The Christian Evangelicals are about to accomplish a goal that they’ve been working toward for decades; denying women the right to abort an unwanted pregnancy. By now, everybody’s heard the rhetoric. They cry passionately for the rights of unborn fetuses to be born. We’ve all seen the way they picket family planning clinics and intimidate women from going inside. Far-right legislators have done everything they can think of to make it difficult for women to get an abortion, including driving the clinics themselves out of business. Doctors have even been murdered for the cause.
Many of us wonder why. Why do these people fetishize fetuses? These are the same people, don’t forget, who do everything they can to cut social programs and safety nets, removing all the supports a young mother would need to raise a child she’s been forced to give birth to. Evangelicals clearly do not care about the well-being of babies after they’re born, children being raised by working moms, or the moms themselves. Only fetuses are important. Why is that?
The Evangelicals will never admit it, but there is only one rationale that explains their behavior; they want to punish young women for having sex. These abstinence-only, purity-worshipping Christians with their dark-age beliefs still see having sex out of wedlock (wedlock… a telling word, that) as a terrible sin. They want to make sure that sex has dire consequences for women (and only women, of course).
And what could be more dire than being forced to have a baby they don’t want and aren’t ready for? Having to give up all their plans for a career, drop out of school and work a minimum-wage job or two to try to cover the expenses of raising a child? Living in abject poverty, with crippling medical debt, relying on childcare that costs half their meager paychecks, all so they can raise a child they didn’t want in the first place? Essentially giving up all the hopes and dreams they ever had?
Yeah, that’ll show ‘em. Those sluts will be sorry they opened their legs to some boy, when they should have been home washing dishes and praying to their god to forgive them for all their lustful desires. Safely under daddy’s thumb.
That, I fully believe, is what it’s all about. It’s cruel, mean-spirited, narrow-minded and puritanical, and isn’t that the Evangelical movement in a nutshell?