Roy Moore is trying to save himself with a tried and true conservative move: resorting to the politics of abortion.
If Republican Roy Moore survives allegations of sexual misconduct (several involving minors) and beats Democrat Doug Jones in Alabama’s Senate election Dec. 12, evangelical single-issue abortion voters will likely deliver the victory.
.. Understanding the power of the abortion issue, Moore’s wife, Kayla, claimed at a rally that Jones is the real threat to children, because he supports “full-term abortion,” which she defined as “suck[ing] a child’s brains out at the moment before birth.” Such a procedure, however, simply does not exist, as states generally restrict abortions after 24 weeks of pregnancy, except in cases of medical necessity.
.. they claim to want to protect children (which they deem unborn fetuses to be), but appear to actually care more about securing a vote for their legislative priorities
.. Before the 1960s, an American woman could obtain a legal abortion only by traveling abroad or having a local doctor persuade a (typically all-male) hospital committee that a pregnancy threatened her life. In practice, this allowed wealthier and better-connected women, who were the family and friends of doctors, to obtain legal, safe abortions under false pretenses — while everyone else was forced to seek illegal, often deadly, abortions.
Fed up with this situation, male reformers from medicine, law and some more progressive religious communities began trying to legalize abortion.
.. Although not all feminist groups supported legal abortion, most seized upon the issue because it fit their larger priorities quite nicely. They wanted to redefine womanhood outside the strict confines of motherhood and domesticity, and as part of this project, they strove to reform the law to offer new opportunities to women. Having the legal right to choose whether to become a mother thus became the ultimate expression of women’s rights.
.. Conservatives turned seemingly unrelated issues, such as lowering taxes, a longtime Republican priority, into a way to strike a blow against legal abortion (by eliminating Medicaid funding for the procedure).
.. Thus, opposing legal abortion, which reformers had positioned as the ultimate expression of women’s rights, became backing the traditional American family (a particularly powerful expression because the nuclear family arrangement had long been promoted as distinguishing America from its communist adversary, the USSR)
.. The economic recession in the 1970s, which left many male breadwinners struggling to keep their jobs, made it easier for conservative Republicans to portray the efforts of feminists and their Democratic allies as a systemic assault upon the family unit. They claimed that by pushing for more opportunities for women, feminists and Democrats were undermining male breadwinners and taking their jobs at a time when men needed them most.
.. When Moore and his supporters court single-issue abortion voters — notably, Alabama’s evangelical Republican base — they are saying: Doug Jones is for feminism, which means he backs women, like Moore’s accusers, who are trying to diminish male power and seize it for their own purposes. Mentioning Jones’s abortion stance also signals that he rejects the traditional nuclear family and women’s domestic and maternal responsibilities within it.
.. Moore, on the other hand, is presented as a conservative Republican who, whatever his personal failings, is fighting a spiritual battle for Christian values as well as the traditional nuclear family and its prescribed gender roles. This means that as a man, his expressions of sexuality need not be questioned, while a woman’s must be channeled into motherhood. In this sense, rallying to save unborn children is perfectly consistent with backing a candidate accused of assaulting minors.