Jay Smooth on making pro-choice activism even more virtuous

Jay Smooth has a few words to say about “Until Abortion Ends,” a site where anti-choicers pledge to give up something they love until abortion becomes illegal all over America.  And by “something they love,” it seems they mostly mean “junk food.”

Because nothing says “solidarity with unborn children whom I believe to have souls and full Constitutional rights” like giving up sour Skittles or Diet Coke. I’m sure those unborn children with souls and full Constitutional rights are totally touched by your wrenching sacrifice, guys. If you really think abortion is murder, if you really think it is an abomination, if you really think that fetuses are unborn children with souls and full Constitutional rights, then, yeah, giving up Diet Coke seems like a proportional reaction to the fact that abortion is still legal. After all, this is Diet Coke we’re talking about here. It is fizzy and sweet and delicious, and abstaining from it until the murder stops does not cheapen the pro-life cause at all.

So go ahead and pledge to give up that sweet, fizzy deliciousness until it’s no longer legal to kill babies. Every day, when you walk past the vending machine and just keep on walking – or stop and get a Fresca or a Vitamin Water instead of a Diet Coke – remember that you’re doing it for the fetuses. You have made a bold and brave choice, not to raise money for anti-choice causes, not to spend time calling your congressional representative, not to volunteer to take in foster children or provide free childcare, not even to brave the winter cold harassing whores outside of Planned Parenthood on Saturday morning, but to give up Diet Coke. You are a hero.

Snark aside (who am I kidding, snark front and center!) Jay has realized that as long as these people keep making ridiculous pledges about the noble sacrifices they’ll be making, our efforts to keep abortion safe, legal and accessible will be even more valuable than they already are:

I’m not personally a fan of diets, and I wouldn’t define dieting as a uniformly healthy thing to do, as Jay does, but his point is well taken. Jay was also reminded, and acknowledges, that reproductive rights aren’t just ciswomen’s rights, and framing them as such excludes trans people.

Transcript below the jump.

So a lot of people on my tumblr have been posting about this website called Until Abortion Ends. It’s this website where young anti-abortion people vow to give up one of their favorite things, they vow to sacrifice one of their most precious things in the world and never do it again until abortion ends. Or at least until safe, legal access to abortion ends, which is what they’re really saying, since the reality is that people will still need to seek it out no matter what the laws are, as one of my tumblr friends pointed out. So basically, they’re vowing to sacrifice something that they love until access to safe legal abortion is taken away.

But the thing about this website is that if you scan through and look at what everyone is sacrificing, almost everyone is giving something up that you really should be giving up anyway, because it’s bad for you. They’re all promising to sacrifice something that’s really crappy and you should be cutting down on it just for health purposes. Like seriously, go to the site and look at what everyone says they’re giving up. “I’m giving up Coke,” “I’m giving up Pepsi,” “alcohol,” “I’m giving up tobacco products,” “Ice cream,” “French Fries,” “I’m giving up sour Skittles,” “I’m giving up junk food,” “I’m giving up carbs and saturated fat.” That’s not really a protest. That’s not really a sacrifice. That’s just, like, a diet. You’re just taking another shot at your New Year’s resolution and calling it a protest this time. No, that doesn’t count, no.

The only thing that’s good about this, the only thing that I like is that for those of us who are pro-choice, from now on, whenever we fight for our side, we will also be bestowing an act of kindness upon our enemies. From now on, we won’t just be fighting to protect safe, legal, affordable access to abortion, we’ll also be helping all of these people stick to their diet plans! How great is that? We’re doing two great things at once from now on!

So I would like to thank everyone at that website for achieving the impossible, and making pro-choice activism even more virtuous than it was before. And I’m going to make my own vow today, that as long as you keep up your side of it, as long as you keep up your noble sacrifice of eating a Whopper instead of a double Whopper or whatever it is you’re doing, as long as you keep doing that, I am going to support you on that by making sure that women’s reproductive rights never come to an end.