Thanks for explaining, I think I understand your viewpoint a bit better now. I still think it's somewhat hypocritical that they want the baby to be born at all costs but many of them do not want public services to help single mothers. And I've seen first-hand how single mothers are treated in churches, so pushing church as a solution is not a viable workaround.
Part of the conservative worldview is just so deeply tied into the idea of "deserving," both in a good and bad sense, that it interferes with the value of harm reduction.
If a single mother struggles it's because she deserves it. If her child suffers for that struggle it's her fault. So long as there's something or someone to blame, you can ignore the question of how you could have prevented the problem in the first place.
In fact, if you provide her support, you might be rewarding her infidelity. And then people will perceive that as a reasonable thing to do and more people will do it and then and then and then....
But the important thing is that she didn't "sin" by "killing the baby". If the baby dies after it's born, it's also her fault.
Like I said, there's no hypocrisy there. Being a hypocrite isn't the worst thing someone can be. It's entirely possible to have a perfectly (or as perfectly as humans are capable of) self-consistent worldview that is also incredibly cruel. I think a lot of people have lost sight of that.
At some point people started to believe that conservativism was about "preserving the past" but that's subtly wrong. It's about "preserving hierarchies". Recognizing that all people are worthy of life is contrary to the idea that some people deserve what's coming to them.
I have to say, you've shifted my view on the issue a bit. I find your analysis very interesting. I've not viewed it in terms of deserving, but what you said makes sense.
