Let’s stop and think for a minute about what it means that conservative Republicans are being quite open about the fact that they support the Hobby Lobby decision because it will make it harder for women to have “consequence free sex.” I think this really gets to the heart of the problem. In societies where women cannot have consequence free sex, their autonomy is usually restricted by their own families, who may have to bear the burden and responsibility for any children their daughter may produce. But in societies that have easy access to effective birth control, women can delay marriage, pursue careers, achieve financial independence, and forge their own course in life.
If you oppose consequence free sex, you basically oppose female autonomy and equality whether you quite realize this fully or not. And a political party cannot expect this to be popular with the ladies. This is especially true when the party is also opposed to equal pay for equal work, which undermines women’s opportunity to achieve financial independence, and opposes abortion services which help mitigate consequential sex where the consequence is unwanted. In fact, by opposing sex education and the availability of female contraception, the party is promoting unwanted pregnancies (consequential sex) across the board. And they’re doing it in the guise of being anti-abortion. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that increasing the rate of unwanted pregnancies will increase the pool of women seeking to end their pregnancies, which will result in more abortions, not fewer of them.
My main point here is that we need to look at this not from the perspective of whether or not the decision to have an abortion is moral or legal, but from the perspective that Republicans want women to get pregnant if they have sex because that will take away their autonomy and make them reliant on their families again. If they can’t risk pregnancy because of their economic insecurity, they will have to marry to have sexual relations. If they can’t get decent pay in the workplace, they can’t overcome their economic insecurity on their own.
This battle isn’t really over abortion. It’s over female equality. And the Republicans are going to lose.
