"Why the Relentless Assault on Abortion Rights in the US?" One comment I found thought-provoking.

[raccoon]

"I think it's less a problem with sexual freedom than it is with the loss of political control over reproduction. Given that birth rates have been central to the evolutionary dominance of some tribes over others, it's no secret that patriarchal societies prefer to keep reproductive power in the hands of rulers rather than women.

Much of the Right's obsession with abortion has to do with maintaining white majorities, for example, and it was white women who most availed themselves of the new right to control their reproductive functions.

Like many issues, abortion is closely tied to the issue of racial rule in the US. It's no coincidence that as immigration rates rise and more nonwhites continue to be ushered into American life, abortion battles have increased in frequency and intensity, and largely concentrated in white supremacist political strongholds (aka red states).

Most of us know the Right couldn't give two shits about the sanctity of life, sonograms or no sonograms. They kill with glee and enthusiasm as a matter of policy. So it has to be something else that drives their elites. And the only thing that generally motivates this kind of action is the preservation of their social and political power."

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/07/23#comment-973498830

Link to article: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/07/23

[sinkingfeeling]

1. I agree and I think the 'abortion battle' was cooked up by the fundies and the GOP.

[theHandpuppet]

2. I've suspected for a long time this is a major reason behind the assault on choice

Thanks for posting this.

[leftstreet]

3. Protestors never target clinics in impoverished minority areas

It's always ALWAYS white 'middle class' areas

[YarnAddict]

4. I think you are wrong

Which racial or ethnic groups are most likely to have abortions in the United States?

Answer
Non-Hispanic black and Hispanic women have higher rates of abortion (40 and 29 per 1,000 women aged 15–44, respectively) than non-Hispanic white women do (12 per 1,000).[32] The higher rates reflect the fact that black and Hispanic women have high unintended pregnancy rates (91 and 82 per 1,000 women, respectively), compared with non-Hispanic white women (36 per 1,000 women).[26]

http://www.guttmacher.org/in-the-know/characteristics.html

If it was all about maintaining a white majority, the right would be all for abortion.

[backscatter712]

5. It's all for maintaining a framework of economic coercion.

If you or your loved ones can have abortions at will, pick and choose when and where you're going to start a family, you have options. You're unattached, you have more of an ability to tell a bad employer to take this job and shove it. You can risk being fired, you can be more resourceful in weathering hard economic times. If you have to, you can camp out, or couch-surf, or go busking. Young unattached people without dependents are harder to coerce because they don't have cute little hostages. That makes them more likely to fight back against the economic fucking the one-percenters want to impose on all of us.

But if you're forced to have children, especially before you had the chance to get higher education or move up the economic ladder a few notches, guess what, you're stuck. You're a de-facto slave. You have to work three McJobs to survive and keep your kids fed. You have to accept the low wages, the shitty benefits, the abusive management. What are you gonna do, quit? You can't couch-surf like a college student when you're between jobs - you HAVE to work. If you were single and unattached, you can risk joining a strike against a bad employer. But if you've got mouths to feed, no.

And that's the way the Kochs and Waltons and the Wall Street Masters of the Universe like it.

[get the red out]

30. I agree

It's a way to trap people and keep them under the thumb of corporations.

[hwmnbn]

8. There seems to be conflicting numbers....

From the same link above:


What is the racial or ethnic background of U.S. women who have abortions?

Answer

No racial or ethnic group makes up a majority of women having abortions: 36% are non-Hispanic white, 30% are non-Hispanic black, 25% are Hispanic and 9% are women of other races.[32]

[link:http://www.guttmacher.org/in-the-know/characteristics.html]



There must be some explanation but I can't find it

[Jackpine Radical]

10. Those numbers are apparently not indexed per capita.

If non-hispanic whites are, say, 70% of the population and blacks are 15%, then the per-capita rates would be about 4 times as high for the black women as for the whites. That comes close to the per-capita numbers reported in the article.

[raccoon]

11. I take it you are referring to this: "and it was white women who most availed themselves of the new

right to control their reproductive functions."

I didn't write that; it was in the comment.

I bet most right-wingers don't even think about non-white women getting abortions.

[zbdent]

6. If the GOP stops fighting "abortion" and "reproductive rights", how will the GOP get to spend all

the cash from the Vatican cashing in Hitler's gold?

[madamesilverspurs]

7. Teabagger told me

that it's about taking rights away from women and minorities. Succeed once, use that as precedent. He called it "return to Constitutional purity" (before it was corrupted by the Bill of Rights).

[sofa king]

9. I think it's a little more general than that.

I think it is about maintaining the control and subservience of women in general. When you provide education and reproductive freedom to women, they become more politically active, which threatens the power-base of the people who control us.

The power-base of the people who control us is not political activism, it is political indifference. If you keep half of the population busy herding kids, they stop worrying about anything else and fall out of political activity.

