Punishing Women?
I really wasn’t interested one way or another in Amy Sullivan’s article on the future of evangelicals in US politics. But the vicious responses it drew made me interested.
Whoa!For another, it’s delusional thinking to believe that the reason abortion is such a hot-button issue is because of some desire to help babies: it’s mainly about controlling women and controlling sexuality.
The polling data on abortion is confusing stuff. People want abortion legal for anyone they know who wants one, and illegal for everyone else. Or they want abortion legal when it’s described in nice-sounding terms, and illegal when it’s not.
But clearly there is a huge portion of the population that thinks the illegalization of abortion is at least an idea worth considering. My question, then, is whether ALL of those people really want to control women and control sexuality.
I’ll spare you the boring biographical details, cut to the chase, and say that I know more than a few people who favor banning abortion and who, so far as I can tell, aren’t yearning to bind women’s feet. They actually DO think there’s a child’s life at stake. Really, they do. They’re not just saying that so they can repeal women’s suffrage after the election.
I don’t know what it is about abortion that makes stubborn children out of intelligent people on both sides who can discuss any other political issue, including ones on which children’s lives depend, rationally. On the left you have the people who say that not only should abortion be legal, not only must we pretend there’s a right to abortion in the Constitution, but we can’t even refer to abortion as an undesirable turn of events. (Atrios, I’m looking at you.) On the right, you have people (Papists like me, mostly) who are basically socialists but won’t ever vote for a Democrat because of abortion.
That the former group won’t engage the latter is just dumb.