Republicans are just weird. They decry that government interference in family life and important decisions are expensive and intrusive, bankrupting the country and bordering on dictatorship. Then they proceed to send troops in to occupy tens of millions of uteri at taxpayer expense, particularly at the state level.
As restrictions on abortion and contraception have become the subject of state legislative action and Republican presidential candidates’ pitches to voters, arguments have focused on the issue’s moral and religious dimensions.
Less attention has been paid to the financial implications to states, businesses and women if governments impose policies that lead to increases in unplanned or unwanted pregnancies. The economic ramifications of such policies are important as the nation recovers from the worst recession since the Great Depression and governments work to reduce debts and deficits.
“There’s a simple math in place: more unintended pregnancies mean more public costs,” said Bill Albert, chief program officer at the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. “Especially for the deficit hawks, it is a penny-wise-pound-foolish strategy.”
Now Uteroccupiers(tm) know full well that it’s not about saving taxpayers money, it’s about using the power of the government to go after any group that sides with the Democrats as punishment. It’s also about wasting money on slut-shaming in order to say “Well, we can’t afford your schools and roads. maybe you should have thought of that before having sex.” They can’t openly say this, of course, so the Orwellian logic they do employ is quite illuminating.
Kristi Hamrick, a spokeswoman for Americans United for Life, a Washington-based legal organization that seeks to overturn abortion rights, rejected that conclusion, saying the value of life can’t be reduced to dollars and cents.
“The unknown and absolute value of life is clear in what a person brings to society,” Hamrick said. “Let’s look, for example, at a girl who gets pregnant in college, does marry the father of her child, works to raise this child, and he becomes president. That’s Barack Obama,” she said, in a reference to the life experiences of the president’s mother.
Now let’s pause for a minute on the fact that we have a conservative making the argument that at some point, even the hated Kenyan Colonialist was somebody’s baby, and that he was loved. I too am sensitive to that argument, having been adopted myself. Second chances and all that. But the thing is that she had a choice at the time, and it wasn’t the state’s job to tell her what to do, or to advocate for one choice over another when both choices are legal. An actual conservative would understand that, but then again we’re not dealing with actual conservatives, but Uteroccupiers(tm).
To them, it’s all about the exercise of power of the state over these women in a cynical effort to trap the ones who deviate socially from their prescribed plan of Dominionist theory. Nearly everything else that social conservatives do makes actual sense once put in the context of building a theocratic society where the wealthy are the favored people of the Divine Right of Cash, and they are morally superior to the rest of us. Basic birth control is vital to women being able to control their own bodies, and if you’re wondering why the GOP War on Women is so pervasive, it’s because it’s a keystone to women being independent members of society. To have that choice available for the unwashed masses is of course an affront.
Bringing in the portrait of the President as a young man is just too much for them to resist, too. They say that kids have to be brought into the world…and then they’re on their own, apparently.
The Other Chuck
Did Obama’s mother actually have a choice? Obama was born in 1961.
Handy
There is nothing conservative about being a conservative these days – it is all pretzel logic and emotional tantrums.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
This is essentially the same argument that Amanda Whatsherface over at Pandagon has been making for years.
Or in other words, the modern Republican Party’s platform on woman is that they should be barefoot, pregnant, and chained to the bed with just enough slack in the chain to get to the kitchen.
That’s a theory far easier understood by the masses. Whenever I see “Dominionist this and Dominionist that”, yes, it resonates but it’s not easily marketable.
Joel
The emphasis on choice is exactly right. We can’t lose that emphasis. Women have a choice and the government should not impede. This argument holds regardless of one’s personal opinion of the procedure.
SiubhanDuinne
Actually, she probably didn’t feel she had much of a choice back then. Ann Dunham would likely have known, guessed, or suspected that she was pregnant ’round about January 1961; Roe v. Wade wasn’t decided until twelve years later. I take your overall point, but having been born just months before Ann, I can well remember what it was like in those pre-legal days.
MeDrewNotYou
And even then they don’t really give a damn. If you really cared about every fertilized egg, you’d be all over free prenatal care, making sure the environment isn’t full of stuff that causes all sorts of issues, and what not. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a forced birth advocate talk about prenatal care or taking care of the woman.
