A U.S. where abortion is once again banned will inevitably end up looking, in most respects, like the U.S. of the 19th Century-a nation which was a hellscape for the vast majority of women who are not wealthy, married, and white.
There is no possible way that such a nation will be a nurturing, positive place for women and children. There is no possible way that such a nation would be a place where the poor had any chance of escaping poverty. There is no possible way that such a place would be a nation in which cis-women live lives of legal and social equality with the cis-men who are obsessed with forcing them to carry all pregnancies to term, even in cases where the person who has been impregnated is a twelve-year-old raped by a clergyman, her brother, or her father.
And since such a nation would also inevitably end up banning contraception, it would be a nation where overall life expectancy for women would drop sharply, with massively increasing numbers of women dialing young of either complications of pregnancy of in complications during labor.
Since such a nation would be free of empathy towards anyone who was born to live outside of sexual or gender norms, life as an openly LGBTQ person would once again become impossible and one of the prime causes of toxic masculinity-the obsession with making young men prove they are heterosexual and are “real men”, would be brutally reinforced. It is likely this would cause a massive increase in the incidence of rape.
What we would not have, in any of that, was “the defense of life”. It is not “life” to simply not be dead. An actual “defense of life”, would be a defense of the freedom of all to live on their own terms, without having to hide, without facing discrimination or violent retribution for not managing to live a live, provided only that living on one’s own terms does no harm to anyone else. An actual “defense of life” would be a defense of the right of all to be able to count on living with a basic level of respect and acceptance from everyone else, to have a responsibility to make sure no one else is poor amid affluence or goes hungry down the block from a fancy restaurant. Reducing the defense of life to the imposition of an obligation that all women either carry to term every pregnancy they are physically capable of conceiving OR abstain from sex is not a defense of life at all-it is simply a defense of cis-men to force cis-women to breed, and there is no value in any birth occurring simply because someone with an obsession with holding power over others compels it to occur. There is no possibility of anything hopeful or positive or joyful coming of that.
