Subtle Message

by digby

Chris Matthews sez:

Matthews: He wants to lessen the harshness of the reputation he's getting among people who are complaining about the Notre Dame speech, that he's too pro-choice. He wants to pull back from that by offering up the story, that I hadn't heard before, that there's a task force in his domestic policy council that's looking at ways to reduce, I think he meant, to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies, the number of situations that would lead a woman to make a decision about an abortion. I thought that was very positive.

Olbermann: And reaching out people from both camps, the anti-abortion and pro-choice camps, somehow involving them in that task force.

Matthews: Yeah. And I think that's what you hear from people like Ryan of Ohio, people on both sides who are pro-choice and pro-life, who would like to radically reduce the number of people who choose abortion because they didn't use birth control or they didn't practice whatever or they didn't ... they put themselves in a situation where abortion was an option when ...

It was a very subtle message to the pro-life community, I think.


This "subtle message" is Matthews' latest "insight" which is that the little sluts are all having abortions out of sheer laziness and stupidity and they need to be forced to be responsible for their hootchies because decent people just won't stand for their abortion loving ways anymore. He got this from Lord Saletan's most recent stupidity and I dearly hope that the Obama administration knows how deeply offensive this particular approach is and are in no way sending messages that they concur.

Yes, we liberals want to help women avoid unwanted pregnancy. We have been advocating for that for years. Education and access to birth control have always been at the top of our agenda. But judging women as ignorant, irresponsible whores if they do get pregnant isn't exactly a big step forward. In fact, I'm pretty sure that takes us right back to square one.


Perhaps someday birth control will be completely safe and available in every drug store and 7-11 in the land and then lazy, abortion loving women won't have any excuses to fall back on anymore ...