It ain’t turtles all the way down, its slut-shaming all the way down.
Satanicpanic
We need to hammer home the point that concern about abortion never was about dead babies. People seem to finally be seeing this with the anti-contraception crusade.
mcd410x
I just priced a flight to London. From Florida, the grand total is $827. Of which the actual ticket is $235; the taxes and fees, $592.
Libertarians, where the fuck are you?
Roger Moore
How much of this is really about going after groups that side with the Democrats and how much is it going after the same old groups they’ve always been going after, and that their overt hostility to those groups has driven them into the arms of the Democrats? I realize there’s something of a chicken and egg issue with this argument, but it seems to me that the Republican attacks have frequently come first and the tendency of the groups they’ve attacked to vote Democratic have come later. It certainly seems to be that way with many socially conservative ethnic minorities, who started out leaning Republican but have been running toward the Democrats since the white supremacist demographic within the Republican party decided they made an attractive target.
mai naem
If Jeffrey Dahmer’s mommy had aborted him, we wouldn’t have had a serial murderer around. And your point is?
SiubhanDuinne
@SiubhanDuinne:
I guess I should add that back alleys, coat hangers, iffy nostrums, and quick trips to Mexico might have been among Ann Dunham’s “choices” in 1961, but legal and safe alternatives? No.
(Mind you, I am exceedingly glad things turned out the way they did. I’m in no way advocating that it would have been a good thing for her to have terminated her pregnancy.)
Mark S.
Conservatives always think this is such a trump card: we hate abortion because we love black babies! We even love your African President!
aimai
Its unbelievably insulting to Ann Dunham to act as though her wanted child was an unplanned pregnancy. Just as it is incredibly short sighted and insulting to act as though the right wing’s attacks on contraception and on abortion rights have anything in particular to do with teen pregnancy. They don’t. Under the kinds of conditions of economic stress the American family is experiencing lots of married couples need and want both contraception and abortion to control their family size. This is not an issue of unbridled teen sexuality. Its just as devastating to a marriage and the home economy to have one more pregnancy and birth than you can afford as it is to a teenager.
And another dirty little secret is that unwanted pregnancies inside a marriage can result in the collapse of a marriage and the destruction of the home economy–much of the fallout from that can probably be seen in new divorces, new kids on WIC, stress on the public schools, stress on the broken insurance system, underweight and early babies in the NICU. There’s a shitload of stuff that happens when an older, married, woman gets unexpectedly pregnant and can’t or won’t have an abortion. That ends up costing a bunch of money to the taxpayers as well as to the family.
aimai
MeDrewNotYou
@comrade scott’s agenda of rage: I’ve always been a pretty liberal guy, but when I started to learn about feminism, I was sympathetic but thought some of the complaints were overblown. These people don’t actually hate women, they just like being in charge or liked “the good ole’ days.” That they didn’t want to control women, they just didn’t want to cede control to anyone.
But now, when I hear Limbaugh say “feminazi,” I know exactly what he and millions of other people want. I’m just ashamed it took me a few years to get there when it looks so damn obvious now.
butler
@Roger Moore: Its both the chicken and the egg depending on the particular circumstance and group. But either way the result is the same.
mai naem
@mcd410x: Uhm, last time I checked they were busy making sure that women did not have the right to choose and children absolutely had the right to go work in Big Ag farms.
Linnaeus
@The Other Chuck:
Hawaii was the first state to make abortion at the request of the woman legal, but that didn’t happen until 1970.
J
I’ve just come from the dentist’s office, where they now have a TV. Not sure what I think of this innovation, but in any case Nikki Haley was being interviewed by Barbara Walters. Without being exactly hard-hitting, Walters did ask some of the questions that need to be asked. To the question about contraception, Haley replied ‘women don’t care about contraception, they care about jobs’. I think the implication was they (the poor little dears) couldn’t care about both. To the question about the confederate flag flying over the capitol, she said something about SC having elected her, an Indian immigrant, as gov. It’s unclear to me how this is supposed to answer the question, but needless to say there was no follow-up.
