The real reason the Republican Party cares so much about abortion

It’s not really about hating women (though it’s a little about that too).

Photo by Gage Skidmore (Flickr)

They just won’t stop. Republicans keep coming for reproductive rights.

Last week, the Texas Supreme Court declined to clarify when a medical emergency justifies an abortion, leaving many doctors all but forced to deny life-saving care to pregnant women.

Why are they doing this? I’m so confused. Especially when nearly two-thirds of Americans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases.

It’s tempting to chalk it up to Republican leaders hating women. And I don’t doubt that many do. But my gut tells me it’s more than that.

My years of working in politics taught me to follow the money. And my experience so far being a therapist has taught me that to resolve symptoms, we have to look at why the symptoms are happening in the first place—the root cause.

(If you’re wondering why I’m writing about abortion in a newsletter for men, here’s why men should care.)

Since starting this newsletter and diving into the culture war over gender, I’ve been learning reasons why Republicans care so much about abortion. Here’s what I’ve found:

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A big reason is they’re worried about not having enough workers.

The fertility rate in the U.S. decreased by 3 percent last year, reaching a historic low. Americans aren’t having as many babies for a number of reasons. One of the biggest reasons is economic. With the cost of housing and childcare skyrocketing, it makes sense that more and more people are “deliberately parenting,” in the words of Karen Guzzo, a demographer and the director for the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Combine that with historically low unemployment in the wake of the pandemic, and Republicans are losing their sh*t. Trump has proposed “baby bonuses for young parents to help launch a new baby boom.” Last year, a Texas state representative proposed a bill to offer property tax breaks to married couples who have four or more biological or adopted children. In January, Idaho Republican Senator Chuck Winder said, “We complain that we don’t have enough service workers. Well, I think there’s a reason, it’s not just the low birth rate. It is the number of abortions that have occurred.”

It sounds conspiracy theory-ish, but it’s true. “[Historically, abortion] crackdowns correlate closely with the ruling class’s stated desire for higher birth rates,” writes Jenny Brown, organizer with National Women's Liberation. “Record-low birth rates in the 1860s, 1930s, and again in the early twenty-first century have all been followed by crackdowns on abortion and contraception.”

Corporate leaders and corporate-backed politicians worry about low birth rates because more kids means more workers, which means more economic growth and more corporate profits. When there are more workers, unemployment goes up, which gives business owners more leverage to keep incomes down.

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Abortion bans further the control and subordination of women in capitalist society.

This reason is the closest to the “Republicans hate women” argument. But it’s not because men inherently don’t like women or want to control them. It’s because the control and subordination of women is a key feature of the capitalist society we live in.

Before capitalism, patriarchy existed to different degrees in different societies across the world. There were societies in which women had power. Like the Taínos, Indigenous people of the Caribbean, where women shared in political leadership, war-fighting, and farming. And the Yoruba people in what is now known as Nigeria, where women held leadership positions and owned land.

It wasn’t until the 1840s-1860s in England that women were forced to do unpaid labor at home to support their husbands working in factories or fields. This happened because business owners first tried to make all poor men, women, and children work long, grueling hours for little pay. But with no one to care for the home and raise young children, this new working class wasn’t able to produce enough workers for the fast-growing economy.

This is where our so-called “traditional” ideas about gender roles come from. Women aren’t “naturally” better at raising children. And men aren’t “naturally” less emotional or more suited for work outside the home. These ideas were invented to justify a particular arrangement of economic relationships—which we call capitalism—where business owners exploit men at work and women at home.

Again, follow the money. When women are providing free care work at home, that means the government doesn’t have to provide as much public support—which means less taxes on the rich. Sociologist Jess Calarco has tweeted:

“The engineers and profiteers of the American economy want women trapped in marriage and motherhood, where they can be more easily forced to do the work of a social safety net.”

The rich and powerful don’t want to have to fund things like health, education, and welfare for the people who work for them. They try to pass as much of it as possible on to families, where women often bear the brunt.

Republican leaders use abortion to whip voters to otherwise vote against their interests.

If you listen to right-wing leaders, it sounds like abortion has been immoral since the dawn of time (or Christianity). But it wasn’t until the 1970s, in the wake of the Civil Rights movement, that party leaders began using anti-abortion to organize and mobilize voters. Abortion up to the fourth or fifth month was even legal in the U.S. from the founding of the country until the 1860s.

Abortion activist Renee Bracey Sherman and scholar Tracy Weitz write:

“The modern anti-abortion movement ... was conceived in resentment at the Supreme Court for the desegregation of schools via Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, and then exacerbated by the elimination of Christian prayer in schools in 1962 and the integration of public schools via busing in 1971. White Christians needed an issue they could exploit for political benefit that maintained the same Jim Crow segregation divide. Roe v. Wade provided an opening.”

The Republican agenda isn’t that popular. Yet, because our government is designed to allow a minority with wealth and power to rule, they’ve been able to hold on to power by cobbling together enough white people (particularly white men) through manufacturing and stoking culture war hate and violence.

Law professor Ian Haney López says, “The way concentrated wealth rules a democracy is by promoting social division … Money power dominates people power by making sure that people can’t come together.” Anti-abortion has also helped them do that, by using religion to whip voters to vote against their interests.

Those are the reasons I’ve gathered so far.

As men, we need to join the fight for reproductive freedom. Crackdowns on abortion are part of a larger strategy by the wealthy few to keep us divided. The same strategy that’s keeping us from addressing climate change, ending racism, and fixing the other crises we face.

We need to join with women to demand full decriminalization of abortion and the abolition of all abortion laws. I give a little money every month to the Baltimore Abortion Fund. But I need to do more.

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Now, a question for the comments below: Why do you think they keep taking away reproductive rights?

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