Don’t be naive — this is 100% a political situation. Until well into the 1980s nearly all Americans supported a woman’s right to choose because it’s patently obvious that the rights of a zygote don’t supercede the rights of a living, breathing, human and that it is not what is best for children to be born into situations where they are not wanted and cannot be adequately cared for. Republicans changed the narrative for political purposes.

“The former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, W.A. Criswell, who ran the First Baptist Church in Dallas, had argued that a child became an individual only after birth when “it had a life separate from its mother.” In both 1971 and 1974, Southern Baptists passed resolutions asking evangelicals to work for legal abortion in cases of rape, incest and fetal deformity, as well as cases where there was “carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental and physical health of the mother.”

Republican election strategists had simultaneously identified the issue as a cleave to peel away Democratic Catholics and Southern Whites unsettled by social change.”

In other words, this issue, which used to be almost universally acceptable in the US has been politicized for gain by political operatives who don’t like the idea of women having any agency and of social progress in general. It very literally and overtly is a bid to return to 1950s America where everyone “knew their place.”

You cannot harvest organs from a dead body without prior consent — even to save a life. You cannot be compelled to donate blood or bone marrow — even to save a life. Life has no sanctity unless personal body autonomy and potential quality of life are also valued.