Betty Cracker
I’m not sure I give Republicans the level of credit for organization that you do, Z. The way I look at it, the moneyed interests really run the whole shebang, and they couldn’t give a crap less about abortion, gays, etc. Those are merely convenient levers to manipulate the votes of enough people to swing elections the moneyed interests’ way.
If there were a sufficient number of libertarians, the GOP bigwigs would kiss off the evangelicals, and the Republican Party platform would include unrestricted abortion, legal pot and gay marriage. It’s all about regulation and taxes to the people who actually run the GOP. The Republic of Gilead or Galt’s Gulch — it really makes no nevermind to them.
Roger Moore
@J:
It’s a variant on the “I can’t be racist because I have a black friend” dodge. SC can’t be racist because they elected a minority governor.
Horrendo Slapp (formerly Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.)
@Handy:
This is right. Conservatives and Republicans are essentially children, emotionally. I deal with my almost 5 year old little girl every day, and the way she behaves wouldn’t stick out at all among a convention of conservatives, other than that she’s maybe more empathetic. One of our failings as liberals is that we unendingly appeal to reason and logic, and those don’t work with children.
Children think nothing of holding two mutually exclusive beliefs in their minds at the same time, and neither do conservatives. Children are willing to trash the place to get their way if they need to, and so are conservatives. Children are forever whining about how some objectively perfectly reasonable refusal to give them their way is a monumnetal injustice, the likes of which the world has never seen, and so are conservatives.
I think our first hurdle is to understand conservatives, and, in essence, they’re stunted people, little children in growuup bodies. Understanding what we’re dealing with is a first step. Finding a way to deal with them is the next, and I don’t have aan answer for that. Withholding treats for a day, giving them an early bedtime or not taking them on a fun outing works with 4 or 5 year olds, but I don’t know whether that would work with Republicans.
bleh
@Roger Moore: I think it’s also in part about simple media manipulation — keeping the mouth-breathing rubes chasing after shiny objects, and turning off in disgust the people who can tie their shoes without instruction, leaving the field to the very wealthy and their servants, who proceed to further their agenda of transferring wealth upward.
ruemara
Here’s the shit. If they loved babies as much as they claimed; 1. Well Baby Care would be a GOP platform.
2. Generous housing and food subsidies for families and marriage/co-housing benefits to encourage 2 parent families.
3. Birth Control Rights to prevent unplanned, unwanted pregnancy. All those religious fasctwits would be rolling condoms on bananas at every school from grade 5 on up with a happy “Jesus loves you and loves you staying safe!” poster behind them.
If they aren’t do that, fuck ’em. They’re just anti-sex.
Horrendo Slapp (formerly Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.)
@ruemara:
Ha, this fits right in with my Republicans Are Morally and Emotionally Stunted 6 Year Olds in Grown-Up Bodies Theory™. Most children find the thought of sex horrifying, disgusting and disturbing when they learn how it works. I need to get a grant to study my theory…
Satanicpanic
They do, it just takes years and years, and some don’t get there. Those that don’t get there call themselves conservatives.
Roger Moore
@Betty Cracker:
I think that’s the theory, but this election seems to be demonstrating that the Galtian Overlords don’t have as tight a grip on the party as they thought. The days when the billionaires could call the shots and the rubes would go along are past. That’s the deeper meaning of the Tea Party.
ruemara
@Horrendo Slapp (formerly Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.): To be honest, it sorta is, unless you’re doing it. Then it’s fun.
Southern Beale
God I fucking hate that argument. Heard that a lot regarding Steve Jobs, too — his biological mother was unwed and put him up for adoption. You know, Ted Bundy and David “Son Of Sam” Berkowitz were adopted too. There are no guarantees.
That’s the most dishonest argument, that every fetus becomes president or a Steve Jobs or whatever. WTF. These women had a choice and good for them for choosing as they did. That’s the point of CHOICE. Choice doesn’t mean you’re forced to have an abortion. Choice means you get to fucking CHOOSE.
I dunno, how many pregnant women think, “oh I’d better continue this pregnancy because my child will be president one day”? Or conversely, “better have an abortion because I’m pretty sure this kid is gonna be a serial killer.” WTF?
