I found this David French column in the NYT to be largely spot-on: The Great Hypocrisy of the Pro-Life Movement.
The traditional pro-life argument comes from different religious and secular sources, but they all rest on a common belief: From the moment of conception, an unborn child is a separate human life. Yes, the baby is completely dependent on the mother, but it is still a separate human life. The baby’s life isn’t more important than the mother’s — which is why the best-drafted pro-life laws protect the life and physical health of the mother — but it possesses incalculable worth nonetheless. Absent extreme circumstances, the unborn child must not be intentionally killed.
[…]
From that standpoint, the Alabama Supreme Court’s decision in February holding that the state’s wrongful death statute applied to embryos frozen and preserved as part of the in vitro fertilization process should not have been surprising at all. If state law can declare an unborn child to be a separate human life, then of course that would apply to all unborn children, including those conceived as part of fertility treatments. Even though the embryos are frozen and exist outside the womb, they are still human — no less human than those created through conventional means.
But I have many Pro-Abortion friends who would read the paragraphs above and scoff. They have good-faith disagreements about when an embryo or fetus becomes a “person” entitled to legal protection, and they disagree about the intentions of the pro-life movement. They argue that the pro-life movement is about power and control. It’s about seeking to constrain the choices women can make, to keep women in the home, and to maintain male dominance. The rhetoric about the value of all life and the rhetoric of self-sacrifice is a ruse. At the end of the day, the pro-life argument is a weapon to be wielded against people Republicans don’t like.
Without any doubt, the Alabama Supreme Court’s decision was absolutely the logical conclusion of the basic pro-life stance. Indeed, the IVF process itself is antithetical to the core of the pro-life position since the embryos do not all lead to births.
And yet, how did a lot of pro-life Republicans, including the governor and many legislators in my state of residence react?
Let’s review the events since the Alabama court’s decision. First, Alabama Republicans panicked. The Republican-dominated Legislature raced to pass a law that granted I.V.F. clinics sweeping immunity from the state’s wrongful death statute. Alabama also has one of the strictest Pro-Life laws in the country. As my newsroom colleague Emily Cochrane politely put it, the vote “demonstrated the intense urgency among Republicans to protect I.V.F. treatments, even if that meant sidestepping the thorny contradictions between their pledge to protect unborn life and fertility treatment practices.” At the conclusion of I.V.F. treatments, unused embryos are often discarded and destroyed.
Moreover,
On Wednesday, Trump reversed his previous position supporting a 20-week ban on abortion; he announced that he would not support a national abortion ban if he wins the presidency, and he said the policy should instead be left up to the states. This is a traditional pro-life position, but only if you also urge states to use their autonomy to pass pro-life bills. Instead, Trump’s advice to voters was to “follow your heart” and “do what’s right for your family, and do what’s right for yourself.” It’s “all about the will of the people,” he said.
This is the most Pro-Abortion position a Republican presidential candidate has taken since at least Gerald Ford.
This is 100% correct. If abortion is murder, which is the essential pro-life position, this cannot be about following one’s heart or just leaving it up to the states. As French notes, the only reason pro-lifers have been pro-states’ rights on this issue is that strategically they wanted Roe gone so that they could first get their way in conservative states and then do all that they could to make abortion illegal nationally. The argument that we should get rid of Roe to return the choice to the state legislatures was always (from an Pro-Life POV) a tactical move meant as part of a broader strategic goal of a national ban. If that national band could come about via a Supreme Court ruling or a federal law, then states’ rights be damned.*
As French notes:
So where is the Republican pro-life consensus today? Philosophically, the movement is breaking. There is no coherent pro-life argument for why a state should prevent women who become pregnant through natural means from destroying an embryo while protecting the ability of families who create an embryo through I.V.F. to either destroy it or keep it frozen indefinitely.
At the same time, poorly drafted abortion regulations have placed a terrible spotlight on conservative states, with many examples of punitive laws placing women who are suffering miscarriages and other pregnancy complications in profound danger. This harsh approach undermines pro-life arguments that the movement does, in fact, love both mother and child.
