We’ve all seen the nuts who go outside abortion clinics and scream at the women or staff who enter. Sometimes, they even bring their own kids there to hold up signs and help them shame women on a day they’d surely rather be left alone. Similarly, there’s a battalion of online trolls (usually older men, occasionally women) who attack anyone who’s for legal abortions as “anti-kid” or against the kids of America in some way.
But all this supposed love for children is hard to swallow when anti-abortion people rarely vote for politicians that want to help impoverished kids or support even basic things like universal pre-K and free children’s healthcare (like the Clintons proposed 30 years ago, and that’s gone nowhere since then).
Perhaps that’s because they have no actual interest in the children.
That’s been proven in a thousand ways: cuts to public schools, cuts to WIC, cuts to food stamps, trying to restrict birth control (which prevents abortions) or spreading outright lies about its health side effects, cuts to after school programs, never voting for district attorneys that are soft on juvenile offenses, cuts to domestic abuse shelters, cuts to public housing, blocking attempts to make children’s healthcare free, blocking universal pre-K, blocking efforts to regulate pollution that is causing children’s health to decline, never supporting programs to help single mothers, and a general gutting of the social safety net.
All these anti-abortion nuts that scream about “the children” will turn around and talk about how kids today are spoiled, and seem to have little actual affection for children or the “loose” single mothers/teen mothers forced to raise them. [Generally, the anti-abortion people I’ve actually met are beyond hateful and donate almost nothing to children’s charities, showing no real interest in kids other than being scared they might learn something in schools that they disagree with.] A lot of these women like Amy Coney Barrett or Michelle Bachmann who do actually adopt kids (which a lot of pro-lifers don’t) show little interest in them after they reach puberty, as I’ve heard from countless adopted kids once they become adults and then have low contact with their adopted parents.
Those nuts that protest outside abortion clinics will sometimes promise to “help” the mother if she won’t abort her child. Do they? No…First, those people don’t have the money to help or they wouldn’t be outside abortion clinics protesting instead of raising their own kids. To me, it looks like they just want people to make the same mistakes they did by having kids too young and with no plan. I wonder how much of the hatred for pro-abortion, liberated women is just plain jealousy?
It is simply not plausible that people who have a near disdain for tackling the problems of the future (the millennial debt crisis, the lack of retirement for millennials, climate crisis, skyrocketing pollution, no regulation of forever chemicals that can stay in a kid’s body for the rest of their lives, lack of interest in education for Generation Alpha beyond banning books or Critical Race Theory) are really that worried about “the kids.” [After all, only a week after the Supreme Cult’s decision to overturn Roe, they issued a decision to gut the EPA’s ability to regulate pollution from fossil fuels; doesn’t seem like they were particularly interested in the health of kids after all.] Maybe that’s why I rarely ever hear the phrase “Think of the Children” anymore, and today’s conservatives seem much more interested in making sure their exact ideological values are rammed down to the next generation than anything approaching honest concern for the world they’re actually passing onto children.