Anti Abortion Propaganda

hey everybody so let's imagine a conversation between a pro-life christian and me a pro-choice genius the christian begins by saying that human personhood with all the meaning and sanctity that holds begins at conception the moment the sperm meets the egg and that for that reason when a mother aborts her pregnancy it's wrong murderous and then i'm like that argument doesn't hold up to scrutiny what is it about a zygote that makes it a person with human rights it doesn't feel pain it doesn't make decisions or plans it doesn't love it doesn't have any desires including the desire to live it doesn't think in fact it has none of the characteristics that we normally associate with personhood and then the christians like okay let's move the goalposts a tiny bit maybe the zygote isn't a full-fledged person yet but they certainly have the potential to be one and that potential should be preserved and then unlike why are we placing this potential line here why aren't you mad that i'm not always having sex why aren't you mourning when women have periods there's just no actual reason we're using the zygote to delineate between the potential for personhood and the lack thereof and then the christian says the reason we should make a line here is because conception is when the human soul comes into existence and then i put on my sunglasses and say well that's a faith-based argument and if you want our society to restrict access to abortions on that basis what you're really doing is forcing people to hold to your religious values and i don't want to live in a christian theocracy and then the christians like why not jesus died for your sins and the conversation ends soon after now of course this is a caricaturish debate i've constructed here obviously it could get more complicated the christian could come out of it looking better making more nuanced more secular or secular looking arguments and i could keep responding in more and more intricate ways like an absolute chat but here's the thing i don't want to do that today and that's for one simple reason i think that this conversation is a bit of a mirage an intellectual narrative that doesn't really map on to the way that this issue works in reality it is the argument we think we're having that we fantasize about having when we argue about abortion unplanned is an anti-abortion christian propaganda film made by pureflix the studio behind the gods not dead trilogy based on a memoir by a pro-life activist the movie centers around abby a woman who happily works for planned parenthood for six years until one day she goes to assist with an abortion sees how terrible it is and becomes a pro-life activist on the surface unplanned certainly seems to be invested in the ideas we've talked about so far characters frequently talk about how life begins at conception about how zygotes have hearts that are filled with love for their mommies and the opening scene in the movie is a bit of body horror as the protagonist watches a fetus avoid its abortion the message is clearly that this little dude is a person who's like no don't do this don't do this but as we dive deeper into the film what we find is something that's a lot more nuanced and complicated than what those points might suggest a movie that continually works to challenge and complicate some of our ideas about what abortion means to society and what it might mean to the pro-lifers who hate it unplanned is a very interesting movie and i'm excited to unpack it today so with that out of the way part one the terms of the conversation as i stepped into unplanned i expected it to be a bit like god's not dead you know in the same way this kid gets into a debate with his atheist professor over the existence of god i thought there'd be some good pro-life person some bad or confused pro-choice person and then they duke it out in the marketplace of ideas but as it turns out this is not the case over the course of the film there just isn't any argument for the idea that life begins at conception any argument against abortion there was nothing i could really sink my teeth into and debunk instead the movie is primarily focused on the real world practice of abortion on making the case that the people who do them specifically planned parenthood are bad and use shady methods and unplanned does this by making two main claims first that planned parenthood performs abortions in unsafe ways in the first act of the movie we learned that the protagonist abby had a chemical abortion that took poorly and caused her a lot of pain after the scene where we watch her writhe in agony we see her call planned parenthood and apparently they warned her about none of these risks they just didn't give a [ __ ] i guess what happened to gently emptying my uterus that is what i was told would happen look i'm sorry but i have another patient later on in the film the abortion doctor performs a botched operation on a kid punctures her uterus you know what i don't care if you're comfortable just do it and instead of calling an ambulance the mean abortion lady is like do you know how bad the pr from this would be if we sent her to the hospital we have to figure this out on our own in both these situations the point is clear planned parenthood is an outright dangerous craven institution one that regularly jeopardizes the health of its patients second planned parenthood desperately tries to sell people on abortions because abortions make a de money this is an enormous part of the film probably 20 to 30 minutes of it are dedicated to this point but for our purposes this little speech that the abortion lady makes conveys the point just fine fast food outlets look to break even on the hamburgers they sell do you know how they make their money no on the french fries and the soda i don't understand is our fries and soda abortions are like fries at mcdonald's planned parenthood just sells those suckers as hard as they can and that's why they're providing the service so looking at these two points we can start by saying that this is some belligerent nonsense right for one there's just no evidence that planned parenthood frequently does malpractice doesn't tell women the side effects of their medication puts women's lives at needless risk how often does that happen i found no research to suggest that it's some big problem all we have to go on is this one lady's dubious and transparently agenda-fueled memoir and as an aside i feel it's appropriate