Trump’s America is, to say the least, a profoundly baffling country; it is one of the most confounding societies in the developed, liberal Western democracies, if not indeed in the entire world. There are many facts and experiences that one could adduce to prove this observation or claim but none is more telling, more indisputable than the stone-age fanaticism that surrounds and pervades the fight against women’s reproductive rights by the so-called “right to life” crusade which is more correctly and better understood as the anti-abortion movement. This is the subject of this week’s column. Let us get right into it.
The central question is: why should there be so much passion, so much vitriol, so much intolerance around abortion? It is perfectly understandable, though not excusable, that on the basis of scriptural or faith-based considerations, many decent people can be against abortions. Moreover, although it is stretching things too far to assert that a six-week old fetus is already a human being with all the rights that all living human beings have, we can still understand the sentiment, the life-affirming ethics behind such a claim. But to go from that claim to the assertion that there are no considerations whatsoever that can make us weigh the rights of the fetus against the rights of others – including and especially the rights of its mother – is that not fanaticism taken to the nth degree? But that is precisely where the anti-abortion crusade has pitched its battle in the United States at the present time: absolutization of the rights of the unborn fetus and near complete evisceration of the rights of the mother. In effect, this amounts to the abrogation of the reproductive rights of all women. Let us put some concrete flesh on the bare bones of this incredible contention in order to arrive at the real-life politics of this fanatical right-to-life crusade.
Flash back to last year’s epic battle over the nomination by Donald Trump of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. There were no attempts made to hide or to dissemble about the calculations as to why the success of the nomination mattered so much to the anti-abortion crusade: if Kavanaugh became an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS), the balance of anti-abortion and pro-abortion justices on SCOTUS would tilt in favor of the anti-abortion side. And that would mean, sooner or later, indeed sooner than later, that the established legal protection in settled law for the reproductive rights of women would be gone for good. The ruling that established that legal protection for women is known as “Roe V. Wade”.
Well, as we all know, although Kavanaugh almost lost the battle for the success of his nomination for SCOTUS, he did get in narrowly. But that was enough. Enough for what? Enough for the avalanche of extremist anti-abortion laws from state legislatures from around the country controlled by the crusaders, the right-to-life fanatics. The goal, the purpose of these laws from around the country is the end, the nullification of “Roe V. Wade”. And when that happens, America would become perhaps the only country in the world in which no reason, no consideration of any kind could make any woman legally obtain abortion. What of a woman who gets pregnant from a criminally violent rapist? She will not have access to legal abortion in a post-Roe V Wade America. And a woman who gets pregnant from an incestuous rape by her father or sibling? Ditto. The fetuses that such victimized women carry in their wombs have more rights than the traumatized mothers who want to end their trauma, pain and shame through a safe and legal abortion.
It is perhaps useful to explore some of the theological and ethical grounds for the fanaticism of the anti-abortion crusaders. Here’s one line of argument: life is precious because it is a gift from God, a gift beyond human capability to create. In decadent, promiscuous and amoral America, this gift of life is being all too casually destroyed by the easy availability of abortions. The tragedy of this situation is worsened by the existential fact that the human fetus is the most defenseless and vulnerable being in nature and society. The teaching of Christ on this is clear: it is our duty to protect and defend the rights of the defenseless and the vulnerable, especially those like, fetuses, that absolutely lack the means and the ability to protect and defend themselves.
These arguments and considerations seem rational and humanistic, though they are also endlessly naïve and gratuitously sentimental. Why so? Well, this is because throughout the history of all human societies, the survival of our species has been augmented by carefully balancing the rights and privileges of fetuses and infants against the rights of their parents, especially the childbearing and child-rearing mothers. The main reason for this is the enormously crucial fact that of all living beings in creation, the passage from fetus through infanthood is the longest amongst us, human beings. Where nearly all the other species take at most a few months to complete the passage, we take years during which the dependency of the fetus-infant is near total. This, in fact, is the reason why bearing and raising children, which used to depend almost solely on women, have gradually over the course of time been gradually democratized to more and more involve men. This is why, among liberal families in America today, you will not hear a man say, “my wife is pregnant”; what you will hear him say is, “we are pregnant”.
Beyond the theological and sentimental arguments, there is another factor driving the anti-abortion crusade in the United States that is notable for the silence around and about it. As a matter of fact, I would argue that it is the single most important factor of all, even though hardly anyone talks openly about it. What is this factor? It is the Malthusian fear or angst that among all the racial and ethnic groups, population growth is overwhelmingly against Whites. The current projection is that by mid-century in the current hundred-year cycle, Whites will no longer constitute the demographic majority of the country. Here, we encounter an irony: Malthusianism usually entails a vigorous push against population growth; among the ranks and throngs of the anti-abortion crusade, the driving force is for more population growth – among Whites.
