NYT editorial today on how to solve the issue of abortion. Why didn't we think of that?

[CTyankee]

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/18/opinion/abortion-bans-pro-life.html

All I can say to this benighted author is "Where have you been, buddy?'

Alluva sudden, this guy has discovered that women might, just might, consider how in the world they can afford to have a child when their lives are interrupted by an unwanted pregnancy?

I am more perplexed at why the NYT chose to run this guest editorial in the first place. Surely, the editorial page editors have discovered the economic reason women might chose to end a pregnancy. It has long been cited, been discussed and the author's "solution" been offered to women over the many years since Roe articulated the right to privacy in main to support abortion rights in this country.

Anyway, in case you haven't seen it, here it is and it invites some response here.

I can't wait to see the readers' LTTE on this one...

[MOMFUDSKI]

1. The good news is the rethug-appointed

SC just fucked the rethugs. This killing of Roe will bring the angry women out in droves next election and every election until we are made first-class citizens again. Carry on

[Lonestarblue]

2. One of my favorite comments on this article.

Raix, Seattle
“Another man, mansplaining abortion to those of us who can actually get pregnant. I dont have an opinion about prostate surgery. Yet some men think they have a right to tell me what to do with my own uterus.

Abortion has nothing to do with children. It has to do with a group of religious people being infuriated that women have control of their own sexual and reproductive lives. Don’t confuse the issue here.”

[Chi67]

3. Ummm

Can you post what the article says in general? It is behind a paywall.

[CTyankee]

4. Basically, expanding the social safety net so more pregnant women choose to keep their babies.

My point is that this has been exhaustively argued for all these years by the religious right, which opposed most of the economic social safety net, then alluva sudden became big fans of said safety net when they saw an opportunity (they thought) to bolster their argument against women exercising their right to choose.

So as far as his argument goes, you've heard it all before. I guess I gotta give him credit for daring to make a complete idiot of himself in the editorial pages of the arch-librul NYT.

I remember back when I worked for Planned Parenthood that protestors outside the PP clinic offered baby clothes and formula to women entering the facility (and who might not be pregnant at all, but needing gyn care).

SMH...

[Freddie]

8. I'm all for more women choosing to keep their babies

The key word is CHOOSE.

[Chi67]

12. The GQP

Will NEVER go for that. According to them, the only thing government should do is punish and hurt our citizens, not help them. Because helping would be.... Soshalizm.

[shrike3]

15. An acquaintance condescendingly told me how her church and others provide diapers, baby blankets

formula and onesies for pregnant women, the implication being that's all they need. I said, "Are you paying rent, utility bills? Babies grow fast, what about clothes? Shoes? Well baby visits? What about baby food? What about real food? What about schoolbooks, when they're older?" She had no answer for me.

[RussBLib]

14. Gifted link

Dobbs Didn’t Reduce Abortions. The Anti-Abortion Movement Needs a New Vision. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/18/opinion/abortion-bans-pro-life.html?unlocked_article_code=1.O00.38vQ.OfIkq88zsoxS&smid=nytcore-android-share

[NNadir]

5. The New York Times, Often Confused with the mythological "Liberal Press," Is Often a Right Wing Rag. n/t.

[CTyankee]

6. I wonder if it's more than that in this instance. My guess is that they have to throw a little red meat at the rabid

right to help their "credibility." Hopefully, the load of shit coming down on them will disabuse them of this notion in the future. DO WE HAVE TO TELL THEM AGAIN?

[NNadir]

7. Well, of course, going back a ways, there's always "But her emails." My personal opinion is that they had a lot...

...to do with legitimizing the psychotic maniac Trump.

[CTyankee]

9. Yep. The utter perversion of "both side-ism" plus their fascination with Trump has given the NYT a black eye in the past

Silly me, I thought they had learned their lesson.

[NNadir]

10. I read the rag often, but mostly it works to exercise my critical thinking muscles. There has actually never been...

...a true "liberal press," although the right wing press, in which the "Saddam Hussein's Weapons of Mass Destruction" was rendered as a truth, and "but her emails" was rendered as a truth, has somehow manufactured a "liberal press" as a truth. Let's be clear; the New York Times is a participant in right wing mythology.

It is totally unsurprising to me that they are here to declare women's internal organs as public property of men. It's consistent with their whole line of bullshit.

[ShazamIam]

11. The same people who complain that poor women have too many babies, oppose birth control & abortion for any reason and

of course for any tax funded financial support of any kind.

The free well baby care program that used to be operated at the county level and available to all babies and mothers free of income level but funded by federal tax funds was one of the many programs that ended with the 1981 Reagan tax cut.

That program included home checks to be certain that both mother and child were in a life sustaining environment.

[shrike3]

16. Ding, ding, ding.

We have a winner.

The people who insist a child must be born no matter what are the same people who will do their damndest to make sure that child and its mother have the most miserable life possible.

[SpankMe]

13. Um, yeah...bullshit editorial

The OP is right. Also, NYT Editorial is in freefall. It's absurd for this editorial writer to float this 'solution' a something that was not considered previously.

The idea of reducing the number of abortions by providing support - financial, policy, culture, healthcare, mandated paternal financial support, etc. - rather than criminalization has been floated constantly by the pro-choice camp for over 50 years. The cons weren't buying.

For the right-wingers, it was all or nothing. Getting numbers down wasn't enough. A total ban down to zero - through criminalization - is all they were interested in. This is why we know it isn't about "unborn life", but is about control of women.

"Centrists" keep telling us not to frame it as "control and subjugation of women" because that antagonizes the right and is off-putting to independents. They say it's hyperbole that willfully mischaracterizes the anti-abortos' true rationale and that it's really a cynical and liberally-contrived rhetorical vehicle that makes us libs feel better about our position. It's equally as inflammatory, they say, as them calling pro-choicers "baby-killers".

I disagree with these "centrists" (a la Bill Maher). It's provable with math equations and flowcharts that the right's actions - especially after Dobbs - are not about babies. They're about women. This isn't an exaggeration or willful misassignment of motives. All you have to do is look at the story of the woman who miscarried and delivered her dead fetus into a toilet and was then investigated for "abusing a corpse". Those charges were dropped. But it was clearly a shot across the bow.

The first civil war was about slavery. It wouldn't surprise me if the next one is about women's rights to bodily autonomy.

[LearnedHand]

18. Oh for fuck's sake

Wrong fucking again! Abortion is not an "issue" needing solving. The ONLY issue needing solving is whether women have the same bodily autonomy that men do. Do women have the right not to be pregnant? Everything else is compassion-washing a draconian stance. Notice the writer ALWAYS says unborn child. In addition, notice how this writer assumes all abortions happen because the pregnant person "decides" they don't want to be pregnant. This promotes the anti-abortion framework that ALL abortion are elective and glosses over the entire issue of medical necessity.

Fuck the writer and fuck the NYT for promoting compassion-washing. And thanks to whomever posted a gift link.