By Jess McCabe | 2 December 2005, 16:29

An unusually elequant summing up of the anti-choice movement in America as the ” baby daddies of the spiritual world: full of promised love for the abstraction, and nowhere to be found when the kid shows up” from Steve Almond on AlterNet today.

Prompted in part by the state-side rumblings, that could well preceed the earthquake that would be the overturning of Roe v Wade, and in part by an email from a young pro-lifer virgin, Almond argues: “Obviously, not all anti-abortionists kill or harass people. But all of them share a histrionic view of themselves as heroic rescuers (the term pro-lifer says it all) aligned against Godless fornicators.”

Anti-abortionists are refigured as indulging in decadently repressed religious fantasies, with little empathy for real-world poverty or the self detirmination of individual women. “Her note is also typical of anti-choiceniks in its flabbergasting solipsism. It seems never to have occurred to her that there might be a world outside her own beliefs; that a pregnant woman’s body is her own property, not that of the state or any religious interest group; that the issue here is one of individual liberty, not ideology.

“Nor has it occurred to her that those women who get abortions suffer considerable anguish, that they are not sex-crazed degenerates who waltz into the stirrups whistling ‘Zip-A-Dee-Do-Da’. In fact, the feelings of the mother, the circumstances surrounding the pregnancy, mean nothing to anti-abortionists. All that matters is the unborn soul, which becomes the object onto which they project all their tender wishes about this fallen world.”