I am quite aware of the Catholic charitable ventures. The former convent at my (former) church was turned into a birth house for unsupported mothers. I’m not talking about this, but about what goes on in the minds of ordinary Catholics. There’s a fairly wide discrepancy between what the church teaches and what individual Catholics both believe and do.
That’s fine, but many on the Christian right who oppose abortion also oppose any form of birth control that may allow an ovum to be fertilized but doesn’t allow implantation. They call IUD’s and hormonal forms of birth control “abortifacients” and claim the fertilized ovum is a human being and therefore has rights, including the “right” of implantation, which, they claim, these forms of birth control prevent. And, of course, they also claim that Plan B is an abortion pill, when actually it just prevents ovulation.
So to these people, some forms of birth control don’t prevent abortions; they cause them. You can read more here.
That is laudable.
However, I think the question is broader than just the Catholic church.
The pro-life movement in the US has spent half a century of intense political and social efforts to get Roe overturned. They’ve spent hundreds of millions of dollars, and untold person-hours, in that effort, working to get politicians elected who will oppose abortion, federally and at the state level. They’ve worked to get sympathetic judges appointed, starting in the law schools, trying to develop strong advocates for the pro-life movement. They’ve worked for social change in numerous ways. They’ve picketed abortion clinics.
That’s a massive effort at public persuasion to change social attitudes to abortion, and to change the law.
Has the pro-life movement put any similar effort into changing laws to favour mothers, especially single mothers? For example, public funding for health care for all pregnant women? And public funding for post-natal health care for all children, up to say 10 years old? Have the pro-lifers worked to get major income supplements for mothers, paid out of the public purse? Housing grants aimed to help single mothers? Better maternity leave, enshrined in law, so that they can spend the first year of their child’s life looking after them and developing the mother-child bond, rather than having to go back to work a week after the birth? Better public funding of day-care?
Has the pro-life movement put public pressure on elected officials to do that? Have they participated in primary and general election campaigns to ensure politicians are elected to implement these sorts of essential supports for mothers and children, especially single mothers?
If the pro-life movement as a whole is only concerned with banning abortion, but not putting an equal amount of their time and money into getting benefits for mothers and children enshrined into law, then they are open to the charge that they only care about abortion, not about ensuring the kids are alright.
The problem is, when it is only charities that help, they are almost always insufficient to the task.
Mary’s House may do great work but they are limited in capacity and limited in reach. Many women may live somewhere where no such charity exists to help them.
So, you need the government to help and conservatives are loathe to let that happen.
Seriously, the point imho, is to punish women for getting pregnant. It doesn’t really matter if she’s married or not she must suffer the consequences of her actions. This includes being responsible for any child she chooses to get herself pregnant with.
The anti-choice movement as a whole cares diddly squat for the children once they are born.
Substitute ‘Christians’ for ‘Catholics’ and this statement would still be true.
Yes, but not all Christian churches have official, codified “what the church teaches” the way the Catholics do.
The biggest problem with “pro-life” is that their views have become untenably dogmatic. Every blastocyst is totally a human person right now, to the point that surgery to deal with an ectopic implantation is on the edge of not ok – some geniuses have suggested that it should be transported to the uterus where it can develop, which is basically ridiculous.
Then there are the cases where a dead fetus cannot be removed because that would be too much like a late-term abortion. Medical personnel had enough trouble from the uneducated public during the pandemic. Add this nonsense on top of that and they will be pursuing less dangerous careers, leaving you to die of that one thing because no one wants to work in healthcare anymore.
The reality is that abortions, and other unappealing activities like heroin use, are going to happen. Even when they were illegal in many places, they still happened, and the wealthier women had an easier time of it. Which is to say, it may not be entirely about subjugated women, but it is at the very least about crapping on the most vulnerable women.
