Abortion laws as a form of power over women

Even before Dobbs, it was clear that the devotion of many American conservatives to restricting or outlawing abortion was about regulating the lives of women, not about “life”. When you put that together with the “family values” fairy tale of a society where sexuality was reproductive and contained within a nuclear-family household, what becomes clear is that the attachment many older conservatives feel to that imaginary time is that it was a world where women could be blamed for what men wanted and what men did and where there was something you could do to women for that: compel them to marry, send them to an institution for wayward girls, characterize them as disabled and sterilize them. Men as husbands, brothers, fathers, uncles, cousins, almost never had to answer for what they did, and there were ways to hide the evidence of illicit and incestuous pregnancies and births that often enlisted several generations, men and women both, in the work of concealment.

— Timothy Burke