First, you can thank the American Catholic laity for it. In most polls Catholics have the same opinions on abortion as everyone else, but pro-life Catholics are the backbone of the movement. It was lay Catholics who developed the legal arguments, organized the marches, created the lobbying groups and founded the crisis pregnancy centers, often in spite of the indifference or interference of the clergy who were anxious to make nice with Democrat party politicians and not rock the boat with their more progressive parishioners.
The Catholic activists were disproportionately women, there is probably some deep meaning to this.
Evangelicals didn’t hop on the pro-life bandwagon until the 80s, precisely because they saw it as a Catholic issue. When they did come around they contributed a heavy voting advantage but the whole infrastructure was already there.
Does that mean this is a sectarian religious decision? No, I can’t help it if Catholics have a better grasp of the good life than the ex-Protestant materialists who set up the absurd law.
A common feminist trope is that being anti-abortion isn’t really about fetal life, it is really about controlling women. They should learn to embrace the healing power of “and”. Yes, it is about fetal life, and yes it is also about helping women and men make good decisions about sex and reproduction. For all the pro-lifers I know the life of the baby is paramount but recreating a healthy society is part of it too.
The sexual revolution is not sustainable. It creates a regime in which we have to pretend that gender differences are fake and puts us into roles that make a lot of people miserable. Thanks to delayed and failed family formation people are increasingly finding themselves lonely and isolated. The sexual revolution is artificially enabled by Rube Goldberg contraption consisting of chemical contraceptives, antibiotics, surgical interventions, mass appropriation of wealth through the family courts, and the welfare state. It is inherently fragile; a crisis comes, and it blows away.
I haven’t thought it all through but there are parallels between the current sexual marketplace and the consumerist economy, both of which are creatures of Cold War liberalism, the left-liberals creating the sexual revolution and the right-liberals creating the deregulated economy. I’m not much of an environmentalist but the promise of eternal growth thanks to dodgy money schemes and technological advances must one day run into a wall. Eventually the material and cultural resources will run out. How much plastic shit do you really need? How many strip malls and subdivisions can you build over what used to be productive land? How many cubical drones, wage slaves and dropouts can you subdue with head meds, pot and porn?
Finally, this is a little too on the nose:
The Satanic Temple is the leading beacon of light in the battle for abortion access. With Roe v Wade overturned, a religious exemption will be the only available challenge to many restrictions to access.
Learn More⤵️
Originally tweeted by The Satanic Temple (@satanic_temple_) on June 24, 2022.
Truth and Tolerance 
The victory on Dobbs goes 100% to President Trump. He did in 4 years what nobody else could do in 50 years.
Must’ve been his religious virtue.
I’m intrigued by but also skeptical of the idea of revealing and meaningful parallels between Reagan-era deregulation and the sexual revolution. I think the first question, though, is: what does it mean for an economy to be “consumerist”? I hear the term used but I don’t know if a good working definition.
Here’s the basic reason I’m skeptical of the parallel between the sexual revolution and economic deregulation. What we call deregulation or neoliberal economics was a replacement of the New Deal social and economic arrangements, which were fifty years old or so at the time. The sexual revolution, on the other hand, struck at much, much older norms and assumptions. The neoliberal settlement now is almost as old as the New Deal was when it was replaced, so it’s not surprising that it, too, is now cracking and the subject of much skepticism including from you and me. But it was just one of a series of social and economic arrangements, each the result of a combination of power struggles and good faiths attempts to meet exigent needs of an era.
I guess the TL;DR is that in my opinion the settlements meant to tame and channel 1930s style industrial capitalism were outdated by 1980, whereas marriage, etc. is still good, actually.
That is a really good critique.
But is it possible to separate the sexual economy from the economy-economy? I don’t think it is. I don’t think the end of economy-economy should be separate from the well being of organic communities like family-extended family-village-region-nation. But these are the very communities that both the economic and sexual approaches undermine.
Of course, one of the critiques of the New Deal (and Great Society) was that they undermined family and local solidarity while attempting to create a national solidarity. The reaction (Reganism / deregulation) assumed family / local solidarity but that has dissolved apace.
So no matter what the national economic policy, it seems like the underlying model of individual & community stays the same.
Your comment hints at another point, that sexual “deregulation” started on a big scale when the Great Society was being implemented (if one ignores the brief postwar Kerouac-era “deregulation” when sexual behavior briefly changed but mores did not; and it seems fair to ignore this, since the mores endured and things were pretty much status quo ante bellum by 1952 or so).
I agree, the sexual economy is linked to the economy economy. At levels above the nuclear family, this is complicated and hard to make judgments about. There are lots ways that nuclear families interact with extended families and other forms of community, and which one a society settles on is going to depend a lot on its economic structure, and to some extent vice-versa, causality can go both ways on this. That diversity is OK, since there are many such arrangements that are basically functional. But the nuclear family as a basic building block–I don’t mean to the exclusion of other forms of community, extended family bonds, just the nuclear family with a married couple and their children as the most basic thing–is superior to all alternatives. And I agree, economic decision-making shouldn’t be separated from its effect on this.
But as you say, family disintegration seems to have started under one economic arrangement and continued under its successor. So what do we do? What economic arrangement might help? Is there any that would, or are the problems elsewhere and too deep? I really don’t know.
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