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.
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