There used to be a subject that I avoided like the plague as too divisive, but almost 20 months ago that subject was thrust into the national dialog with the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which overruled nearly 50 years of settled law and overturned Roe v Wade.
I want to start by saying I’m not trying to insult anyone. This is just how the world looks to me.
In my humble opinion the result of Dobbs has been a disaster. Not just for women of child-bearing age, for our society as a whole. It’s incredibly divisive.
And it didn’t have to happen.
It was engineered by people who have other axes to grind. The Anti-abortion movement was manufactured out of whole cloth in the mid-70s by power hungry white male evangelical Christian leaders and conservative politicians as a way to divide the country.
What got me riled up is a 2022 Politico article by Randall Balmer, an historian of American religion and an Episcopal priest that re-introduced me to the hypocritical actions that led to the current Pro-choice vs “Pro-life” divide:
The Religious Right and the Abortion Myth - POLITICO
When Roe v Wade was handed down by the Supreme Court most white born-again Christians and Evangelicals considered opposition to abortion as a “Catholic issue”.
According to the Balmer’s article:
When the Roe decision was handed down, W. A. Criswell, pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas and sometime president of the Southern Baptist Convention, issued a statement praising the ruling. “I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person,” Criswell declared, “and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.” [Emphasis mine]
Balmer also says:
When Francis Schaeffer, the intellectual godfather of the Religious Right, tried to enlist Billy Graham in his antiabortion crusade in the late 1970s, Graham, the most famous evangelical of the 20th century, turned him down. Even James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family who later became an implacable foe of abortion, acknowledged in 1973 that the Bible was silent on the matter and therefore it was plausible for an evangelical to believe that “a developing embryo or fetus was not regarded as a full human being.”[Emphasis mine]
About this time segregation was becoming less effective as a “wedge” issue that could be used to divide the country. Jerry Falwell, Bob Jones and others opened Segregation Academies, including Falwell’s Lynchburg Christian School [later Liberty University] and Bob Jones University, plus segregated K-12 academies.
When they started losing government funding and tax exemption because they were segregated they went looking for another wedge issue.
In another Politco article from 2014, Balmer writes:
For nearly two decades, [Paul] Weyrich, by his own account, had been trying out different issues, hoping one might pique evangelical interest: pornography, prayer in schools, the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, even abortion. “I was trying to get these people interested in those issues and I utterly failed,” Weyrich recalled at a conference in 1990.
Paul Weyrich was co-founder of the Heritage Foundation and coined the term “Moral Majority”.
Weyrich saw that Evangelical and Born-again Christians tended to gravitate to the Republican Party and was looking for an issue that would activate this “Moral Majority” to vote for Republican candidates.
Segregation was losing steam.
So the Christian Right leaders made a cynical and hypocritical decision, they chose abortion as their wedge issue.
Their goal was to create a solid bloc of reliable conservative voters to vote in Republican candidates, who tended to be more amenable to granting favors to the Christian/Conservative coalition.
In the first Politico article, Balmer wrote:
Because evangelicals had considered abortion a Catholic issue until the late 1970s, they expressed little interest in the matter; Falwell, by his own admission, did not preach his first anti-abortion sermon until February 26, 1978, more than five years after Roe.
Then,
During the midterm elections of 1978, …, antiabortion activists — Roman Catholics — leafleted church parking lots in four Senate races during the final weekend of the campaign: … Two days later, in an election with a very low turnout, anti-abortion Republicans defeated the favored Democratic candidates.
At this point Christian Conservatives knew they had a winner, a way to cut a reliable Republican voting bloc from the herd and keep them fired up, and voting, especially in low-turnout elections.
This way they could force their reactionary views onto the entire country, whether the majority of Americans agree with them or not.
I know a lot of Conservative Christians don’t know about this, or don’t care. But it’s something every voting American should know.
In my humble opinion your religious beliefs do not affect folks who don’t share your religion, and, from the articles referenced in this post (written by an Episcopal Priest historian) and from my own reading on support or lack of support for abortion in the Bible, their is no clear teaching regarding abortion, especially in Jesus’ teaching in the New Testament.
And even if there was a passage where Jesus said something like, “You must not terminate a pregnancy.”, it still wouldn’t affect folks who aren’t Christians.
As Young Sheldon said to his mother when asked if people on other planets were saved by the Son of God in Star Trek, “You have your stories, I have mine.”
The fact the the vast majority of arguments against abortion are religious in nature makes laws against choice in violation of the First Amendment. It would be tantamount to choosing an official state religion, and enforcing the rules of that religion on everyone.
Finally, as near as I can tell, most leaders of the “Pro-life” movement are really “Pro-birth”. Once the kid’s born it’s on its own.
When I start seeing state and national full financial, medical and mental health care support for mothers forced to give birth, against their will, I’ll let you start calling yourself Pro-life. Until then, you’re anti-choice.
According to a Gallup poll last July, about 85% of Americans think that abortion should be legal under any circumstances (34%) or under certain circumstances (51%).
I understand that “certain circumstances” can cover a wide range of opinions.
A Pew poll from a couple of years ago asked the question differently and “Legal in all/most cases” (61%) beat “Illegal in all/most cases” (37%) handily.
There are similar polls from Vox, NPR and a summary of polls from Forbes, not exactly a den of left-wing philosophy.
What it boils down to is that, from what I can tell most folks in the US think abortion should be legal in all or most circumstances. We live in a democratic republic. Majority rules.
There is no bright line that determines when a fetus becomes a baby, but in my opinion it’s way later than the 15 or 16 week limits on abortion currently being floated by some conservative power brokers.
And, when it is medically certain that a fetus or the woman carrying it, even at a late stage, will have serious or fatal medical issues once it’s been born, it should be up to the woman carrying the fetus whether or not to terminate the pregnancy. She can consult with anyone she wants, but in the end it’s her decision.
If abortion is easy, safe and legal, it would be extremely unlikely that a pregnancy that is late in term, say 30 weeks or later, is not wanted.
At that point the only reason a mother might have to terminate it would be for her own good or the good of the potential child.
One last thing.
I once saw a social media video where a snide young man looking very satisfied says, “If you don’t like guns, don’t buy one!”
Which makes little sense.
I actually love guns. The precision machinery. The kick when you fire one. The feeling you get when you hit what you aimed at.
So it’s not that I don’t like guns. I just want there to be less of them and better regulation of who gets one.
When I had a confrontation with a rabid right winger last week I was very concerned he might be armed.
I’d like to live in a society where that would be extremely unlikely,
But, if I say, “If you don’t like abortions, don’t have one.” it makes perfect sense to me, because, if anything I wrote above is even close to being true, there is no valid reason to ban or even limit abortions.
Discuss.
Someday, in part 2 of “Bodily Autonomy” I’ll take on LGBTQ+ issues. Won’t that be fun!
If you’re interested the Politico articles quoted in this post these are a good read:
The Real Origins of the Religious Right
The Religious Right and the Abortion Myth - POLITICO
I tried having my mother’s phone disconnected, but the customer-service rep told me that since the account was in my dad’s name, he’d have to be the one to put in the request. The fact that he’d been dead for 40 years didn’t sway her. Then a solution hit me: “If I stop paying the bill, you can turn off the service, right?” “Well, yes,” she said reluctantly. “But that would ruin his credit.” —Jeannie Gibbs
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