Forced birthers: if you can get pregnant, God demands you do so!

In May, two men writing for the popular evangelical website The Stream warned that “maternal sovereignty”—the “right to refuse motherhood”—is so dangerous and “deadly” a notion that “rational women” who abort “for calculated reasons” should be placed in “short but mandatory psychiatric custody.‘” As Charlotte Shane writes at the link, these dudes aren’t outliers in the forced-birth movement: at its heart, it’s built around the belief that women have no right not to be pregnant. Nor any rights, period, compared to the fetus — women, as I’ve mentioned before, are aquariums.

The Federalist has printed multiple articles discussing how women refusing to get pregnant are making a terrible mistake. Matt Walsh thinks the very idea of contraception treats pregnancy as a health issue rather than celebrating the power of women to give birth (never mind that it does, indeed, come with lots of health issues). Despite lies about how the Dobbs decision doesn’t threaten birth control access, they are coming for our contraception (gay marriage too). Why wouldn’t they, when they hate the idea of women having premarital sex without consequences.

In other misogynist news:

“If, in a given day, twenty such fetuses are flushed into the Town’s wastewater treatment systems, it would be the equivalent of a shredded forearm or foot being passed through the system” — a bullshit claim one pro-choice group used against a proposed new Planned Parenthood clinic.

For years Texas pushed a disastrously ineffective abstinence-only education program on students. I’m pleased they’re finally discussing contraceptives in class too.

State Rep. Neal Collins said he was horrified to learn how the state’s abortion restrictions affected women. Faced with a worse bill, however — no rape or incest exemption — he didn’t vote against it, he simply abstained. Way to go!

The University of Idaho says if any of its staff or teachers do or say anything that might be construed as promoting abortion, they face possible jail time and a bar from state employment.

Forced birthers have claimed for years that they oppose punishing women who get abortions. This has always been a lie. I doubt we’ll hear the movement object to Pen. gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano supporting murder charges against women who get abortions.

The FBI recently took anti-abortion activist Mark Houck into custody for injuring a 74-year-old abortion-clinic escort. Franklin Graham, who was fine with Brett Kavanaugh committing assault claims the FBI sent a SWAT team to arrest Houck, which the FBI denies.

While Graham is a lying, immoral snake, it’s possible the SWAT team accounts are right — using SWAT teams when there’s little justification is a common thing. But Graham painting Houck as a godly man who should never have been arrested at all is nonsense, just another iteration of the right-wing belief (as expressed by some of the 1/6 coup group) that police are supposed to arrest other people, not them! I doubt a SWAT team dealing with a liberal activist or any of the unmarked police vans snatching people off the Portland streets a few years ago would upset Graham at all.

The Republican war on women getting non-abortion medical treatment continues apace.

In more general misogynist news

I wrote a lot about the incels in Undead Sexist Cliches. They haven’t gotten any less misogynistic.