Last Call

Republicans are just weird.  They decry that government interference in family life and important decisions are expensive and intrusive, bankrupting the country and bordering on dictatorship.  Then they proceed to send troops in to occupy tens of millions of uteri at taxpayer expense, particularly at the state level.

As restrictions on abortion and contraception have become the subject of state legislative action and Republican presidential candidates’ pitches to voters, arguments have focused on the issue’s moral and religious dimensions.

Less attention has been paid to the financial implications to states, businesses and women if governments impose policies that lead to increases in unplanned or unwanted pregnancies. The economic ramifications of such policies are important as the nation recovers from the worst recession since the Great Depression and governments work to reduce debts and deficits.

“There’s a simple math in place: more unintended pregnancies mean more public costs,” said Bill Albert, chief program officer at the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. “Especially for the deficit hawks, it is a penny-wise-pound-foolish strategy.”

Now Uteroccupiers(tm) know full well that it's not about saving taxpayers money, it's about using the power of the government to go after any group that sides with the Democrats as punishment.  It's also about wasting money on slut-shaming in order to say "Well, we can't afford your schools and roads.  maybe you should have thought of that before having sex."  They can't openly say this, of course, so the Orwellian logic they do employ is quite illuminating.

Kristi Hamrick, a spokeswoman for Americans United for Life, a Washington-based legal organization that seeks to overturn abortion rights, rejected that conclusion, saying the value of life can’t be reduced to dollars and cents.

“The unknown and absolute value of life is clear in what a person brings to society,” Hamrick said. “Let’s look, for example, at a girl who gets pregnant in college, does marry the father of her child, works to raise this child, and he becomes president. That’s Barack Obama,” she said, in a reference to the life experiences of the president’s mother.

Now let's pause for a minute on the fact that we have a conservative making the argument that at some point, even the hated Kenyan Colonialist was somebody's baby, and that he was loved.  I too am sensitive to that argument, having been adopted myself.  Second chances and all that.  But the thing is that she had a choice at the time, and it wasn't the state's job to tell her what to do, or to advocate for one choice over another when both choices are legal.  An actual conservative would understand that, but then again we're not dealing with actual conservatives, but Uteroccupiers(tm).

To them, it's all about the exercise of power of the state over these women in a cynical effort to trap the ones who deviate socially from their prescribed plan of Dominionist theory.  Nearly everything else that social conservatives do makes actual sense once put in the context of building a theocratic society where the wealthy are the favored people of the Divine Right of Cash, and they are morally superior to the rest of us.  Basic birth control is vital to women being able to control their own bodies, and if you're wondering why the GOP War on Women is so pervasive, it's because it's a keystone to women being independent members of society.  To have that choice available for the unwashed masses is of course an affront.

Bringing in the portrait of the President as a young man is just too much for them to resist, too.  They say that kids have to be brought into the world...and then they're on their own, apparently.

New tag, of course: Uteroccupiers.  Always up in your vajayjay.