Jesus. This attitude strikes me as a very male, Christian attitude, rooted in Biblical tales like the annunciation. I don’t think it’s rooted in the real world. So fucking stupid.
Mnemosyne
@SiubhanDuinne:
aimai has pinpointed the problem here, I think:
Really, that’s what they’re saying: Ann Dunham couldn’t possibly have really wanted to marry a black man and have his black baby, so she totally would have leaped at the chance to have an abortion if it had been available. Therefore, we have to prevent other women from having abortions just in case things happen to work out for them, too.
Also, too, I hate to say it, but I suspect that in 1961 a white girl who was pregnant with a half-black embryo and didn’t want the baby would have no trouble at all getting a “therapeutic” abortion from any doctor she went to, even in a happily mixed-race state like Hawaii.
Amir Khalid
@J:
Did Governor Haley actually call herself an immigrant? Sounds like she’s stretching the truth just an ooch too far. Per her Wikipedia entry, she was born in South Carolina. Her parents are immigrants from Punjab state in India.
batgirl
@Mark S.:
Of course black babies grown into black teens who wear hoodies. We see how much the conservatives have valued the life of Trayvon Martin. “Value of life” for these assholes ends at birth.
RedKitten
@ruemara:
They’re just anti-sex. There is NO damn way that the right-wing is going to endorse well-baby care ,or housing and food subsidies for families. That would encourage more poor people (read: black people, Mexicans, and people on welfare) to have more brats, thus taking even MORE of the hard-working taxpayer’s money! No, no, no. They can’t have that.
When it comes to poor people, the right-wing doesn’t want to help them obtain birth control, because that’s immoral, and hands off MY money! They don’t want to help them more easily afford families, because that will just encourage them to make more welfare babies, and hands off MY money!
The right-wing solution is that if you’re too poor to pay for the pill yourself, you should just never have sex again for the rest of your life. Only hard-working ‘Muricans deserve to procreate. The rest of y’all can just die out, like God intended.
SiubhanDuinne
@Mnemosyne:
And I fully agree with you and Aimai. I have no idea whether Ann Dunham wanted the baby, or would have made a different choice if she thought she had a choice. I just don’t know.
That’s all I was saying, although perhaps not very gracefully: that pre-1973, as I vividly remember, “choice” just wasn’t part of the equation for an awful lot of women, and it was misleading (IMHO) for Zandar to have stated “she had a choice at the time” when she really didn’t.
You make a good point, though, about the likelihood of her being able to get a “therapeutic” abortion had she wanted one, in those anti-miscegenation days.
slag
@aimai:
Seconded. And it’s also very convenient. Just like it being all part of God’s Plan(TM). The way I see it is, if God has a Plan that involves treating women as little more than hapless potting soil, then God’s an asshole. Why should anyone follow a Plan drawn up by an asshole?
beergoggles
Fixt.
RSA
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Americans United for Life is also rabidly opposed to Obamacare. And yet it’s easy to imagine just a small change in Hamrick’s statement:
Sorry, mom to a potential future President. You’re on your own.
aimai
People routinely had babies much younger–even in college!-in those days. The entire argument that Ann Dunham probably would have aborted President Obama if she’d had the chance is based on the racist assumption that she couldn’t really have wanted to have a “half black” child. That she didn’t love and admire her husband enough to want to have a child with him. There’s zero evidence for that perspective, or none that the right wing ever adduces. The racism of the conflation of Ann Dunham (married woman) with a horny teenager is overdtermined, to say the least.
Anyways, the other obscenity lying in the argument is that it is not a liberal argument that any children are “throwaways.” It is the right wing–right now in Wisconsin–who compares single motherhood to child abuse, and who believe that every child that doesn’t have a middle class white father and mother is doomed to destruction. They make the same argument with lesbian and gay parents, afterall. For them children in unapproved family structures are cursed–more akin to the (also phantasmagorical) “crack babies” than they are to real babies.
