Angry Democrats, united on the cause of abortion, scored wins earlier this month in several state elections and referenda.

Amid all this, we need to ask: Why are Democrats so upset with the right-wing push to ban abortion in America? The anger cannot be about the phenomenon itself because abortion is somewhat rare in reality. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, abortion affects one in every 100 childbearing-age American women, much rarer than poverty, racism or sexism as an issue. Nor can it be for social justice, for, as a practical issue of great significance across racial and economic divides, racism and inequality affect far more people and more severely.

The common rallying cry “the right to choose” cannot be its explanation. As a matter of common political-economic reality, we Americans really have little or no right to choose anything if it involves power or money. (If our right to choose were subject to our collective decision, we would all choose to be rich and to go to Harvard.) For the great majority of Americans, abortion rights is an abstract concept, like freedom of speech: Important but not a cause for such direct and prolonged citizen action.

No, the Democratic wrath must be explained by something else.

Here, history (and marginally psychoanalysis) comes to the rescue: We should note that the Roe v. Wade decision to liberalize abortion was made in the early 70s, a decade of turbulent social change. Following the great cultural stirrings of the 60s, the 70s saw more tumultuous social transformations. In the two decades together, a flood gate had just opened to sweep away America’s moral tradition and social convention. Spurred on by the anti-Vietnam protests, America was fast-moving toward a “deregulated” society whereby many of the pre-WWII-era ethos and sentiments, long the common underpinning of society, were challenged and dismantled daily. The famed “Woodstock” music festival was its highlight.

Beneath these events and changes that excited and befuddled America, awakening from the Great Depression and WWII to the wide-open possibility of a new world of peace and pleasure, was the coming of the sexual revolution (alternately called “Free Love”) in America. Sexual liberation, which had already begun in the 40s and 50s, really took off in the 60s, peaking in the 70s with cultural freedom and economic deregulation, still continuing today in which the moral issue of sex is simply out of date. This confrontation with sexual taboos in America, an oddly Puritan nation of adolescent fetishes and old-fashioned prudishness about sex, threw out the prevailing sexual mores and beliefs and welcomed the freedom of love and sex unencumbered by tradition and Puritan hang-ups.

Here, sexual rights and abortion rights naturally coincided, as a cause-effect chain reaction, the former necessitating the latter. We cannot imagine the extent of discord in American society if it allowed wild sexual liberation with restrictive abortion laws.

Sex has been one of the few things, along with cheap alcohol, drugs, and entertainment, made freely available even for the economically-challenged Americans, perhaps to alleviate their hard feelings about America’s social-economic-political injustices. Also softened was our resistance toward contraception, public nudity and pornography, alternative forms of sexuality, and, most significantly for us, abortion, to solve the inevitable consequence of open sexual relations that was pregnancy. Abortion, although infrequently used in actuality, was a societal safety-net that made such physical and relational liberation possible as a choice.

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After 50 years of this freedom from the anxiety of pregnancy that open abortion made available to all women, the Supreme Court’s reversal, banning abortion literally overnight, came as an unbearable shock. With abortion banned, the sexual revolution that Americans had enjoyed over a half century was now under dire jeopardy, possibly coming to a screeching halt. With the lurking threat of pregnancy without the open gateway to abortion, always thought available, it’s an unthinkable trip back to the Dark Ages of fire and brimstone associated with unholy sex.

As a general cultural rule, Americans for generations have been conditioned to expect that life can be enjoyed without consequences (today’s buzzword is “accountability”). Eating junk food without getting fat and burning of fossil fuel liberally without earthly destruction, for example. Now, the abortion ban is threatening to break this immunity from nature’s logic and society’s retribution. America is caught between the wrath of judges at Salem’s witch trials and the pity of seeing the scorned woman in the pillory with the scarlet letter.

It may not be too wrong to say that, in democratic America’s reckoning now, restrictive abortion is restrictive sex, which may be more practically critical than the abstract right to choose. With abortion severely restricted, each sexual encounter becomes perilous. Some pundits, like Kirk Swearingen (Salon, Aug. 28), argue that restriction on sex is what GOP-Puritans want to impose on America. Democrats, perhaps more open to free love than the intimacy avoiding Republicans, fear their sexual (or “reproductive”) freedom is being restricted.

In a nutshell, Democrats don’t like the idea of free sex overshadowed by childbearing issues. Republicans just don’t like to see the oversexed democratic libertines enjoying rampant sex — something they don’t get to enjoy themselves.

This must be keeping Freudian psychoanalysts up at night.

Jon Huer, columnist for the Recorder and retired professor, lives in Greenfield.