How To Stump An Anti-Choicer

Anti-choicers cannot answer a simple question.

When asked the question “What should happen to women who have abortions if they were to become illegal,” anti-choice demonstrators have a very difficult time coming up with an answer.

Joseph C. Packer asks this question in the scholarly journal “Argumentation and Advocacy” back in 2013, in an article entitled: “How Much Jail Time? Returning Women to the Abortion Debate?“

Below is a brief except from his piece:

“If abortion is criminalized, what should be the penalty for a woman who has an illegal abortion?” This deceptively simple question leaves many pro-life protestors, politicians, and organizers struggling for an answer. The Manichean pro-life rhetoric has difficulty accounting for the complex figure of the mother who aborts; typically she is absent entirely from pro-life discourse. The question of “how much jail time?” (HMJT) moves these women to center stage in a way that undermines the simple narrative that abortion is murder, which has come to define the pro-life movement. After a long period of stagnant rhetoric from both sides of the debate, HMJT offers the pro-choice movement an opportunity to radically reframe the question of legal restrictions on abortion.

A recurrent question in the abortion debate, HMJT made a major splash in public discourse in 2007 when At Center Network posted a short documentary entitled Libertyville Abortion Demonstration on You Tube (At Center Network). The documentary takes place in Libertyville, Illinois, where red shirted pro-life protestors hold signs depicting aborted fetuses. An unseen cameraperson asks the demonstrators variations of the question: “If the government makes abortion illegal, how should it punish women who have abortions?” The responses differ, but almost all the protestors shown on the documentary admit not having considered the issue despite many years of participation in the pro-life movement.

Libertyville Abortion Demonstration attracted major attention, garnering 391,651 views as of November 3, 2012. [over 450,000 at the time of this article] The question of HMJT moved from the web to print, when Newsweek published a piece by Anna Quindlen (2007) praising the documentary saying, “The great thing about video is that you can see the mental wheels turning as these people realize that they somehow have overlooked something central while they were slinging certainties” (p. 68).

The same month, the National Review, a conservative journal, organized an online forum comprised of leading pro-life thinkers to respond to Quindlen’s article (One Untrue Thing, 2007). Three months later, Chris Matthews forcefully put the HMJT question to guest David O’Steen of the National Right To Life Committee (Matthews, 2007).

The National Institute for Reproductive Health, a pro-choice organization, turned HMJT into a successful political ad campaign during the 2008 campaign. They credit the message with helping to defeat anti-choice ballot initiatives in South Dakota and Colorado and defeating anti-choice US senate candidate Gordon Smith in Oregon (National Institute for Reproductive Health, n.d.).

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You can watch the clip by At Center Network, below, and be sure to share your thoughts with us.