With the leaked decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and send our country back to the era where we burned witches at the stake for staring at people, a famous old stand-up bit by the late, great, George Carlin is doing the rounds again. It’s a piece about the “pro-life” movement, aka the “anti-abortion” movement, the Christian conservative movement that has continued on in our country for decades and has now successfully dragged our society’s discourse back hundreds of years. Carlin takes on all of the language used and how just the smallest bit of analysis exposes how incoherent, how hypocritical, and ultimately, how clearly false all of the right’s rhetoric around abortion really is.
Carlin talks about the right-wing concept of “conception of life.” How the “fertilized egg” is supposedly a child. After riffing on how problematic and untrue that is, Carlin makes the point that the majority of a person’s “fertilized eggs” end up being flushed out during the menstrual cycle, “So basically what these anti-abortion people are telling us is that any woman who's had more than one period is a serial killer.” He also reminds everyone that Catholics are some of abortion’s biggest opponents, and also one of the biggest opponents of homosexuals and homosexuality. “Well who has less abortions than homosexuals? Leave these fucking people alone for Christ's sakes. Here is an entire class of people guaranteed never to have an abortion and the Catholics and Christians are just tossing them aside—you'd think they'd make natural allies.”
