I can imagine that people like Will Saletan, who sincerely want to believe that there’s a possibility of separating “pro-life” opposition to abortion from “pro-life” opposition to contraception and sex education, might actually be shocked at this news that should shock no one who admits that anti-choicers are and have always been more interested in punishing women for having sex than preserving fetal life.
As the White House readies its plan for finding “common ground” on reproductive health issues and reducing the need for abortion, a major debate has emerged over how to package the plan’s two major components: preventing unwanted pregnancies and reducing the need for abortion.
Many abortion rights advocates and some Democrats who want to dial down the culture wars want the White House to package the two parts of the plan together, as a single piece of legislation. The plan would seek to reduce unwanted pregnancies by funding comprehensive sex education and contraception and to reduce the need for abortion by bolstering federal support for pregnant women. Supporters of the approach say it would force senators and members of Congress on both sides of the abortion battle to compromise their traditional positions, creating true common ground that mirrors what President Obama has called for.
From the get-go, the selling point of “common ground” has been that it’s not a compromise of core beliefs, but an attempt to find what both sides have in common and work with that. A plan to offer more social support to women who continue pregnancies, to offer more contraception and sex education to prevent unplanned pregnancies, and to make adoption easier (whatever that means) only works if you assume good faith all around, and believe that anti-choicers are actually in this because they are disturbed by the killing of fetuses. In that case, there is a lot of common ground, and no one should have a problem with this bill.
In reality, anti-choicers are experiencing this as a compromise, even if you remove the contraception and sex education parts. If you correctly assume that the anti-choice movement is motivated primarily by a misogynist need to punish women who have unapproved sex, then you can see how offering social support to mothers is already, from their point of view, a compromise of their basic beliefs, from two angles:
1) The sex is bad angle. Anti-choicers see sex as fundamentally sinful, especially out of the bonds of marriage, and unplanned pregnancy as both a punishment for those who transgress and a danger to keep others from transgressing. From that point of view then, there’s something distasteful about making it easier on women who have babies out of wedlock. If you’re trying to use punishment as a deterrent, especially from the right wing point of view, then it’s not especially effective to reduce the amount of punishment. But wingnuts are willing to compromise on this issue, because they compromise on the punishment thing a lot. For instance, from their point of view, they’re letting go of anti-sodomy laws, but they’re not going to just roll over for gay marriage.
2) The patriarchal angle. Opposition to abortion and birth control are about more than making women pay for fucking. It’s about channeling women into their proper patriarchal gender roles. Ideally, for anti-choicers, all unplanned pregnancies would result in giving a baby up to be adopted by proper married parents, or the pregnant mother would get married. (That unplanned pregnancies happen and are aborted within marriage doesn’t compute, even though 1/3 of abortions are obtained by women who are or have been married before.) From this point of view, the social support for pregnant women is a huge compromise of values on their part, because it makes it easier for women to be single mothers, which they definitely oppose, even though it’s hard enough to satisfy angle #1. But since abortion is legal, there’s not much they can do about it. That they understand that a lot of women simply will don’t have adoption or marriage on the radar for this pregnancy is a huge concession to reality for them.