There is a diary on the rec list now that makes the supposition that anyone who believes abortion should be illegal except in cases of rape and incest is by definition anti-sex. These people are only against abortion because they want to punish people for sex, the diary says.
I know some of these folks, and I also understand basic human emotions and thought processes, and I am here to say that this supposition is certainly not true, and all of the accompanying misinformed bashing of these people in that diary is not going to help our side.
Like I said, the supposition is that anyone who believes abortion should be illegal except in cases of rape and incest is must be motivated by a desire to punish women for sex rather than to not kill babies. The reasoning behind that hypothesis is that if someone thinks killing fetuses is wrong, it should be wrong in all circumstances, regardless of how the fetus was conceived, and since these folks are making exceptions based on how the fetus was conceived, they must not actually care about the fetus itself.
But this ignores the fact that different people employ different moral reasoning than you do. People can make moral and ethical calls that don't seem logical or internally consistent to you, but make sense to them. We all do it all the time!
Many people who are anti-abortion except in cases of rape/incest feel as follows: Killing fetuses is morally wrong and therefore abortion should be illegal in most cases. However, making a woman have a rapist's child is more wrong, and therefore, having to weigh one immoral thing against another, they make the call that there should be an exception for rape/incest. Lesser of two evils.
You might not agree with the logic they employ or the moral weight they assign to things. Hell, I don't agree with it. But it's there, and that's what's in their heads. Incorrectly diagnosing them as sex-haters is not going to win any hearts and minds. In my experience, people who believe in exceptions are actually the more moderate people on the 'pro-life' side, and the people we could be making common ground with in terms of contraceptives and so on.
If you don't believe me, here's an example of a moral conundrum that different people resolve differently: I would bet that a number of people here think it is wrong to kill animals for sport. However, I would bet that a much smaller number of people here are actually vegetarians. Does that mean that everyone who is not a vegetarian secretly lusts for killing animals? No, it is just that they are weighing one moral value (not killing animals), against another (not feeding meat to their family) and making their own decision. It is, by the way, not the decision that I make, and I could try to persuade them otherwise, but I won't do so if I incorrectly identify them as people who lust for blood and killing on the basis of the call they've made.
Finally, I have some real life examples. My mom is a liberal, a feminist, not religious, and not particularly anti-sex, and yet she believes that abortion should be illegal. Believe me, myself and others have tried to convince her otherwise for years, but it hasn't worked. She believes that fetuses are essentially little helpless people in developent, and if it is wrong to kill people, then it is wrong to kill fetuses, and it should be illegal. But she also thinks that it is more wrong to make a woman have a rapist's baby, so there should be an exception. I don't agree with it, but that's her opinion, that's the decision she has come to. She is entirely motivated by fetuses, and would be all for giving condoms to anyone and everyone if it prevented unwanted pregnancies.
Another example is an ex-girlfriend of mine. Again, she's liberal, educated, and I can assure you with fond memories that she is most certainly not anti-sex. But she believed that fetuses are almost babies and it is wrong and illegal to kill babies so there you go. We debated it frequently but I could never convince her otherwise. Her moral universe also led her to make an exception for rape/incest. I don't agree with her logic, but that's how it is. Again, she is entirely motivated by fetuses, and not at all motivated by sex.
The bottom line is that some people who believe that abortion should be illegal except in cases of rape/incest are nice, normal, sex-positive, and sometimes even liberal folks. Sure, if someone is anti-abortion and also anti birth control, then they probably don't give a shit about fetuses and they are just anti-sex. But the same just isn't true for people who just make a rape/incest exception. Many of them could be our allies in making contraceptives more available and encouraging family planning.
Update Ok folks, reading is fundamental. The purpose of this diary is not so you can debate me as a proxy for someone else about whether abortion should be legal or not. We settled that on this site long ago - abortion should be legal. The purpose is to show you that some of the people who disagree with you, who think that abortion should be illegal except in cases of rape/incest, those people are not necessarily anti-sex - or "bullshitting hypocrites" as the author of the other diary put it.