Jesse Watters makes an argument that sounds familiar to many liberals and progressives
They only care about the unborn. Once you’re born, you’re on your own.
Immunocompromised people can’t be protected by heard immunity because you can’t force anyone to get a vaccine. But you can force a woman to give birth to a fetus that can’t survive outside of the womb and may kill the mother in the process.
Just use the famous Carlin quote: “If you’re pre-born, you’re fine…if you’re pre-school, you’re fucked.”
No they don’t. Denying reproductive health care to women leads to higher infant mortality. It was never about “saving babies”.
It was useful as a wedge issue when denying legal abortions was just an abstract idea. Now even ‘pro-life’ people have to see the consequences and start actually thinking about what they’ve been shrieking about mindlessly for decades. Some of them will start finding nuance in the issue, but they’ll never just think- ‘maybe we should have fucked off and not denied abortion in the first place.’
One would think but I don’t think insight or nuance is their strong suit. If it were, we wouldn’t be having this conversation today.
The only way any of these people will start to actually think about what they’ve done is when it personally affects them. It’s “too bad, so sad” for everyone else, until they see the consequences hurt them or someone they love.
Nice snippet about his mother.
One person who may have appreciated Watters’ comments on Thursday afternoon is his mother, a Democrat, who called into his primetime show earlier this week to offer her son some advice on his new show.
“Perhaps you could suggest that your people take less interest, for example, in other peoples’ bodies, and talk about that,” she said.
His argument was against vaccines and not pro abortion. In the anti-choice mind, you can both be anti-choice and anti-vaccine as the choice to abortion impacts not just your body but someone else’s (i.e., the baby’s).
They can make both arguments without being in contradictions from each other.
They are still contradictions. As we saw, there is collateral damage to hospitals and emergency resources when anti-vaccine folks hate science until they are on their death bed.
With that said, now we are doing better to the point that anti-vaccers aren’t overloading hospitals and my argument becomes moot. But during a period of time once vaccines initially were available, anti-vaccine folks were definitely hurting other people.
They are still contradictions.
Unfortunately this is a dead end argument for conservatives. Their entire platform is built on “rules for thee, not for me”. I still enjoy pointing this out to conservatives but it never goes anywhere.
Abortion is not a good counterargument for the modern “medical choice” movement. Because the addition of another theoretical human life that is directly affected is enough to make the question more complex, at least in their minds. I’m happy to spell out why I don’t actually think it should change anything – why body autonomy of a pregnant person is hierarchically more important than any right to life the fetus may have – but that’s still a factually more complex argument.
A better counterargument is gender-affirming care. The same people that make all these anti-vax and medical choice arguments are the ones who are blocking parents, kids, and doctors from working together to come up with a plan for gender-affirming care. Who are insisting that the state needs to step in and slap parent and doctor-approved, safe treatments like hormone blockers out of the hands of adolescents.
It’s the same argument for the “parental choice” policy advocates in education. They don’t really want parent choice because they don’t want parents to be able to chose to have their kids taught certain materials about race, identity, or sexuality. They just want the materials banned.
The “pro-choice” crowd – of which I am one – should be very wary of the “choice” framing in the movement. 99% of the time, “choice” as a concept is invoked disingenuously. Maybe that’s why conservatives are so frightened by the idea. When they say they want choice, it means they want any other option from their “choice” banned. So I guess they hear “pro-choice” and assume they want the option of not getting an abortion banned.
Another example to show the double-standard is the public education vs charter schools debate. The same people that are anti-choice regarding abortion are very pro-choice when it comes to how their tax dollars are spent on education, and in both cases the underlying motivation is wanting to use the mechanisms of the state to advance their religion.
