This isn’t new! Texas social science curriculum I read back in 2006-08, claimed that the soviet union and satellite states were totalitarian regimes due to abortion.
Stalin was a totalitarian dictator for regulating abortion.
Khruschev was a totalitarian dictator for easing Stalin era restrictions on abortion.
free countries like america choose the correct option for women, rather than oppressing them with the burden of making those tough decisions that their brains aren’t even developed to make in the first place. i heard all about it on my favorite podcast “FREE SPEECH ZONE”
Chuds have always been saying that… at least since abortion became an issue for Protestants in the 70s.
Did it really only become an issue for Christians in the 70s? Why was it so rare before the revolution?
From what I’ve read back in my atheist activist days it coincided with integrated schools as a culture war issue becoming untenable as a position so they moved on.
There were always Christian groups against it, Catholics were required to be against it because of a non-revocable Papal decree in the form of “received wisdom from god” type was announced at some point in the 20th century I think. Some Protestant sects were against it, others shrugged at it. There were different theories for centuries on when the fetus was given a soul so different time periods where it was okay. Some traditional religions for example thought the soul was inhaled on the first breath after birth, others gave 30 or 90 days and for much of history abortion was considered okay as long as no movement had yet been felt.
So basically they grabbed onto this as a culture war issue. You know that Republican strategist who wrote in his memoir about how you used to say n-word n-word, etc and then you couldn’t do that you moved onto integrated schools then busing and soon it was all an abstract thing but racism just the same. It’s the same thing but for sexism, they couldn’t be against sexual freedom that second wave feminism had brought and won and which was quite popular, at least they couldn’t do so while winning without some wedge issue (they still were openly against feminism but a lot of
type folks shrugged at all that and didn’t care to join their movement). So they couldn’t just slut-shame and call for criminalizing sex outside of marriage, it wouldn’t fly and wasn’t going to succeed. So what do you do instead? You punish women with “consequences” in the form of having kids. It becomes abstract, you invent dishonest tactics and claim they’re killing babies and do this whole moral masturbation thing and freak-out over that, that plus trying to keep contraceptives to couples and you clamp down on sexual liberation by making women liable to suffer pregnancies and bear children they may not want as punishment for sex and then go on and on about stable families and births in wedlock and you’re doing the same slut-shaming thing but it’s abstract, you’re talking in sociological terms and of murder and stable society and families and its cryptic.And what happened was the school integration and open racism card was no longer as useful by a certain point so political operatives latched onto it after prominent “moral majority” Evangelical leadership did (who themselves of course were deeply political creatures) and they turned it into a culture war issue, they made it part of their purity culture push but they also pushed it beyond that. After all if you can convince people that abortion is murdering a baby you don’t have to sell them on your whole system of morality, they don’t have to accept the purity culture as a whole because they can delude themselves into thinking oh the women will give it up for adoption, there are plenty of families who want it, it’ll be fine for the child and there wasn’t much further thinking on it or these poor misled fools would sit there and cry and be upset about the situation because blah blah murder is wrong, poor kids, boo hoo. And they won over a lot of women that way and continue to unfortunately.
Catholics were required to be against it because of a non-revocable Papal decree in the form of “received wisdom from god” type was announced at some point in the 20th century I think.
It’s much older. Officially, it’s been prohibited since the 1st Century.
What I recall is that the understanding of what that was changed over time. The wiki article on the issue of the CC’s stance on abortion mentions compilations of lists of abortifacient herbs by the church several centuries later among other things. Basically abortion used to refer exclusively to doing so either shortly before birth/deep into pregnancy or after the first “quickenings” or movements could be felt or at the minimum a month after impregnation. By the 20th century they decided that basically the second that sperm gets in there and division starts it has a soul and messing with it is unacceptable.
Yeah, that’s about right. AFAIK when the actual mechanism of how a zygote forms was pinned down, the Church pretty quickly decided that life must begin at conception and abortion at any time was illicit.
Definitely but the way Catholicism differs from protestantism is there’s like degrees of sin and it’s a dudes job (the priest) to rules lawyer it and talk to god about it for you.
So for the longest time abortion was considered bad, but so much less worse than killing a baby. By the 20th century they considered that the same thing.
I think the late '70s is around the time that the evangelical movement starts to come into power in the US (Focus on the Family is founded in '77, Moral Majority in '79).
Not 100% sure of your second question, but assuming it’s referring to abortion in the Russia Empire, I’d guess it’s mainly due to being a largely pre-industrial country with poor education (so less doctors/nurses etc to carry out procedures in a hospital and more midwives doing their best in rural villages).
Yeah, true, but surely Catholicism and previous Mainline Protestants would’ve been lobbying to oppose abortion before then, no? I remember reading that the American religious right wing only started to crystallize around abortion as its nucleation point, and that Christianity as a whole didn’t have much of a position on it before the mid 20th century, but I don’t remember the source for that claim and it seems inconsistent with everything else I know about attitudes toward abortion.