This also brings us back to something I quoted from French above,
I have many Pro-Abortion friends who would read the paragraphs above and scoff. They have good-faith disagreements about when an embryo or fetus becomes a “person” entitled to legal protection, and they disagree about the intentions of the pro-life movement. They argue that the pro-life movement is about power and control. It’s about seeking to constrain the choices women can make, to keep women in the home, and to maintain male dominance. The rhetoric about the value of all life and the rhetoric of self-sacrifice is a ruse. At the end of the day, the pro-life argument is a weapon to be wielded against people Republicans don’t like.
I think that there is actually a great bit of truth to these critiques. I don’t think they tell the entire story, but it is very, very hard to look at what is unfolding before us and not see this as at least part of an overall truth.
I will pause here and note, as I have before at various times, that I used to be profoundly conservative in my religiosity. Indeed, there is some alternative universe in which present me would be more like David French in my intellectual and religious outlook than I currently am. Indeed, French and I are the same age and I have a pretty strong sense that we would have had similar views back in our youth. Weirdly, one of the main things that have profoundly affected my viewpoints is moving to Alabama and living here for almost 26 years but I just found out that French was born in Opelika, AL, which is less than an hour from where I sit typing these words.
I suppose I am one of the odd Americans who has changed my mind on a number of key topics, and abortion is one of them. Some time ago I came to the conclusion that individuals should be able to make this choice for themselves. Moreover, the profoundly horrifying stories of women who have had to endure terrible medical circumstances post-Dobbs have only confirmed this position.**
Indeed, as I look retrospectively I remember a me who thought it was all pretty straightforward. But that is simply not the case. And while I can hear any number of people say things like it is all so easy: simply don’t have sex outside of marriage! I know that reality is not that simple. Not by a long shot.
French’s column reminded me that I realized a long time ago that there was an internal contradiction in the notion that there was any room in a pro-life position for supporting exceptions for incest or for allowing room for IVF. If a fertilized egg is equivalent to a human being in the fullness of that notion then there is no room for a saying that an egg fertilized from rape or incest is morally different than an egg fertilized by any other means. The only morally acceptable exception, if one truly believes that a zygote is a human being with full rights is when the pregnancy threatens the life of the mother because then you have to make a decision between the two (or, more likely, if the mother dies the zygote/embryo dies, too).
Beyond any of that, as sad as a miscarriage is, most people simply do not treat them the same way they treat the death of an infant. To be clear: I am not trying to minimize the pain of a miscarriage. But from a personal point of view, and based on personal experience, I would note that one of our children was originally a twin, but that one twin didn’t make it past a very early stage. My wife and I (and especially my wife) found this to be hard news. But I also can say that what grief we felt about that fact, was nothing compared to what grief we would have felt had that child been born and then died. I just know that to me it would not have been the same thing. Again, I say that fully acknowledging that many people suffer great grief over miscarriages and I am not trying to minimize it. I am simply noting that societally we do not treat miscarriages the way we treat the death of children after they have been born and that my own personal experience mirrors this fact.
From a theological point of view, I was always struck, too, that if the fetus is innocent, and yet has a soul, it goes to heaven, yes? Of course, if one is a Calvinist,*** some do and some don’t but that’s up to God, anyway (and in that case, it isn’t even about giving a specific person the chance to choose salvation or not). It is all, to me at least, a dog’s breakfast of weird contradictory, if not blatantly unjust, notions.****
At any rate, the point of all of this is to agree with French on a couple of levels.
The first is that yes, the pro-life position in the United States is rife with contradictions. Even French, whom I think to be principled on this issue, inadvertently admits he holds some contradictions:
I’m grateful for I.V.F. I have very close friends who conceived their children that way, but the law should not treat I.V.F. embryos substantially differently and worse than embryos conceived through natural means. But that’s exactly what the Alabama Legislature chose to do.
Again, if all embryos are human beings, IVF destroys some human beings. I am not sure how one can be deeply pro-life and be “grateful” for IVF. IVF and the pro-life position as defined by French himself strikes me as being clearly at odds with one another.
Ultimately I think that there are people who deeply believe that abortion is wrong. I also think that a lot of people who are opposed to legal abortion are actually more focused on stopping certain sexual behaviors than they are worried about pregnancies (let alone truly concerned about babies post-birth). I think, too, there is a clear patriarchal motivation behind quite a bit of this. Female autonomy is clearly feared by many. This is true whether they admit that to themselves or not.
