Reproductive justice has always been a bugbear for reactionaries and totalitarians. A woman who enjoys bodily autonomy and controls her own womb is free of the control of male supremacist hierarchies—those associated with the fundamentalism problematised in the mentalities of official enemies, but warmly embraced when benefitting traditionally privileged classes and the ideological status quo that rationalised the power of propertied white males at home.
The contradictions of pro-life narratives aren’t new: for all their moral pretences, pro-lifers want to get government off people’s backs, and into their wombs. They maintain militant ignorance regarding the lives, right or freedom of the mothers, or the circumstances under which conception takes place. They don’t care about the child once it’s born, especially if it’s working class, female, not white, or wants to live in a world with hope for a future without hereditary class privilege, corporate capture of politics or ecocide. They are raging militarists who support imperialist wars of aggression. They shoot abortion doctors. They’re joyless moralists who suck all the oxygen out of the room; ‘that pro-lifer was hands down the life of the party’ said no-one ever.
We find then that the American Taliban exhibit the same haughty aristocratic attitude as everything they claim to oppose. They justify themselves by arguing the need to speak to others in a language they understand—most conveniently the one they had already decided on. This also appears to be why they need to demonise the left; the project of class society rests on the narrative of a protection racket, scaring the public with what H.L Mencken described as ‘imaginary hobgoblins,’ and then offering safety and token privileges in return for obedience, loyalty and tribute through submission to class and social hierarchies.
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