There are any number of noble and productive ways International Women’s Day could have been observed this year — highlighting important women throughout history, taking time to appreciate their role in American life, calling attention to actual rape cultures, etc. — but of course, those who co-opt and subvert the name “feminist” these days just couldn’t help but make it all about abortion.
Few things deserve more derision than this vile premise that women’s equality, power, and dignity are contingent upon killing innocent children. Alas, Right Wing Watch’s Peter Montgomery didn’t take it well when the Family Research Council served some of it up on International Women’s Day. Not well at all.
The object of his ire is an IWD post by FRC’s Daniel Hart, celebrating President Donald Trump’s executive order halting federal funds to non-government organizations overseas that perform or promote abortion and deriding Canada and Europe for “grind[ing] their teeth” over it:
In response to the U.S. policy’s reinstatement, the Netherlands announced in February that it has launched a new fund to replace the money that the Mexico City Policy withholds from funding abortions overseas. Dubbed the “She Decides Global Fundraising Initiative,” the fund will solicit donations from other countries in order to bankroll “ongoing initiatives that improve access to lifesaving contraceptives, family planning, sexuality education and/or safe abortion,” according to the initiative’s website. So far, seven other countries (Canada, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, Luxembourg, Finland, and Cape Verde) have officially joined the fund.
If there was ever proof of the extent to which the pro-abortion mentality has taken over in Canada and Europe, this is surely it. When no quarter is given to withholding taxpayer money from be used to directly fund the killing of unborn children, the true colors of those who tout their support of “family planning” are revealed. What was completely glossed over in the media furor over Trump’s Mexico City Policy reinstatement is the fact that it still fully funds all forms of family planning that does not involve the active promotion of abortion […]
If other countries want to protest this by feigning “human rights” for women and girls in the form of abortion, as the “She Decides” initiative does, that is their inhuman prerogative.
Exactly.
What did Hart get wrong? Montgomery, er, doesn’t say. He prefaces the piece by quoting Vox, the Washington Post, and the New York Times — all notoriously biased mouthpieces for pro-abortion propaganda — as claiming Trump’s EO will be “catastrophic” for “global health” on not only unintended pregnancy, but also on cancer, HIV, Zika, and Ebola.
In true Right Wing Watch fashion, he doesn’t bother to respond to Hart’s points that real health providers still get funding or that pro-abortion NGOs apparently don’t need American dollars if other countries are willing to dig into their own profits. Nor does he acknowledge that these groups could keep their subsidies if they really wanted to — simply by giving up the slaughter of babies.
But FRC isn’t Montgomery’s only target. He next complains that Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, “will almost certainly resist efforts by UN agencies to have access to contraception and safe abortions acknowledged as human rights.”
Of course, he doesn’t bother to define “access” or explain why the ability to execute one’s own offspring fits the definition of a “human right” — just as he sneered about Hart’s observation that funding abortion was “inhuman” without offering any substantive rebuttal.
(Montgomery also attacks Concerned Women for America’s Penny Nance for calling out several popular falsehoods about women’s rights in America — falsehoods Montgomery repeats but does not substantiate.)
Right Wing Watch gives up lots of indignation, but it’s all paper-thin. They know there’s nothing “extreme and intolerant” about what they’re chronicling here, and they know the facts aren’t on their side, so they don’t put much work at all into constructing a case that might persuade anyone who hasn’t already bought into their hysteria. Their only purpose is to keep that hysteria running at full blast, to prevent people from calming down long enough to stop and think about how fundamentally condescending and degrading it is to tell women that becoming killers is the way to achieve equality.
