20
POLICING PREGNANCIES
In one aspect of its politics, the United States stands apart from other democracies. It is the only nation where a large portion of its population gears their votes to how candidates stand on abortion. That issue no longer divides Ireland, and is quiescent in France, Italy, and Spain, even with their Roman Catholic legacies.
Here a caveat is needed. In the United States, it is primarily citizens who oppose abortion who frame it as their core concern. For many, it easily tops their list. Even so, they are not a numerical majority. As we have seen, more than half of Americans want the procedure to be available, and to have this choice within reasonable reach. But few of them voice that sentiment with the intensity that drives the other side. Indeed, for most who support choice, it is one of many topics on which they have opinions. Nor is this an anomaly. Owners of private arsenals tend to be sharply focused and evince more passion than those supporting controls.
This chapter will be saying quite a bit about abortion, and for a reason. Since 1976, Republicans have set abolishing abortion at the center of their platform. For more than four decades, it has provided the party with a solid core of support. More to the point, its allegiance can be counted on regardless of whatever other stances the party affirms.
If abortion is most explicitly a medical or surgical procedure, it has become a lot more than that. Indeed, it’s hard to think of another clinical practice that raises so many ramifications. Of course, it is about pregnancies, and how they should eventuate. It’s also about a sexual activity that can lead to conception, but which can be pursued for many other purposes. To this extent, opinions about abortion echo how people feel about carnal commingling. How far abortion is accessible, if at all, can expand or constrict the lives of women, with secondary consequences for men. Arguments about abortion turn intense because this procedure has become a surrogate for forebodings not always acknowledged or understood. As a public issue, it also allows individuals to define themselves morally and present who they are to the world.
One talisman is the GOP’s view that teenagers should be taught denial: to curb their urges by remaining chaste until marriage. Allied to this precept is the belief that sexual release should be confined to licensed and loving partners when they intend to reproduce. Altogether, a source of Republican anxiety is that sex is suffusing our society, and to an unconscionable degree. Public discipline must be imposed to rein in wanton drives.
On abortion itself, the parties are deeply at odds. The 2012 Republican platform stated its position succinctly: “We assert the sanctity of human life and affirm that the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed.” The party’s ultimate goal is to have the procedure totally banned, settling for erecting obstacles until that time comes. The Democrats in 2016 were just as direct: “Every woman should have access to quality reproductive health-care services, including safe and legal abortion.” Also in 2016, even before Donald Trump had secured the nomination, Republican platform officials were framing its most sweeping abortion statement yet. It ran over nine hundred words, with paragraphs specifying waiting periods, parental consent, and clinic regulation. Along with deploring fetal harvesting, early induction delivery, and dismemberment, as well as stem cell research.
Other Republican qualms are closer to the surface. Stated simply, they see sex as an original sin. Lust, which features prominently on the Seven Deadly list, inheres in our corporeal condition. Hence its urges must be repressed and suppressed if humans are to lead productive and enlightened lives.
The parties’ positions generally reflect the sentiments of their supporters. How people feel about abortion is expressed in the results of two surveys, which took different approaches in the questions they posed. Indeed, some pondering is needed to fathom what’s going on in people’s minds. As can be seen, 72 percent of Republicans take the pro-life position; yet only 66 percent want to make abortion illegal. With Democrats, the choice view gets 71 percent, but rises to 86 percent when the legal option is given. Equally notable is that as many as a third of Republicans want abortions to remain legal in most circumstances, not just rape and incest. Nor should this be surprising. At least a third of its supporters have other priorities, like taxes and immigration, or firearms and racial worries. They go along with the platform, just as those who put abortion first accede to stands on other subjects. On the whole, Democrats feel more benignly toward sex. Most believe its impulses will surface, even amid the most stringent of controls. (So best include condoms in curricula.) Against the GOP’s stress on sanctity and self-control, Democrats propound what might be called responsible sex: fusing lust with respect, exhilaration with precautions. But given the frequency of couplings, with even the most sedulous safeguards, mishaps will occur. Hence most Democrats believe that provisions for ending pregnancies should be broadly available. While the phrase abortion on demand is never used, it is what is being espoused.
| OPINIONS ON ABORTION: CHOICE, LIFE, AND LEGALITY1 | ||
| “Would You Consider Yourself to Be Pro-Choice or Pro-Life?” | ||
| Republicans | Democrats | |
| Choice | 28% | 71% |
| Life | 72% | 29% |
| Republicans | Democrats | |
| Legal | 34% | 86% |
| Illegal | 66% | 14% |
| No opinions or undecideds are omitted. | ||
So here is the battle line. One party says childbirth must sometimes yield to other choices. The other views pregnancies as beyond debate; once begun they must be brought to completion. Abolition has been a central Republican tenet since 1976, with the first platform subsequent to the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade. All ensuing party pronouncements have called for barring the procedure, not just via legislation, but by embedding the ban in the national Constitution. In all parts of the country, nomination to Republican slates requires an avowal of opposition. Similar affirmations are expected with elected and appointed judgeships. It’s not easy think of another topic—guns are close behind—where the GOP demands so adamant a stance.
