(Yes, I know I’m still on vacation — the photo is from Mestia, capital of the Svaneti region of the High Caucasus — but once again the news won’t let me be. I originally posted this on Facebook after the Alabama monstrosity was signed into “law” and thought it deserved a hearing here. I’ll check back in later today.)
A quick diary from the Caucasus, based on a response I wrote on another person's timeline that I want to expand on:
The fight against abortion isn't about the fetus. It's about the sex.
This is obvious from two things: The anti-abortion crowd is also trying to outlaw birth control (on the specious grounds that some forms of birth control are a kind of abortion), and second, that they lose absolutely all interest in the fetus once it is a baby.
I'm not going to go into how Christianity perverted human sexuality (you can read my article here for a partial explanation, though its focus is on Catholic priestly sex abuse; see also here for a general academic overview), but essentially that's what the western world has been subjected to for the past two millennia. Although the Renaissance and the Enlightenment went a long way to breaking this hold, it was really the advances in contraception - especially contraception under the woman's control - that made it possible for both men and women to explore their sexuality fully and healthily.
The anti-abortion movement didn't start with Roe v Wade. It started with the pill.