THOSE WHO ARE “PRO-LIFE” ARE NOT PRO-LIFE
The employment "pro-life" is a propaganda tool, a catchall phrase that masks the dehumanization of women. Misogyny is at issue.
The recent ruling by Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk in Texas suspended the Food and Drug Administration's approval of the drug mifepristone, which over 50% of American women who have had abortions use to end their pregnancies. The medicine, decades old, is safe and effective. This is the first time a judicial ruling has banned a drug approved by the FDA. Judge Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee, is known as an extreme right-wing ideologue. Anti-abortion activists went judge shopping.
We need to look at the ruling in light of its broader political and social context. Since the Dobbs decision, which rescinded Roe v. Wade and abolished a constitutional right to abortion, the right to an abortion was remanded to the states. But that leaves the radical right, which has commandeered the Republican Party, dissatisfied. Their objective has been to universally prohibit and criminalize abortion throughout the entire nation with, at best, very limited exceptions.
It is relevant to ask why for more than 50 years abortion has become the primary social issue among conservatives and ultra-conservatives. Why should they care so much about the welfare of the fetus? Their purported concern resonates with the zeal of an obsession that implies more than the manifest issue.
The attack on the right to an abortion is an attack on women more widely. Behind the movement to abolish abortion is a long-festering misogyny, which in these times, given to extremism, is becoming explicit in all but name. The hegemonic power of men is slipping away -- in the world of work, in educational attainment, and in the culture at large. Much of personal identity is vested in one's sense of power, which, in our competitive environment, is too readily expressed in power over others. Men's dominance over women has largely been the norm since time immemorial. But this hierarchy is being threatened and many men find it especially destabilizing at a time of political and economic change and insecurity.
Misogyny is ugly and menacing. It is an oil spill that spreads out to poison attitudes as it leeches deeply into the political soil. There is something darkly primordial about it, characterized by a need for dominance, control, and dehumanizing of the other. It partakes of a proclivity to assess women as near-children, and as not fully human. Behind it is a discomfort with equality, which can be attached also to others who are different with regard to race, ethnicity, and cultural values and mannerisms. Attitudes that seek dominance, and are held by a large class of people, are justified and reinforced by such dehumanization. Belittlement in many forms becomes commonplace. Manifest on the interpersonal level, it becomes progressively solidified by public policy and law. Criminalizing abortion is the most salient first step.
The 50-year campaign to prohibit abortion has been done in the name of “pro-life.” It is this long-standing rubric that needs to be examined and exposed for its hypocrisy. I have often pondered why those who oppose abortion on the basis of being “pro-life” should be more sensitive to life and the value of human life than I am. It seems evident that in the political realm, and I would speculate in the personal as well, among the “pro-life” cohort respect for life has been minimally evident, if evident at all.
To proclaim a commitment to life is to make an ethical statement. It requires a sense of respect and moral sensitivity to others. This sensitivity substantively partakes in a capacity for empathy and compassion. It requires a person to be able to take the standpoint of the other, whether acquaintance or stranger, and emotionally respond to what they experience. It is to feel as they would feel, especially when experiencing hardship and misfortune. To be pro-life in a way that has substantive meaning requires that a person be sensitive to the human condition, especially the misfortune and suffering of the living. If this capacity is not present, then identifying oneself as “pro-life” is merely formal, an abstraction without content. In this sense, the pro-life movement is analogous to the demand for unrestrictive gun rights. It is likewise absolutist while lacking any compassion or sensitivity for its effect on the agony and anguish of those victimized by the assertion of this putative right.
And so it is. The appellation “pro-life” is a propaganda tool, and organized evangelical Christianity is greatly responsible for it. While the power of the evangelical subculture in opposing a woman's right to abortion is certainly widely known, I nevertheless believe that the scope of this power has not been fully recognized.
The origin of evangelicalism's appropriation of the abortion issue and the commensurate “pro-life” moniker is telling. Abortion has long been a Catholic issue, but it came to the evangelical churches relatively recently and for explicitly political reasons. A love of life or an intrinsic concern for the welfare of the fetus had little to do with it. Upset with the federal government removing the tax-exempt status of racially segregated evangelicals established in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, they re-entered the political fray with a vengeance.
