I’m sure you’ll be shocked and stunned that the new Let the Poors Die Faster bill, AKA Obamacare repeal, includes a shit-ton of restrictions on abortion, Planned Parenthood funding, etc.[UPDATE: Forced-birther Rick Santorum was a primary architect]. And gets us back to the old days when plans were free not to cover maternity benefits (which more than three quarters did not cover). When they talk about turning decision-making over to the states, they mean letting states make decisions they like.
As I’ve said before, and will undoubtedly say again, this is less about poor murdered babies than about their horror at women having sex without risking pregnancy. [UPDATE AGAIN: As witness Trump is slashing support for non-abstinence sex ed, even though those programs are better at preventing teen pregnancy] Beyond that, the focus on “why should men pay for plans with maternity benefits” (as opposed to “plans should stop covering testicular cancer! Women shouldn’t have to pay for that crap!”) is both sexist and stupid. Men father children. A lot of men actually want the woman and baby to get good care, and it’s a lot more affordable with insurance. Even if the couple are done with kids, the same applies to grandkids. Maternity care is not some frivolity just because the patient is a woman. Heck, all these men were born, aren’t they glad their mom had a doctor (though I admit the country might be better off if the Republican senators had all been stillborn). As Slacktivist says, these guys ain’t just sexist, they’re stupid.
Oh Slacktivist is also running a series quoting from a mid-1970s conservative evangelical book which makes it clear abortion isn’t murder. That changed a few years later when the Religious Right got rolling as a political force and needed a rallying cry.
I have to admit that for a long time I bought into the “pro-life” movement’s claims that they were all about protecting sweet, innocent babies from grisly murder; what made me realize that that *wasn’t* actually the motivation many of them had for opposing abortion was the fact they didn’t seem terribly enthusiastic about any of the measures that probably *would* reduce the number of terminations eg ready access to reliable birth control, *effective* sex education (not that abstinence-only crap), and government support for new parents (especially ones in difficult financial circumstances). As you say, their agenda is more about punishing women for having sex (or, to put it more crudely, making “sluts” realize there are “consequences” to having sex – funny how the male participants never seem to have to worry about those “consequences”). Indeed, given how reactionary their agenda is, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if a lot of them also want to bring back the stigma against “illegitimate” children (“Why yes, we think that just because your parents weren’t married when they had you, you deserve to be treated like a pariah your entire life, but, dammit, you have a *right* to the miserable life we have planned for you!”).
One irony of history that greatly amuses me is the fact that one world leader who *did* manage to achieve the forced birthers’ dream of completely banning birth control and abortion in his country was that Godless communist, Nicolae Ceausescu. By all accounts, though, his policy didn’t end up having terribly good results for Romania. I also gather that the Nazis weren’t great fans of abortion either (despite it often being likened to the Holocaust by the forced birth crowd), at least not for good Aryan breeding stock.
You’re right about Hitler–no aborting Nazi babies.
A number of right-wingers are already nostalgic for the days of shotgun marriages (so much better for women!) and there have been a couple of cases in recent years where someone decided the “solution” to a teenager getting raped was to make the rapist marry her.
And I agree, illegitimacy-shaming the kids wouldn’t surprise me.
In fairness, they can be flexible. When it’s Sarah Palin’s kid having a baby out of wedlock it’s AWESOME because she’s a Good Girl who doesn’t abort the fetus so praise Jesus!
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