In the meantime, a huge proportion of male voters are suckers and vote according to whatever is scaring them the most that day--hence Osama bin Laden's appearance at election time during the Bush years. It's easy to lead them around by the nose, those who care enough to vote at all.

So The Man, dead-set on turning the American people into serfs, has an interest in marginalizing women and amplifying the fears of ignorant men... exactly as America is today.

However, having said all that, I will point out that exactly because Republicans operate on a system of beliefs rather than on a system of knowledge, it doesn't really matter which racial subset of Americans is getting more abortions right now or historically--Republican voters and policymakers will always choose the stupid belief that best supports their own stupid beliefs. So it doesn't matter if the Republican belief that outlawing abortion would help propagate child-rearing among whites is spurious--if that fits into their own fantastic puzzle, they're going to believe it no matter what the statistics say.

[n2doc]

12. Don't forget, this has coincided with the flood of big money in politics

I think we are seeing the influence of a handful of billionaires who hate women and long for the '
old days' when white men like them ruled everything. I am thinking about the Koch's and their ilk.

[YoungDemCA]

13. One or two billionaires can run some political neophyte....

...who is almost invariably, a Tea Party extremist, and literally buy an election-as we saw in 2010 and 2012, in the House especially.

[YoungDemCA]

14. It's about class and social control

The thing is, many of the anti-choice Right's legislation doesn't ban abortion outright, but it does disproportionately affect poorer women.

[backscatter712]

16. Like I said earlier, it's easier to coerce you if you've got cute little hostages.

If you're single, childless and unattached, you can risk telling your employer to take this job and shove it. You can risk striking. You can uproot yourself at will. You can endure couch-surfing, a few nights under the bridge, go busking.

But if you've got a litter of children, now you HAVE to work. You're a slave. Especially if you've been forced to have kids before you're ready, before you've completed your education, or moved up the economic food chain a couple rings. You have to work two or three McJobs just to keep mouths fed and a roof over their heads. You can't quit. You can't risk being fired. You don't even have time to look for another job if your current job sucks. They've got you by the short-and-curlies.

Like I said, that's the way the Kochs, Waltons and Wall Street tycoons like it.

[phantom power]

15. it's got everything to do with white male patriarchy

"choosing life", not so much.

[Starry Messenger]

17. They are proto-fascists.

Their support of capitalism comes wrapped up in the same quasi-mystical bullshit that is a hallmark of other countries that need to impress high levels of social control to keep this going. It's tied up in the worship of the nuclear family, with the veneration of whiteness as the economic standard bearers of monopoly and prosperity.

[Auntie Bush]

18. I've always believed the Pope is against birth control and abortion is solely to propagate

more Catholics ...Christians too. They don't care about the life of the baby or they would be fighting for more money for the poor.

[truebluegreen]

19. I think it's more about controlling the wimmins

although it is likely both.

[Android3.14]

20. If it were true that whites had more abortion, I'd be inclined to agree

However, according to Guttmacher Policy Review, "...the abortion rate for black women is almost five times that for white women..."

[NewThinkingChance40]

21. I think the real issue here..

is individual right to choose. In my opinion, it should be the womans right to choose to have a baby. There has become a lot of social pressure to have sex before marriage, accepting that, we have come up with many birth control measures. These measures do not always work, so some who get pregnant either when birth control fails, or because they didn't use any, want a way out of the pregnancy. Legally, if you kill someone (stopping their heart) it is murder, we blur the lines at this point with babies. Why is it that it is not ok to kill someone who is alive, but it is ok in some peoples eyes to kill an unborn child who has a heartbeat? An argument could also be made for rape victims, they did not choose to have sex, and if a baby is formed out of said sex they should not have to have that child.

The right tries to make it seem like they care about life, but i think we all know the truth is they care more about power and controlling people through emotions. For me, it is about the law. I have seen cases where someone is convicted of a double murder for killing a pregnant woman, but then abortion is different? We need a black and white law about this, either it is ok to kill someone with a beating heart or it isn't. Now, I understand there are times when a woman on birth control gets pregnant and doesn't know it until after there is a heartbeat, and there are times where the child is determined to have a terrible birth defect which would really hurt their quality of life if they were to be born. So the real issue here is what should an unborn child be considered? Is it a person when the heart starts beating, and therefore is murdered when the heart stops? Or is a person only someone who has been born, and unborn children don't count? If that is the case, then all those who have murder charges because of unborn children should have those taken away. Where is the line? If there were to be a real debate about this topic, the right would have no ground to stand on because they are too busy buying votes to truly care, but the conversation should be had by someone.

[MisterP]

22. something similar happened in 20s France: theirs was the only population in Europe to decline,

so they cracked down HARD on abortion; their demographics researchers (Alfred Sauvy) were in fact the foundation for the natalism of the following decades, which was in fact strongest in countries with high growth rates (India, Mao's China, Echeverria's Mexico, Third-Worldism in general)

[JDPriestly]

23. It's a little off topic, but . . . why abortion is common in our country:

It can be very expensive to keep a child in diapers -- but most of us never realize how devastatingly difficult it can be for low-income families to afford to buy enough diapers to keep their babies clean and dry. Government programs help families pay for food and housing and medical care. Very few programs anywhere, private or public, chip in to help parents buy diapers.

