Paternalistic social control of the poor: The real agenda of abortion opponents

Comment published on New York Times online blog, in response to Times opinion writer Linda Greenhouse, “The Supreme Court’s Next Abortion Chapter,” May 24, 2018,

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/24/opinion/supreme-court-abortion.html?comments

Since many of the restrictions apply to fetuses that are not yet even sentient, we should ask: What can it mean that the many, and constantly being added, state laws restricting abortions in some way particularly target poor women? It's one more form of social control directed at the poor. 

Americans believe in liberty--for those with not only motive but means and opportunity. Upper middle class women can often readily agree that people like them should be able to exercise liberty in this most personal and consequential of areas. But there is a tacit consensus that poor people and other losers (for in America, poverty is considered failure) must have their lives regulated, like children, for their own good. (God-talk is also in this category; it has always been used in this country as a club to hit poor people with. Religion to the right is about obedience.)

What happens if poor women and families are legally constrained to have and raise children? At least, it prevents them from doing much of anything else. And it also keeps them and their children poor. 

Social control morphs further in the direction of requiring much and offering little. To paraphrase one President and a philosopher friend of another: From each according to her or his abilities, to each, what we permit you. Or: Ask not what your country can do for you (it owes you nothing); ask what you can do for your country (the answer nowadays is just "obey"). 

This is the price of ideology,

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Addendum:
It is also property right.  That God is rightful owner of all things, including the potential human lives (who will perhaps praise him) of embryos and rudimentary stage foetuses, is the only possible real meaning of the supposed right that these non-sentient beings have.  An actual human life is a potentiality in part for enjoyments, or “happiness,” if we follow Jefferson’s Declaration founding our nation, and if only some other being can enjoy their existence, than it has rights and they do not.  This is not argument against the idea of God, which is larger than this, but against the notion that there exists a right in persons and things that is possessed and experienced or known only to some other being who has authority over them.  That is, again, not the only way to think of God, but it is implicitly the logic of the Christian anti-abortionists, who have used the idea of God in conjunction with an, unclear at best, notion of the “value” of “life” (or that of members of the human species in any stage or state of latency).  And these ideas are ideas of authority and property.  This is the real commitment of the Christian anti-abortionist, and that is why this position is so dear to conservatives.  Indeed, the incomplete break of American conservatives from support for slavery and its avatars is also consistent with this.  They speak of the sanctity of “life” but actually reduce this life to property right, in accord with the very utilitarianism they oppose, and that also explains why so many of them are so unconcerned human suffering.