In May 2011, a few months before Mikki Kendall and her sycophants began a Tumblr smear campaign of lies against me, calling me a "racist" because I disagreed with the claim that John Lennon and Yoko Ono are racists (the result is that when you Google my name these extremists' Tumblr posts calling me a racist come up on the first page), Kendall had a piece published in Salon entitled Abortion Saved My Life.
Shortly after, anti-abortion activist Jill Stanek made an issue out of it.
Now I'm a liberal and an atheist and a feminist and I'm not about to start siding with a bunch of right-wing anti-abortion activists.
On the other hand, no anti-abortion activist has ever undertaken a deliberate smear campaign against me. It took a liberal feminist pro-choice advocate like Mikki Kendall to do that.
As much as I would like to automatically dismiss whatever any anti-abortion activist says, Stanek does get at something that cannot be dismissed. Stanek wrote:
I asked why hadn’t Kendall sued? Why didn’t she name both the hospital and doctor? I concluded my comments at Salon by writing the publication was negligent for posting Kendall’s story without fact-checking and should retract it.
Pro-aborts went on to slam me with their standard fare of slurs, nor did Kendall handle the criticisms very well. She blogged on May 27 that pro-lifers were “motherf***ers” and threatened, “I’m not a nice girl, and you’re about to see that.”
Then, on May 29, still aggravated by “the comments and emails that are flooding my inbox,” Kendall blogged:
Some say I should name and shame the doctor that refused to do the procedure. If I knew why he refused I might have done just that, but since I know that there are many possible reasons that he did not do it? I’ve left him to deal with the internal procedures in place.
Excuse me? Kendall’s entire Salon story was built upon her accusation that a heartless, negligent, anti-abortion doctor was willing to let her hemorrhage to death rather than provide a life-saving abortion.Stanek does have a point. The sub-heading of the article is "I almost died in an emergency room because the doctor on call refused to perform a necessary procedure." And Kendall writes:
The doctor who didn’t do abortions was supposed to have contacted her (or someone else who would perform the procedure) immediately. He didn’t. Neither did his students. Supposedly there was a communication breakdown and they thought she had been notified, but I doubt it. I don’t know if his objections were religious or not; all I know is that when a bleeding woman was brought to him for treatment he refused to do the only thing that could stop the bleeding. Because he didn’t do abortions. Ever.
My two kids at home almost lost their mother because someone decided that my life was worth less than that of a fetus that was going to die anyway. My husband had told them exactly what my regular doctor said, and the ER doctor had already warned us what would have to happen. Yet none of this mattered when confronted by the idea that no one needs an abortion...The article presents no evidence at all for the doctor's views on abortion. All we know is that he didn't do abortions. Kendall even admits that she doesn't know. Perhaps because he had no experience doing abortions? That could have been it, but Kendall doesn't care.
And then she suggests that the doctor deliberately left her to die (my emphasis):
Supposedly there was a communication breakdown and they thought she had been notified, but I doubt it.Kendall "doubts" that it was a legitimate communication breakdown. How convenient, since nobody would be interested in publishing her article if it was a story about a tragedy that almost occurred in a hospital due to a communication breakdown, because anybody who knows anything about hospitals understands that those kinds of situations happen all the time. It's a perfectly plausible explanation.
So on the basis of nothing more than "I doubt it" Kendall proceeds to accuse the doctor of attempted second-degree murder, stating that:
...(he) decided that my life was worth less than that of a fetus that was going to die anywayThe difference between her smear of me and her smear of the doctor is that she doesn't name the doctor. But of course she wouldn't because Mikki Kendall and Salon would have been sued for defamation if she had made such an ill-founded and outrageous claim against any individual.
She did name me though, because apparently it's legal to spread a malicious lie about someone on the Internet, if you "only" falsely claim they are a racist.
The article clearly does give the anti-abortion side a legitimate gripe - Salon published what appears to be a deliberate attempt to smear those with anti-abortion views as heartless murderers.
So thanks for giving the anti-abortion brigade the moral high ground, Mikki Kendall and Salon.
And thanks for making me agree with an anti-abortion activist, because I must echo something that Jill Stanek wondered about Salon - do they do fact-checking? Do they have any editors? How did Mikki Kendall's scurrilous sensationalist piece of yellow journalism come to be published by Salon?