to say here that while yeah abortions are a medical procedure that do come with risk it's a whole lot less risky than the other thing pregnant people can do give birth a point which never comes up in this movie for obvious reasons and as far as the other point is concerned that planned parenthood constantly upsells abortions because it's how they make all their sweet blood money again where's the proof i've never seen anyone talk about this being a serious problem and while i won't say i did a scientific study by any means i did ask on twitter for people to share their experiences getting an abortion from planned parenthood and literally a few dozen people dm'd me the vast vast majority of whom said that planned parenthood was nothing but neutral just told them their options in a non-judgmental and helpful way in fact if anything planned parenthood is forced to downsell abortions in a lot of cases in texas where this movie literally takes place the law requires that women get told inaccurate information about abortion about increased chances of breast cancer and infertility they have to hear the baby's heartbeat and see an often medically unnecessary ultrasound they have to get state-mandated counseling 24 hours before their abortions causing many women to have to pay far more to stay overnight in the town where the clinic is a price many can't pay it's repulsive honestly and the movie comically never brings any of this up but okay as he did as all of this makes me it's not actually the point i wanted to make here and it's not that important to this video rather i mostly just want to make one observation here that the way unplanned focuses all its energy on convincing us that the people who give abortions are bad fundamentally undermines the idea that this film is actually opposed to abortion let's pretend for a second that every claim this movie makes against planned parenthood is true they are medically negligent and they do sell abortions like hotcakes or french fries i guess what would our takeaway from that actually be what would we do with all of that newfound info outlaw abortions and force every clinic that provides them to shut its doors well no that seems a bit dramatic doesn't it my reaction would be to just solve the problems at hand fix the broken methods of planned parenthood if for instance we made abortions easily accessible free healthcare as we obviously should then we wouldn't have to worry about corporations trying to sell them or about them endangering people's lives because of bad pr the most obvious critique we can read into the case made by unplanned is not abortion bad but rather private health care bad the current state of abortion is bad and you know that's pretty strange right why would this anti-abortion propaganda film center its argument on this extremely specific thing that has nothing to do with abortion it doesn't quite add up does it part two the moral stakes of the conversation okay we'll get back to that can of worms in a little while but for now let's change the topic to another interesting aspect of this movie in the first act of unplanned as abby the protagonist volunteers at planned parenthood for the first time she encounters a pro-life protester he yells at some lady to not get an abortion and calls her a baby murderer does daddy know that you're here yeah yeah does he know that you're killing these little grand babies right now now of course i hate this guy and i think people like him in real life for the scum of the earth but the interesting thing is the movie wants us to hate him in a later scene in the film abby talks to a nicer pro-life woman and she's like that guy's awful and we've asked him to stop anti-abortion people shouldn't act like this it's unhelpful wrong lacking in the compassion that all people should have so we can ask them to stop and we do but we can't force them to do anything so for what it's worth i think you're right abby there's something kind of unsettling about this isn't there to be clear i do think it's better to be nice and pro-life than to be awful and cruel and pro-life but i have a hard time accepting that this could be a really important distinction within the film's ethical framework i mean abortion is supposed to be murder right that's the go-to position that the film constantly shoves down our throats the pro-life people pray over barrels of aborted pregnancy material describing the lost children as having names only known to god they directly compare america's abortion culture to the holocaust the truth is you've just cited three examples of injustice slavery segregation and the holocaust that can only occur when a whole segment of the population is dehumanized and that's exactly what planned parenthood does to the unborn but you know my reaction to the holocaust wouldn't be to tone police its protesters act like they're doing something wrong for being mean to the nazis that would be ridiculous right rude words are a justified response to mass murder and yet this notion that we should always be nice and polite and forgiving about abortion is one of the most important threads in the movie one we can see most clearly through abby's arc when she starts getting involved with abortion taking on more responsibility at planned parenthood her husband and parents both dislike it but they do so in a really low-key kind of detached way they say a few words here and there about how they hope she'll stop with all this and about how life begins at conception but they don't really engage further than that this is particularly strange in the husband's case here's a guy who explicitly believes that a life worthy of human moral considerations is created at conception okay pretend for a second that you're someone like me who believes all abortions are bad and yet he marries abby no questions asked and you know i can't even fathom that marrying somebody that i know to be a serial murderer it seems deeply incongruous to me and then at the end of the film after abby stops working for planned parenthood she cries that she was responsible for the deaths of 60 000 children and her husband tells her god will forgive you you thought you were doing the right thing but now you've seen the light you did what you thought was right baby why do i feel so ashamed abby look at me i love you and so does god he'll forgive you if you ask then at the very end she's proudly accepted by all the pro-life people as she delivers a stirring speech and all of this