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I am gen­uinely con­fused by this recent Fem­i­niste post, Michele Bach­mann: rad­i­cal pro-choice fem­i­nist?

The author offers two pieces of infor­ma­tion that she seems to believe are contradictory.

1. A quote by Michele Bachmann:

“That’s why peo­ple need to con­tinue to go to the town halls, con­tinue to melt the phone lines of their lib­eral mem­bers of Con­gress, and let them know, under no cer­tain cir­cum­stances will I give the gov­ern­ment con­trol over my body and my health care deci­sions.“

2. A video of Michele Bach­mann speak­ing. Basi­cally, she calls for the gov­ern­ment to quit fund­ing Planned Par­ent­hood, which pro­vides alot of abortions.

Now, I under­stand how this is a weird pic­ture if you add a fur­ther piece of information:

3. Michele Bach­mann is quite rad­i­cally pro-choice (and that is why she wants Planned Par­ent­hood defunded)

But in the absence of 3, there is no con­tra­dic­tion, and so I don’t really under­stand the shock value of the orig­i­nal post as presented.

I guess it comes down to this:

If you oppose state con­trol of health care (and thereby abor­tion), and you think that “con­trol” con­sists in, or is pro­moted by, many-strings-attached state fund­ing, then def­i­nitely retract­ing fed­eral fund­ing from Planned Par­ent­hood is the right thing to do.

But I can only assume from the post that the Fem­i­niste author thinks that state con­trol of health care amounts to the state refus­ing to help pro­vide those ser­vices pro­mot­ing repro­duc­tive choice for women — i.e., abor­tion. (Remem­ber, the Bach­mann speech wasn’t about out­law­ing abor­tion, even if she actu­ally wants to, but merely about defund­ing it).

Which seems like a bet­ter way of under­stand­ing “state con­trol of health care/abortion” to you? Or am I totally miss­ing some­thing here?

Edited to add: A very sim­i­lar story also appeared over at Fem­i­nist­ing.  Some­one, please explain this to me? I don’t get it.

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