So in preparing a story about a new study in the journal Pediatrics that attempts to quantify how many women have so-called "diaper need" in New Haven, Conn. (nearly 30% of those surveyed, it turned out), we couldn't help but be saddened by some of the situations that study authors Megan Smith, of Yale University, and Joanne Goldblum, of the National Diaper Bank Network, described.

Mothers sometimes forgo food to buy diapers. When circumstances are especially dire, many resort to "stretching" their diaper supply -- keeping their children in dirty diapers, because it's all they have.

Not having diapers can mean a child can't go to daycare, and a mother can't go to work, "[perpetuating] the cycle of need," said Caroline Kunitz, the founder of the Los Angeles Diaper Drive.

http://www.latimes.com/news/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-pediatrics-diapers-how-to-help-20130729,0,6796987.story

[world wide wally]

24. Great point. This makes total sense from a sociological / anthropological psoint of view

[MNBrewer]

25. Falling birth rates is one of the reasons Putin's Fascist regime is using to persecute homosexuals

in Russia.

[lark]

26. I think it's deeper than just minority vs. white voters.

IMO the real impetus is to create low knowledge workers they can pay slave wages. Most people having abortions are not at the top of the food chain and don't want the babies adn can't take proper care of them either. The Repugs want to force people to have babies they can't afford and want to end public education. Then they don't need the illegal immigrants to do their shit work, they can hire the uneducated, less well cared for young people and create a permanent class of serfs. This is their real motivation, create a permanent under class and destroy most of the middle class.

[factsarenotfair]

28. "create a permanent under class and destroy most of the middle class"

Bingo. This, I believe, is the Rosetta Stone of American politics. The abolition of slavery made this a requirement and the advent of globalization made it possible in order for the elite(s) to maintain control.

[Mr.Bill]

27. Republicans are against abortion

because Democrats are for the right to have it available. If Obama had a bill introduced in Congress to ban all abortion in the US, every single Republican would find something wrong with it and vote against it.

[SCVDem]

29. Look at the Mormons

They needed numbers for their upstart religion and how better than polygamy?

Same as any group needing brainwashed zombies.

What would you believe if not for juvenile indoctrination?

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

31. I have often wondered why the anti-choice billboards I see

along the highways always feature a picture of an extremely cute white baby (not a fetus, not even a newborn baby, but one that is at least old enough to sit up, and usually wearing a frilly little dress). I have never, ever seen any anti-choice posters, billboards or other literature featuring non-white babies of any race - not African-American, Hispanic or Asian. Always very Aryan-looking white ones. Are they just playing to their usual audience of white fundies or if there is an even more sinister, master-racey sort of motivation?

[Ford_Prefect]

32. Along with the issue of ultimate control over others there is a tactical dynamic at work here.

The reason so many state by state attacks on all kinds of rights have happened in so brief a time is to defeat the Federal system and divide those who would otherwise work together locally and nationally to undo the TeaHadi Hegemony. The intent is to force "us" to spend time, energy, political capital, and most important money responding to the state by state attacks and to provide so many legal challenges to Federal authority that it is functionally overwhelmed.

The ultimate purpose of this tactic is to create a procedural log jam along with generating as many undue burdens as possible on those most vulnerable. It is the same tactic seen in the denial of unemployment and medicaid funds such as was recently accomplished in North Carolina.

The tactic is meant to keep us so busy on so many fronts that we cannot act effectively on progressive change such as the environment, social justice, corrupt banking, peace, etc.

Make no mistake: they also want to make individuals and groups suffer by returning us to the culture of 50 or 100 years ago. They have scores to settle, sinners to punish and are clearly convinced they are closer to God than anyone else.

[Sarah Ibarruri]

34. Right wingers are a sick, sick bunch, aren't they? nt

[Sarah Ibarruri]

33. Great article! Thanks! nt

[felix_numinous]

35. It's to create a generation of tea baggers

--just look at them, who can carry guns, demonstrate all they want, and you have your answer.

A generation of undereducated, overworked, prejudiced, propaganda watching, war fighting, authoritarian, religious superstitious people who can be manipulated into fighting amongst themselves. People who will never get in the way of the raping and pillaging if the Earth, because they accept it as part of prophesy.

All of this CAN be accomplished by denying women their sovereignty, in just a couple generations. Their mission is underway already.

Interestingly, this has been attempted in Iran and other theocracies, with only some success--the Internet and black market has prevented a complete conversion--there are always rebels

[Bake]

36. That also explains their newfound obsession with birth control

I've been wondering why they are suddenly opposed to birth control. You just nailed it.

Bake