Argentina legalizing abortion offers an opportunity to reflect on the great unwritten media narrative of the past few generations: the lives of women and children got worse in so many ways after Roe v. Wade.

Media would never, ever write that narrative, of course - would never string stories together and search for a pattern that could be refined into a political point - but it's the net impact of their reporting on women's issues. Everything started getting worse in the 70s.
There is a valid "narrative" to be discerned from that ocean of bad news about women and children over the past few decades. It's not a coincidence. It's a direct result of the Big Lie pushed by the abortion lobby: that only one person is involved in the decision to give birth.
That's so obviously untrue that entire civilizations are driven mad when they are forced to accept it. It's like forcing everyone to agree that the sky is green or gravity is a myth. Cognitive dissonance inflicts far more social damage than politicians or academics want to admit.
Women and (born) children suffer after abortion becomes broadly legalized because men are erased from the picture. A lot of men - including rich and powerful men - LIKE being erased from that particular picture. Others are intimidated out of insisting they belong in it.
Of course legalized abortion has a profound negative impact on how a society values life, but it also has a tremendous impact on what it expects of men and how it values women - and that impact is the opposite of what women are told to expect.
Once pregnancy becomes viewed as a minor illness that can be easily "treated" by a trip to the clinic, everything about the relationship between men, women, and children begins changing for the worse. And those relationships are the foundation of human civilization.
The possibility of pregnancy informs every social custom between men and women, everything about the way society values them highly in different ways, and has separate but equally high expectations of them. It establishes a crucial sense of RESPONSIBILITY between men and women.
It matters a great deal whether society treats that possibility of new life as a priceless blessing, or a miserable curse. And no, you can't officially designate it a curse and then tell people, "Good for you if you insist on seeing it as a blessing!
Abortion on demand was an early "triumph" of ideology over biology, human nature, and positive social forces. It opened the floodgates for many others, each more deranged and destructive than the last. We're close to completely erasing the realities of life by political decree.
It won't work, because as we should have learned over the past half-century, those realities don't go away because fanatical ideologues and political power brokers declare them invalid and irrelevant. The truth remains, so the lies grow more insistent and tyrannical.
Abortion-supporting media will never look at the jumble of their own miserable stories of suffering and oppression and perceive the narrative that men, women, AND children all suffered because their rights, duties, and nature were redefined by political fiat.
It's ironic because so much of the rest of our media and political culture is defined by the notion of Nature as an unstoppable force, and Man's every immoral effort to tame her is doomed to failure and ruin. It's the core tenet of our State religion of environmentalism.
But when it comes to the Nature of mankind, all bets are off, meddling is considered morally SUPERIOR to respecting the truths of life, and the highest political achievement is to tell Nature to get on her knees before almighty human will. Hubris is celebrated, to our cost. /end

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Two things can be true at once:
1. There is an issue with hostility some academics have faced on some issues
2. Another academic who himself uses threats of legal action to bully colleagues into silence is not a good faith champion of the free speech cause


I have kept quiet about Matthew's recent outpourings on here but as my estwhile co-author has now seen fit to portray me as an enabler of oppression I think I have a right to reply. So I will.

I consider Matthew to be a colleague and a friend, and we had a longstanding agreement not to engage in disputes on twitter. I disagree with much in the article @UOzkirimli wrote on his research in @openDemocracy but I strongly support his right to express such critical views

I therefore find it outrageous that Matthew saw fit to bully @openDemocracy with legal threats, seeking it seems to stifle criticism of his own work. Such behaviour is simply wrong, and completely inconsistent with an academic commitment to free speech.

I am not embroiling myself in the various other cases Matt lists because, unlike him, I think attention to the detail matters and I don't have time to research each of these cases in detail.

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