As religious historian David Hollinger in his book Christianity's American Fate notes,
“Until the 1970s abortion had been largely a Catholic issue, and even five years after Roe v. Wade (1973) 'pro-life' advocacy remained tepid. A majority of Protestants, ecumenical and evangelicals, generally accepted Roe while supporting some restrictions for adolescents. Yet as Paul Weyrich and other Reagan advisers sensed, the issue had potential appeal to evangelicals who were protective of traditional gender roles (parentheses mine). They mobilized luminaries Francis Schaeffer and Phyllis Schlafly (who was Catholic but proved to be an effective ally) to promote antiabortion efforts”
“...The New Testament is entirely silent on abortion. Yet a religious community committed to literal readings of the Bible, once it became persuaded that traditional family roles and hierarchies were threatened by the legalization of abortion, was suddenly comfortable with bold new extrapolations from scripture.”
This observation is worthy of very serious consideration. Evangelicals landed upon and appropriated the abortion issue in the late `70s (where was their concern for life before then?) as a political organizing tool, and not out of compassion for the fetus or respect for “life.” They did so because the issue comported with their notion of family hierarchy and the subordination of women within that hierarchy.
For evangelicals, the family is rigidly structured, with God the Father supreme. The husband and father is under God and rules as the head of the family. The wife is subordinate to her husband, and children are at the bottom of the family totem pole. Consequently, a woman expressing independence from her husband and moving out from under his authority into the public domain and the world of work is not only a threat to his authority but is also a violation of the divinely-ordained cosmic order.
Again, opposition to a woman's right to an abortion is an effort to control her sexuality and bodily independence and set straight the divinely mandated authority of her husband as the head of the household. Patriarchy is the issue and with it the misogynistic assault on the autonomy of women. A person's autonomy is a correlate to one's humanity.. Diminish one and you diminish the other. In this case, that disparagement is not temporary and circumstantial; it is existential and reinforced by the eternal and absolute authority of God.
The subsequent power of politicized evangelicals, together with their Catholic allies, in moving the entire political landscape far to the right has been enormous. With the progressive dismantling of the wall of separation between church and state, it has spread out to pervade the general political landscape. With the help of an extreme right-wing Supreme Court, the influence of conservative religion will grow, and along with it its aura of misogyny.
The conclusion herein is that the high-minded resonance of “pro-life” is anything but that. It is a political rallying cry. If the “pro-life” movement cared about life, it would be moved by the suffering and plight of the living. Its minions would dedicate themselves to those deprived of adequate medical care, the poor, the hungry, the anguish of refugees, disabled children, those lost to drugs, the millions of Americans incarcerated in a judicial system besotted by racism, the tens of millions of fellow citizens oppressed by the anxiety of whether to pay their rent or purchase medications to preserve their health and their lives. They would concern themselves with supporting those programs intended to provide Americans with a life lived with dignity. But the evangelical movement bears little relation to the compassionate teachings of Jesus. It has become prevailingly a movement to promote a narrow range of hate-filled issues. Among them is the degradation of women. It has lost its soul.
We live in an ideological age with the lines drawn. There is little attention given to the complexity of issues or the patience needed to deal with them rationally and civilly. Our social atmosphere is contentious. Ideas are reduced to ideologies and simplistic thinking; nuance is discounted and buried. We live in an environment enveloped in incessant chatter, soundbites, headlines, and name-calling. The rubric of “pro-life,” a rallying cry resplendent with false virtue, needs to be exposed for what it is – a hollow and ideologically vacuous catchphrase.
Perhaps, in the future, if and when normalcy is restored to our public life and our politics, the values of decency, kindness, elemental justice, compassion, empathy, and a passion for the humanity that resides in ourselves and others, will gain currency. These are the values that speak to our better angels and truly give life. They are pro-life in the truest meaning of the term. May the time come when the rubric can be claimed by those who are its rightful owners.