“Keep her legs closed!”: Republicans are mad one of them said the quiet part out loud

With just over a year to go until the 2024 elections, Republicans are beginning to realize that the abortion issue won’t just go away. The GOP has faced a political quandary ever since Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, the 2022 Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, opened the door to abortion bans, which red states started to enact immediately. On one hand, abortion bans are wildly unpopular, and have only gotten more so as we hear horror stories about women being seriously injured or forced to carry dying babies to term. On the other hand, Republicans don’t want to just give up on their long-standing dream of using forced childbirth to punish women for having sex. 

To square this impossible circle, Republicans have relied on their favorite strategy: Relentless dishonesty. Lots of pseudo-compassionate noises about women’s pain, while insisting that their sadistic impulses are “pro-life.” They pretend to support hypothetical exceptions to abortion bans, which for the most part do not apply in actual reality. They make weak attempts to rebrand their agenda as “pro-baby.” They feign support for contraception access while supporting organizations that actively work to demolish viable birth control. 

That is, most Republicans most of the time are on board with the lying-through-our-teeth strategy. But not all! Meet New Jersey state Sen. Edward Durr, a truck driver-turned-politician who has a habit of saying the quiet parts out loud. 

---

Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Subscribe to her newsletter Standing Room Only.

---

“A woman does have a choice! Keep her legs closed,” Durr wrote in a 2020 Facebook post, in which he also called a pro-choice woman an “idiot.” He also “liked” a post that called for “spaying women like dogs.” 

Democrats in New Jersey are pouring a lot of money into making sure that voters know about these Facebook comments. One Democratic PAC spent more than $500,000 on a TV ad tying Durr to other New Jersey Republicans by name. Another sent out a mailer highlighting his comments. 

Republicans in New Jersey are crying foul, claiming that this is oh, so unfair. State Sen. Vince Polistina, who’s named in the Democratic ads, called them “political hack jobs” and claimed they’re “lying to voters.” Another group of Republicans issued a joint statement saying that Durr’s statements were “offensive and unacceptable” and “don’t represent us or what we believe in any way.”

It’s true that New Jersey Republicans have the luxury of mostly avoiding the issue, which doesn’t come up too often in their largely Democratic state. But their claims that they’re miles away Durr’s views don’t measure up to the evidence. Polistina, for instance, voted against two bills that would protect New Jersey abortion providers from legal persecution if they serve patients from out of state. The other Garden State Republicans complaining about this are tougher to pin down — no doubt on purpose — but would only commit to saying that they support exceptions from a possible abortion ban “for victims of rape or incest, or in case of a serious health risk.”

The difference between Durr and most other Republicans is about surface-level rhetoric, not actual substance. That’s demonstrated by the routine invocation of “rape exceptions.” Making an exception for rape is just a more polite way of saying “shut your legs,” since the implication is any woman who consents to sex deserves to run the risk of forced childbirth. And as reproductive health experts routinely point out, these “exceptions” are often meaningless in practice. Even if you’re legally entitled to an abortion under those circumstances, you can’t get one if all the competent providers have been run out of the state. 

Durr’s viewpoint may not be uttered in public very often, but it’s at the foundation of the entire anti-abortion movement. Former Texas Solicitor General Jonathan Mitchell admitted as much about his state’s abortion ban, which he played a major role in writing. In a 2021 Supreme Court brief defending that law, Mitchell wrote, “Women can ‘control their reproductive lives’ without access to abortion; they can do so by refraining from sexual intercourse.” He condemned pro-choice court decisions for accepting the view that “women (and men) should have the right to freely engage to sexual intercourse.”

Mitchell included that parenthetical “and men” to put a pseudo-egalitarian gloss on this puritanical crackdown, but his actual behavior suggests he’s a big fan of the sexual double standard, or worse. Right now, he’s representing a man named Marcus Silva, who is using the Texas abortion ban to sue friends of his former wife, apparently because they helped her leave him. Court filings suggest that Silva threatened to report his wife to police for having an abortion if she didn’t submit to him “mind, body and soul.” Other documents indicate that Silva tried to coerce her into having sex with him and doing his laundry, saying he’d drop the lawsuit in exchange. It sure sounds like Jonathan Mitchell believes women have no right to control their own bodies. 

---

Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Subscribe to her newsletter Standing Room Only.

---

Earlier this month, Audrey Dutton of ProPublica published a story about abortion laws in Idaho, which illustrates how dishonest compassion-shaped words about pregnancy are when they come from the mouths of Republicans. Gov. Brad Little signed a near-total abortion ban in the state soon after the Dobbs decision, and talked a big game about much he and other Republicans would do to take care of the little ladies they were forcing to have babies. 

“We absolutely must come together like never before to support women and teens facing unexpected or unwanted pregnancies,” Little said, adding that “local and state government must stand ready to lift them up and help them and their families with access to adoption services, health care, financial and food assistance, counseling and treatment, and family planning.”

Readers will not be surprised to learn that every word of that high-minded promise was a lie. Instead, Idaho Republicans have eagerly seized on every possible chance of persecuting and undermining young mothers and their children.

This isn’t about some principled division, where Republicans are “pro-life” but also favor “small government.” Depriving women of support after they give birth is part of the same misogynist program that motivates abortion bans. Poverty is part of the punishment they are inflicting on women. Once a woman has sex, there’s really no limit to the pain that Republicans believe is her just deserts. Bleeding out from an untreated miscarriage, losing a job, delivering a baby to watch it die on the table, struggling to feed young children, being stuck in an abusive relationship: They understand perfectly well that these are among the likely outcomes of forced childbirth for women.

But of course, making women suffer is, and always has been, the point. Ed Durr’s only mistake was saying so out loud.