Some of the extremists in the anti-abortion movement in the US seeks as their goal the complete abolition of all abortions with no exceptions. They are also seeking to make medical abortions even harder by placing abortion pills under the list of controlled substances, making them much harder to obtain. But the end goal is not just the elimination of abortion. They are seeking much broader rollbacks on all manner of freedoms that have been gained in the last half-century.

In his concurring opinion in the 2022 case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that overthrew Roe v.Wade, Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas said that he wants the Supreme Court to revisit its other landmark decisions such as the right to use contraception (Griswold v. Connecticut 1965), the right to engage in homosexual acts (Lawrence v. Texas 2003), and same-sex marriage (Obergefell v. Hodges 2015). This is perfectly in line with what religious fundamentalists and evangelicals seem to really want, which is the prohibition of all sexual activity except between men and women within a marriage, and that too just for the purpose of procreation.

Weird JD Vance wants to go even further and invoke the infamous Comstock Act of 1873.

[J]ust last year, Vance signed onto a letter with more than 40 other Republican lawmakers demanding that the Department of Justice apply the more than 150-year-old Comstock Act—a 19th-century anti-obscenity law that bars the mailing of “every article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral use”—to “shut down all mail-order abortion operations” nationwide. That’s precisely what Project 2025, an initiative led by dozens of conservative groups and spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, has said the DOJ should do in the next conservative administration.

The news, which appears to have first been reported by the Washington Post on Wednesday, offers even more evidence of Vance’s strong opposition to abortion. As I reported earlier this week, Vance has also, in the past, said he would support a national abortion ban; argued against rape and incest exceptions; and asserted that “there’s something comparable between abortion and slavery,” alleging that both have a “morally distorting effect on the entire society.”

But extreme as such views are, it does not end there. Some even want to get rid of no-fault divorces, that can be obtained without anyone having to allege or prove that one party’s behavior is to blame. No-fault divorces have been especially a boon to people in abusive marriages in which the abuser is skillful in hiding the abuse.

Some Republican lawmakers and politicians have begun criticizing no-fault divorce, arguing that it is too easy for people to obtain a divorce. According to the Guardian, right-wing religious conservatives claim that contemporary divorce laws “deprive [men] of due process and hurt families.” The Texas Republican Party 2022 Platform, for example, expressed a desire to “rescind unilateral no-fault divorce laws and support covenant marriage,” directly threatening no-fault divorce¹. Ohio Republican Senate nominee J.D. Vance described how no-fault divorce makes it “easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear.” Beverly Willet, co-chair of the Coalition For Divorce Reform claimed, “unilateral no-fault divorce clearly violates the 14th Amendment. Too often in family court, defendants are deprived of life, liberty, and property without due process of law.” Contributors to the draconian Project 2025 have also expressed interest in ending no-fault divorce, a concerning development as they lay out policy agendas for a potential Republican presidential victory in the 2024 General Elections. All of these perspectives represent dangerous conservative ideologies that pose a threat to individual freedom and the rights of women. 

So why do some conservatives want to get rid of no fault divorce?

Following what some conservatives view as legal victories on the battlegrounds of abortion rights and affirmative action, a number of politicians and influencers are turning their attention to another long-held construct: No-fault divorce.
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Newly minted House Speaker Mike Johnson has been a vocal opponent of no-fault divorce, which allows couples to obtain a divorce without proving fault — and without both parties agreeing to the split. In a 2016 sermon, he claimed it turned the United States into a “completely amoral society.”

Though no-fault divorce was first legalized more than 50 years ago, it has long been sneered at in conservative circles, who see it as a danger to the sanctity of marriage and the concept of the American family.
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Before no-fault divorce, a woman in the US who was in an abusive or exploitative marriage didn’t have many options. Husbands typically controlled a family’s finances, and the social stigma for seeking divorce — not to mention the difficult process of having to prove “fault” — was a major deterrent. These problems got more complicated if a husband didn’t want a divorce.

You may also recall my earlier post about ProPublica’s report on the needless deaths of two women in Georgia who died because they did not receive the care they needed due to their pregnancy. On Monday, Fulton county superior judge Robert McBurney overturned Georgia’s law that bans women from getting an abortion after six weeks. In his opinion, he said something that is rarely said out loud about why some of the most vociferous proponents of abortion bans are men.

Many women, McBurney wrote, do not even know they are pregnant at six weeks.

“For these women, the liberty of privacy means that they alone should choose whether they serve as human incubators for the five months leading up to viability,” McBurney wrote. “It is not for a legislator, a judge, or a Commander from The Handmaid’s Tale to tell these women what to do with their bodies during this period when the fetus cannot survive outside the womb any more so than society could – or should – force them to serve as a human tissue bank or to give up a kidney for the benefit of another.”

In a footnote, McBurney added: “There is an uncomfortable and usually unspoken subtext of involuntary servitude swirling about this debate, symbolically illustrated by the composition of the legal teams in this case. It is generally men who promote and defend laws like the Life Act, the effect of which is to require only women – and, given the socio-economic and demographic evidence presented at trial, primarily poor women, which means in Georgia primarily black and brown women – to engage in compulsory labor, ie, the carrying of a pregnancy to term at the government’s behest.” [My emphasis-MS]

Although I agree with the judge’s comments, I was surprised at this level of editorializing in a judicial opinion, even if it was tucked into a footnote. Unless the opinion is overturned on appeal (a distinct possibility considering that this is Georgia, abortions are now available up to 22-24 weeks of pregnancy.

Conservatives may claim that all they want is to preserve ‘the sanctity of life, marriage, and the concept of the American family’ but what this overall pattern of behavior suggests is that what they really want is for heterosexual men to be in control of everything, and that they fear that women have too much freedom to make choices over their bodies and their lives.