What abortion opponents really want and why

Comment published on New York Times blog in response to John Irving, “The long. cruel history of the anti-abortion crusade,” June 23, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/23/opinion/anti-abortion-history.html#commentsContainer&permid=101101843:101101843:

The most powerful case on this I  have read.  In Sophistical debates, people have one reason for holding a view and another given in defending it.  Making the real argument clear is then a useful task for us writers.

The religious right cares for neither "rights" nor "life" and they know it.  The rights they claim are proxies: A affirms his "moral" values, binding on B as her duty to C, a hypothetical person (whom A protects).  "Life" functions here as idea, an abstraction. When not even sentient, it is a biological "person" whose similarity to us is developmental, prospective, and so hypothetical, a "scientific" dogma.  Its "right" is her duty, which she owes to the state, society, and God of the righteous.

The right of persons to choose how to live their life is not accidentally in conflict with the competing "right" of a fetus; rather, the latter cancel the former.  It is meant to.  The purpose is to force women to have children.  

The right values "the family" as a duty (to have kids and raise them); it posits a morality of obedience and duty (do the right thing).  It is a morality of enforceable mastery and servitude.  This also explains why the evangelical religious right in America has no recognizably "Christian" values in the sense of their Gospels' message of universal love and compassion.   And in terms of our nation's founding document, how hypothetical rights to "life" prevail over any interest in the free pursuit of happiness.