The Kavanaugh Accusation Is Dangerous for the Pro-Life Movement.
Repealing Roe will be a hollow victory if the anti-abortion cause is hitched to a party that’s seen as anti-woman.
'“While on the surface it is the embryo’s fate that seems to be at stake,” the sociologist Kristin Luker wrote in 1984, “the abortion debate is actually about the meaning of women’s lives.”
This line, from Luker’s book “Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood,” neatly encapsulates a longstanding pro-choice charge against the pro-life movement. As much as opponents of abortion claim to care about the killing of the unborn, the argument goes, in reality abortion restriction is a means to a different end: The restraint of women’s choices, the restriction of their sexual freedom, their subordination to the rule of fathers and husbands and patriarchy writ large.
The reality has always been more complicated. From the beginning of the modern anti-abortion movement — whose origins lie in the 1960s, not just the aftermath of Roe v. Wade — it has included female leaders who identify as pro-life feminists and reject the idea that female liberty depends on a right to kill your unborn child. And while the pro-life grass roots tended to be strongly traditionalist on gender roles in the 1970s, with time pro-life and pro-choice citizens converged in their views on women’s roles; by the late 2000s, the Claremont McKenna professor Jon Shields wrote in a 2012 commentary on Luker’s book, a clear majority of pro-lifers voters held views that sociologists would describe as “gender egalitarian,” not traditionalist or Gileadean.
At the same time the abortion-rights movement was linked in its early days to a distinctive form of upper-class WASP paternalism — in which legal abortion was sold as a means of helping upper-class “good girls” out of trouble while keeping the undesirable fertility of other classes and races in check. And from Hugh Hefner’s early abortion-rights advocacy to a certain style of predatory male feminism today, support for legal abortion among men has often carried a strong whiff of self-interest, with feticide as a get-out-of-responsibility-free card for caddish men.
But with all this said, it’s also obvious that social conservatism can lapse into a version of Luker’s portrait, and it’s easy to think of examples — the Todd Akin fiasco of 2012, for instance — where a cruelly sexist form of anti-abortion politics reared an ugly head.
Which is why the allegation of sexual assault against Brett Kavanaugh represents a uniquely dangerous moment for a pro-life movement that has spent decades working toward the goal of a fifth Supreme Court vote to amend or overturn Roe v. Wade. . .
This includes the pro-life movement. Even if it wins its long-desired victory at the high court and more anti-abortion legislation becomes possible, a pro-life cause joined to a party that can’t win female votes and seems to have no time for women will never be able to achieve those legislative goals, or at least never outside a very few, very conservative states. And having that long-awaited victory accomplished by a male judicial appointee confirmed under a cloud of #MeToo suspicion seems like a good way to cement a perception that’s fatal to the pro-life movement’s larger purposes — the perception that you can’t be pro-woman and pro-life.
This points to a conclusion that’s certainly unfair to Kavanaugh if he’s innocent, but nobody ever said that politics would be fair. If his accuser testifies publicly and credibly, if her allegation isn’t undermined by a week of scrutiny and testimony, if it remains unprovable but squarely in the realm of plausibility, then all the abortion opponents who were supporting him should hope that his nomination is withdrawn — with, ideally, a woman nominated in his place.'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/19/opinion/christine-blasey-ford-kavanaugh-senate-hearing.html?
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