Ross Douthat examines the future of the pro-life movement in the linked article. He grapples with the value of human life in modern American politics, a question a socialist, or indeed anyone of good will, should take seriously.
But Douthat can only approach that issue through the narrow strait of his pro-life Catholicism. Again and again, he asks, why hasn’t the pro-life movement succeeded? Clearly, he is deeply troubled by this issue.
However, he sees the pro-life movement right now as being on the verge of a great victory, with a Supreme Court that should theoretically overturn Roe v. Wade—but Douthat seems uncertain whether this will really happen or not. He writes:
But abortion foes actually have good reason to feel unsettled and uncertain rather than triumphant. First, there is the strong possibility that the 6-to-3 conservative court does not have a majority of justices who particularly want to apply their principles to something as fraught as abortion, as opposed to the comforting blandness of administrative law. Between the popularity of Roe in polling and the fear of liberal backlash and potential court-packing, some combination of John Roberts, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh may decide to follow the rule of institutional self-protection rather than their principles, or find ways to make only the smallest-possible edits to the court’s existing abortion jurisprudence.
I agree. They won’t overturn Roe v. Wade, unless the goal of making life worse for the poor (see Class and Underclass) is worth the political risks, or if they miscalculate those same risks. But they won’t overturn it because of their “principles.” They may have principles on certain issues, but not abortion. Barrett might be an exception, but for most of them, being anti-abortion is just a bullet point on their resumes.
The conservatives on the Supreme Court, especially the younger ones, are pure careerists, appartchiks of a political movement that has been a major force in our country as long as they can remember.
And they probably know that Roe v. Wade can’t be overturned without tearing the country apart and delegitimizing the Supreme Court.
And as Douthat recognizes, this uncertainty extends to all elected Republicans as well:
For a long time the core pro-life position — not that abortion should be a little more regulated or a little more culturally disfavored, but that it should be truly forbidden in almost every case — has been a symbol and an abstraction: an idea that Republican presidents can very notionally support, a cause that judicial appointees can benefit from without directly endorsing, an ideal that Republican state legislators can invoke without having to compromise their libertarian principles to make it real.
But now, with the pro-life movement hovering in a strange limbo between a longed-for victory and another judicial defeat, the question looms up: Is anti-abortion sentiment notional or real?
We can only answer that question by asking, what is the political function of the pro-life movement? It certainly isn’t to outlaw abortion, or that would already have happened, given the conservative dominance of the Supreme Court and the Executive Branch since 1973.
From the point of view of Billionaire Capitalism, the political function of the pro-life movement is to get anti-abortion Catholics to vote for tax cuts for the rich. The anti-abortion activists are no doubt sincere, but they don’t get to choose the overall political context in which they operate. Once you’ve decided that the Democrats are evil because they support Roe v. Wade, then the billionaires own you. This is one thing Douthat doesn’t get….although he may be close to a breakthrough on that issue.
If you doubt that the political function of the pro-life movement is to deliver tax cuts for billionaires, then let’s consider Douthat’s assertion that the “core pro-life position” is an absolute ban on abortion. This is fair enough as a statement of what the activists want. But is that anything like what they would actually get, even if Roe v. Wade were overturned completely? Five minutes of thought on that subject is enough to establish that no, if the issue were turned back to the states, the most populous would allow abortions with little or no limitations. Most Americans would notice no difference at all in abortion policy.
And that the few states that might ban abortions wouldn’t have the jurisdiction to prosecute women who traveled out-of-state to terminate their pregnancies. So we’re really talking about prohibiting abortions for poor women in a few deep-red states; overturning Roe v Wade might reduce the number of abortions in this country by 5% to 10%. And no one would thank them even for that, because (a) legislatures in red states would be paralyzed by this issue for years to come, and (b) the poor in those states would only become poorer.
Overturning Roe v Wade was always a shiny object—it was never a proposal that would end abortion. And who is dangling this shiny object before pro-life voters?
One of Roe v Wade’s advantages is that it was a national solution; of course that can also be seen as a disadvantage. But it was after all a solution. And since there’s no federal aspect to the abortion issue, there’s likewise no clear advantage to sending the issue back to the states; ovaries are the same in Massachusetts as they are in Mississippi.
Hence the 14th Amendment remedy being currently discussed:
….. in the last two weeks part of the anti-abortion movement has fallen into an acrimonious debate over a radical proposal — from the Australian philosopher and Notre Dame professor John Finnis, in the journal First Things, arguing that unborn human beings deserve protections under the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
The political implication of Finnis’s argument is that the pro-life movement’s longtime legal goal, overturning Roe and letting states legislate against abortion, is woefully insufficient, and in fact pro-life activists should be demanding that the Supreme Court declare a fetal right to life.
