For the longest time, I wondered why conservatives, more specifically the hardcore "pro-lifers" that comprise a significant portion of the current GOP, were so hell-bent on eliminating abortion and along with it the right for a woman to have agency over her own body. I actually had a longer, more drawn out post for this one, but then I thought, "the issue might not be as complicated as I thought." As much as I hated to trash that post, I'm glad I did.
It started out with paying attention to who exactly was calling for "the right to life" and the end of abortions. The more I listened to and read about the klaxon calls, the more I saw something that was rather disturbing, but something I shouldn't have been surprised about.
I noticed the calls for respecting the sanctity of life started no sooner than the act of copulation was done but abruptly ended as soon as the baby was finally born. Then the child goes from being a blessing to being a burden and a drain or just plain forgotten about. If conservatives had this much respect for a child when it was in the womb, you'd think they'd have that same level of respect for a child out of it, or for all life, for that matter. As you can see by current GOP goals to crumble up the social safety net like so many used Dixie cups, that's not the case.
I caught the vibe the pro-life movement seemed to be specifically aimed at white Americans. There were furtive efforts to bring black Americans and Hispanics into the pro-life tent, but the movement took on a sort of urgency I couldn't put my finger on.
Then I read the demographics.
Look at the latest U.S. Census figures and U.S. population projections for 2050 and beyond. The numbers don't lie. The U.S. is getting browner and browner by the minute, and that disturbs a lot of people. That would have been the end of it if it wasn't for a black man becoming a U.S. president, signaling the crumbling of another barrier and a slow end to Anglo-Saxon hegemony when it came to positions of power. You'd be surprised at how many people were comforted over the fact that a "colored" would never become president.
The GOP's worried about demographics being the party's downfall. With few Hispanics and nearly zero black Americans backing the GOP, the party has only a certain, dwindling pool of people to rely on. It's not just the crazy 27-percent - it's the relatively uninformed swing voters who'd vote for the most convincing personality if convinced hard enough into a certain direction. 2012 is the GOP's last chance. If they don't win this now, chances are they won't be able to win for the foreseeable future.
The alarm over abortion transforms into a silent worry that too many white women are choosing not to be fruitful and fulfill their destined duty while the wrong types of people are allowed to reproduce like crazy. The underlying story is "too many blacks and browns being born and not enough whites." Racial hegemony and political posturing swaddled in a blanket of faux concern for womens' prenatal health.
I also read about the Stolen Generation, about how the Australian government took scores of aboriginal children and attempted to reshape them into something more "respectable" to Anglo-Saxon standards. The ultimate aim was to simply breed the "abo" out of them, eventually leaving people with little to no trace of their original heritage and a culture that would be inevitably distilled to monuments, trinkets and rituals performed by people who haven't a clue about the actual people who were behind it all or their culture.
The native Americans were largely slaughtered into irrelevance and attempts to breed the Negro out of Negros only succeeded in adding a dollop of "Negro blood" into the white American gene pool. Eugenics was tried but that went out of fashion, eventually. I see much of the pro-life movement as a last gasp for retaining "demographic balance" while enforcing socio-religious mores at the same time.
Finally, I read this. This is powerful. This is something that everyone should read, comments and all.
One thing the author addresses is how the "bad" women who do decide to go ahead with having their child are expected to give their children up without a second thought - no guilt, no pain, no mourning. It's assumed that these women were callous enough to not want to keep their baby in the first place - henceforth, letting go wouldn't be any problem. It would be like leaving a Dixie cup on a counter and walking away:
And why the fuck are actual babies so disposable that you're expected to get over it after a suitable period of mourning (i.e., till you get a good Christian husband) in the case of adoption? It's odd how this does not apply in the case of aborting a blastocyst, when you're expected to wall yourself into a tomb away from decent society and gnaw on the bitter bones of your own despicable evil. Bad woman. BAD.
A certain morally vindictive set of folks see pregnancy as just desserts for promiscuity. Dealing with nine months of pregnancy and childbirth is supposed to be the punishment.
Babies as punishment, at least until they're given up to a proper, respectable "Christian" family who will raise them up in the proper "Christian" way until they grow up to be mirror images of what proper society deems to be a proper, respectable person. I always thought babies were a blessing...