is just it's whack right like i get that christians believe that god can forgive any sin but they don't tend to believe that society should always be responsive to that fact right if abby actually had killed 60 000 people it's hard to believe that everyone would just be like it's okay god forgives everything you thought you were doing the right thing we love you sweetie you're fine don't even worry about it no they would want to throw her in jail execute her probably if the conservative christian agenda that pureflix is advocating for were really so aligned with total carte blanche forgiveness for terrible crimes you'd think they talk a bit more about prison abolition you know forgiving actual criminals which of course they don't ever do so like in the last section of the video we've hit a roadblock here another place where the film seems to break down but this case is arguably even more serious and thought-provoking before we were talking about the arguments that unplanned uses about how they didn't meaningfully counter a pro-choice perspective but at the end of the day maybe we could just chalk that up to the way that propaganda sometimes works it's effective for the film to spend most of its time positioning abortion as a crude shady capitalist conspiracy it taps into the audience's feelings of disgust and victimization and maybe that is in some sense more important than providing a genuine intellectually persuasive pro-life position but this situation is different right because here the very center of the film its moral code its message becomes a contradictory mess in one breath it regards abortion as one of the worst things that could ever happen comparable to the holocaust and in the next breath it treats it as this imminently forgivable and understandable sin the sort of thing we shouldn't be mean about the sort of thing we should just move on from and we're left wondering what should we even feel about abortion what should our reaction be to its existence what is this propaganda film even about and how could it be accomplishing whatever that is how does this movie work part three the absence of the conversation so uh why are we talking about this movie in the first place is this just the big joel power hour where we dive deep into a bit of interesting art for the raw pleasure of it well yes but also no let me tell you about what really motivated me to make this video recently i was watching videos by some of my absolute favorite lefty youtubers ian danskin aka innuendo studios and cody johnston aka some more news this is what ian says about abortion in his recent piece called i hate mondays if you wanted fewer abortions you would promote comprehensive sex education and easy access to contraceptives because that's all that is ever reliably lowered abortion rates in any country all making it a crime does is determine whether the abortion happens in a doctor's office or a motel room this is what cody says in a video about ben shapiro the actual data shows that countries where abortion is illegal either have the same amount of abortions or even more and what actually reduces abortion is access to contraceptives and better sex education it's what has been factually determined through multiple studies using the best data we have now the context of these statements are certainly different from each other but the message is roughly the same right that making abortions illegal will not reduce them and at this point is a reasonable and persuasive argument against banning them now this is obviously not a call out of either of these boys these beautiful sons of mine but i will say that this argument utterly baffles me for me to be a pro-lifer one who ever wanted to ban abortion i'd have to accept two bad premises first and probably most importantly that a fetus at every stage of its development is a person or person-like entity who was owed various moral considerations and second that those considerations trump the autonomy and safety of the mother in other words i'd have to think abortion was murder and if i accepted that then no i wouldn't be okay just making abortions legal because making them illegal wouldn't prevent them this is 600 000 abortions per year we're talking about and making contraception more available and teaching more people about it would make that number go down but tons of abortions would definitely definitely still happen if that's all we did and considering that if i were a pro-lifer perish the thought i wouldn't be down to just say well whatever let's just let that go this systemic mass murder is just part of living i guess no honestly i'd probably say that we just haven't tried hard enough yet haven't put in the enormous amount of work we'd need to fight against this unbelievably bad thing so to me this argument is kind of incoherent it sounds common sense and reasonable but it just doesn't seem like it works seem like it could ever convince the people who actually need convincing i see arguments similar to this all the time points like it are pretty common in discussions about abortion and again i'm not trying to pick on these two but it does leave me with a question how does this conversation happen what does abortion mean to many of the people who talk about it and watching unplanned in all of its propagandistic strangeness helped me make sense of it at least a little because within this film abortion is not a concrete idea the sort of thing we can analyze for its material impact and make a judgment about rather it sees the practice as this peculiar and contradictory social object an act of horrendous violence that we should not treat as such a terrible crime with no substance or gravity what's more even as we're assured over and over again that abortion is wrong every time we try to actually look at it it escapes our grasp all we get to see or really think about is the people who do it how bad planned parenthood is how george soros is responsible have you ever seen the names of our donors soros gates buffett so abortion here is really just an absence a trick of language that is amenable to any situation that can shift its meaning at the drop of a hat to suit the case the movie wants to make and sure by the end of unplanned we might feel disoriented like we can't quite conceptualize abortion as a moral problem that needs solving but the movie doesn't need to care about that because it gets something way more valuable in return the ability to produce a set of claims that