After 48 years, Finnis and his supporters are belatedly realizing that overturning Roe v. Wade was always pointless, given their objective of completely eliminating abortion? Their goal always required a sweeping national solution, not fifty interminable battles at the state level—because if state legislatures can outlaw abortion, then legalizing it again is only an election away, and vice-versa.
But of course the 14th Amendment remedy is just a fever dream, only a shade or two more plausible than the QAnon mythology. The current courts would never agree to it.
But it has one sterling virtue: it will keep the pro-life movement together and still voting for billionaire tax cuts. Once the grass-roots supporters understand that overturning Roe v Wade didn’t work, they might be ready for the next windmill.
Douthat sees the overthrow of Roe v. Wade as an opportunity, however. His vision is that the pro-life movement can agitate for a social safety net for poor women who would otherwise have aborted their fetuses, or perhaps for all poor mothers:
The pro-choice side insists that these women’s independence and well-being and equality depends on a right to end a life that, were it wanted, would be called by name and celebrated with ultrasound photos on the fridge. Against that argument the anti-abortion movement needs more than just the ultrasound photo: It needs to prove the pro-choice premise wrong.
The movement’s wiser leaders know this. Last year, for instance, The Atlantic’s Emma Green profiled Cheryl Bachelder, the former chief executive of Popeye’s and a rare pro-lifer in the C-suite world, who was working with other anti-abortion leaders “to brainstorm all the community support systems that would need to be stronger in a world where abortion is illegal: mental health services, addiction-recovery programs, affordable child care.” Green also reported that the Charlotte Lozier Institute, the research arm of the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List, has been compiling a database of state resources for pregnant women in preparation for the hoped-for end of Roe.
But, of course — as Green noted with dry understatement — actually getting a major expansion of social services in states that might conceivably ban abortion would require a different Republican Party than the one that exists today.
And further on:
And a victory at the court should likewise widen the pro-life imagination well beyond Republican politics-as-usual, toward an all-options-on-the-table vision of how public policy could make an abortion ban feasible, popular, enduring.
In either scenario, there is something to be said for a pro-life movement that talks less in the language of partisanship and proceduralism and sounds more like the utopian and not simply conservative cause that its logic ultimately requires it to be.
In this sense, saying “yes, the Constitution that protects ‘persons’ should protect the hidden and helpless person in the womb,” and “yes, we will pay whatever price in spending and social support that this principle requires” are not contradictory positions: They are the same argument on different fronts.
Douthat is saying that he’s willing and even eager to adopt socialist family policies in order to make a ban on abortions work. (After some thought, I decided not to put quotation marks around “work” in the previous sentence.) If he thinks those policies such great ideas, let’s adopt them first, and see how that affects the abortion rate and the well-being of newborns and their mothers. And that’s not just an argumentative point: if he concedes—as he has, implicitly—that economic motives often play a large role in the decision to terminate a pregnancy, then perhaps the abortion rate is just the tip of the iceberg? Maybe we need to step back and take a long look at the overall economic pressures on young families, including the ones who aren’t poor and who aren’t considering abortion.
Perhaps the decline in the rates of marriage and of births, as well as abortions are all strongly influenced by the demands of modern capitalism?
Be that as it may, the idea that the pro-life movement might go rogue in an effort to ensure that unwanted babies at least have child care and proper nutrition is another fever dream. Billionaire Capitalism will never permit that. Douthat talks about the pro-life movement re-assessing its “alliances” with the Federalist Society and the GOP. But the pro-life movement is much more a colony than an ally of the Republican Party.
And given that the GOP has become a distinctly unsafe space for people who merely believe in free elections, an expansion of the social safety net via family policy is totally out of the question. But we can admire Ross Douthat’s relative independence of mind. He’s the first conservative writer I know of who has admitted that outlawing abortion would mean significant hardship for poor women. He’s also the first to implicitly admit that economic pressures often loom large in the decision to terminate a pregnancy.
But like many moderate and reasonable Republicans, he projects his own decency onto the movement he belongs to. Unfortunately, the anti-abortion movement was never as high-minded as Douthat appears to be, and it was never an independent phenomenon. It was always part of the religious wedge issues from the ‘70s and ‘80s: opposition to gay rights, gay marriage and women’s rights—particularly their position in the family and the church. There is a pretty tight correlation even today between people who oppose the ordination of women as priests or ministers and those who oppose abortion. And likewise for gay marriage and gay anything.
And the pro-life movement was linked to the Christian Identity Church, the Army of God, and other white supremacist groups. And of course it has a history of murderous violence, we might say terrorism.
The Army of God and Eric Rudolph probably best exemplify the linkages between white supremacy, homophobia, the anti-abortion movement and violence.
