“You can imagine a future in which anti-abortion laws are permanently linked to a punitive and stingy politics.”

That’s a quote from Ross Douthat’s latest column, in which he portrays the Dobbs decision killing the right to abortion as a miracle: the majority of Americans support the right of abortion, the Democrats support abortion and yet those plucky underdog forced-birthers won a victory in their crusade against the right not to be pregnant.

This is the future Republicans want (so is this) but it looks like it might hurt them at the polls. With the midterms so close, Douthat blithely assures us that “punitive and stingy politics” needn’t be the  future. He mentions anti-abortion legal scholar Erika Bachiochi who argues abortion is really anti-woman, an excuse for corporations and governments not to support women or children. But now that red states can ban abortion, they only way they can help the poor is by actually helping them with more generous maternity welfare benefits.

Yeah, right. If they were going to do that, why aren’t they doing it already? Lots of anti-abortion red state governments have enough Republicans in office to pass bills; hell, if they proposed it most Democrats would sign on because it’s a good idea. Contrary to Bachiochi, there’s no reason to think Republicans are using abortion as an excuse not to provide welfare: they hate government benefits unless they’re going to rich people.. Easing the pressure on women who get abortions for financial reasons could cut the abortion rate and help the fetuses and babies Republicans claim to care about. Why wait? Or (as someone suggested online elsewhere) why not set up generous welfare laws that activate as soon as abortion bans become law?

Simple. They. Don’t. Want. To. They might make small, grudging concessions but nothing compared to the need. Washington could have passed some kind of family support bill under Trump but it didn’t, any more than it passed the wonderful better-than-ACA health plan they’ve always pretended they’re working on.

If you don’t like misogyny, vote Democratic on Tuesday (assuming you haven’t voted already). Not that Democrats are free of it, but they don’t embrace it as a policy plank. It’s a choice between an America slowly inching towards equal rights for women and Gilead.

As Mollie O’Reilly says, Republicans have learned they don’t have to be decent or compassionate to win elections and it might cost them votes from their own people if they were. Though some of them are backing off their absolutist right-to-life stance. Pro-lifers are insisting they don’t want to prosecute moms but they’ve been lying about that for a while (“don’t want” will never translate into “we’ll fight it”).

NC Republican congressional candidate Bo Hines has gone from No Exceptions to letting rape and incest victims get abortions if a local review panel signs off. That’s kind of brilliant — a Shirley exception pretense they’re going to be compassionate in special cases combined with an option to slut shame the women (why was she dressed like that? Was she a virgin? Sluts can’t get raped, everyone knows that!), then force them to give birth anyway. And I’ll bet money that if elected, Hines will sign off on the first absolute ban he gets a chance to vote for.

Oppose them in every way possible. Predictions of a red wave are quite possibly wrong — let’s make the red wave not happen!

In other abortion-related news:

Yet another right-winger thinks if you got pregnant after rape, it’s god’s plan. Not just no, but hell no!

“The mother was 21 weeks pregnant with identical twins, which shared one placenta. One of the twins was almost certainly going to die, which would most likely have killed the other twin without intervention.” — from an article about red-state abortion doctors who are either changing careers or relocating.

“To sue on behalf of the embryo, the would-be father, Ryan Magers, went to probate court where he asked a judge to appoint him as the personal representative of the estate.”

“Medicine can answer the question ‘When does a biological organism cease to exist?’ But they can’t answer the question ‘When does a person begin or end?’ because those are metaphysical issues.”

If you want to hide the fact of your pregnancy from apps and databases it’s not easy.

I write a lot more about right-wing anti-abortion bullshit in Undead Sexist Cliches.