The leftists that award the Pulitzer Prizes named Washington Post "gender columnist" Monica Hesse a finalist in the Commentary category for “columns that convey the anger and dread that many Americans felt about losing their right to abortion after the Supreme Court overturned Roe V Wade.”
That feminist rage carried over into a Thursday column on the front of the Style section ripping Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for protesting the Pentagon “funding abortion tourism” for service members. Online the headline was all about dismissing the poor aborting “pregnant people”:
‘Abortion tourism’: A tidy phrase for punching down at desperate people
Hesse found this term has been in use for decades, and it's "used almost exclusively by antiabortion Republicans and with obvious intent: to make pregnant people, whom the party has forced into desperate straits by pushing draconian state laws, seem like harlots on holiday."
When you're a feminist, you believe that there is no such thing as a casual abortion, even when feminists make movies described as an "abortion comedy." No "desperate" woman can ever be judged. They're all secular saints in the Church of Planned Parenthood.
Are pregnant people crossing state lines to take in a Broadway show, finally eat at Momofuku and grab a relaxing abortion before ice skating at Rockefeller Center? Please.
“Abortion tourism” is a dismissive, frivolous phrase that implies abortion is a dismissive, frivolous thing — something that bored pregnant people do when they’ve suddenly run out of Abbott Elementary episodes. “Abortion tourism” implies that reproductive care is a luxury, not a necessity, and that pregnant people — such as the active-duty soldiers who have no say in whether they’re stationed in Idaho, where abortion is illegal in nearly every circumstance, or in Oregon — are embarking on the equivalent of a Carnival cruise if they get in their cars, drive 400 miles, put their feet in some cold stirrups, swallow a few Tylenol, then drive home with a maxi pad wedged in their pants.
While she was on a roll, Hesse also hates the phrase "abortion on demand."
I cannot count the number of times I’ve heard antiabortion activists decry the concept of “abortion on demand,” a phrase clearly meant to imply that people seeking abortions are treating medical clinics like the customer service line of Comcast. That they are impatient, impulsive and self-centered. That they want what they want, and what they want is three free months of HBO and unlimited mifepristone.
What is the protocol that these activists would prefer? Abortion upon polite request? Upon begging? Abortion upon getting permission from your husband, your father, your priest and a slim majority of your state’s legislative body? (Nevermind; I have answered my own question.)
Hesse hates pretty much all the "insidious" terms that pro-life activists use -- "elective abortion," "chemical abortion," even "late-term abortion," believe it or not. Then she concluded by trashing DeSantis as a desperate loser: " He has less at stake in this campaign than someone who needs to end a pregnancy, but there’s a certain kind of desperation at play here as he keeps traveling around trying out new ways to get people to react to what he’s saying. It’s outrage tourism. It’s manufactured outrage on demand."
As she ranted against politicians banning abortions "faster and with more cruelty," there was no room to consider the unborn child, and what happens to him or her when things get "desperate." There's no term that makes that child a human life, apparently. They're never the victims of "punching down."
