots of rights for those who can’t, too. Don’t blame the rich folks or the politicians that you can’t actually take advantage of them when they gave you every opportunity to get off your lazy ass and make it happen. We could all move to Iraq so that they can continue to have an occupying democratizing force without having to pay for it and we could have universal health care and the babies practically abort themselves. Win win!!!
Yglesias’ argument is that, even if the bill refuses to fund abortions, overall, it’s an economic boon for millions of poor women and their families.
This isn’t about ‘funding’ vs rights. Stupak bans any insurance policy on the exchange from covering a legal medical procedure even if that portion of the policy is covered entirely by YOUR MONEY.
The Nelson amendment allows states to ban any abortion coverage on the exchange whatosever.
So it goes way, way, way beyond who pays. This is about whether a woman has the right to purchase an insurance policy that covers a legal medical procedure for her own body.
If they don’t, they’re second class citizens. Men have no such restrictions.
I paid for my own abortion out of pocket almost 35 years ago. Not because my insurance wouldn’t pay for it, but because I didn’t even think of filing a claim for what was a perfectly legal and highly affordable procedure.
Although I didn’t realize it, I was living in a time when women were closer to having equal rights than at any other time in history. What Yglesias and Skopcol both avoid recognizing is that if a woman does not have control over her own body, she has no control at all.
And if a feminist is not concerned about having some control over her own body, how can she possibly be concerned about “advocacy on behalf of the wellbeing of families and the poor”?
Why is it at this point, that we are still fighting over a woman’s most fundamental rights here in the United States? Well, because while we were “sleeping” the Right has been chewing away at them, and all over the world, even being born female is becoming less and less popular. As a matter of fact, a recent study has shown that being born female is becoming more and more endangered – and it is not just the Chinese and the Indians who involved. Women have the right to choose – as long as they choose to have male babies.
http://www.economist.com/world/international/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15636231&source=hptextfeature
It not just “the Right”, buddy, the entire generation of post-hippy liberals became corporate plutocrats over the last 40 years, and they don’t stand for anything except for a feel-good “remember Woodstock and Purple Haze!” image while watching the money roll in. If it takes attacking womens’ freedoms to get health care “reform” legislation that favors corporate profits enacted, then the elite members of the generation that defined feminism 1969 onward, now in power, will happily flush Roe v. Wade down the toilet.
For the most part, I find American “feminism” as it exists in national mass media to be a vapid coffee club for rich white women on the East Coast wealthy due to their husbands’ large holdings. For my part, real feminism has to do with things like basic property rights, the right to vote, and a large number of rights won in the historical womens’ movement long pre-dating the current nonsense.
And anyone who tells me how much better it is to have women in power than men, how it is that the world if led by women would become some sort of peaceful goddess-worshipping vegan-agrarian art colony, need only look at the sheer number of female Democratic Party officeholders who are being exposed as reprobates and scoundrels just the same as male politicians.
With those very direct and blunt thoughts on the table, however, I must make it clear that the last year of Democratic power in the national government has shocked my conscience as a man. For example, I really, really, really thought that the abortion issue was done. I saw it 15 months ago as a political lever for rallying women voters and little more. How wrong I was!! The attacks on reproductive freedom – and I do consider reproductive freedom, access to abortion, the right to not become a mother, etc. – to be basic human rights of women – by women officeholders and by officeholders in the Democratic Party in the guise of “health care reform” are completely unacceptable.
After the last year of the supposedly “post-feminist” Democratic Party with its vaunted numbers of women officeholders, I think its clear to me that reproductive freedom is still, somehow, under attack, and with it, basic economic and social justice for women, under attack, and I think that women across the country – women who don’t enjoy the rich comforts of the officeholders and plutocrats’ wives – should be horribly angry. These women should be angry at the political system, angry at the plutocrats who drive it, angry at the religious conservatives, angry at the officeholders in particular the Democrats who always claim to be friends of women. It’s time to bring back the bra-burnings, the Andrea Dworkins, the protests, all of it.
OH, yeah, and Matt Yglesias? He needs get over the idea that he is anything other than yet another brand-name celebrity political gasbag. The country is full of them and full of shit for it. The health care “reform” now likely to be enacted is an atrocity in ten thousand ways and the assault on reproductive freedom for women is one of the worst of those ten thousand ways.
