The real reason for the anti-abortion push has been laid bare

Controlling women, of course.

In Alabama on Tuesday evening, the state senate voted to approve a measure that would ban virtually all abortions in that state.

[...]

Amendments that would have carved out exceptions in the law in cases of rape and/or incest were resoundingly defeated.

[...]

Clyde Chambliss, the Pride of Prattville, who was one of the prime movers of the law, and who was asked whether in vitro fertilization clinics that discard embryos could be criminally liable under this new law. Of course not, Chambliss replies. After all, people Chambliss knows might need to use those. "The egg in the lab doesn’t apply. It’s not in a woman. She’s not pregnant."

[...]

Game? Given away. This wasn't about protecting god's little embryos. It was about asserting control over women, taking away their physical autonomy in the most intimate fashion.

[...]

Time is going to honor Adam Serwer for defining in simple fashion the Republican Party that has been built in this country over the past five decades, and for summing up in a sentence the ultimate manifestation of the prion disease that has been eating away the party's higher functions ever since Ronald Reagan fed it the monkeybrains in the late 1970s, that ultimate manifestation being the current presidency*.

The cruelty is the point.

[...]

Sen. Clyde Chambliss is in full flush of the prion disease.

[...]

[A]nd so were all 25 state senators who voted for this act of oppressive cruelty.

[...]

Overlooked in the sensation surrounding the Alabama bill was a decision by the Department of Justice aimed at making it easier for states to kill people in grotesque fashion. From CNN:

"We conclude that articles intended for use in capital punishment by a state or the federal government cannot be regulated as 'drugs' or 'devices' under the (Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act)," Steven A. Engel, the head of the department's Office of Legal Counsel, wrote in a 26-page legal opinion signed May 3. "FDA accordingly lacks jurisdiction to regulate such articles for that intended use."

This was in response to an FDA crackdown on the substances used to poison inmates to death, and to an injunction granted by a federal court in 2012 aimed at blocking the importation of these drugs on the grounds that they were "unapproved and misbranded" for use in killing people. The DOJ now has said that the FDA has no authority over any drug that can be used by the government to kill people.

[...]

The Department of Justice simply does not care how barbaric a state might want to be in its efforts to kill people. The cruelty is the point.

  Charles P Pierce

Excerpts from the October 2018 Serwer column linked above:

The Museum of African-American History and Culture is in part a catalog of cruelty.

[...]

The artifacts that persist in my memory, the way a bright flash does when you close your eyes, are the photographs of lynchings. But it’s not the burned, mutilated bodies that stick with me. It’s the faces of the white men in the crowd.

[...]

Their names have mostly been lost to time. But these grinning men were someone’s brother, son, husband, father. They were human beings, people who took immense pleasure in the utter cruelty of torturing others to death—and were so proud of doing so that they posed for photographs with their handiwork, jostling to ensure they caught the eye of the lens, so that the world would know they’d been there. Their cruelty made them feel good, it made them feel proud, it made them feel happy. And it made them feel closer to one another.

  Adam Serwer @ The Atlantic

The same things seen in photographs from Abu Ghraib and soldiers' Facebook Pages recording their actions throughout the Middle East.

The Trump era is such a whirlwind of cruelty that it can be hard to keep track. This week alone, the news broke that the Trump administration was seeking to ethnically cleanse more than 193,000 American children of immigrants whose temporary protected status had been revoked by the administration, that the Department of Homeland Security had lied about creating a database of children that would make it possible to unite them with the families the Trump administration had arbitrarily destroyed, that the White House was considering a blanket ban on visas for Chinese students, and that it would deny visas to the same-sex partners of foreign officials. At a rally in Mississippi, a crowd of Trump supporters cheered as the president mocked Christine Blasey Ford, the psychology professor who has said that Brett Kavanaugh, whom Trump has nominated to a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court, attempted to rape her when she was a teenager.

[...]

Ford testified to the Senate, utilizing her professional expertise to describe the encounter, that one of the parts of the incident she remembered most was Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge laughing at her as Kavanaugh fumbled at her clothing. “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” Ford said, referring to the part of the brain that processes emotion and memory, “the uproarious laughter between the two, and their having fun at my expense.” And then at Tuesday’s rally, the president made his supporters laugh at her.

[...]

Even those who believe that Ford fabricated her account, or was mistaken in its details, can see that the president’s mocking of her testimony renders all sexual-assault survivors collateral damage. Anyone afraid of coming forward, afraid that she would not be believed, can now look to the president to see her fears realized. Once malice is embraced as a virtue, it is impossible to contain.

[...]

The cruelty of the Trump administration’s policies, and the ritual rhetorical flaying of his targets before his supporters, are intimately connected. As Lili Loofbourow wrote of the Kavanaugh incident in Slate, adolescent male cruelty toward women is a bonding mechanism, a vehicle for intimacy through contempt.

[...]

We can hear the spectacle of cruel laughter throughout the Trump era. There were the border-patrol agents cracking up at the crying immigrant children separated from their families, and the Trump adviser who delighted white supremacists when he mocked a child with Down syndrome who was separated from her mother. There were the police who laughed uproariously when the president encouraged them to abuse suspects, and the Fox News hosts mocking a survivor of the Pulse Nightclub massacre (and in the process inundating him with threats), the survivors of sexual assault protesting to Senator Jeff Flake, the women who said the president had sexually assaulted them, and the teen survivors of the Parkland school shooting. There was the president mocking Puerto Rican accents shortly after thousands were killed and tens of thousands displaced by Hurricane Maria, the black athletes protesting unjustified killings by the police, the women of the #MeToo movement who have come forward with stories of sexual abuse, and the disabled reporter whose crime was reporting on Trump truthfully.

Links to reports of all those situations are provided in the article.

It is not just that the perpetrators of this cruelty enjoy it; it is that they enjoy it with one another. Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to one another, and to Trump.

[...]

Somewhere on the wide spectrum between adolescent teasing and the smiling white men in the lynching photographs are the Trump supporters whose community is built by rejoicing in the anguish of those they see as unlike them, who have found in their shared cruelty an answer to the loneliness and atomization of modern life.

[...]

Only the president and his allies, his supporters, and their anointed are entitled to the rights and protections of the law, and if necessary, immunity from it. The rest of us are entitled only to cruelty, by their whim.

[...]

A blockbuster New York Times investigation on Tuesday reported that President Trump’s wealth was largely inherited through fraudulent schemes, that he became a millionaire while still a child, and that his fortune persists in spite of his fumbling entrepreneurship, not because of it. The stories are not unconnected. The president and his advisers have sought to enrich themselves at taxpayer expense; they have attempted to corrupt federal law-enforcement agencies to protect themselves and their cohorts, and they have exploited the nation’s darkest impulses in the pursuit of profit. But their ability to get away with this fraud is tied to cruelty.

Trump’s only true skill is the con; his only fundamental belief is that the United States is the birthright of straight, white, Christian men, and his only real, authentic pleasure is in cruelty. It is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them, that binds his most ardent supporters to him, in shared scorn for those they hate and fear: immigrants, black voters, feminists, and treasonous white men who empathize with any of those who would steal their birthright. The president’s ability to execute that cruelty through word and deed makes them euphoric. It makes them feel good, it makes them feel proud, it makes them feel happy, it makes them feel united. And as long as he makes them feel that way, they will let him get away with anything, no matter what it costs them.