What is the extreme right’s reasoning behind abolishing abortion? And the subsequent stopping of contraception, and IVF (which doesn’t even fit in the same category, IMHO.)
I’ve heard of the Project 2025 reasons of “having more white babies born” to counteract the fact that more brown people are coming in. But under this law or rule, brown and black people can’t have abortions either and they will keep having children.
Ok - they can round up all the illegal brown people and escort them out of the country. But there are still black people! What are they going to do about them? Kill them off somehow? What in the world is the plan to Make America White Again?
A lot of people really, sincerely believe abortion to be the murder of innocents. This may not include many right-wing politicians, who are cynically exploiting the issue for votes, but it 100% does include many rank-and-file voters and some of the politicians, and if you do believe that, the point of abolishing it is self-evident.
Attempting to apply logic to the ideas promulgated the American right-wing these days is inevitably going to give you a splitting headache.
In answer to your question, and echoing previous posts, a fair amount of the Christian right do legitimately believe that abortion is tantamount to murder. They also believe that using contraception is impeding God’s will and that IVF is not right if it creates any fertilized embryos that are not actually implanted (“every sperm is sacred”).
Of course, Trump, the undisputed leader of America’s right-wing at present, believes in precisely none of this. He is just cynically trying to get people to vote for him, as per usual.
Anything to do with life or death gives manipulative people the justification to push and shame and pressure others into holding an absolutist position. Whether there’s a right answer on the question or not, you can strongly make it feel like there’s a right answer and an evil, immoral, sinful answer.
It helps to create a very strong wall against outside influence from anyone else not willing to take on the same absolutist position.
Thanks. It’s so hard to wrap my mind around it. They think it’s God’s will to let mothers die from sepsis - through no fault of their own. Just like the good old days!
I truly hope the fairer and free-er party wins, all down the ticket. We need a Democratic House and Senate, too.
In addition to the above, I also believe that there is an element of conservative Christians wanting to use laws to inhibit sexual freedom and (perceived) promiscuity, which they believe became a rampant element of American society with the access to reliable birth control and abortion in the 1960s and 1970s.
I used to visit a pro-life site and interact with the nice people there. They honestly believed that “sex without consequences” was simply a way for men to have an easier time pressuring women to have sex without marriage. They thought that was bad for women, and they didn’t mind a policy to “protect” women, even from their own choices. Real men marry you and then have sex. The fact that married women might want or need an abortion seem to them to be such a rare thing that it wasn’t worth modifying their policy to cover.
So, yes, they believed they were protecting unborn humans. But they also were very “pro women” in their own minds.
Yeah, I read one fundie non-jokingly refer to America’s current social mores about sex, contraception and abortion as comparable to the worship of a Babylonian goddess of whoredom and infanticide.
Indeed so. Over the years, I’ve read various pieces which noted that, if conservatives were truly concerned about abortions, they should thus also be in support of full, easy access to contraception, in order to reduce the likelihood of unplanned pregnancies. Which, of course, most anti-abortion people disagree with, for that very reason – it’s not just about saving unborn babies, but about stopping people from fornicating.
It’s also about control. Keep women in their place. Outlaw abortion, then contraceptives, then no-fault divorce. If they manage all that the next target will be re-legalizing spousal rape. Barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, as God intended.
If you want to eliminate abortions, another method would be to provide for the children that would be born but many aren’t interested in that, either. I remember a Catholic nun saying many years ago something to the effect that in many cases, what people want is a child to be born, but they don’t care if it’s fed or housed or educated and she knows that because they don’t want their tax dollars spent on providing for children. And she said those people are not pro-life, they are pro-birth - they don’t care about pregnant women in countries where war is going on, they don’t care about toddlers starving in famines. They only care about life until the moment of birth.
Yeah, the old anti-Catholic joke is that Catholics are obsessed with souls when they enter this world and when they leave it, but in-between they’re on their own.
Their religion tells them that sex outside of marriage is immoral and should not be engaged in, and they believe that extramarital sex is a big factor in what they see as a decline in America. Most would likely support a re-institution of laws that make adultery illegal once again.
Agreed. A lot of the right-wing are fundamentalist Christians and if you believe life begins at conception then yes, abortion is murder. That doesn’t mean that some aren’t hypocrites that believe no one should get abortions except their girlfriend or daughter
I would question this. Catholics? Sure! But I believe many conservative Protestants support using birth control.
To my mind the clearest proof of this is the fight from the right against the HPV vaccine. From the conservative point of view, the potential of getting cervical cancer is a good thing as it acts as a deterrent against having promiscuous sex.