Saletan’s Rules for Girls

It’s a well-known fact (at least, to Slate’s William Saletan) that pregnant women who seek abortions actually have no idea what abortions are. Let alone what a fetus is.
Enter Saletan’s Rules for Girls. Cleverly disguised as an article about the increasing popularity of ultrasound bills among the anti-choice sect, Saletan’s article is more like a manifesto about why us absent-minded gals need laws (and men like him) to remind us what happens in a pregnant uterus.

Critics complain that these bills seek to “bias,” “coerce,” and “guilt-trip” women. Come on. Women aren’t too weak to face the truth. If you don’t want to look at the video, you don’t have to. But you should look at it, and so should the guy who got you pregnant, because the decision you’re about to make is as grave as it gets.
…The image on the monitor may look like a blob, a baby, or neither. It certainly won’t follow some senator’s script. All it will show you is the truth.

Because obviously women who have made the decision to end a pregnancy won’t understand the “truthâ€? unless it’s put up on an easy-viewing screen. As Amanda so aptly noted in an email exchange: “If women only knew that they were getting abortions when they got abortions!!!!!”
You can’t get much more repulsive than Saletan’s rhetoric. He claims to “trust women� while simultaneously making the case that women don’t understand what they’re doing when they get abortions; that we’re incapable of making an informed decision without a helping hand from the state.
My favorite line in this mess of an article, though, has to be this: “Ultrasound has exposed the life in the womb to those of us who didn’t want to see what abortion kills. The fetus is squirming, and so are we.â€? Are we, now?
Also see a bird and a bottle, Lawyers, Guns and Money, Feministe, Echidne and Newscat.