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:
Disturbing Ultrasounds Show How Unborn Babies React When Their Mothers Smoke http://t.co/scfSMRPzMp pic.twitter.com/qDPJq9CUhb
— Cosmopolitan (@Cosmopolitan) March 24, 2015
Ultrasounds show how unborn babies react when their mothers smoke — this is REALLY disturbing: http://t.co/tNB2zw0xwY pic.twitter.com/ItbH9LHndk
— Cosmopolitan (@Cosmopolitan) March 24, 2015
I had some questions:
.@Cosmopolitan but you still think it's cool to straight up kill these little ones, right? Just not smoke with them in utero?
— Mollie (@MZHemingway) March 24, 2015
.@Cosmopolitan but if we tear this baby apart limb from limb, that still is cool with you, right?
— Mollie (@MZHemingway) March 24, 2015
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.
