Baby born clutching IUD? Free abortion vacations? Nope - but such urban legends are very useful to..

[DonViejo]

MONDAY, MAY 8, 2017 08:59 AM EDT

Baby born clutching IUD? Free abortion vacations? Nope — but such urban legends are very useful to the right


Titillating stories can be more persuasive than facts, and the anti-choice movement loves its nutty urban myths

AMANDA MARCOTTE

Alaska state Rep. David Eastman, a Republican from Sarah Palin’s home of Wasilla, has some strange notions about why women get abortions.

“We have folks who try to get pregnant in this state so that they can get a free trip to the city, and we have folks who want to carry their baby past the point of being able to have an abortion in this state so that they can have a free trip to Seattle,” Eastman told the Associated Press in an interview about his opposition to Medicaid coverage of abortion.

That’s just one of the many infuriating and ignorant things that Republican lawmakers say about women who have abortions — remember Todd Akin’s comments about “legitimate rape,” anyone? — but what struck me upon reading this story was how much it sounded like an old-fashioned urban legend. The story is a reminder of the role that urban legends play in shoring up cultural hostility towards abortion and contraception, by spreading negative stereotypes and fears around women’s efforts to control their own fertility.

Gretchen Sisson is a qualitative sociologist for Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health at the University of California, San Francisco, whose work focuses largely on TV and movie depictions of abortions and the women who get them. Her research, she explained over the phone, demonstrates that there are a lot of myths out there “that abortion is dangerous, that it’s physically risky, that it leads to depression, that it leads to infertility.”

“Pop culture is both a reflection of these myths and a way of perpetuating them,” she said.

more
http://www.salon.com/2017/05/08/baby-born-clutching-iud-free-abortion-vacations-nope-but-such-urban-legends-are-very-useful-to-the-right/

[Retrograde]

1. The IUD one has been around since the 1970s

at least - I heard it before I got my first IUD.

And no one stops to think about how it would possibly happen in the first place, since a fetus in the uterus is encased in the amniotic sack. And if somehow a developing embryo did manage to form around an object in the uterus, wouldn't that object be more likely in the largest part - i.e., the head? I know they don't teach sex ed in fundamentalist schools, but it seems they don't teach basic biology (or logical reasoning) either.