Salon.com published an article last Friday entitled “The 10 Most Dangerous Places To Be A Woman In America.” Naturally, the ten places were the states with the strictest abortion regulations in the country.
The article, written by Katie McDonough, was chock-full of pro-abortion rights language, starting with the opening sentence: “Lately, the preferred strategy for reproductive rights opponents in the United States seems to be: If you can’t beat Roe v. Wade, then simply regulate around it.”
Ah, yes, leave it to abortion to get a liberal to discover the ills of regulation. These are the same folks who keep telling us that it's possible to regulate gun rights without violating the Second Amendment. Unlike gun rights, however, abortion isn't actually enshrined in the text of the Constitution.
But as with all political rhetoric, semantics matters a great deal, and McDonough made sure to load her article with freighted language aimed at canonizing pro-choicers and demonizing opponents of abortion.
“Reproductive rights opponents” sound much more nefarious than “pro-life advocates,” even though they are the same people. But Salon has an agenda to push. Why would they use positive language when they could paint their enemies as opponents of rights?
Conversely, there were four references in the article to “reproductive rights advocates,” the same people whom we might call pro-choice advocates. In fact, “pro-abortion” might also be a good way to describe them, because the term “antiabortion” popped up eight times, not including direct quotes, in reference to pro-life lawmakers and activists.
State abortion regulations were described as “extreme” three times, and McDonough warned of “four draconian measures” that the North Dakota legislature passed. There were two states that wanted to “eradicate” abortion, and the North Carolina state legislature was described as trying to “crush abortion rights.” McDonough proclaimed that Ohio was using its budget as its “weapon of choice” to eradicate abortion.
The whole premise of the article seems a little absurd. McDonough is saying that, if you are a woman, danger equals difficulty obtaining an abortion. But there are many other types of danger, and plenty of other dangerous places to be a woman in America. A lion cage is probably a more dangerous place than a state with few abortion clinics. Or a swamp filled with hungry alligators. Or the home of an abusive boyfriend.
It’s as if Salon and other media outlets view women as a crowd of abortion-craving fanatics who only care about “reproductive rights.” If abortion were the only issue that mattered to women, then almost none of them would vote for pro-life Republicans. But many of them do, because there are other issues that matter to them. Women care about jobs, taxes, immigration, health care, foreign policy, and a whole host of other issues that men also care about, yet the left insists on defining women by their sex organs.
It’s time the liberal media stopped trying to shove the “antiabortion” narrative down our throats.
[Read the full Salon article here.]