Mainline Protestants, and even the forerunners of the current evangelicals didn’t give a shit about abortion until the 70s. Like, they probably would mostly say they opposed it if you asked them, but they were certainly not organizing around it. It was regarded as a Catholic issue.
What happened was school integration, actually. When the courts started denying tax-exempt status to church-attached segregation academies (whites only private schools set up to get around school desegregation), Evangelicals got organized. But publicly organizing around restoring segregation was kind of a political non-starter, and it was easier to get people excited about abortion.
Article: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins-107133/
I remember someone in the old r/ChapoTrapHouse shit stirring about how John Brown’s stance on abortion would be bad but like in reality he’d probably get really confused why anyone cared?
Before the 1970-80s being too interested in abortion meant you were a secret Papist.
And Catholics only locked in on abortion at the end of the 19th century (before they didn’t like it but thought it was preferable to infanticide).
They lost the battle for segregation and needed to pivot to something else.
Phyllis Schlafly was behind a lot of it, before that it wasn’t hyperpartisan like it is now and a buttload of even reactionary christians were on the “life at first breath” thing as described in some bible passage i’m not going to look up.
Yet somehow Communist countries had/have better birth rates than their capitalist counterparts. Curious.
It’s really strange how, to these chuds, gay people existing and abortions means the birth rate must go down, to the extent that even if the birth rate doesn’t go down, they still act like it did.
so what you’re saying is, if people have hope for a better future and feel like they are contributing to it they want to bring children up in that world?
This is actually a very old talking point. Back when the USSR was still standing, there were hit-pieces about this in western press, including at least one in the NYT iirc.
reactionary pro-lifers have always said stuff like this as far as I can remember
Yeah the Catholic high school I went to had anti China posters on the wall about how many abortions they have
Ooh, I went to a Catholic high school that had anti China posters on the walls, too! And anti Soviet posters! Walking in the front door of that place felt like stepping back in time into the Cold War! The globe in the Social Studies room still had the USSR on it! (And you should have seen the elementary school’s combination gymnasium and lunchroom, there was a “flags of the world” display around the walls, countries in alphabetical order. I remember distinctly they still had a Soviet flag up, and they had both East and West Germany, I don’t recall about the rest of the Eastern Bloc.) I don’t know whether to blame outdated equipment and the dreadful state of education in North America, or some washed up Cold Warrior in either the school district or the Catholic diocese who was intentionally curating that stepping-through-time effect. Funnily enough, my mother had kept her old clothes from when she was a teenager all those years, and they fit teenage me, so at least I got to walk into that Cold War living history museum every day dressed the part. I remember a “student poll” posted on a bulletin board asking if we’d rather have to live in Communist China or the USSR for 10 years. Was a tough question for me, but not for the same reasons most of those teenagers struggled to answer that! I was definitely thinking “do I have to come back?” rather than “ten years of hell…” I also got called to the principal’s office and asked the infamous Communist Party question more than once. That was funny. I’m just glad there weren’t rumours of “being forever frozen in the tail end of the Cold War has finally caught up with us, an actual 80s Soviet sympathiser has somehow shown up! At least, she’s dressed like one!”
This is so strangely racist it’s kinda… hilarious? Like why did you write it that way? Reminds me of that YT comment that went something like “Even I, a racist, can admit that Jamie Foxx did a great job as Electro!”
19·13 days agoWow I made the mistake of opening it up and reading the comments.
It’s X. Big mistake.
isn’t there also a competing anti-communist talking point that the USSR forced women to become baby factories?
In the USSR, each woman was forced to be a scientist, a farmer, a housewife with 15 children, and also abort 10 other babies.
All women in the ussr had to enter quantum pregnancy, where they simultaneously aborted all their babies and constantly gave birth
Did you know that the leading cause of death for pregnant women in the USA is homicide and that was still true when abortion was still legal?
Ok, then I suppose Cold War Romania would be more tolerable to them.
gags
It’s only new if libs not chuds are spitting it out
Using the famous Parenti quote as a framework, you’d expect chuds to criticize the USSR for having too many abortions, then the libs to claim they didn’t have enough (meanwhile the US undemocratically overturned Roe v Wade)
IIRC abortion was still not legal in Soviet Poland. The historical context was that Poland got an exception because of how the Nazis forced many into abortions for their racial purity laws, so it was some weird catholic compromise alongside cultural association of abortion with the Nazis.
revolutionaryth0t recently did a video that touches on the re-criminalization of abortion in the eastern bloc. love their stuff. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnTlejH-WzQ
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Abortion in PRL was legal. In fact, there existed medical tourism from Denmark for abortions. You probably confused Poland with Romania, where abortions were indeed highly restricted.
I thought they later implemented stricter abortion laws due to conservatism?
