As most sane people recognize, the "pro-lifers" don't care in the least about the potential child. This is all about punishing women who have sex. Even married women, if they have sex without wanting (yet another?) child.
When is the last time you saw a right-wing protest demanding free pre-natal care for poor women, so that any child they bring into the world will be at least healthy when born? They don't care if the baby arrives premature, undernourished, or otherwise damaged by lack of pre-natal care. They just want that baby BORN, DAMMIT!
When is the last time you heard the right-wing anti-choice crowd rally in support of poor single mothers, who cannot afford health care for their children -- or even good nutrition? They don't care if the child arrives into abject poverty and dies later of a preventable disease. They just want that child BORN, DAMMIT.
How many of those who demand the overturn of Roe v. Wade have actually adopted a child whose parent or parents couldn't -- or wouldn't -- keep that child? How many special needs children live their entire lives in foster care, shuttled from one "home" to another, because no one wants to adopt them? The right wing doesn't care about these unwanted, children who live without love or psychological and emotional stability. They just want those children BORN, DAMMIT.
What about the children born with hopeless deformities, who will die anyway, perhaps in great pain, within a few years of birth, at a huge cost in medical bills -- or, in the case of parents with an inability to pay -- without medical treatment at all? Does the right care about these kids? No, but they sure want them born.
Does the right care about the emotional, economic and psychological costs to existing children in an impoverished family which are sometimes associated with the birth of a permanently disabled child into their midst? The neglect they may have to suffer, as all the attention and efforts of the parents must go to keeping the sick or disabled child alive and functioning? The lack of funds for adequate nutrition for all the chilren, in order to provide for the weakest one?
The number of examples of cases in which children are brought into the world only to suffer agonies of illness, poverty or neglect which might be avoided were the pregnancy never be brought to term is nearly limitless in scope, yet you never hear of demands by the right that these forms of suffering be alievated, to the extent possible, by a society which pretty much tells the child from the moment of birth, "You're on your own. Hope you got lucky and were born into a family of limitless resources."
They don't care about the kids. They never have. And this fact is even more vile than the fact that their real objective is the punishment of women who have sex "without the only valid reason to do so: to produce a child."
These are people who really, really think that women shouldn't even want to have sex, and that the fact that they do proves these women to be "whores," deserving of punishment. These women should "bear the risk" they take in order to "engage in immoral acts." They should have to deal with the "consequences," and the consequences to any consequent child are just so much "collateral damage."
One of the most significant factors in identifying people who lean to the right politically is their preference for punishment of those they view as "wicked" over the protection of those whom even they would regard as "innocent." It's more important to execute every one who even might have committed murder than it is to be certain they're not executing some innocents among them. It's more important to bomb a house with 10 children in it to kill a possible terrorist than it is to wait a little longer and protect those kids. It's more important to withdraw subsistence funds from the poor in order to punish those who don't want to work than it is to help those who are poor through no fault of their own to survive.
And they'd rather see thousands of innocent kids suffer disease, poverty and neglect if it means they can use those kids as tools to punish women who enjoy and engage in sex for any reason other than procreation.
They do not -- I repeat -- do not hate abortion because they think abortion kills children. They hate abortion because they think abortion provides a way for women to escape the "consequences" (read: punishment due) of "immoral" behavior.
These people do not live to nurture and protect. They live to punish behaviors to which they object. It's their most important, most defining characteristic. They hate "the sinner" more than they "love" the innocent. By a wide, wide margin. In fact, they hate "the sinner" more than they are capable of loving anything.
And their view of exactly what constitutes a "sin" is a galaxy wide and a universe deep.
SLL
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