Ayanna Pressley: Killing Babies in Abortions is “Racial Justice”

I’ll continue to stand on what I stated.

BTW I was there in that fight.... I watched Clergy and mothers driving young high school girls to clinics to abort their babies and fathers begging their daughters not to do this. So I am well acquainted with where the blame and responsibility lays.

This would have never happened had the American people stood against it. There would be no abortion....and it certainly was well known about. It was not done in secret.

I’ll continue to stand on what I stated.

BTW I was there in that fight.... I watched Clergy and mothers driving young high school girls to clinics to abort their babies and fathers begging their daughters not to do this. So I am well acquainted with where the blame and responsibility lays.

This would have never happened had the American people stood against it. There would be no abortion....and it certainly was well known about. It was not done in secret.

"This would have never happened had the American people stood against it."

That part is certainly true.

But this part of what you wrote at #5 ("Thank God we haven't had a woman for President or no baby would have a chance!") is irrelevant at best, misleading at worst. The legalization of criminal abortion had almost nothing to do with women in political power. The state legislators, and later, jurists, responsible for legal abortion were overwhelmingly men.

Not that anyone is entirely off te hook. There's plenty of responsibility---and irresponsibility -- to go around, in all races, all ages, and both sexes. But the preponderance of men in Roe-era abortion activism led to Andrea Dworkin's pathetic witticism:

"Abortion is the solution...

...to the liberal boy's problem."

You state....” The legalization of criminal abortion had almost nothing to do with women in political power. The state legislators, and later, jurists, responsible for legal abortion were overwhelmingly men”....

By the time of Roe v. Wade abortion was ‘already legalized’ in Hawaii, New York, Alaska and Washington..and it was the ‘Women’s Rights movement and court cases involving contraceptives that laid the groundwork for Roe v. Wade.

You wrote: ""Thank God we haven't had a woman for President or no baby would have a chance!"

Women running for the presidency or holding any elected political office or any sort ---city, state,local --- had exceedingly little to do with the legalization of criminal abortion. Ironically and peculiarly enough, the emergence of abortion as a broad-based "popular" "women's" political issue happened after abortion was legalized via Roe vs Wade.

As I mentioned, groups like the National Organization for Women did not take up abortion in the late 60's --- which really frustrated the male abortion vanguard like Nathanson, Lader,and Baird.

NOW's focus was, locally, anti-discrimination workplace issues and challenging men-only social spaces, and nationally, the ERA. They actually churned out a ton of propaganda refuting the idea that there was an abortion-ERA connection. They felt that any link to abortion would be toxic to the ERA, and assailed conservative lawyers (like Phyllis Schlafly) who insisted that the ERA would be used to buttress a "right" to abortion and to abortion funding.

Pro-abort radical left feminist lawyers (like Sarah Weddington and the equally odious Margie Pitts Hames) got their support from the ACLU and the Georgia Legal Aid Society.

After legislative successes for abortion in CA, NT, HI and other liberal bastions, their political /legislative campaigns were losing steam or stalling out altogether. Abortion was not a popular political issue. That's why they preferred getting things "fixed" in the courts rather than the state legislatures.

Now, of course, abortion is "the" litmus test and rallying cry for ambitious female politicians and their associated demented maenads and pussyhats. But it was not always so.

Well we could go round and round about this and what is or not historically correct in how this began and woman's involvement. You can actually go back to the 1800’s..But the facts remains.....as Leslie Reagan wrote....” that ‘women's demand for abortions’ transformed medical practice and law..that it was physicians and lawyers who initiated the earliest efforts to rewrite the abortion laws....and Ultimately, women's pressing need for abortion fueled a mass movement that succeeded in reversing public policy toward abortion in the 1960s and early 1970s.”

Further writing....”Most scholarship on abortion has focused on two moments of legal change:. when abortion was ‘criminalized’ in the mid-19th century..... and when it was ‘decriminalized’ a hundred years later in the mid-1960s and early 1970s..... The century of illegal abortion is typically treated as obscure and unchanging. I find, however, that the history of illegal abortion was dynamic, not static.”

Analysis of public policy should examine how policy has been implemented and by whom, rather than be narrowly restricted to federal legislation or agency activity as much of the regulation of abortion was carried out not by government agents, but by voluntary agencies and individuals. .....as an example...........It would have been virtually impossible for the state to enforce the criminal abortion laws without the cooperation of physicians. State officials won medical cooperation in suppressing abortion by threatening doctors and medical institutions with prosecution or scandal ....

By the 1940s and 1950s, physicians and hospitals had become so accustomed to this regulatory stance toward women and abortion that they instituted new regulations to observe and curb the practice of abortion in the hospital. The medical profession and its institutions acted as an arm of the state

Her book brings attention on the nature of the public sphere, its membership, democratic discourse, citizenship, and the formation of public opinion and debate. You might consider a possible read.

When Abortion was a Crime 1867 - 1973
exerts of her book....

https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/97may/abortex.htm

I thought abortion was always illegal? is this author claiming it wasn’t illegal in the US before 1867? I find that hard to believe.

There were no laws against abortion because nobody would have thought of having one! It wasn't just religion. Without children, who would take care of you when you got old, work your farm, or support the family in the factories (if you were one of the unlucky ones that worked in a factory during the nasty early years of industrialization)?

In those days, children were an asset. It was only when the Progressives invented compulsory education in the years after the Civil War and enacted child labor laws, that children became a financial liability. Then the New Deal invented the government's social safety net. After World War II government policy pushed for the nuclear family as opposed to the extended family as a way of supporting real estate.

Sound strange? Do some research into economics and the effects on social policy. It will curl your hair.

The link provides your answer.

That you. Makes sense. Any books you would suggest to get me started on the economics/social policy history?

I gathered my info from years of reading articles and the occasional snippet of a book that addressed the changes that the Progressives made with the TR's Square Deal and FDR's New Deal. (The Progressives screwed up anything and everything they touched.)

I'll look around to see if I have anything left on my bookshelves.

OK.

I cleaned out a lot of stuff from my iibrary in my last move, but I would suggest a magnificent book on the Constitutional Convention of 1787: Decision in Philadelphia: The Constitutional Convention of 1787, by Christopher Collier and James Lincoln Collier. The second chapter, titled "America in 1787" gives you a good taste of what life was like when the only social safety net was your children.