For years, the right has been passing anti-choice laws in the hope they will end up in the Supreme Court and lead to the overturning of Roe v Wade. Alabama passed such a law. More recently, Texas passed a diabolically clever law crafted to effectively ban abortion . My adopted plague land state of Florida has also jumped on board, introducing a similar bill.
While purporting to be motivated by pro-life (or at least anti-death) principles, these laws and bills are fundamentally misogynistic. They have three fundamental functions. The first is to appease a key portion of the base; the right has been promising their anti-choice wing that they will ban abortion for decades. Now they find themselves in a position where they both need to and can make good on this promise.
Second, couched in pro-life language, these laws provide excellent dog whistles for misogynists. The male misogynists generally understand that the message being sent to them is: “Your baby in her body. Her body in your kitchen. Making you a sandwich to put in your body.” More generally, the laws say to the misogynists in the base “we are misogynists like you, and we will put women in their proper place.”  Naturally, to make these claims is to seem crazy in the eyes of the “normies” who do not have the inclination to peer beneath the surface of the debate.
Third, the laws actual codify misogyny by harming women. To be fair, I can add a fourth reason that brings in the Democrats: the abortion debate was something of a battlefield of deceit in which the Republicans falsely claim to be pro-life (or at least anti-death) and the mainstream Democrats agree to fight the battle on this assumption. Their rhetoric is that they are pro-choice and they do not seem inclined to get into a substantial and complex fight over the core ethical and political issues. That is, of course, broadly true across what was mainstream politics: politicians mouthing their fighting words while most of them struggle to keep the status. . .