Why Trump Can Lie to His Base About the Nature of Abortion
Trumpists cannot fathom the many scenarios where an abortion is necessary and have no idea how an abortion is done in the first place, because they often have very little personal exposure to them. If nearly everyone in your community is religious and anti-choice—as is the case for my mom and my birth mom, both of whom live in an extremely conservative part of rural Alabama—most or all of your received wisdom about abortion is coming from people who’ve never been anywhere near one, and you are very likely to believe the same thing they do. If you grew up religiously, got married early, didn’t have much or any sex outside of that marriage, abortion is very likely an issue that’s only seems relevant to other people. If you’re a man, even more so.
It does not help that abortion narratives are not routinely presented in pop culture or as human interest stories in mass media, which can sometimes be a corrective to homogenous cultures that only allow one perspective on the issue. Where we do see women getting abortions in fictional works—movies and television, in particular—they are overwhelmingly young middle-class white women (think Girls, Obvious Child, etc.) who are determining their own fates. The stories of abortions they don’t see portrayed regularly are those of women who already have children and can’t afford another one. Or the many, many, many couples who are faced with the possibility of taking a fetus to term that will die shortly after birth, or being forced to carry a fetus to term that isn’t viable in any sense now and being further traumatized by having to do that.
They don’t particularly want to hear these stories because the medical professionals and women who have to deal with these situations often look far more like them or the doctors they know. But that’s why it’s so important to tell them, and it may be the only thing that actually works as an anecdote to Trump’s obscene fabulism.
Religious and cultural diet considerations aside, how is it that the people endorsing and amplifying Trump’s grotesque fantasies about the mechanics of and reasons for abortion believe them when they’re so on the face of it, implausible? Have you ever known a doctor to intentionally kill a healthy patient outside of the true crime and horror genres? Does it really seem plausible that a woman would carry a baby all the way to term—despite the significant difficulties, cost and burdens of pregnancy—in order to murder it upon birth despite the obvious alternatives?
These screwed up fictional archetypes that Trumpists use to demonize women who get abortions and medical professionals who provide them are a failure of empathy—that ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. Trumpists are hypocritical on the issue of “life” generally: they stringently oppose gun control; voted for a President who wants to gut healthcare which, if successful, will kill many of the same people who voted for him; and do not care if immigrant children are neglected in cages for political point-scoring. And these anti-abortion lies sometimes result in actual violence visited upon the doctors providing critical medical care to women.
Ultimately, Trump is only articulating a more sinister and exaggerated version of what he believes they want to hear. His own values—inasmuch as he has them—don’t matter. In all likelihood, he is still pro-choice personally, but is willing to lie about it in the same way that he lies about his Christianity because he knows his base will buy it. They want to believe that he thinks the way they do, and when his lies confirm their worst suspicions about Democrats and liberals in general, they believe he is on their side. They look at him and they see themselves.
But when he looks at them, he doesn’t see a group of individuals who have a position on an issue that they believe is consistent with their values; he just sees a powerful bloc of single-issue voters, and he’ll do or say anything to win them over, no matter how wrong or grotesque.
DMT.NEWS
via DMT.NEWS, Elizabeth Spiers
April 30, 2019 at 05:22PM