look real and important but which could never be countered or explored in any way that matters if i said planned parenthood isn't an awful institution and it doesn't do any of the weird things you say it does they could say that's not the point abortion is a problem on the face of it if i said fine planned parenthood is bad and abortion should be part of free national health care they'd say give women free abortions you'll only get more abortions that way if i say that abortion isn't murder they'll respond with viscera and body horror and people praying over barrels of fetuses if i say well if abortion is murder why aren't you acting like it they'll say uh because we're christians christians are fine with murderers in lieu of an actual conversation the sort of fun hypothetical i began this video with all we find is a smoke screen a series of double binds and manipulations that provide the fiction of a real argument but that doesn't come with the burdens of an argument evidence thought justification standing by your convictions the possibility of being wrong but when i really thought about it i realized that this sort of rhetoric that unplanned uses its way of positioning abortion as an absence isn't as simple as it just being a propaganda film that wants to manipulate us rather it relates in a deep way to the way abortion conversations so often work it is reflective of our general abortion discourse at least in the u.s like one of the most important messages of unplanned is that making abortions available doesn't reduce the number that people get abby starts the film believing the opposite but then learns progressively that abortion only begets more abortion and then you know cody johnston comes in and looks at an argument like this one that a pro-lifer makes the absolute level of the activity decreases but what's left is going to be illegal just by logical necessity and he goes no no no legalizing abortions doesn't increase the rate at which people get them just look at the actual statistics for one second but if the people behind unplanned saw those statistics and believed them do you think they'd become pro-choice well maybe people can be convinced by strange things but i do doubt it for the reasons i talked about before and if i came over to cody's house to vibe and chill and said hey bro i actually found a set of policies that would allow us to ban abortion effectively now we can needlessly steal women's bodily autonomy to our hearts content do you think he'd say [ __ ] my pro-choice position is destroyed ban away well no probably not right if he sees this video and i'm wrong he can feel free to correct me but i do hope that i'm not wrong so this point has no purpose to the people saying it despite how we might act there's no way to this claim being proven or disproven because no one here not me or ben shapiro or cody johnston or unplanned or ian danskin could change their minds because of it it just wouldn't make sense for that to happen in essence then it's a conversation about nothing but see maybe that's the point maybe we want to talk about nothing and maybe that's for one simple reason that we can't or don't want to talk about the elephant in the room about what abortions actually mean on an ethical level about who benefits from getting them about what makes a moral person a moral person and you know i think we avoid this stuff at least partly because if we did talk about it it might create some level of discomfort the people behind unplanned might hate abortion they might legitimately see it as murder and think that the people who get them should go to jail i don't know but either way a statement as bold as that probably wouldn't land well among the film's audience many of the people watching this movie might have a real problem with abortion but not necessarily a coherent one one that comes to them through careful moral thinking they might find the practice upsetting ungodly and worthy of being banned but nonetheless they still might not be willing to truly conceptualize it as murder to look into the eyes of their parents and children and siblings and spouses and say you killed a baby like so many of you killed a baby and so the film doesn't tell them that i mean it does but not in a way that actually counts for anything or that we're forced to take seriously meanwhile the pro-choicers among us might be a hundred percent fine with abortion but the world we're talking to is more complicated and messy than that many people might think abortion should be legal but have deep reservations about the practice think they're immoral and distasteful but necessary sometimes the lesser of two evils a tragic reality again that's not necessarily some kind of morally rigorous position the sort of thing everybody thought through no it's just the way a lot of us end up feeling about it and so maybe we don't want to tell those people i don't think there is any significant ethical problem with abortion no reason to stigmatize them or look at them as this sad unfortunate procedure i think they're fine that can be painful to say feel like you're alienating reasonable folks or like you're not sensitive enough to this serious and sometimes very upsetting issue and so instead of going with either of our options saying that abortion is fine or saying that they're extremely not fine we turn ourselves inside out to make strange arguments and moral claims that justify some of our beliefs without challenging others does it matter if making abortions available and accessible will increase or decrease the rate at which people get them well not really right not when you get down to the bone of the issue but we'll keep having these conversations about this and other equally vapid subjects because we don't want to talk about abortion anything's better than talking about abortion [Music] hey everybody thanks so much for watching this video i know it was a bit intense or whatever uh like comment subscribe if you want to i imagine this video isn't going to get monetized considering the subject matter so of course any money you wanted to give me on patreon would be appreciated uh cool anyway now it's time for my patreon question of the video dan deford parentheses the deacons asks what are your top three favorite donuts please note an eclair is not a donut uh okay crawlers apple cider donuts and just normal glazed donuts okay bye hope you hope you liked it okay bye hope you enjoyed this video and i hope you have a nice day

