This article appears in the June 2022 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
It’s a strange thing to be pregnant while abortion rights are being axed. It’s like being sober on the brink of Prohibition, musing about how you’re “naturally drunk on life.”
My pregnancy is wanted. Sure, my child will be born into late-stage capitalism’s inferno, and sure, they’ll have to become a Twitch streamer or OnlyFans creator in order to even afford trade school. But damn it, the kid will have been wanted.
GREG HOUSTON
That will not always be the case with generations born in the coming dystopian dark ages ahead for American uteruses. Thanks to the hollow-hearted fuckleheads on the Supreme Court and in state legislatures across the country, many children will now be born out of coercion. And unwanted kids face far more challenges than the average woes of growing up in the United States, with our lack of paid leave, unaffordable child care, unaffordable health care, unaffordable college, unaffordable housing, and other symptoms of living in … the richest country on Earth? Given that their parents’ needs were ignored and neglected, so too will these kids be susceptible to being ignored and neglected, and thereby all-around miserable people. In other words, more susceptible to becoming Republicans.
This makes it very clear what the goal of rolling back abortion rights is in the year 2022. Sure, it’s about making women second-class citizens and undoing decades of civil rights for them and inevitably the LGBTQ+ community. But for a party that governs thanks to minority rule, this is about something more. It’s about growing their ranks as that minority gets whittled down to a sliver. Justice Samuel Alito even bemoaned the dip in “the domestic supply of infants,” a turn of phrase that makes the harvesters in The Matrix seem benevolent.
The GOP knows their current voter stock is depleting. Fox News understands that its average viewer is an octogenarian scammer’s mark who’s been robbed of at least a few thousand dollars because they couldn’t locate their reading glasses before checking the box next to NO, I wouldn’t NOT want to make my donation monthly to help Donald Trump Make America Great Again, again. They’re dying off and they need new recruits.
What are Republicans to do? Appeal to the sensibilities of Catholic Latino immigrants? Never! Lift up young conservative women to nurture the next generation of Liz Cheneys and Meghan McCains? Gross! Support workers and unions to finally make good on their faux populism? LOL.
Soulless turds cannot be created or converted. They must be spawned from other soulless turds. (They are after all obsessed with pure bloodlines.) How else can they replenish not just the voter chanting “Jew S.A.!” at a Trump rally, but the majestic douchebaggery of a Ron DeSantis, the brute idiocy of a Sen. Tom Cotton, the glassy-eyed contempt of one Stephen Miller? New generations of children who’ve never been hugged, replete with mommy issues and forever seeking daddy’s approval, inevitably mean new generations of Republicans.
This is the GOP’s Great Replacement, replacing wanted Americans with unwanted ones. They’ve already made so many in the country feel unwanted, why not start at the source?
Of course, Republicans like Tucker Carlson love to peddle a different “great replacement” theory, the one where Democrats pave an imaginary pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants out of homely green M&M’s. Immigrants who he imagines will then vote Democrat, a painful irony considering Democrats can’t even secure voting rights for current citizens. But that replacement theory, like everything the GOP says and does, has been nothing more than projection. It is they who want to hatch armies of failsons and faildaughters to perpetuate a Christian nationalist neofacist nightmare.
Look, I can’t guarantee my kid will turn out great. Maybe they’ll vote for Pete Buttigieg one day and I’ll have to sit there and take it. But as the one with the uterus here, at least it was my fucking choice. See you on the streets.