On first reading, it might seem anomalous that a party whose prime priorities are wealth and profits would take on the policing of pregnancies. That it has says a lot about what Republicans will do to gain and maintain power.
At the outset, any analysis should grant that views about abortion can have religious wellsprings, especially if forms of worship interweave theology and ideology. When Americans take to religion, they are more apt to vent passions than in more settled societies.
As the 1970s started, concern over abortion was almost wholly a Roman Catholic province. As it happens, its tenet that gestation must take its course is not an ancient doctrine. In earlier times, the church countenanced terminations up to when the fetus became “animated,” meaning that movement could be felt. In 1591, Pope Gregory XIV issued a papal bull positing that “unanimated” embryos lack a soul. This essentially said that they could be removed, as readily as a cyst from a liver. It was only in 1869, barely a century and a half before our time, that Pope Pius IX changed the rules, proclaiming that full life commences at conception. So the sanctity of a seconds-old embryo is a rather recent canon of an otherwise venerable church.
As recently as 1968, abortion wasn’t on the agenda of most evangelical denominations. Bruce Waltke of the Dallas Theological Seminary affirmed a general consensus that year, when he wrote, “God does not regard the fetus as a soul, no matter how far gestation has progressed.” For authority, he cited Exodus 21:22–24. This view was supported by the magazine Christian Life: “The Bible definitely pinpoints a difference in the value of a fetus and an adult.”2
Yet changes were in the wind. Not long thereafter, in 1971, the Southern Baptist Convention affirmed “the sanctity [of] fetal life.” Even so, its adherents included provisions for abortions “under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.”3
These allowances aren’t far from Planned Parenthood’s platform today. With the Baptists’ codicils—especially the emotional and mental provisos—networks of clinics would still be needed.
A new era opened in 1973, when the Supreme Court gave federal approval to abortions in Roe v. Wade. That decision, a decree in the name of the national state, prompted a major shift in evangelical theology. A posture that had seemed somewhat relaxed, or at least ambiguous, became a rigid stance. Henceforward, the dictum would be that any germination creates a sacred soul. To purposefully end it should be considered murder.
The decision had another consequence. As recently as 1960, when John Kennedy ran for president, many Protestants were so deterred by his Roman Catholicism that they refused him their vote. Yet not much more than a dozen or so years later, an unusual détente was coming about. A critical mass of Protestants joined dutiful Catholics in a joint campaign to overturn Roe.
In 1972, Richard Nixon’s platform did not speak of abortion at all. But not long thereafter, Watergate intervened and he subsequently resigned in disgrace. In 1976, a beleaguered GOP felt obliged to nominate Gerald Ford, his hapless successor. Republican prospects looked so dim that any straw was considered for grasping. One came from Jesse Helms, a North Carolina senator who was always avid for a decisive issue. He proposed that the party commit to revoking Roe.
So it’s worth the space to parse the GOP’s 1976 platform. The relevant section opened almost as an academic essay, notable for its even-handed tone:
The question of abortion is one of the most difficult and controversial of our time. It is undoubtedly a moral and personal issue but it also involves complex questions relating to medical science and criminal justice. There are those in our Party who favor complete support for the Supreme Court decision which permits abortion on demand. There are others who share sincere convictions that the Supreme Court’s decision must be changed by a constitutional amendment prohibiting all abortions. Others have yet to take a position, or they have assumed a stance somewhere in between polar positions. The Republican Party favors a continuance of the public dialogue . . .
But its text did not stop there. Notice that the last sentence has no period at its end. As if new hands had commandeered the keyboard, there then came this concluding clause:
. . . and supports the efforts of those who seek enactment of a constitutional amendment to restore protection of the right to life for unborn children.
So four decades ago, the GOP pledged to do all it could to end accessibility to abortions. Ronald Reagan’s 1980 platform, after a nod to “differing views,” sustained the 1976 affirmation, adding “we also support the Congressional efforts to restrict the use of taxpayers’ dollars for abortion.” A Republican Congress soon passed the so-called Hyde amendment, prohibiting federal funding for abortions. It has been subsequently renewed.
Fast-forward to 2016. Donald Trump, like many Republican aspirants, had earlier held the view that women had a right to choose. This had also been the case with Ronald Reagan, Mitt Romney, and the senior George Bush. But to obtain the nomination, all four proclaimed they had been converted to the anti- side. On this score, Trump went much further than any of his predecessors. In March 2016, he told MSNBC he felt that “some kind of punishment” should be inflicted on women who sought the procedure. Even right-to-life zealots were aghast. Their stance is that women who have had abortions are themselves victims of a barbaric system. Those who subsequently express regret are invited to join the opposition and are often featured in it. After going on record for overturning Roe, which would end federal involvement, Trump averred that women could “travel to another state.” In a word, teenagers in Alabama could still fly up to Illinois.