I mean, its not just abortion by itself. The right to family planning and related health services is in my opinion and unassailable right of women. However, the attack on women in the last year of Democratic control of the government is much broader than that.
The Great Recession. Sure, we men lost our jobs at a comparatively huge rate, relative to women, and women commentators don’t pay much attention to that. But who gets hit the hardest by these job losses? Women. For one thing, women on average make less money and have less economic security than men. When a woman loses her job she may be marginalized economically very rapidly. For another thing, when the breadwinning man loses his job, the woman typically is in real trouble because she’s dependent on a guy with no job and may have kids. Finally, single mothers are economically destroyed by major recessions.
And what has the Great Democratic Party with its control of the government done to assist out-of-work men and women in the recession?
1) The party has thrown trillions of dollars at the feet of bankers so they can go snort cocaine while on sex safaris in Thailand and Latin America with their bonuses.
2) The party has attacked abortion rights in the attempt to heap huge sums of money at the feet of the insurance and pharmaceutical plutocrats, institutionally, for decades to come.
3) The party has passed a ludicrous 15 billion dollar jobs bill (should have been named “The Ebeneezer Scrooge Memorial Act of 2010″ which does nothing at all to address the crisis felt by the crumbling middle class and out of work people.
The Democrats, in short, have participated in a total class war attack on working people. Women, being (yes, its true) on the bottom of the economic totem pole at any level of society you choose suffer the most.
So my point is that the attacks on reproductive freedom by the Democrats should already have every American women enraged. But on a very deep level, the way the Democrats have abrogated their responsibilities as the party in power to protect the middle class and shield the out of work during a historic economic crisis, and instead serviced their corporate sponsors and plutocratic friends, should have every American woman angry ten times over. Every jobless man in America is a jobless family in crisis, and every jobless single mother in America is another nail in the coffin of our supposed and widely-trumpeted moral superiority.
Women should be angry, and while in the past, rich, comfortable media feminists and plutocrats’ wives with time on their hands have really alienated me with their industry, this year I think that I stand with working women in outrage.
You have internalized the issue, and your arguments about what the right to reproductive choice for women means, are better than any woman I’ve ever heard.
Younger people that weren’t around to learn about the issues or participated int the fight for these rights the first time don’t understand how hard fought these battles were. That’s why the pompous ass Matty can brush it off as mere a hobby horse issue.
I won’t even give him that as an excuse. I am too young to remember a pre-abortion or pre-civil rights world, but it doesn’t excuse me from being able to wrap my brain around how important the results of those fights were. It shouldn’t matter if the fights were hard or not, the rights are important and we are the people who are so proud of our understanding stand for inalienable rights. More people should have empathy, but even if you can’t manage that, being able to be intellectually consistent is a must. Or he can just admit he’s as full of shit as the teabaggers.
That’s it in a nutshell as to the DLC Democratic Party. It is also apparent Obama has little concern for women’s rights in his personal or political circle.
But those situations will be forever, just insert name. The real question is why in recent years average women show little interest in activism to support their rights.. They are going to lose more as long as they remain so passive.
The Democratic Party has drifted so far right it has developed a fetus fetish. Obama wants to force us all to pay tribute to the health insurance cartel. Democratic partisans like to describe themselves with the word “progressive”. What a joke.
They sure have some funny sounding progressives over at ThinkProgress.org and Center for American Progress. This stance against “feminists,” pushing the escalation in Afghanistan, against single-payer. Which corporations fund this think tank and all their umbrella organizations that are “progressive?”
Fine questions to ask. You now that CFAP is a Podesta outfit, right?
Sorry about the repeat posts, I’ve really wanted to get those things off my chest for a while now. If you read the posts, thanks.
Time to start the Pink Pitchforks movement, women.
“If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.”
attributed to Florynce Kennedy
who is also credited with
“Our parents had us so convinced we were precious that by the time I found out I was nothing, it was already too late–I knew I was something.”
God bless!
My mom used to say that if men got pregnant, no family would have more than one child and many would not have any because the men would talk to each other and not risk finding out for themselves. It is so easy to tell other people what they should be willing to sacrifice for the greater good when you know it is a physical impossibility that you will ever be asked to make a similar sacrifice. Men complain about having to pay money for child support, for heaven’s sake, and yet that money is the worst thing they could lose from a pregnancy they were equally responsible for creating. Men don’t die in childbirth. Men don’t give risk their health to complete a pregnancy. Men haven’t even had to acknowledge any real responsibility until as recently as readily available DNA testing.
