I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what 2024 (and beyond) holds for the fight for reproductive freedom (“shitstorm” seems about right), and I keep coming back to statistics around domestic violence. Studies show that leaving an abusive relationship is the most dangerous time for victims and survivors of domestic and intimate partner violence, and those risks increase significantly for pregnant people — especially pregnant people of color — establishing their independence. This is probably the most useful lens we can use when planning for what lies ahead, because we’re in a “leaving” moment when it comes to abortion rights and access in the United States.

Abuser tactics have always been at the heart of anti-abortion politics. The end of federal protections for abortion rights with Dobbs was a key opportunity for the anti-abortion movement to realize the thrill of winning, really winning, the control they’ve always fantasized about. In light of this, it’s no surprise that the anti-abortion movement is not stopping at overturning Roe: they were never going to in the first place. The patriarchy is a power-hungry beast, and it only wants more. Now that the anti-abortion movement has had a little taste, we can expect it to become more abusive, more violent, and more controlling — especially because, after their big win with Dobbs, their movement has been losing steadily on local and state ballots. 

I touched on this in my DAME column today, and detailed some of these escalations, which include ongoing efforts to prosecute abortion as homicide, remove “exceptions” to abortion bans and restrictions, and ban life-saving emergency abortion care. This stuff is rooted in racism, classism, and misogyny, as all anti-abortion efforts are, but there’s a post-Roe edge to it that is about more than hating women — it’s about the belief that abortions are fundamentally emasculating to the men who finally achieved their rightful domination, only, of course, to have the thrill of subjugation wrested away from them in Kansas and Ohio and Kentucky and Montana and and and ….

Neither pro- nor anti-abortion folks tend to talk explicitly about abortion politics in terms of emasculation, though it’s a pervasive subtext in messaging about the ways in which abortion supposedly harms cisgender men by denying them their God-given right to fatherhood and familial/patriarchal domination, and in white supremacist, fascist, “men’s rights” and “red-pilled” communities’ use of words like “cuck” to describe pro-choice and feminist men. Emasculation is also heavily implied in conversations about the ways in which misogyny motivates abortion bans and restrictions.   

Of course, a misogynist will date, fuck, marry, and procreate with a woman; the survival of the human race has more or less depended on it. But a man who feels emasculated will fly into a rage. He will lash out. He will punish. He will do anything but name that he feels emasculated — itself an emasculating thing to do, as it requires the (highly feminized) capacity for self-interrogation, social-critical thinking, and emotional intuitiveness and regulation.

It’s telling that, to the extent the anti-abortion movement is grappling with the backlash to the end of Roe, they are predominantly concerned with not seeming like “bad guys” for doing, well, bad things. They are worried about losing votes and voters — not with saving (let alone improving) the lives of the women, transgender folks, and gender non-conforming people whose lives and livelihoods they are directly wrecking with attacks on abortion (and contraception, and gender-affirming care, and pregnancy care and and and and …). They are worried about losing the power and prestige with which all patriarchal movements and entities are singularly obsessed.

When I went looking for people making explicit connections between abortion and emasculation, I didn’t find much, but what’s out there is pretty revealing. This piece, from an anti-”woke” author Noelle Mering for the right-wing Ethics and Public Policy Center, describes the pro-choice man thusly: “… he isn’t only indecent but also emasculated, cut off from any true purpose or deeper meaning of manliness, divorced from his duties and unwilling to forgo his pleasure for the sake of the more vulnerable.” An anti-abortion Denver Post reader wrote in a 2017 letter to the editor that “women’s liberation” means that “men are emasculated from their instinctual role as protector and provider.” 

On the other side of things, gender scholar Whitney Arey published a paper in NORMA: The International Journal for Masculinity Studies in 2020 looking at, among other ideas, themes of emasculation in anti-abortion protest speech: “The examples I use from anti-abortion speech present men’s participation in abortion as emasculating, shameful, weak and irresponsible, while simultaneously emphasizing male patriarchy, toxic masculinity, responsible fatherhood, and strength as characteristics that men inherently possess.”

I put it to y’all that when anti-abortion politicians, protesters, and activists describe pro-choice men as being essentially emasculated, they are engaging in the classic and well honed right-wing and conservative practice of projection — ascribing their own behaviors and motivations to those on the political left as a deliberate deflection tactic. This is especially prevalent in the pervasive fiction that conservatives are hard-working and liberals and leftists lazy do-nothings, but we see it in everything from allegations of voter fraud (a right-wing specialty) to claims that lefties and Democrats are “groomers” and pedophiles (it’s the other way around).  

I’m still noodling on this part of my theory, but I think some of the best evidence that the anti-abortion movement is motivated by deep-seated feelings of emasculation is its struggle to find a comfortable public alignment with Donald Trump on the issue. Because whatever it is that motivates Trump to do anything, I don’t think that he feels emasculated by abortion, or that the concept of emasculation informs his commitment to anti-abortion politics. While Trump is of course a misogynist and a rapist, I suspect he lacks — perhaps pathologically — the self-awareness necessary to feel emasculation, or at least to identify it as such. (I assume his brain short-circuits at “feel bad” and he starts throwing lamps and bawling until someone hands him an iPad and a bag of gummy worms.)

Other anti-abortion leaders’ emasculatory rage at the prospect of women self-determining their reproductive (and public and private) lives are easier to pin down. Mike Pence’s entire political (and, I assume, personal) identity is wrapped up in protecting his own toxic, American evangelical masculinity, from eschewing masks to refusing to meet alone with women. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is similarly fixated on the preservation of a deeply creepy brand of manhood, rooted in what Melissa Gira Grant at The New Republic identified as an obsession with casting himself as a “persecuted minority.” What is emasculation but a dangerous and violent sense of persecution at the hands of the women you feel entitled to dominate?

It is not enough to say that anti-abortion politicians, lobbyists, and activists “hate” women, though of course they do hate us (and, by virtue of the strength of internalized misogyny, often seem to hate themselves, too). They are motivated by emasculation, a potent combination of imagined persecution and subscription to the ideals of a toxic patriarchy that must be preserved through force — not merely by enforcement or statute, but by the punishment of feminine non-compliance with retrograde sexual and gender norms. It is eminently villainesque, and especially in our era of growing fascism and dark-money politics, it may be their greatest strength. But if we can manage to identify and exploit it, it may also be their greatest weakness.

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