Do these people even listen to themselves? Richard Land thinks women who have an abortion must be "impaired", and therefore only the doctors providing the abortion should be charged with a crime should the procedure be outlawed:

Such a legal stance is tantamount to "ignoring or infantilizing women, turning them into 'victims' of their own free will," Quindlen wrote. "State statutes that propose punishing only a physician suggest the woman was merely some addled bystander who happened to find herself in the wrong stirrups at the wrong time."

Land doesn't deny that women who have abortions might be addled, but he, along with Yoest, Earll, and Gans, takes exception to them being described as bystanders—or as enlightened women making free, educated choices.

"It's not demeaning to assume that any person who is a mother who could make the decision to do this must be suffering from some form of psychological impairment because of the crisis of the pregnancy or because of societal demeaning of human life," Land said.

...

Would making most abortion procedures illegal cause women to seek deadly, unprofessional abortions? Almost certainly not, Earll said. "What we saw with abortion is that when it's illegal, most women don't try to have one. The law is a teacher in this."

Look, one either has moral agency or one doesn't. If there's agency, then an illegal act is a crime. If not, then not. But to write off an entire class of women as mentally ill - if only temporarily - because they make a decision you don't approve of? That doesn't fit any moral framework I'm aware of. Nor does the outmoded idea that estrogen makes you crazy or the risible theory that society brainwashes women into killing their children.

The "tell" here is the that last line about the law. It really doesn't get any clearer than this: these people think women aren't capable of making moral decisions for themselves. Therefore, they must be "taught" right from wrong and regulated in the meantime. Even as they deny it, they prove the point.

This is a very unforgiving perspective, not to mention a punitive one. As Digby has said over and over again, the laws intended to strike down Roe aren't about ending abortion. They're about regulating women's sexuality, so that Papa always guides the family. After all, he's the only one who can think clearly enough to lay down the law.