Ultimately, we are also seeing here at least two clear political facts.
First, a lot of people do not think deeply about even their allegedly deeply-held “beliefs.” Instead, they are more malleable than they realize and often hold contradictory views when push comes to shove. Along these same lines, holding a specific view is often more a signifier about one’s partisan team than it is about really having reached those beliefs first and then choosing a team.
Second, elite behavior affects mass behavior. Trump’s foray into a Pro-Abortion position (whilst couching in the magic words of “states’ rights”) is leading to supporters doing the exact same thing.
This reminds me of a niche meme some political science acquaintances like to share on Twitter:
This refers to the work of political scientist Philip Converse. A summary of one of his articles can be found here.
I would note the following as it pertains to this discussion (especially varying portions of 3-5):
Converse classifies voters into the following categories based on their understanding of basic ideological differentiation between ideas:
- Ideologues: These respondents relied on “a relatively abstract and far reaching conceptual dimension as a yardstick against which political objects and their shifting political significance over time were evaluated” (p.216).
- Near Ideologues: These respondents mentioned the liberal-conservative dimension peripherally, but did not appear to place much emphasis on it, or used it in a way that led the researchers to question their understanding of the issues.
- Group Interest: This group did not demonstrate an understanding of the ideological spectrum, but made choices based on which groups they saw the parties representing (e.g. Democrats supporting blacks, Republicans supporting big business or the rich). These people tended to not understand issues that did not clearly benefit the groups they referred to.
- Nature of the Times: The members of this group exhibited no understanding of the ideological differences between parties, but made their decisions on the “nature of the times.” Thus, they did not like Republicans because of the Depression, or they didn’t like the Democrats because of the Korean war.
- No issue content: This group included the respondents whose evaluation of the political scene had “no shred of policy significance whatever” (p. 217). These people included respondents who identified a party affiliation, but had no idea what the party stood for, as well as people who based their decisions on personal qualities of candidates.
And, therefore,
Converse also found that the mass public does not seem to share beliefs in any predictable way with elites or that the voting patterns of the people at the lower end of the scale are following the patterns of the ideologues and near ideologues who have a firm grasp of the issues.
So, to use those classifications, most voters will just roll with these changes rather than reassess their partisan allegiance. At a minimum people, in the main, do not choose parties based on policies. Instead, they end up following their parties even as those parties change on specific policies (among other implications).
Of course, Trump can still claim the mantle of the Roe slayer, which helps him with the hardcore pro-lifers, but it doesn’t help him with a huge swath of the population, as French notes:
It’s no wonder, then, that the pro-life cause is in a state of emergency so soon after its greatest legal triumph, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. It has lost every referendum since the Supreme Court decided Dobbs, including ballot measures in red states like Kentucky, Kansas, Montana and Ohio. Early polling indicates that Florida’s proposed Pro-Abortion referendum may well cross the 60 percent threshold needed to pass and overturn the state’s six-week abortion ban. In fact, a majority of Republican voters appear to support the referendum.
Not to mention the lack of policy efficacy:
Even more ominously from a pro-life perspective, the abortion rate rose under Trump, and the total number of abortions has actually increased since the Dobbs decision.
I cannot think of a bigger “dog caught the car” moment than the GOP’s current dilemma with abortion.
*Just like with slavery, states’ rights in the abstract are not the issue. The slave states were pro-central government when it came to the Fugitive Slave Act, for example. Dred Scott was an anti-states’ right decision, for that matter.
**A few examples:
- Via the BBC: She was denied an abortion in Texas – then she almost died.
- Via NPR: New abortion laws changed their lives. 8 very personal stories.
- Via ABC News: Delayed and denied: Women pushed to death’s door for abortion care in post-Roe America.
***If I could pick one (and it is certainly more complicated than that) theological notion that utterly broke my brain in terms of my own theological views, it was Calvinism. Not only do I find key components of it, well, abhorrent, but if God has already determined who is saved and who isn’t, then what does any of this even matter?
****This paragraph probably only makes sense if you understand various aspects and variations of evangelical Christianity.
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Author: Steven L. Taylor
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