“Won’t someone please think of the future labor units??”
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Wisconsin Speaker of the Assembly Robin Vos brings the next great moment in Republican messaging:
“I think how many Americans today would be alive in our workforce, doing all the things that helped make America great, if we hadn’t had such easy access to abortion,” Representative Robin Vos said on Tuesday at an event. “I think it’s bad for society.”
Ah yes. Future fodder for the workforce. What perfectly normal way to think of babies and children. It fits perfectly with the idea that the only way a woman can contribute to the nation’s greatness is via the production and rearing of the next generation of laborers/soldiers.
Where have I heard that before?
At any rate, to Vos and his ilk, if you can get pregnant it doesn’t matter if an unwanted pregnancy might hinder your ability to work. You either shouldn’t have that job in the first place, or you have an unimportant “woman’s job” like nursing or teaching. (And of course, that is one reason the right insists on conflating sexuality, gender and person’s reproductive system. Or at least, that’s their “polite” excuse for being perverts who get off on rubbing their obsession with genitals in everyone’s faces.) And no, Republicans won’t pay men who father children enough to support a family on a single salary. /
Consciously or not, Vos was riffing on the old anti-liberty message that if girls and women aren’t forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, it could deprive the world of the one person who would eventually grow up to cure cancer. (A message I’m convinced was created after they figured out that the signs that asked people to consider what would have happened if Jesus had been aborted were a tad blasphemous.) In that narrower case, no one is concerned that the inability to get an abortion might keep a living girl or woman from finding the cure. Science and medicine are for boys. And now science and medicine are bad, so general bewailing of the imagined loss of imagined laborers with an imagined harm to society it is.
Vos, in common with his fellow chucklefucks, is happy to expose actual children to risks that are known to interfere with their ability to grow up to be big strong coal miners with tears in their eyes. Risks like poverty, communicable diseases that can be prevented with vaccinations and injuries or fatalities from firearms are fine. People like that don’t read about another school shooting and say “Dang, that’s another dozen kids who won’t grow up to enter the workforce.” They’re too busy crying about their precious guns. I suspect Vos also doesn’t want to talk about the fact that Republican policies are bad for any person or worker who isn’t filthy rich to begin with, or even the fact that the U.S. doesn’t have a shortage of workers. And even if we did forcing people to have children isn’t a solution.
People who post off-topic comments smell like rotten cheese.