To take Ross Douthat seriously on the morality of abortion is one thing. To take the next step and accept his implicit claim that the anti-abortion movement is founded on that concern is something quite different. The anti-abortion movement is in truth part of a multi-faceted reaction to the Sexual Revolution and the Civil Rights movement, with “reaction” being the operative word. If they truly cared about abortion, they’d be pursuing measures short of outlawing it, which is unlikely to ever happen. For example, they could support mandatory sexual education and widespread availability of birth control—but they oppose both.
Douthat writes:
…. a lot of the country just seems not to want to think too much about abortion and to punish the party that forces it to do so.
Douthat is wrong to sneer at the moral judgement of the American people. They take abortion seriously as an issue, but they do not trust the violent fanatics that control the anti-abortion movement, and they will punish a political party that enables them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-abortion_violence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army_of_God_(United_States)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Spitz
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Rudolph
But let’s turn away from Douthat’s illusions and the violent history of the anti-abortion movement. Let’s instead look in the mirror.
Haven’t I written that my vision of socialism is founded upon the sacredness of human life? Doesn’t that include the life of fetuses? Shouldn’t socialism oppose abortion?
What I wrote in What Our Mind Cannot Grasp:
“When we say human life is sacred, we cannot sentimentalize the conditions of life. Death is an inevitable part of life. The belief that life is sacred cannot imply a denial or evasion of death.”
With regard to abortion, what “conditions of life” are relevant? There is a brutal math involved in human reproduction: many people will have sex thousands of times their life, but we can’t sustain a birth rate much above replacement, 2.33 children per family, without increases in productivity or available resources. There is a Malthusian mismatch between human sexuality and a birth rate we can afford.
This implies that all societies attempt somehow to limit the number of mouths to feed. Ancient societies openly practiced infanticide: weak children in particular were likely to be abandoned, and in Sparta this appears to have been the law. These societies usually had a deep understanding of the medicinal properties of plants, so abortifacients were well-known. They may also have had birth control methods unknown to us.
Christian societies were not so different, even after the Industrial Revolution. Large numbers of children died from sheer neglect and starvation in orphanages, even in the twentieth century. This was a sort of slow-motion infanticide:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bon_Secours_Mother_and_Baby_Home
And of course hundreds of thousands, even millions died from working in textile mills, mines, and warships. Although this wasn’t precisely infanticide, there was a pervasive attitude that children were highly expendable, even in advanced Western countries well into the twentieth century.
Of course their parents tried to protect them and nurse them when they fell ill, but poor parents could do little—and most people were poor.
Today, we have more effective methods of birth control, but not effective enough to prevent all unwanted pregnancies—particularly among people who refuse to use birth control for religious reasons.
I personally would love to see far fewer abortions in our country, but I have to be realistic about the conditions of life. Abortions or something similar are common to most societies. If we provided everyone with easily accessible and free birth control, then yes, we would see fewer abortions. But outlawing abortion, in effect compelling people to have more children than they can handle? That seems barbaric. And in today’s context, in America, we are always talking about outlawing abortions only for poor people—and everyone knows that. The other classes will find ways to get abortions.
I want to see many more young people have children, provided they want them—and most of them do. Our birthrate is too low, and our playgrounds are too quiet. Our economic system shouldn’t prevent people from having families, but it does, and the churches have nothing to say on that issue.
Our economic system is causing a low birthrate. How is this low birthrate accomplished, specifically? Contraception is the primary means, but abortion is inevitably part of the picture.
How many abortions per year are caused by the economic system, by the pressures and lack of opportunity young people face?
But Douthat is right to be concerned about how American society values life, or doesn’t. But even if abortions stopped by magic, children would still be huffing paint and eating high-fructose corn syrup. They would be breathing polluted air and drinking polluted water. They would often lack health care and if Billionaire Capitalism had its way, tens of millions more would lose SCHIP and Medicaid.
And when these children reach adulthood—if they do—will the minimum wage still be $7.25 per hour?
But for Douthat, it’s a case of “just this one thing,” the issue of abortion. If only abortions would stop, he would feel hope for the world again. A lot of people are like that, on a variety of issues. The #metoo movement longs for an end to rape in the workplace and sexual harassment; BLM longs for an end to police violence against blacks; people weep and pray for an end to mass shootings, and they think that the world would be made new if their prayers were granted. Trans people believe if they were accepted then the future could finally begin. The ADL can only dream of a future without antisemitism, but dream they do. The battle against climate change seems like a struggle against a collective death wish. If only climate change could be stopped: “just this one thing!”
But what if we live in a society marked by pervasive dehumanization? And what if all these individual issues are just manifestations of this dehumanization? What if they are all connected?
And what if we could understand the source of this dehumanization, and we discovered that it was capitalist socialization—a set of habits and attitudes that are economically useful but, if carried too far, profoundly destructive?
What if, right at the center of our civilization, there was an emotional and spiritual dead spot?
The Socialist Investor 