Absent the Ruinous "Family Wage" System, No Return of the 1950s Is Possible

This is what the antiabortion people cannot understand, and they never will understand it.  The whole "debate" over abortion has never been about fetuses; it is all about whether people see women as human beings or as merely fuck toys and incubators for a man through marriage.  It is really that simple.  Lots of suggestions of restriction of abortion access denigrates the humanity of women saying they are merely "hosts" for "babies."  That is rendering women subhuman, good only for sexual or reproductive exploitation.

The antiabortion crowd romanticizes the 1950s, an era long since dead, and in fact was an era where women increasingly participated in the labor force despite all the nonsense about "homemaking" being a "career," which of course it is not.  It is labor, but it is not a "job," much less a "career."  Men would never lower themselves to this "career" without extreme ridicule on the part of society, but they never hesitate to push women into cooking, taking sole care of kids, cleaning, and "emotional labor," whatever the fuck the last thing is because men don't want to do it.

Besides, it is not possible for a return to the 1950s nuclear family anyway.  It existed, when families could afford a SAHM, only through the poisonous "family wage" idea.  It was poisonous because it provided the foundation for sex discrimination against women in the workplace.  Unions and the Catholic Church pushed for it early in the twentieth century because they thought women didn't belong in the labor force but instead should be at home raising the future labor force participants.  Through around the 1970s, more and more male-dominated jobs were paid a SAHM subsidy through inflation of their salaries and wages while women were shut out of those fields.  The fields they did dominate were denigrated in pay and prestige not because they were "helping" fields or anything of the sort but simply because women did them.  Employers felt women simply didn't need the money the way men did because they were primarily dependent on the man's income and were working merely to "supplement" the household.  This was economically ruinous, and continues to be economically ruinous, for women who find themselves alone or having to support children alone on their income.  However, for white males especially, it was great for them since all they had to do was point to a job upon high school graduation and make damned good money whether or not the job had skills, education, and experience required.

This idea of man as provider, woman as dependent not only forms the attitude of the antiabortion crowd, but it also underlies the MRA and alt.right crowd.  Never mind the fact neoliberal economic ideas beginning in the 1980s virtually destroyed private sector unions, forced millions of jobs overseas, and provided ruinous trade agreements making it rarer men could in fact "support a family" on one income.  These same right-wing idiots continue to vote for people who continue to hollow out our economy and listen to propaganda pushed by the likes of Charles Koch.

It doesn't matter if abortion is outlawed or not.  Marriage rates are not going to climb back up, let alone early marriages returning to 1950s level, men are not going to make family wages, and all restricting abortion is going to do is encourage more and more women to reject men, marriage, and children.  Count on it.  Women aren't going back to the kitchen.