Abortion: A Tea Party war on women?

When Tea Party conservatives talk about “freedom from government interference,” said Michelle Goldberg in TheDaily​Beast.com, “they’re assuredly not talking about women’s bodies.” In recent months, the supposed libertarian wing of the Republican Party has been the driving force behind a war on women’s rights. At the federal level, the GOP has proposed stripping all government funding from Planned Parenthood and killing the Title X family planning program for low-income women. At the state level, legislators elected in the Tea Party wave have launched “a fusillade of anti-abortion legislation,” including a Nebraska bill that would make killing abortion doctors “justifiable homicide” and a South Dakota bill that would force women to visit a “crisis pregnancy center,” run by anti-abortion zealots, before having an abortion. Tea Party activists insisted they wanted to shrink government, but now that they’re in power, they have made “curtailing abortion rights and family planning a pre-eminent goal.”

The bitter irony of this crusade, said Nancy Gibbs in Time, is that eliminating funds for family planning will vastly increase the number of abortions. By providing contraception at 4,600 community health centers, Title X alone prevents about 1 million unintended pregnancies a year—at least half of which would end in abortion. Once born, poor children won’t be safe from the Republicans, either, said Katha Pollitt in TheNation.com. Republicans want to cut $750 million from the Women, Infants, and Children health and nutrition program and $1 billion from the Head Start program. They seem hell-bent on proving true the “bitter joke that ‘pro-lifers’ care about children only before they are born.”

Quite the opposite, said Kathryn Jean Lopez in National Review. We pro-lifers simply do not buy the Planned Parenthood assumption that women are better off because of contraception, abortion, and the culture of meaningless sex. We “do want to turn back the clock—to a time when we valued love and marriage and didn’t expect, support, and even encourage promiscuity.” Scoff if you like, said Ross Douthat in The New York Times. But in new research, sociologists have found a link between sexual restraint and happiness, particularly among young women. By ending taxpayer support for organizations that facilitate promiscuity, social conservatives want to encourage women to think more carefully about their choices so their “sexual lives will be a source of joy rather than sorrow.” What could be more pro-women than that?

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