Not long ago I read that someone had described abortion as a "lifestyle choice." Let's look at what sort of lifestyle an abortion might allow a woman to maintain.
A woman seeking an abortion might want a style of life that allows her to continue her education. She might desire a style of life that enables her to keep her job. She might enjoy a lifestyle in which she can provide materially and emotionally for the children she already has. She may have a medical condition which might be worsened by pregnancy and care to maintain a lifestyle characterized by good health.
It seems to me that a woman might seek an abortion to maintain any one of a million possible lifestyles. The only commonality is that they do not want to lose all semblance of control over their destiny to their reproductive capacity.
I have a photograph of my great grandmother standing beside a donkey. While she was pregnant with her fourth child, she developed gestational diabetes. The doctor told her not to have any more children. She bore eight more and eventually died from complications caused by diabetes. She died much younger than she might otherwise have for lack of a reliable form of birth control. In the earlier part of the twentieth century women had a shorter lifespan than men. The danger of childbirth was the primary reason for this.
Children without mothers, even when their fathers were alive, were often raised in orphanages. A boyfriend once told me that he wished he could be closer to his father, but he tried to understand because his father and his aunt were raised in an orphanage after their mother died.
My mother once told me how, when she was in college studying to be a teacher, her class visited an orphanage. She said that she was haunted for days by the memory children who pleaded, "Please take me with you."
Back in those days, you didn't have to go overseas to adopt an infant. We had more children than homes then.
I'm adopted. On the block over from where I grew up, there were two brothers who were also adopted. Their biological parents were poor, too poor to support all their children when the fifth one arrived. Their parents had to choose which of their children to abandon. This was around 1970.
Reproductive rights is a woman's issue, but it is not simply a woman's issue. It goes straight to the heart of the kind of society we want to build. Like many people, perhaps most, there are things in the modern world that I do not like. Perhaps it is this that drives people to want to turn back the clock, although I can't always tell to what point they would like to set it. 1950, 1920, 1890, 1500? If you are seduced by the image of the perfect family smiling in some picture from the past, know that outside of the frame likes a world of overworked fathers, dead mothers, orphanages and more. In a world where everybody had a place, some people are kept in theirs brutally.
If the radical religious conservatives succeed in wresting from individuals control of their reproduction, they will not be prepared for the level of change they will bring to our society. It seems to be that they want to return to some fantasy of paradise, but that exists outside of history.
You might think that reproductive freedom is a cultural or social issue, but it is not a side issue to religious conservatives. It is the core they need for creating the world they long for.