Liberals believe every child should be a wanted child and that the government can step in and help overwhelmed parents–with great schools, free health care, and etc… make up the difference so that all the children of single parents can grow up to be productive citizens. Its a straight up right wing viewpoint that we need more miserable orphans to staff the workhouses (that’s Gingerich’s argument, btw).
aimai
J
@Amir Khalid: Sorry, probably not, she may have described herself as a daughter of immigrants, or said they were the first Indian family in whatever little town it was in which she began dreaming the American dream or whatever. In any case, a useless answer on her part
Zandar
@Roger Moore:
Ehh, that’s a decent argument. Did the GOP create the exodus, or the exodus create the GOP?
Mnemosyne
@SiubhanDuinne:
But AFAIK, there’s zero evidence that Dunham didn’t want to get married and/or have a baby. If there was any, I think it would have come up in her recent biography. And, as Aimai points out, the age of first marriage was much, much lower in 1961 than it is now.
Making the automatic assumption that of course she would have gotten an abortion is, frankly, insulting to her.
the fugitive uterus
NO! GET.OUT! really?? what an astonishing revelation! i may have to sit down for a moment and catch my breath. i’m not sure i can get past the title at the moment, my brain is spinning.
Amanda
Several folks up thread have alluded to this, but I just wanted to offer one other reason that the righties are finally showing their anti-contraception and deep women hating ways at this time…the racial demographic change that is sweeping our country.
The more I listen to these people, I don’t think I’m wrong to hear that they are, among other things, interested in FORCING the birth of more white babies. Controlling the fertility of all non-monied women doesn’t just affect women of color but a lot of white women, too. And these guys really really want those women to give birth. If they muck with the rights of women of color in the process, my guess is that is viewed as a bonus too. But FORCING white women to get with the program of reproducing as they should is, I think, a key underlying often unspoken motive here.
There are alot of white people (disclosure: I am white & female) who are clearly super freaked out that they aren’t going to be the majority soon or may already be a minority. They are not handling it well. And they’re lashing out desperately in all sorts of ugly irrational ways. I think this is one of them. I think it would behoove us as progressives to name this clearly for folks so they see it for what it is. Thoughts?
Horrendo Slapp (formerly Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.)
@aimai:
I couldn’t have put this any better. Thank you.
hitchhiker
I personally know four young adults who would not be on the planet today if their mothers had not had access to abortion services long before those young adults were born.
Those mothers’ lives would have been irrevocably altered if they had been forced to carry college-years unplanned pregnancies to term. Those mothers would not be married to the men they are married to, and they would not have been in a position to give birth to their now grown children, if they had been forced to give birth before it made sense for them to do so.
I always think about those four young adults — delightful, worthy people — when I hear the emotional, faith-based agonizing over abortion. For all the right-to-lifers know, it was always God’s plan for these people to be born, and things were so arranged.
For all they know, these four young adults were what God had in mind all along. Or would they like to claim that none of them should exist?
Patricia Kayden
@Mark S.: Yeah, their actions really show how much they love the President! Could you imagine what they’d do if they HATED him?
Roger Moore
@Amanda:
Forcing white women to have babies isn’t going to help much when the fathers aren’t white. Something like one in six or one in seven new marriages in the US now is between people from different census designated ethnic groups. In the Western US, it’s more like one in five. Unless they can overturn Loving v. Virginia, attempts at increasing the “white” population are more or less doomed.
@Zandar:
I think there’s a feedback loop, but the driving force is White Christian Male hatred for Other. A good example of this is the Muslim vote. Before 9/11, it tended to lean Republican, but all the Republican Muslim bashing has driven them into the Democrats’ arms.
hw3
It always amazed me that the culture warriors are both Pro-life, and Stand-Your-Ground and state-sanctioned death supporters.
Apparently, small government protection of the sanctity of life is only appropriate while the fetus is in a woman’s body. Once, he’s out, he’s fair game.
fuzed
Its all about imposing their moral values structures onto others. Basically, social Jihad/crusadism. Conservatism/Republicanism is just a thin veil (heheh) to make it palatable to the MSM.
patrick II
While we don’t know the precise value Republicans put on life, we can figure a range.
