Abortion, trans legislation, book banning: We are all fetuses now. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/03/we-are-all-fetuses-now.html

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"The tactic deployed to “protect” the unborn has now been deployed to deprive actual living, breathing, ambulating humans of agency, too.

It’s become axiomatic in our political discourse that one of the reasons the anti-abortion crowd became so powerfully persuasive in the decades after Roe is that claiming to speak for a fetus is rhetorically unassailable. If every fertilized egg is a human life, nobody can claim to understand its preferences and hopes and dreams, so substituting the voice of the movement is a simple matter: All fertilized eggs want to live and thrive, goes the theory...

This is why, as Barney Frank famously put it, “these people believe that life begins at conception and ends at birth.” It’s why the quote from Dave Barnhart that went viral right before Roe was overturned is still so perfectly apt. As the pastor put it:

'The unborn are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don’t resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don’t ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don’t need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don’t bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn...'

The emptiness of this interest in life is also why so many anti-abortion politicians mouthed platitudes after Dobbs about their increased focus on poverty, food insecurity, and maternal and child health—and why very little of this has actually materialized.

But what many of us have missed is that the tactic of protecting the voiceless innocent unborn has now been deployed to deprive actual living, breathing, ambulating humans of moral agency as well. It’s the tactic being used to ban books, to silence teachers, to go after drag performances, to deny health care to families seeking to support trans kids. The notion that everyone must be protected from a scourge of immorality is, in some ways, old wine in a new bottle. But it is also a creeping form of illiberalism that ensures that for some GOP politicians, we all remain fetuses forever.
...
Getting from parental rights to book bans means deploying, again, the meaningless language of “grooming” and “Marxism” and “CRT” and the “sexualization of teenagers” that reduces both them, and the parents who choose to send them to public school, to fetuses, with no moral agency to think or speak for themselves.
...
The Texas Tribune reviewed more than two dozen anti-drag incidents, including protests and online harassment campaigns, that have occurred in the state since the beginning of Pride Month last June. Taken together, they show how a small but influential cadre of activists and extremist groups have fueled anti-drag panic by routinely characterizing all drag as inherently and nefariously sexual regardless of the content or audience. Those claims have then been used to justify harassment and legislation targeting the LGBTQ community as a whole, often under the guise of protecting kids.

Live human children, who have functioning human parents who either choose to take them to these events or do not, are being “protected” here, from being the ones to make decisions about their own lives. The opponents who insert themselves—into protected free-speech activity, by the way—have erased the moral will and decision-making choices of any player in this drama; have reduced them to nothing, zygotes in fluid. Their clarion call for parents’ rights now excludes parents. Who is being treated like a fetus now?
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We are all fetuses now. American teens and, increasingly, their grown parents have become, as Barnhart so aptly put it, “the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus, but actually dislike people who breathe.”"

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