By Mollie Hemingway
Wednesday, March 25, 2015
Cosmopolitan magazine is known mostly for teaching
impressionable women to feel bad about their appearance and for recycling the
same 14 sex tips over and over each month even though they never sound terribly
sexy. But last year it decided to shake things up by devoting resources to
advocating for abortion.
Cosmo announced it would be upping its political content
as well as endorsing candidates. Amy Odell, Cosmopolitian.com’s editor, led the
effort. According to Politico, “The Cosmo endorsement criteria fall squarely
into the liberal camp — equal pay, pro-choice, pro-birth control coverage,
anti-restrictive voter-ID laws. Asked how a candidate who might line up on
certain issues like equal pay but is pro-life would fare, Odell said that would
be a deal breaker.”
Odell said that they wouldn’t endorse candidates who
didn’t fit their abortion litmus test. “We’re not going to endorse someone who
is pro-life because that’s not in our readers’ best interest,” Odell said.
Nevermind that women are split down the middle on this topic. Apparently the
pro-life half are not the Cosmo audience. Odell went on to say getting an
abortion is totes awesome. NARAL (formerly National Abortion Rights Action
League) was thrilled by the move.
Jill Filipovic, who is an enthusiastic if unpersuasive
advocate of abortion rights, is the magazine’s online senior political writer
and chief baby denier.
“What It’s Really Like to Have an Abortion,” “5 Women
Explain Why They Became Abortion Providers,” and “How Our Abortion Changed Our
Relationship” (according to Cosmo, it makes your relationship better when you
work together to end the life of the little one you created) are some of the
headlines women can read after getting horrible relationship advice and
otherwise developing insecurity about their worth as young women.
The team constantly praises Planned Parenthood, a massive
abortion company that ends more than 300,000 lives each year, as well as the
aforementioned NARAL. They play up stories critical of pro-lifers and they run
breezy stories about how to get a job at Planned Parenthood.
So folks were surprised at yesterday’s Cosmo fare:
I had some questions:
I mean, here we have a magazine that just weeks ago was
complaining about a bill that would ban abortions after the point at which
unborn children feel pain. So they’re totally fine with offing a child in utero
even in late-term abortion — but they don’t want that same child to have to
deal with cigarette smoke?
If you think an unborn child doesn’t like it when her
mother smokes, can you imagine her reaction when her body is dismembered or her
heart is pierced?
Listen, I’m all for magazines lifting their self-imposed
ban on showing the life of unborn children in the womb. But let’s hope Cosmo
thinks for a moment about how to prioritize the negative things that might
happen to a child in utero.
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