Abortion

Wednesday

Jarvis Dupont

Jameela Jamil is the sassy pro-choice voice we need

I was scrolling through the ‘Woke AF’ Twitter list I created on my account in order to help me keep up-to-date with some of the most influential minds of my generation this week. My attention was piqued by a tweet from Jameela Jamil; British actress, radio presenter, model, writer and most importantly, feminist activist. On Friday she had written:‘Receiving THOUSANDS of messages about how I made a mistake having an abortion 7 years ago and how I must be a miserable person... I am in fact a happy, thriving multi millionaire, madly in love, with free time, good sleep and a wonderful career and life.

jameela jamil

Tuesday

Michael Warren Davis

Tulsi Gabbard, conservative crush

Conservative sadbois like two things: hot moms and Middle Eastern despots. Enter Tulsi Gabbard, the comely representative for Hawaii’s second congressional district. The single lock of gray hair tucked behind her ear and her array of red pants-suits give her an almost Palinesque allure. Her secret friendship with Bashar al-Assad and visceral hatred for the House of Saud brings us all back to our political puberty: hiding copies of The American Conservative under our beds, taking them out only when our parents weren’t home and fantasizing madly about the end of American Empire. Knowing only that, we can hardly blame an aging fogey who finds himself crushing on Rep. Gabbard.

tulsi gabbard

Thursday

Mairead McArdle

Alabama’s abortion law is a progressive leap forward

To a Greek chorus of progressives caterwauling ‘Regressive!’ on Wednesday, Republican Alabama Governor Kay Ivey signed into law the country’s strictest abortion ban. Depending on your perspective, it’s either a national reckoning on the right to life or a call to arms for women’s rights.Alabama’s Human Life Protection Act criminalizes performing an abortion at any point during pregnancy with a single exception for when an ‘abortion is necessary in order to prevent a serious health risk.’ Doctors who commit the felony of performing an abortion can be punished with a prison sentence of up to 99 years.

abortion

Sunday

Paul Rowan Brian

The futility of the sex strike

Progressives spent decades telling conservatives how harmful sexual restraint was. Yet our open-minded friends on the left now seem to have discovered a new appreciation for the benefits of abstinence. Take the ‘#SexStrike’ led by the actress Alyssa Milano. The message is simple: no sex for men until new limits on abortion are rolled back. In particular, activists and their mainstream media allies are incensed about a new ‘heartbeat’ bill in the state of Georgia which would ban most abortions after around six weeks of pregnancy. This isn’t the first sex-strike aimed at female empowerment.

sex strike

Tuesday

Caroline McCarthy

Pyle on: the warped logic of online cancel culture

A while back, a friend in the San Francisco Bay Area confessed to me in a hushed tone that she was thinking of buying a gun. The neighborhood was a safe one. But she and her husband, no-nonsense tech executives with reasonably public profiles – the kind that might draw attention from internet crazies – but far from the means to hire private security, had calculated just how long it would take for police to reach their home in the event of an emergency, and they weren’t satisfied with it. With the Bay Area’s real estate market being what it is, giving up their below-market-value lease seemed more outlandish than exercising their Second Amendment rights.

nathan pyle

Tuesday

Christopher Buskirk

Conservatives shouldn’t get too excited about Tulsi Gabbard

When Tulsi Gabbard announced that she would seek the Democratic nomination in Hawaii’s 2nd district in 2011 she was quickly endorsed by a laundry list of liberal institutions including the Sierra Club and Emily’s List. She was asked to speak at the 2012 Democratic Convention and by 2015 she was Vice Chairman of the Democratic National Committee. National Democrats were eager to boost this rising star, but now that she is running for president they are just as eager to snuff her out. So why are Democrats giving her the cold shoulder? For starters, during the last election, Gabbard was not down with Team Clinton or the corruption that follows them.

tulsi gabbard

Monday

Freddy Gray

Abortion and the new covert culture war

What connects the Ralph Northam story, the Covington story, and the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation story? Is it the dark side of social media? The perils of high-school? Catholicism in America today? It is all that. More than anything, however, it is abortion. Abortion is and arguably always has been the nuclear core of the culture war, yet these days it hides itself. The pitched media scraps between progressives and conservatives are often still about Roe v. Wade, we just pretend that they are not. We act as if the Ralph Northam story is about racism. It isn’t. It’s about what he said about fetuses, and the tasteless whooping for late-term abortions.

abortion

Tuesday

John Waters

Frame by frame, Gosnell tears apart everything America has told itself about abortion

The legal limit for abortion in Pennsylvania is 23 weeks and six days. Theoretically, a termination one minute beyond that could become the basis of a homicide rap. Yet, there is no visible or measurable difference between a foetus of 23 weeks and one of 24 weeks. The self-evident arbitrariness of such a law announces itself as quite devoid of reason and morality, and thus offers a provocation to the consciences of those whose reasoning mechanisms derive their logic from a perhaps unfocussed belief that man might become his own God. Such a man was Kermit Gosnell, the Philadelphian abortionist who in 2013 was put away for the rest of his natural for the unnatural crimes that to him seemed to represent naturalistically good deeds.

earl billings kermit gosnell

Thursday

Damian Thompson

Social conservatism is dead

Just before Ireland voted overwhelmingly to end the country’s constitutional ban on abortion, Catholics in the fishing village of Clogherhead could be seen storming out of Sunday mass halfway through the service. Why? Their parish priest had come on too strong. He had not only ordered them how to vote but also supplied grisly details of an abortion procedure. Presumably some of them voted to repeal the eighth amendment. The ‘Yes’ campaign couldn’t have won its two-thirds majority without the support of practising Catholics. Very few of these, we can assume, were militantly pro-choice. Instead, they were reassured by promises that any future law would be limited in its impact — and determined to ignore a Catholic hierarchy contaminated by child abuse.