When we lived in Texas, during the Bush years and 20 miles from Crawford, I was surrounded by Republican women. I befriended several Republicans. Which I didn't know was possible--probably because I had never met any female Republicans my age. All the Republicans I knew were very old, male, and white. Republicans were my Dad and his friends.

I learned in Texas most Republican women are pro choice on the abortion issue. I've never asked, but I believe even my father is pro choice. Barbara Bush is pro choice. Lara Bush is pro choice. Virtually every person I've ever met with a college education, who isn't Catholic, is pro choice. So why has the Republican party made abortion a plank upon which it stands? This question has been bothering me for months. And yesterday trying to answer this very same question put to me by my astute children, I thought I'd found the answer.

In the very most base way, its possible to break Democrats and Republicans down like this: Democrats believe in helping people who can not help themselves. The party stands on a basic moral premise. While Republicans believe in protecting their money.

I like my money. I appreciate the wish carried by Republicans, that life could be made simple, we should not be called upon to extend ourselves beyond our own lives, and if we didn't have to pay for government services our lives might be less expensive. I understand why someone might have those wishes. But, I find that point of view simplistic and immoral.

Now that church has fallen away for most families, moral structure is no longer implied evenly across society.  Republican politics are on a lonely shore; there is no moral structure underpinning their platform. Which, I think, is why their politicians are constantly making a show of faith by conflating scripture and government. After all, talk is cheap and praising God wins votes without costing any money. The irony here is so huge and would make any deity so wrathfully angry, I'll leave it to Karma. Republican politicians collect votes in the name of Jesus, but leave the feeding of needy people to....the needy people, I suppose.

I'd begun to think Republicans are spouting Anti Choice rhetoric simply to try and cobble a moral seeming plank into a platform devoid of morals. Then I read: Charmaine Yoest's Cheerful War on Abortion. Please read it. Its excellent and haunting. To sum up, I was nearly correct. The Republican party, tossing our children's reproductive health under an enormous shameful fascist and brutal bloody coat hanger, blithely courts Catholic votes with Anti Choice rhetoric. And that's it.

Meanwhile, I have yet to hear anyone make the most salient point about the abortion argument. So I'll make it here.

A fertilized cell goes through many changes during its 40 weeks inside the womb of its mother. For the first half of that time, this little lump of stardust is 100% completely and totally dependent on its mother's body. Let's name this developing embryo Stardust. It actually has several different scientific names as it develops. But Little Stardust can not be separated from its mother's body at first. It has no capacity to live on its own.

Most every person in the United States owns two healthy kidneys plus extra eyes, lungs, bone marrow, skin, and ropes of intestine they can technically live without. There are very sick human beings alive, barely, who could die without an extra kidney, lung, or bone marrow donation from someone healthy. But HEALTHY PEOPLE ARE NOT REQUIRED TO SHARE THEIR BODIES IN THIS WAY, EVEN IF THAT MEANS SOMEONE ELSE WILL DIE. This is a sad necessary difficult truth of life. And we can all see why this is so. Who would make someone else donate a part of their own body? No government could do such a thing without being monstrously fascist.

Stardust and all such developmentally dependent little lumps of love are allowed by their mothers to borrow her body. This is a beautiful arrangement, based on love and hormones. But it is not an arrangement we can legislate without becoming fascist. Yes, somewhere inside the womb Little Stardust does become capable of living without its mother (or a surrogate medical womb.) Exactly where that line is, is changing all the time. Be that as it may, this is still an arrangement that must be left up to each individual woman and her doctor. Governments can not legislate such without fascism.

Human beings are not pressed by the government of the United States to donate their body parts to keep other citizens alive. We are not even required to donate our very easily given blood. Every day, nearly every citizen alive in the United States elects to keep their body for their own use. Most of us even elect to keep our own bodies for our own use after we are dead. Women and their wombs are neither less human, nor lesser citizens, than anyone else in the United States. And unless we plan to change that, abortion must be kept safe and legal. Republicans and Democrats both know this is true, at least on an intuitive level.

Please consider: It’s hard to remember now, but for a brief moment around the time the Supreme Court decided Roe in 1973, it looked as if legalizing abortion would not be hugely divisive. Between 1967 and 1970, 17 states, including Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Kansas, North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia, lifted some restrictions on the procedure. The vote for Roe on the Supreme Court was 7 to 2, with conservative Republican appointees signing on. In a Gallup poll, 68 percent of Republicans and 59 percent of Democrats said in 1972 — the year after A.U.L. was founded — that the decision to abort should be solely between a woman and her doctor.

As those polls indicate, opposing abortion wasn’t always a moral imperative for the Republican Party. But it would soon become a tactical one. In 1979, two G.O.P. strategists, Richard Viguerie and Paul Weyrich, seized on the issue as a tool for wooing Catholic and evangelical voters to the party. As Linda Greenhouse and Reva B. Siegel write in their book, “Before Roe v. Wade,” the pair approached the Rev. Jerry Falwell with the idea of organizing a socially conservative “Moral Majority,” with abortion as the central issue. Vigurie and Weyrich also set up an early anti-abortion political action committee for the 1980 election, which they used to help get like-minded candidates elected. And in fact, around that time Republicans in Congress started voting for abortion restrictions at a higher rate than Democrats — even though Republican voters would remain more likely to be pro-choice than Democrats until the late 1980s.