Channel: Big Joel

Views: 245,032

Rating: 4.8614664 out of 5

Keywords: unplanned, gods not dead, big joel, pureflix, abortion, propaganda, pro life, pro choice, anti abortion, video essay

Id: VG_hsUdFkOM

Length: 31min 15sec (1875 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 29 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/SlaugtherSam]

In the past masturbation was demonized because of Onan "wasting" his sperm. So the line was actually drawn there at some point. It just is as arbitrary as ever.

[u/Genoscythe_]

Citing Innuendo Studios here as a basic anti-abortion video that doesn't change conservative minds is weird, because the cited video wasn't even about abortion, but about how conservatives fail to think in systemic terms, and instead focus on personal virtue ethics, and showing their dismissal of basic pro-choice arguments is one case study for that.

That's basically what Big Joel was going for here too.

[u/portmanterrific]

"Abortion is our fries and soda"

mmm i'm loving it

[u/mouse_Brains]

There are many objectively bad things that are better prevented by means that are not just fighting and banning it. Terrorism is one, drug abuse is one, that is why Ian and Cody's arguments should still work.

And the point of those arguments exclusively about convincing the opposition, it is about showing that the conversation is actually about controlling women's bodies. That's why you have the same people fighting against birth control, sex education and abortion at the same time even though the first two reduces the third.

I think a reasonable person would agree that abortion isn't the ideal endpoint for anyone involved in a way that is independent of the moral value attached to it so I don't really see arguing in these terms as talking around the main issue really.

[u/Kajel-Jeten]

I know it’s been said before but Moths art has really been making Big Joel’s videos so much better.

[u/whoopar]

I want that sweater

[u/maryjanerx]

Thanks for sharing!!

[u/Toodle122]

I feel kind of compelled to point out that abortions, despite very strongly believing that they should be as accessible as possible, should be reduced as much as possible. Not because they're immoral or anything, but because they are a medical procedure and medical procedures carry inherent risks. As such, if an abortion could be avoided by better education and contraceptives then that should be the goal as they are far safer for the individual.

Another reason I find the Cody/Ian argument compelling is because, while not appealing at all to those who believe abortion is akin to the holocaust, there are plenty of people that are far less dead set in that opinion. If your goal is to appeal to the evangelists, by telling them they're going about it the wrong way or by telling them their central premis is wrong, you're going to get nowhere fast. It's the people in the middle who haven't really thought about it, but might kind of instinctually feel abortion is wrong, that you're appealing to with such arguments.