Let us admit it: contemporary White nationalism in America should not be equated or integrated with the anti-abortion crusade. This is because there are legions of many Non-Whites in the armies and foot soldiers of the movement since, in fact, the ideological core of the movement is religion. But all the same, there are eminently valid reasons why race should not be ignored in any discussion of the fanaticism of the right-to-life movement. This issue is captured in one seemingly very simple question: why do people who claim to care so much about life, people who claim that we should cherish life in all its stages, why do such people again and again demonstrate that they do not care about Black lives, about Brown lives, about the lives of immigrants and refugees? They shout to the skies that they care about life and yet they wildly cheer Trump’s savage separation of children from their parents among the asylum seekers on the southern border of the country – all because they are not White enough? Let us look more closely at this issue.
Why has the Black Lives Matter movement become so poignant as a cross on the moral conscience of America? Is it because the shooting of unarmed Black men, women and children by White cops happens again and again? Perhaps. Or is it because most of the White police officers who shoot down these unarmed Black people almost always go unpunished? This we must register: perhaps even more than the regularity with which the phenomenon happens is this fact that most of the perpetrators go unpunished. Or is it really that a great number of White officials and community leaders show little or no interest in bringing the practice to an end as quickly as possible? I think this is it! For not only do White police officers who shoot down unarmed Black men often go scot-free, they in fact are often protected and even treated as vilified heroes by Policemen’s Benevolent Associations dominated by Whites and by prominent voices in White communities across the nation. Indeed, the very phrase, “Black Lives Matter” arose precisely because it seemed more and more indisputable that to many Whites across the length and breadth of the country, Black lives didn’t seem to matter at all. At least not as much as the lives of fetuses.
This preceding bitter remark is intended to bring some distancing perspective to our discussion. What do I mean by this? Well, mainly, I mean that the conversation about the fanaticism of the anti-abortion crusade is so charged, so irrational that people quite easily forget that most people in America are for women’s right to safe, regulated and legal abortion as an indivisible part of women’s reproductive rights. What does this tell us? It tells us that the anti-abortion crusade does not have the demographic and political strength that it claims and projects. In this regard, it is very much like the National Rifle Association (NRA) which deliberately projects the image of being majoritarian in the country, when in fact, most Americans support reasonable gun control and background checks on all potential gun owners and buyers. To look at how devastatingly effective the NRA has been in preventing legislation for gun control, one would think that the organization has the support of most Americans. But this is not the case at all, by a long shot. Yes, America is without equal in the world in gun ownership and mass homicides from gun shootings and a lot of the responsibility for this comes from the NRA’s effective lobby against legislation to curb the uncontrollable circulation of guns in the country. But like the anti-abortion crusade, the NRA does not have demographic advantage, not to talk of numerical superiority, on its side.
I confess: it was a deliberate act on my part to bring the anti-abortion movement together with the NRA in my reflections on the demographic politics around the veneration for life that is at the heart of this essay. Of all the Western liberal democracies, America is without parallel in the number and constancy of violent deaths. On the surface, it would seem that the fanaticism of the anti-abortion crusaders is a humanistic response to this overall cheapness and fragility of life in the country. In other words, one could say that the anti-abortionists have had enough of how cheap life has become in America, more so in Trump’s America. But this is completely false. As we have seen, the crusaders care only or mostly about the lives of fetuses, not the lives of mothers and parents whose responsibility it is, not the government’s, to give their children real, meaningful and dignified lives. Of especial concern is the reverse Malthusian angst of many conservative Whites driving the crusade against abortions. When you look at this without sentimentality and without any quasi-religious blinkers, what the crusaders are really about is a new and reconstructionist view of childbearing women as factories which, absolutely without fail, must bring the fetus to term and life, no matter under what circumstances it was conceived. This is why, for instance, in all the recent legislations imposing more and more restrictions on abortions, the punishment is entirely on the doctors who provide their services to women seeking abortion: punish, not the vessel carrying the fetus, but the “technician” who empties the vessel of its cargo.
Life is indeed precious, unquantifiably and immeasurably so. But it is all of life, not life only at the moment of its inception. Of very special consideration is life that brings life: the mother and the fetus-that-will-be-the-child. Oh, how presumptuous, how hubristic it is to try to silence the voice and the choice of the mother in this chain of being!
- Biodun Jeyifo
bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu
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