Hey, I’m white, so I can easily expect minorities to give up their voting rights if it scares the wingnuts and makes them shoot people and blow things up, right? The entire country is at risk of fascism and imposition of martial law if this stuff continues and all it would take to calm them down is get the black guy out of the white house and not let that growing minority population take over political power. They just need to grow up and do the right thing. After all, we’ll look out for them. They can trust us to find ways to take care of their needs down the line if they just do this for us now. They don’t need to worry about our willingness and ability not to allow things to get too bad for them, right?
He is as full of shit as teabaggers are, in fact he’s worse. He’s a self entitled limousine “liberal”. He’s been funded to steer opinion, and cage any rogue progressive ideas that show up in his comment section. He’s a sheep herder for the status quo.
That’s true. At least the teabaggers don’t pretend to give a shit about anyone but themselves and certainly not about women’s rights. They don’t pretend to be progressive or independent of the administration, either. You’re gonna get screwed by either set, but at least one has the decency not to lie to you about it.
Another brick in the wall.. nibble here , nibble there…pretty soon the rights are gone. People don;t remember how hard wimmin fought for the vote and these rights to control our own lives…conveniently. they think men just…gave them to us. HA!
suppression of wimmin’s voices is all part of the fascist, war mongering, patriarchal mentality which is also killing the “sacred feminine” earth.
You’ll notice these men who want to remove the rights to our own bodies never want to provide help for the babies they want to make us carry….a very powerful clue that this is about controlling wimmin and not about babies at all
A thought. If the anti abortionists had gotten their way and out lawed it they say we would have fifty million more people in the United States.
What the fuck would we do with them?
We can’t keep the ones we have working.
Are barely able to feed what we have.
We let them die with no healhtcare.
They say we can’t afford the soldiers we have so we can’t put them in our Miltary.
One thing is absolutly for sure that the people who were so against abortion won’t in any way wan’t to pay for them.
Abortion is a legal procedure in the United States. The Hyde Amendment forbids federal funding for this legal procedure. Why do churches, many of which openly campaign to outlaw abortion, get federal subsidies in the form of federal and state tax breaks? Why do churches get such financial support when this legal procedure is denied funding? Why do churches get support when women do not? I do not understand how the Hyde Amendment is constitutional. Has it ever been challenged in court?
Good and central point about the Hyde Amendment. It’s cast a large shadow.
It was been challenged in court and still stands.
The fact that abortion is now seen as a wealthy white woman’s issue is testament to the forced birth lobby’s success at limiting lower income womens’ access to both abortion and contraception. So now even progressives like Yglesias and Skocpol assume that lower income women are less interested in those things than their more affluent counterparts.
Many good to great posts here. Just so frustrated, devastated and demoralized by the ongoing demonization of women’s right, esp reproductive rights. The current status of the so-called “Democratic” party on this is beyond depressing, and although there are some of us out in the trenches continuing to fight this fight (which was supposedly over a long time ago), not nearly enough are standing up for rights which should be a given.
I’m not sure where to point my finger of blame anymore, although certainly BHO and the current in-a-shambles and beyond-stupidity “Democratic” party is one place to look and point.
Younger women, in particular, though, do not seem to be standing up and shouting about this. Look, we can complain all we want about white, middle class limousine liberal women, but many of us who *might* be classified this way are still fighting and protesting and donating money and making phone calls and all of that. Seriously, though, where are the younger women (of whatever persuasion) who are the most affected by this??
I am constantly saddened by the apathy seemingly displayed by the young, esp in re to this critical right. They don’t seem to care, or somehow don’t seem to get how it directly affects them. Of course, the media, politicians, the church, etc, have all gone a long distance to desensitizing citizens into believing that, if something doesn’t directly affect you at this second in time, then you don’t need to have concern over it. And thus the wool gets pulled over our eyes, complacency settles in, and we end up with a ridiculous post from a so-called “liberal.”
Ugh. I will continue my ongoing fight to preserve this right, but for sure, I cannot do it alone.