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A review by the_jesus_fandom
Bodies on the Line: At the Front Lines of the Fight to Protect Abortion in America by Lauren Rankin
2.0
I read this book as a prolifer, to broaden my view.
The author makes a lot of claims about the prolife movement, which I can’t factcheck easily, but I reccommend this review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4897588621
that tackles them from a prolife perspective.
The claims:
- photos of bloody fetuses are doctored
- the goal of protests is to scare patients
- dehumanization is the point; they want to make women invisible (Interestingly, the author claims clinic escorts give women their face back, but then also says that all contact they have with women is surface-level and only for as long as it takes to get the abortion done. This is ironic, since pro-lifers are always the ones who are accused of not caring about the woman after the baby is born… pro-choicers, it seems, only care for her before she’s had her an abortion, and then never follow up. Pro-lifers, on the other hand, make it part of their goal to actually get to know women and support them throughout her pregnancy and at least the early years of her child’s life.)
- “late-term” abortions are a mislabel (The author does not explain why this is so.)
- prolife literature is filled with junk science
- protestors come in their 1000s (these numbers seemed to change… she’d say a protest had thousands of people, then a few paragraphs later it’s only hundreds or even tens)
- the niceness of demosnstrators is a facade; they want a fight so they can report you
- pro-lifers are racist
- pro-lifers like rape: “All the energy seemed to be getting poured into defeating a guy who says, ‘Rape rules because then you have a baby out of it,’ but that’s not a vision, and that’s not expanding access to care.’ This is from an interview with a pro-choicer, who, as you can read, is talking about expanding the vision of pro-choice activism so that there are actual changes. There are two footnotes: one at the end of the entire quote, stating which interview the quote is from, and one at the end of the rape quote the pro-choice activist talks about. That footnote tells us about Todd Akin (Rep. Canditate), who apparantly said that if it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. That is, of course, a ridiculous statement, but I want you to notice one thing: he doesn’t say that rape rules because you get a baby out of it – in fact, he’s saying you don’t get a baby out of it. So I don’t know who this mythical man is who is out here saying rape is cool, because the source isn’t actually of a man saying that.
- pro-lifers use disabled people as pawns: “One frequent protest group, the Church @ the Rock, would bring people with disabilities to the clinic to protest, a tactic I heard about from several clinic escort groups across the country. Some would be given gory signs to hold, standing quietly off to the side. But some were much more agressive, walking right up to patients and even screaming at them. ‘They were actually instructed to be most aggressive toward patients because their disability makes intervention more delicate for the patient and for the escorts,’ explained Moira Donegan, another clinic escort at Choices. Protestors were almost goading clinic escorts and patients into a confrontation, seemingly exploiting people with disabilities to do their bidding.
Perhaps not surprisingly, abortion opponents have been criticized before for using people with disabilities as pawns.” - Where to start… first of all, this all portrays people with disabilities as sheep without a will, going and doing whatever their church tells them (“they would bring people with disabilities”, “they were given signs to hold”, “they were instructed to be aggressive”, “they were used as pawns”… notice how in none of these sentences the disabled people are the actors)
- Also, she often quotes clinic escorts like this, without telling us where these escorts got this information. How does that escort know that the church specifically instructed the disabled people to be more aggressive? That seems like a pretty bold claim that would need quite a bit of backing up.
Some other things:
The author always shows you the worst part of a demonstration, then goes on to tell you of the years after that, where it invariably got worse. She’ll say: “The years before weren’t so bad, now it gets worse.” This is confusing, since she clearly described the previous years as very bad. Basically: she first describes time period A as awful, then goes on to describe time period B by saying: “Time period A wasn’t so bad. Time period B is way worse.”
She shows a bit of hypcrisy: when pro-choice people infiltrate and spy on pro-life organisations, they are heroes. I doubt she would appreciate it if the situation were reversed. Another example is that she is okay with pro-choicers filming encounters (to protect them from the police and make sure reports are corroborated with evidence) but when pro-lifers are filming, she says they’re invading people’s privacy and doing it to intimidate.
Interestingly, pro-lifers are portrayed as violent and rude, but when they do act kind and nice, they are accused of still disregarding people’s realities and having “cooing” voices.
The author uses a very large amount of [] brackets, which means she is either replacing parts of quotes or filling in extra information. My question is: what is she replacing? Now, to be clear, I have done interviews and I know sometimes you have to use these brackets to make quotes understandable. But to this extent? It gets to be a bit weird when almost every quote has important parts within brackets.
The author complains about TRAP laws, but they seem reasonable to me. After all, shouldn’t both sides agree it’s important to protect women’s safety?
One thing this book should teach pro-lifers is that violence is an idiotic strategy (duh). Even if you don’t think it’s immoral – which I do – it ruins it for everyone. The peaceful sidewalk councelors have to follow the same rules that were set up to protect patients from violent protestors. This behaviour shoots the movement in its own foot. Sadly, most of the violent and rude protestors wouldn’t listen if you told them to behave, but still. We can try.
The author always shows you the worst part of a demonstration, then goes on to tell you of the years after that, where it invariably got worse. She’ll say: “The years before weren’t so bad, now it gets worse.” This is confusing, since she clearly described the previous years as very bad. Basically: she first describes time period A as awful, then goes on to describe time period B by saying: “Time period A wasn’t so bad. Time period B is way worse.”
She shows a bit of hypcrisy: when pro-choice people infiltrate and spy on pro-life organisations, they are heroes. I doubt she would appreciate it if the situation were reversed. Another example is that she is okay with pro-choicers filming encounters (to protect them from the police and make sure reports are corroborated with evidence) but when pro-lifers are filming, she says they’re invading people’s privacy and doing it to intimidate.
Interestingly, pro-lifers are portrayed as violent and rude, but when they do act kind and nice, they are accused of still disregarding people’s realities and having “cooing” voices.
The author uses a very large amount of [] brackets, which means she is either replacing parts of quotes or filling in extra information. My question is: what is she replacing? Now, to be clear, I have done interviews and I know sometimes you have to use these brackets to make quotes understandable. But to this extent? It gets to be a bit weird when almost every quote has important parts within brackets.
The author complains about TRAP laws, but they seem reasonable to me. After all, shouldn’t both sides agree it’s important to protect women’s safety?
One thing this book should teach pro-lifers is that violence is an idiotic strategy (duh). Even if you don’t think it’s immoral – which I do – it ruins it for everyone. The peaceful sidewalk councelors have to follow the same rules that were set up to protect patients from violent protestors. This behaviour shoots the movement in its own foot. Sadly, most of the violent and rude protestors wouldn’t listen if you told them to behave, but still. We can try.