Anti-choice advocates say they oppose abortion because it stops a beating heart.
They say it makes no sense to have a rape or incest exception because it’s not the fault of the beating heart that it was conceived through violence.
That’s rather difficult to believe when the exact same people also say that capital punishment — though it stops a beating heart — is an appropriate punishment.
It’s also rather difficult to believe when the exact same people also say that stopping the beating hearts of hundreds of children who were simply attending school is just the price we have to pay for gun rights.
But it’s the extreme cruelty of the refusal to make exceptions to save the life of the mother — to prevent stopping HER beating heart — that reveals what’s really going on.
When it comes to anti-abortion legislation, the cruelty is the point!
Adam Serwer, writing in The Atlantic in 2018 first articulated in print what we all know to be true:
President Trump and his supporters find community by rejoicing in the suffering of those they hate and fear.
Unpacking his assertion further:
Taking joy in that suffering is more human than most would like to admit. Somewhere on the wide spectrum between adolescent teasing and the smiling white men in the lynching photographs are the Trump supporters whose community is built by rejoicing in the anguish of those they see as unlike them, who have found in their shared cruelty an answer to the loneliness and atomization of modern life.
And they hate and fear women, particularly educated and powerful women.
That’s why when a tape surfaced immediately before the 2016 election that quoted Trump advising another man, “Grab ‘em by the pussy,” it wasn’t disqualifying. To his supporters it was fulfillment of their ugliest fantasies: to humiliate, punish, and terrorize the women they fear.
The recent spate of anti-abortion legislation is just another form of “grab ‘em by the pussy.” It is designed with the express intent of humiliating, punishing and terrorizing women.
THAT’S why such legislation often doesn’t have exceptions for rape or incest. It’s not enough imagine violated women; it is more satisfying to watch them fear an unwanted pregnancy and live a life destroyed. And it sends a message to all women — even their wives and daughters — that men are ENTITLED to control women’s lives.
THAT’S why such legislation often doesn’t have exceptions for the life of the mother. Apparently even humiliation, punishment and terror are not enough to appease the men who fear they have lost control of women. Women must die. It sends a message to everyone that men OWN women’s lives, which they can extinguish at their will.
To paraphrase Serwer:
The fundamental belief of those responsible for anti-abortion legislation is that the United States is the birthright of straight, white, Christian men. Their only real, authentic pleasure is in cruelty. The ability to execute that cruelty — anti-abortion legislation — makes them euphoric. And if women have to die, so much the better!
