Woozle/2021/11/20/2

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subject: Historically, this is where anti-abortion legislation leads.

Some things to remember:

1. Most of humanity is opposed to abortion. Most of humanity is opposed to diseases, death, or poverty. We all want less of all those things.

2. You can't just make less of a thing by making it illegal. This has been proven over and over again. To paraphrase the gun-rights lobby, "If we outlaw abortions, only outlaws will have abortions." To make less of a thing requires policy based on (to oversimplify a bit) what works and what doesn't.

3. As Rebecca points out, bad things don't just happen by accident, through carelessness; all too often, there are people who *want* those things to happen because they stand to benefit.

In this case, certain religious groups have historically made a killing (financially and literally) exploiting the labor (natal and otherwise) of women who have been disempowered by the state chaining them to their reproductive biology. (So much, once again, for the "right to life".)

This was justified by "othering" those women as "fallen", "sinful" (note the Biblical connotations) -- and therefore somehow ultimately to blame for any punishment meted out to them as a result of unwanted pregnancy.

This follows the authoritarian pattern of telling the masses comforting lies for political ends: "Bad things happened to these people because they were bad. You, however, are good -- as long as you do what we say -- and therefore these bad things will never happen to you. ...and being good means making these bad things illegal. So you need to support whatever we do in order to make bad things illegal, and to punish the bad people who do them."

This, naturally, leads to widespread support for absolutely terrible legislation... and certain nominally-Christian groups are ready to profit from that. This happened before -- and it will happen again, if the Texas forced-birth law is allowed to stand. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magdalene_asylum

Disempowering women, on whatever pretext, empowers exploitative patriarchy and authoritarianism.

2021-11-18 WaPo Advertises a "Maternity Ranch" (fka a Magdalene Laundry)