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My mother was very religious, she's not so religious anymore. But back when I was in high school and college, she joined the anti-abortion movement. I don't understand why - she was hanging out with all of these Republicans, going to conferences, and all the while she would tell me how much she disagreed with them on other issues. This Kavanaugh stuff has brought back a lot of my feelings of revulsion from that time. It sickens me to see how excited these people are about his nomination.
They are a bunch of phonies. One of them had a daughter who had two miscarriages - surely if this was a "human life" that was lost, he'd be mourning, he'd have a funeral for it and they'd name the "baby", but his family didn't make a big deal of it. They live in a world of cognitive dissonance - what about all of the pregnancies that naturally don't come to term? They are motivated by fear - fear of their religious values losing influence in the culture - it's not just about abortion. It's about their group maintaining their power and influence. They feel that their whole way of life is under attack.
They're also horribly classist and racist - they only associate with "their own kind', their not familiar with cultures other than their own white middle-class culture. And they tend to be affluent. They tend to have a philosophy of protecting their own - which is why they apologize for rapists and look the other way when one of their own finances an abortion.
For some reason women's autonomy scares the hell out of them. They can't wrap their heads around the fact that the majority of people in this country do not think abortion is "murder", that it's a private decision. They're shoving their religion into politics and most people don't share their religious views. They claim to be patriotic, but loyalty to their religious beliefs over separation of church and state is not patriotic at all!
Somehow we have failed to drive these points home and get these arguments into the mainstream. They're bullies, and we need to push back. They try to paint abortion rights activists as sluts and Hollywood-type elites. This is nonsense - ordinary women support the right to choose.
I think we've made the mistake of thinking of abortion as a marginal issue, but it's a major battle we need to fight and win if we want to dismantle the power of this way of thinking. Abortion as an issue needs to be dead and buried for good, or we're going to continue to have these nauseating spectacles. It needs to address the class, race and religious makeup of the anti-abortion movement, and their bigotries and biases. We need to stop painting it as just a "women's issue".
On a final note, they're just CREEPY. It's creepy for a father (and many of these people are men - men dominate the movement and are the most vocal and bullying, even if you see a lot of women in the movement) to lecture his daughter about her uterus.
