In the wake of a leaked draft of a Supreme Court opinion that seeks to eviscerate abortion rights, it’s worth asking:
Is there anything more hypocritical than a reactionary Republican Party — that revels in cruelty and violence against its perceived enemies — claiming that their opposition to abortion rights stems from a respect for human life?
I doubt it.
The Republican Party, the same group of people who can’t be bothered to restrict guns, which kill more than 30,000 people per year, that separated immigrant toddlers from their mothers and put them in cages are rabid to restrict abortions. It has nothing to do with respecting life and everything to do with oppressing women.
How do I know?
By observing the monstrous gulf between what they say and what they do.
Check out their favorite slogans:
Choose life.
That’s an argument for universal healthcare, not an argument for banning abortions. Curiously, many of those who staunchly oppose pregnancy termination have no problem denying life saving healthcare for others, including children.
Providing health insurance for poor children is choosing life, but apparently for the anti-choice crowd all life is not equal. They are keen to protect life from conception up to, but not including, birth. Once you’re born, your life is worthless if you are poor or a child of immigrants or a child of color.
Abortion stops a beating heart.
You know what else stops a beating heart? Capital punishment. Despite that incontrovertible fact, many of those reactionary Republicans who profess “pro-life” beliefs have no problem letting government stop the beating hearts of those convicted of crimes. If your reason for opposing abortion is to preserve life, it is hypocritical to promote mandated death at the hands of government.
They feel pain.
We could argue about whether or not science supports the claim that an embryo feels pain, but there is absolutely no doubt that everyone born, regardless of age, race or economic class feels pain. So why do the same reactionary Republicans who feel they must protect the unborn from pain practically revel in the pain of Black families whose fathers, brothers and sons are shot in the back by police officers? Why do they support the police and not the innocents who are gunned down?
Pro-life means every life has value.
If every life has value, why didn’t Republicans support Colin Kapernick’s campaign to kneel when the national anthem is played in order to draw attention to the Black lives lost to police violence? Those opposing Kapernick justify it by claiming he is disrespecting the flag. That’s a lie, but even if it were true, are we supposed to believe that a piece of cloth has greater value than the life of a young Black man?
Abortion is murder.
We could argue whether abortion is murder, but there’s no argument that murder is murder. Guns facilitate murder. Indeed, hand guns and semi-automatic and automatic weapons have no purpose other than to murder or threaten to murder others. If reactionary Republicans actually cared about murder, they would ban murder weapons, but you won’t see anyone in Congress stand up to the gun lobby.
These five slogans of the anti-choice movement put its hypocrisy into high relief. The so called “pro life” crowd has no problem being anti-life whenever it suits them. So if ending abortion isn’t about saving lives, what is it about?
It’s about punishing women — but never men — for sex.
It’s about promoting misogyny, forcing women — but not men — to be slaves to their biology.
It’s about privileging radical white Christian nationalist ideology above the Constitution.
Because make no mistake, criminalizing abortion will not end abortion. It will just kill women.
Who cares? Certainly not the “choose life” crowd!
