Anti-Abortion Republicans Are Reaping What They Sowed

Well well well, if it isn't the consequences of their own actions!

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It’s hard to take “pleasure” in anything happening in the realm of reproductive freedom these days. With Roe a thing of the past, red states across the country have wasted little time criminalizing any and everything that has even the faintest whiff of female bodily autonomy, while the usual ghouls and hypocrites are salivating at what they see as an election-year opportunity to do the same on a federal level. It’s bad news all the way down, with the very real possibility that things could get even worse in the not-too-distant future. So, yeah.

There is, however, a good measure of what I suppose could be called “grim satisfaction” in watching the Republican lawmakers who have, for years, exploited the issue of reproductive health for their own electoral gain now panicking because the voting base they oh-so-carefully cultivated has suddenly deemed them not fanatical enough.

From Politico:

The anti-abortion movement is turning on Republican lawmakers who support bills to protect in vitro fertilization, accusing them of sanctioning murder.

As many politicians raced in recent weeks to get to the right side of public opinion on IVF, some of the country’s biggest and most influential anti-abortion groups are pushing back.

Several have attacked state and federal lawmakers — who introduced legislation to protect IVF after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled last month that frozen embryos are children — for giving doctors a “license to kill” and said legislators’ efforts would result in “thousands of dead human beings.”

Other groups are going further, running ads against longstanding GOP allies that use the same graphic imagery — blood, babies and scalpels — they have long deployed to oppose Democrats and the abortion-rights movement.

All this comes as Alabama Republicans furiously attempt to avoid sleeping in the bed that they made, following a state Supreme Court ruling that frozen clumps of cells — literally, icy blobs in a petri dish—are actually living, breathing, rights-having human beings.

Alabama's Anti-IVF Decision Is a Sign of Hell to Come

“Oh no no no,” these lawmakers said, conspicuously making election-year googly eyes toward the overwhelming public support for IFV. “That can’t possibly be right! How could anyone think we were so craven in our lust for controlling women’s bodies that we’d somehow open the door for this extremely predictable, obvious outcome?? Why, we must bang together a last-minute fix, so this doesn’t come back to bite us in our lily-white asses! And we’d better get our own senator, Katie Britt, to mention her love of IVF in her State of the Union response that will definitely go great and not terrify the world!”

Well, the Britt part didn’t go so great, and those aforementioned asses are now in the process of being firmly bitten by the very same anti-abortion forces that put them in their legislative seats to begin with.

Per Politico, again:

In Mississippi, the anti-abortion movement and its GOP allies have called a Republican-backed proposal to protect IVF the “greatest assault on the cause of life that we’ve seen in Mississippi in a long time”

As it happens, there was a mass shooting in Mississippi just last week, but, okay, this is the “greatest assault on the cause of life” now I guess.

Whether this saber-rattling on the part of anti-choice shitheels will actually cost Republicans deemed insufficiently protective of cold petri dishes remains to be seen. And, of course, the alternatives that anti-women groups like the Family Research Council have in mind are likely to be even nuttier than the current crop of Republicans who, hypocritical as they may be, can at least be shamed into walking back some of their worst accomplishments. Nothing about this whole awful situation is good. But when it comes to Republican dogs who finally caught the car, there’s something to be said for watching them freak out with a mouth full of bumper.