1. Profit yearly to insurance companies before ACA = P
2. Lower yearly profits to insurance companies after ACA = L
3. The 45,000 Deaths each year from lack of health care (according to a Harvard study) = D.
4. Estimate of the Republicans dollar assignment of the Value of life = V
V<((P-L)/D))
Or the Value of a life for republicans is less than the difference in yearly profits divided by the amount of people who die each year from lack of healthcare. The value is not lower bounded by zero, since sometimes I think they would like to kill someone just to watch them die.
sophronia
If their goal really is to force more white middle-class births, they’re going about it totally wrong. The people these laws are going to affect are going to be overwhelmingly the poor and marginalized.
So what they’re actually doing, as the article points out, is ensuring that a lot more babies will be born to poor, nonwhite mothers. These mothers will then need more public resources such as food stamps and public health care, to raise their kids. And in the worst-case scenario, the foster care system will be hugely overburdened by kids abandoned by parents who simply can’t afford to care for them.
Unless they’re hoping that without Obamacare, all these kids will die young, what they’re creating is a massive glut of penniless, unparented children who will have to be raised by our increasingly starved state governments. Certainly a recipe for disaster. If these laws continue to be enacted across the country, along with the Republican starve-the-government agenda, I fully expect the U.S. to look more and more like Russia in a generation or two.
SiubhanDuinne
@Mnemosyne:
Again, I am not making that assumption. I’ve tried to say that as many ways as I know how.
danielx
@Horrendo Slapp (formerly Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.):
Nicely summarized, and examples are legion.
Republicans:
We believe that all life is sacred from conception until birth, then it sucks to be you if you don’t have at least middle class, reasonably well adjusted parents.
We believe in smaller, less intrusive government, and this applies particularly to financial and corporate regulation. In the area personal behavior, not so much – we think that government should be very intrusive when it comes to women’s bodies, to the point of committing rape under the laws of many states. Except for this area, we are completely against any government involvement with any aspect of health care, except for Medicare and paying for top shelf insurance for Republican congressmen. Pay no attention to that Republican originated mandated coverage idea behind the curtain over there.
Also we are totally sure of the government need to control the use of recreational substances and the need for government surveillance of behavior, communications, finances and anything else which might be of use in controlling personal and/or political behavior. All in the name of keeping us safe, of course. Forget all that Ron Paul libertarian bullshit, we don’t need no stinkin’ liberty except for use in slogans.
Except, of course, when it comes to the media reporting on the financial and sexual peccadilloes of Republican politicians and preachers, which should totally be kept secret. We also believe that the government should keep just about everything secret, because the less information people have the less likely they are to get uppity. Also we don’t believe in any regulation on the possession, carrying or use of firearms except that we think everyone should have one except people we don’t like. (If you know who we’re talking about, and we know you do.)
We totally believe in every provision of that sacred document the Constitution except when it would interfere with something we want to do, in which case it’s just a goddamned piece of paper.
We believe that tax cuts are the answer to every problem because taxes are coercive. Except when it comes to using taxation as a cub on activities we don’t approve of, in which case taxes should be raised to the sky if not higher.
And if you disagree with us on any of these ideas, we’ll kill you.
Roger Moore
@sophronia:
You’re assuming that the social safety net will still be there. These kids aren’t going to be getting food stamps, public health care, or even foster care, because the Republicans are trying to gut those programs, too. In the Republicans’ ideal world, their parents will be thrown into debtors’ prison and the children would be sent to a workhouse. Where else are they supposed to get workers who can compete with the Chinese on wages?
Interrobang
@Southern Beale: *applause* And some of those fetuses grow up to be technical writers living relatively unremarkable lives in middle-sized Canadian cities.
Some of us also wind up with physical disabilities because our biological mothers were too damn young to carry us to term. No forced-birther has ever offered to do chores I can’t handle because of my cerebral palsy. And my pro-choice parents are one adopted special-needs kid up on every single one I’ve ever met.
Beauzeaux
@The Other Chuck: Not for a legal abortion.I guess she could have had an illegal one.
And you know, it STILL wouldn’t be any of my business.
Amanda
@Roger Moore: Absolutely agree with your point about increasing multi-racial demographic. Yeah rationality is not their strong suit, these folks.