After Roe v. Wade, a Class Divide Between Abortion Haves and Havenots

The Supreme Court will almost certainly reverse Roe v. Wade, effectvely banning abortion on the federal level. Then it will become legal in liberal states and banned in right-wing ones. Then the class divide will reassert itself and the sturm and the drang will die down.

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  • Then the class divide will reassert itself …

    «Class divide», Ted ? What «class divide» ?!! Surely you residents of that Shining City on a Hill (soon, if I understand aright, to be joined by those of Little England) are not divided by anything as crass and marxist as «class», but only by skin colour, ethnicity, religion, age, etc, etc – i e, by the legitimate dividing lines dans le meilleur des mondes possibles ?…

    Henri

  • alex_the_tired
    December 13, 2019 7:00 AM

    I wonder if, after all these years, we aren’t all looking at it backward.
    In “Silence of the Lambs,” Lecter asks Starling to explain why Buffalo Bill kills. Starling says he kills women, and Lecter corrects her. “No,” he says. “That is incidental.”
    I don’t think the issue was ever “abortion.” The issue was controlling, abusing, and subordinating women.

    • That is sort of obvious. But in banning abortion on a class basis conservative authorities may be opening a considerable can of political worms, since their patriarchalism and sexism will now hook up with class war.

      • If we widen our view maybe people will organize (see my post below). I’m not sure if conditions get worse if that automatically means people will organize themselves since the politicians have ruled against the majority’s best interests.
        However, if abortion is banned, what will the Republicans have to fire up the base?

  • proletarian
    1650s (n.) “member of the lowest class;” 1660s (adj.) “of the lowest class of people;” with -ian + Latin proletarius “citizen of the lowest class” (as an adjective, “relating to offspring”), in ancient Rome, propertyless people, exempted from taxes and military service, who served the state only by having children; from proles “offspring, progeny” (see prolific).

    https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=proletarian

    Think about it. “people … who served the state only by having children; from proles “offspring, progeny”

    The wealthy see the lower economic classes as breeders, producers of the army of the desperate poor and unemployed who serve the purpose of driving wages down.

    And profits up.

    More desperately poor means more servants.

    More abortions means fewer people fighting for scraps, killing each other, and accepting lower wages.

    • When more Americans see the situation as you lay it out, the better. However, the rulers want us to stay mired in debating the morals of abortion, while taking away women’s autonomy through forced motherhood that is pretty much a reality now in places like Alabama, and Ohio, which is aspiring toward that. The latest issue of The Nation magazine is all about the latest reproductive rights struggles across the country. I urge people to donate to abortion access funds, if they are moved.

      • The wealthy bastards know how much more they can extract from those who are kept in the poor and precarious position of having a family with basic needs that can be barely met, or cut off entirely on a whim.

        A desperate wage earner will tolerate much indignity when the income of their family is on the chopping block.

        The incidence of workplace violence began to increase when economic desperation proved too difficult to endure and its consequences became too severe during the Clinton presidency. See “Going Postal” by Mark Ames.

        But it is so declasse and fruitless to speak of such in the presence of the “temporarily disadvantaged millionaires” whose multitudes populate the typical gathering of American wage workers; better for the individual wage slave to discredit and disavow any hint of suspicion of him by his wealthy overseer.

        The claims of the immorality of abortion by the wealthy are made by those who have no sense of any morality but of its equivalence with wealth.

  • American Teacher
    December 14, 2019 8:24 AM

    Abortion is murder.

  • in Jenny Brown’s “Birth Strike:The Hidden Fight Over Women’s Work”, she argues that the fight over reproductive rights and abortion is not just a religious or cultural or moral difference of opinion. These are really about control over human labor, the public good of supporting the next generation of citizens has been privatized to benefit a capitalist for-profit system designed to minimize labor costs to produce wealth for the top 10%.

  • from page 147:
    “To get the things we need to make childbearing and childrearing fair, we will need to see that we’re not just making bad choices within a fundamentally sound system. It is not our individual failures to get an adequate job or relationship, the right kind of health insurance, or the right childcare arrangement; it is a systemic failure to provide the things that mothers and all parents need to carry out the necessary work of bearing and raising children. And it’s not a failure in the sense of an oversight: it is a carefully maintained economic arrangement in which a powerful class of rich people benefit from our work but do not contribute to it.”
    If we want to save access to birth control for all, we have to change the debate. We get nowhere with the current terms of debate.

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