Why Conservative Judges Keep Calling Abortion Providers "Abortionists"

[In It to Win It]

B&S

Last Friday, Trump judge Matthew Kacsmaryk issued an opinion ordering the withdrawal of the Food and Drug Administration’s 23-year-old approval of mifepristone, a drug used in medication abortions. The decision, which effectively gives control over the bodily autonomy of millions of people to a robe-clad anti-choice activist in Texas, is slapdash and bleak. It also makes liberal use of the term “abortionist” to refer to licensed medical professionals who perform legal abortions‚—one passage, for example, distinguishes between “abortionists” seeking legal protections for abortion rights, and “physicians” working to roll them back.

This language might feel archaic and weird, but it’s been part of anti-choice rhetoric for the last few decades. By using it, Kacsmaryk is blowing a dog whistle for hardcore anti-choice activists—an implicit endorsement of their long-held belief that abortion providers are murderers, not medical professionals.

The only reason to insist on using this terminology is to signal to hardcore anti-choicers that you speak their language. Thomas used it again in his dissent in 2020’s June Medical Services v. Russo, which he called a challenge “brought by abortionists and abortion clinics.” In Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, he reached back to an 18th-century treatise on British law for the proposition that it “treated abortionists differently from other physicians or surgeons who caused the death of a patient.” William Pryor, a conservative federal appeals court judge and longtime Balls & Strikes reader, bragged of “reversing the judgment in favor of the abortionists” in his first abortion case after Dobbs.

In his medication abortion decision, Kacsmaryk puts them all to shame. People who perform abortions are “abortionists,” stripped of their title, while the plaintiffs working to limit access to mifepristone are caring “physicians.” Kacsmaryk uncritically quotes the plaintiffs’ filings throughout, stringing bits of them together in clunky ways to make abortion providers sound like something less than medical professionals. “There ‘is no follow-up or additional care provided to patients’ by abortionists, there is ‘no established relationship with a physician’ and ‘patients are simply left to report to the emergency room,’” he writes. Kacsmaryk also quotes a 2020 Alito opinion that refers to abortionists “financial interest in avoiding burdensome regulations,” as if people providing care to pregnant people are just there to become millionaires overnight.

Kacsmaryk was put on the bench by Trump to get this exact result: Previously, he was a lawyer at the First Liberty Institute, a “religious liberty” law firm that worked to block the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate. As a judge, Kacsmaryk is the perfect person to revive this “abortionist” language: The term hearkens back to when abortion was illegal, allowing judges like Kacsmaryk to paper over the fact that although Dobbs removed constitutional protections for abortion, it did not make it illegal. Peppering his writing with “abortionist” intentionally blurs the distinction between a dangerous back-alley experience performed by an uncredentialed person, and a fully-licensed provider dispensing a pill that more than 100 studies have shown to be very safe.

Kacsmaryk’s opinion is wrong on the law. But no matter what happens next, this rhetorical sleight-of-hand allows him and his fellow true believers to frame abortion providers as incompetents at best, murderers at worst. Kacsmaryk is not the first guy to try this stunt, and if recent events are any indication, he won’t be the last.

Link to tweet

[grumpyduck]

1. Name-calling. The current repuke playbook.

Give the morons another label to throw around.

It's getting so old...

[Lovie777]

2. Yeah.......................

1700 to 1900............

or so.

And the women and newborns that suffered, died, so be it.

So say the pro-life.

[bucolic_frolic]

3. Can we call these clowns prigs and pricks, then? /nt

[crickets]

4. For the same reason women's health clinics are called "abortion clinics."

https://www.factcheck.org/2015/09/planned-parenthoods-services/

Abortions accounted for 3 percent of the nearly 10.6 million total services provided by Planned Parenthood clinics in 2013, according to its annual report.

Some services it provided in addition to abortions were:

4.5 million tests and treatment for sexually transmitted infections
3.6 million contraception related services
935,573 cancer screenings including breast exams and Pap tests
1.1 million pregnancy tests and prenatal services

Never mind that women's health clinics are staffed with doctors and nurses who provide health care in detecting cancer and other women's health issues, family planning aimed at preventing unwanted pregnancies, and prenatal care for those who have planned a pregnancy and want a healthy outcome - for some troglodytes crawling the Earth, women have been reduced to mere baby factories ripe for abortion at any moment. Ugh.

[Poiuyt]

5. They also refer to zygotes as "unborn human beings."

Alito did that too

[Hortensis]

6. Right. Word choice is hugely influential, sneaking in at below-cognition level. Otoh,

we can identify scoundrels out to deceive us BY their word choice. Words really do have established definitions. Look them up, and even if 3 different malicious factions have created 3 new ones to deceive people with, that just becomes a way of identifying 3 malicious actors. Or even more often in forums, their useful idiots come to spread their mindfucking.