No; it means getting out the vote of their opponents, and waiting until the Rightists die of old age. Changing their minds doesn’t happen in significant numbers; they’ve hated women all their lives, and they’ll continue to hate women until the day they die. Persuasion of the Right is never what works. Didn’t work with slavery, didn’t work with segregation, didn’t work with same sex marriage.
I agree in general. But new rightists are born every day. Their upbringing and worldviews carefully shaped by their rightist parents.
Good point, but all Christian churches purport to teach the teachings of Christ.
They try, but they fail more often than not. That’s why they’ve shrunk in numbers over time instead of just enjoying eternal supremacy.
I’m guessing that the percentage of the faithful who question the teachings of their church is fairly close to the percentage of MAGAs who voluntarily leave the cult.
And for roughly the same reasons.
There is a point being missed here. The rationale for opposing all forms of birth control does not come from a mandate to control women’s bodies. It comes from a belief that everything is God’s will, and subverting that will is a sin against God. Opposing all birth control including abortion has an internal logic to it.
I’m not saying other posters aren’t correct about the underlying causes.
I think your guess would be wrong. People leave churches every day because they question the teachings. Often they move to a different church, or call themselves ‘spiritual’. Rarely does the bottom drop out of all their assumptions like it must if you give up being a trumpist. t’s not the same. Christianity as a whole, is not a cult. There are cults within it which parallel the trump cult in their structures, but don’t have to be evangelical, or political at all.
I have never understood this idea of subverting god’s will. Choosing to eat breakfast or not eat breakfast is subverting god’s will to exactly the same degree as is using or not using contraception. Or having or not having sex in the first place.
Having or not having an abortion subverts god’s will to the exact same degree as taking or not taking an aspirin while feeling a headache coming on.
IMO, the various sects of the various religions have a very curious habit of deciding that god’s will is utterly absolute on point X, but somehow utterly absent on point Y. With no rhyme or reason to which items fall in which category.
I accept completely that your explanation is the one they’d trot out. You’ve accurately described their anti-thinking on this point.
I would argue that questioning and going elsewhere are two different things 
Agreed. People go to church for all sorts of reasons, the teachings being but one of them. I know a fair number of people who don’t believe in the teachings, are not members of that faith, or don’t believe in God at all, who are regular churchgoers. I mean, two members of our seven person choir can be classified that way. One is a practicing Jew. They just like the people and like to sing. Unlike a cult, no one has the slightest intention of changing their minds.
Im firmly pro-choice, but pregnancy is a big deal. Deciding whether or not to continue a pregnancy absolutely determines the entire trajectory of your life from then on. If a person believes in a higher power and feels that higher power is actively involved in their day to day life, it is pretty clear that the higher power would be more concerned with this huge literal dilemma than with a decision that has no consequences.
The presumption is that sex is for procreation, in the same way that eating food is for sustaining one’s body. Yes both are pleasurable as a reward but it’s held that divorcing the pleasure from the purpose is decadent or perverse. An interesting example is the Old Testament story of Onan. What he was supposedly condemned by God for was not masturbation per se but practicing a crude form of birth control– refusing to impregnate his dead brother’s widow so that the resulting child would inherit the deceased’s cattle and property, rather than the surviving brother.
On the one hand, lots of religions around the world and down through the millennia have held that licentiousness and the pursuit of lust are not good or honorable things. Many have upheld celibacy as a praiseworthy thing. On the other hand, saying it is “God’s will” has caused a lot of jaundiced eyebrows to be raised by modern feminists who basically reply “Sez Who?”, and who bitingly point out that as preached by men “God’s will” seems to somehow be that women be subservient to men.
But God doesn’t actually say anything, so that’s just a way for people to label their own personal desires as divine will. They might as well be claiming to be God themselves and demand obedience.
And in a nominally secular society it’s not an actual justification, anyway. God doesn’t even have the vote, he’s not an American citizen. It’s like claiming that “Vladimir Putin opposes abortion, therefore it should be made illegal” (except worse since Putin demonstrably actually exists).