Mandatory childbirth: how the anti-abortion crusade masks cruelty to women in the "sacralizing of fetuses"

[Wanderfound]

In societies throughout the ages, if able to find the opportunity, women have attempted to limit the number of children they bear. This poses a potential problem for a fascist patriarchy that needs vast numbers of soldiers and armaments workers. Women are less able to assert their procreative rights if kept subservient and dependent. So fascist ideology extolled patriarchal authority. Every man must be a husband, a father, and a soldier, il Duce said. Woman’s greatest calling was to cultivate her domestic virtues, devotedly tending to the needs of her family while bearing as many offspring for the state as she could.

Patriarchal ideology was linked to a conservative class ideology that saw all forms of social equality as a threat to hierarchal control and privilege. The patriarchy buttressed the plutocracy: If women get out of line, what will happen to the family? And if the family goes, the entire social structure is threatened. What then will happen to the state and to the dominant class’s authority, privileges, and wealth?

From Michael Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds