Just in time for Mother’s Day, the United States Supreme Court has a gift that is “sure” to warm the hearts of moms and would-be moms everywhere — a leaked draft decision that would appear to repeal Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that made abortion legal in America. Chief Justice John Roberts — whose position as a swing vote on the court appears to have been nullified by the arrival of conservative Amy “the Handmaiden” Coney Barrett and whose legacy is in jeopardy — was shocked, shocked I tell you, that someone leaked the draft and has vowed an investigation. But the leak is hardly the point, which we’ll get to in a minute.
Pro lifers are, of course, exultant if also somewhat subdued lest the Repubs experience a backlash in the mid-term elections. They’re also regretful.
“Which child was — which innocent life was lost that perhaps had the cure for cancer?” Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge asked rhetorically during an interview with “PBS NewsHour’s” Amna Nawaz. “Which child was lost that had the cure for Alzheimer's? Which child was lost that could have stopped some domestic violence case?”
Of course, you could counter that with which abortion spared us another Hitler, but that’s not the way to think about this. We don’t know which aborted fetus would’ve won Wimbledon and we’ll never know that now. Better questions to ask are how many children felled by gun violence would’ve grown up to cure cancer? How many Black men lynched in Rutledge’s state might’ve cured Alzheimer’s? How many sitting on Death Row and/or executed might’ve been wrongfully convicted or repented their actual crimes and gone on to lead honorable lives?
And anyway, as I have written elsewhere on this blog, you can’t quantify life; you can only qualify it. One life then is worth a zillion. And you can’t force someone to give up that life. So you might argue that a woman is forcing her unborn child to give up his/her life. But you could also argue that the demise of Roe v. Wade means that the state will force some women to give up their lives. And they’re already in the world. The potential child is not.
The problem with an absolute view of anything, even life, is that it must be taken to its logical conclusion. If you’re for life at conception, then you must be for life in all its forms, including its criminal aspect. But many pro lifers are instead for the death penalty and the right to bear arms, including assault weapons. I myself am personally opposed to abortion, but I’m also anti-death penalty. Yet even as I try to take my views against abortion to their logical conclusion, I’m stopped by my anathema to the idea of men controlling women. I can’t wrap my head around it.
Let’s be clear here. This isn’t just about men controlling women and their bodies. This is about the right’s desperate attempt to counter whites becoming a majority-minority in this country in the next decade or so. (It’s interesting that abortion was never an issue in the United States until the Civil War when the new American Medical Association, made up of white men, took over obstetrics from midwives and an anti-abortion campaign was launched as whites feared the Emancipation of slaves and a “darkening” of America’s racial complexion.)
But then as now white women are not going to be the ones having lots of babies. Armed today with education, careers and money, they will wait on reproducing and limit the number of offspring they have.
No, the ones who will be disproportionately affected will be desperate, underserved women of color, who will not be able to travel out of state and out of the country for a safe, legal abortion. They’ll be the ones who will be thrown back on the state when faced with an unwanted pregnancy. And how will that work? Rutledge vowed that Arkansas — one of the states with a tellingly named “trigger law” that will ban abortion the moment Roe v. Wade is struck down — will love and educate these forced, abandoned human beings. But Nawaz wondered how the state would do this. It’s the fourth poorest in the United States and ranks 41 in education.
What will happen is that instead of developing full-proof birth control, education and social services — with abortion available early on only as a last resort — we will create an increasing underclass of resentful, potentially violent people, who will go after the white minority that will continue to try to rule over them — in other words, South Africa in the 1980s.
The white fear of the other will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.. Yet that seems a price the right is willing to pay to crush the left.
The final irony is that pro-lifers talk a great deal about life and love and Jesus and innocent children, but their actions and the tone in which they couch them seem to reflect a meanness, a judgmental quality that has nothing to do with Christian love. Rather they’re all about the culture of death.