Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon says
...even though most people, when pressed, don’t have the nerve to force women to have babies against their will, anti-choicers aren’t entirely wrong about their ability to use female sexuality to stir up anger and fear. The problem is that when you get people to think about this logically, they’re pro-choice. But when you appeal to them emotionally, they’re all too easily sucked into hating on sluts, believing female sexuality is dangerous, and wanting it to be controlled. When asked specifics about how it should be controlled, people balk—-they want it to be controlled, but they don’t want there to be actual force involved, in part because most Americans have female sexuality as part of their own sex lives, and they don’t want their own bedrooms invaded. The key to creating a sex panic is making the panickers believe this is about Other Women. And unfortunately, 65 Democrats are convinced that this amendment is about punishing Other Women, not their own voters.
Elsewhere in her post Amanda links to an interesting article from 2000 called “The Only Moral Abortion is My Abortion” When the Anti-Choice Choose. In my own conversations with women’s and family-services professionals it turns out that “good” women seeking “moral” abortions are a healthy proportion of the clientele.
Funny thing, though, is this notion of, I guess, “immoral” abortion isn’t exclusive to ‘wingers. The other day I was grousing about the Stupak debacle to an educated, progressive-to-radical woman and her angry reaction was “well, does he just think a good alternative is more of these twenty-four year old girls having six different children by six different fathers instead?!?!”
Can I just say how frustrating that is?
For the record, though, about six in ten women who have abortions already have one or more children. Roughly a third are married and a quarter of those who are unmarried live with a male partner, which my very poor arithmetic says that adds up to 49.7 percent. Stereotypes about “godliness” are not — 78% say they’re religious. The fact that 88% live in metropolitan areas would be a stereotype-affirming gotcha… if not for the fact that 79% of everybody lives in metropolitan areas. The stereotypes about income do hold up — 57% are economically disadvantaged. (But even there, not to put too fine a point on it, but back in the days before Roe vs. Wade we noticed that the daughters of upper-middle-class families had a disproportionately high rate of “appendicitis.”)
I mean, yeah, I guess, even though it’s more a production of racist/classist/conservative fantasy than reality there are women who match the stereotype of multiple pregnancies by multiple partners. But in absolute terms it would be about as accurate… if also just as much a caricature… to say the stereotypical abortion seeker is a lower-middle-class midwestern married or long-term partnered suburbanite who doesn’t see herself as one of “those people” at all.