As with other topics, Trump held forth with improvisations. So here he was in October, in his final debate with Hillary Clinton: “If you go with what Hillary is saying, in the ninth month, you can take the baby and rip the baby out of the womb of the mother just prior to the birth.”
It’s immaterial that neither Clinton nor anyone else has ever supported allowing interventions at so advanced a stage. Veracity was not how Donald Trump won his nomination or the margins that assured him the Oval Office. What’s germane here is that “rip the baby” enthralled Republicans, who now had evidence that he was their man. His riffs on abortion galvanized rank-and-file Republicans more than anything John McCain, Mitt Romney, or either George Bush had essayed.
If a religious denomination includes conception in its theology, those joining its rolls are usually assumed to embrace that part of a creed. Still, religions are not totally doctrinal. They provide comfort, succor, and elucidation that goes beyond tenets and texts. Individuals have deep-seated needs that can be solaced by spiritual creeds. This chapter will consider some aspects of modern life that the abortion issue helps to resolve.
Republicans have always prided themselves on holding high standards for family life. By this it means marriage unto death, responsible raising of dutiful children, and eschewing unconventional sex. At least, this is its outward stance. In fact, prominent Republican seem as drawn to licentious couplings as any kindred group of Democrats. Three of its recent stalwarts—Newt Gingrich, Rudolph Giuliani, and Donald Trump—together boast nine betrothals and assorted infidelities. Also among the party’s adulterers have been Dan Burton of Indiana, Mark Sanford of South Carolina, Bob Barr of Georgia, and Helen Chenoweth of Idaho, all from strong Republican states. Plus Henry Hyde of Illinois, John Ensign of Nevada, John Schmitz of California, and Tim Murphy of Pennsylvania, as well as both David Vitter and Robert Livingston from Louisiana.
So it may be that straying Republicans, whether in public or private spheres, have a special need to affirm their moral stature. An apt avenue is to espouse a strict conception of life. Virtually all humans want to believe that they are moral creatures. This desire goes well beyond sexual indiscretions. In today’s United States, it isn’t easy to satisfy ourselves that we are leading principled lives. If anything denotes this country, it is its stress on success and status, with plaudits for lauded talents and envied attainments. But with so much emphasis on the self, not much energy is left for commitment to the wider society. Of course, Americans can attest they’ve worked hard, paid taxes, and improved their neighborhoods. However, these are everyday expectations, warranting two cheers at best. But a third asks for evidence that you have denied yourself to aid others.
Many, if not most, Republicans show little solicitude for people seen as short on initiative, responsibility, and effort. True, they support charities with suitable recipients. But all too many of those low on the social scale are seen as being culpable for their own plight. Hence Republican penchants for harsher prison sentences and limited assistance for the unemployed, not to mention heavy penalties for late loans. Given such agendas, those who take a stern line need an avenue for showing a caring countenance.
Enter solicitude for the unborn, as a way to establish that you are a moral individual. The right-to-life movement allows a broad band of citizens to feel that they are giving of themselves. Especially when they seek—as they often frame it—to rescue innocent infants from medical murder. Thus they can tell their grandchildren that they donated much of their vitality to fostering a more civilized and caring world. Few other causes offer so straightforward a satisfaction. If not all take time to picket clinics or resound at rallies, many send checks for causes such as underwriting counseling to those considering the procedure, to urge them from that choice. Each pregnancy that is preserved, by whatever means, is counted as an infant whose life has been saved.
An upside of opposing abortion is that the espousal itself will suffice. To that extent, it is a relatively undemanding way to gain moral stature. Thus adherents aren’t expected to aid, let alone adopt, babies whose births they have induced. Nor are there signs that such opponents feel obliged to ponder the futures these children face. Republicans aren’t notable for financing the schools these youngsters will attend, or the health care or other interventions that might give their lives a good start. It is as if the party’s strictures on self-reliance commence at the moment of birth.
The centrality of abortion also excuses Republicans from another effort. By some moral logics, belief in the sanctity of life should lead to opposing executions performed in the public’s name. But with so much involvement needed to oversee what happens in wombs, attention to capital punishment will have to wait. True, that all lives must be preserved (except in war) is still the official posture of the Roman Catholic Church. Yet it and other denominations that seek to end abortions do not show equal interest challenging to the death penalty. Few Republican officials have problems with capital sentencing, since it comes with the tough-on-crime menu. Research by James Unnever at the University of Southern Florida found that of individuals who want to abolish abortions, over half also wish to preserve public executions.4
Nor do they see this as being inconsistent. But then, not many of us are ready to allow that views we hold may be logically dissonant. Hence humans become adept at weaving webs of words to reconcile positions we concomitantly endorse. Like: “The unborn are wholly blameless; murderers willfully transgress.” At all events, it’s far easier to champion a not-yet-born infant than adults slated for a gurney.
Since the dawn of human history, men have been aware of how women can challenge their domains. Even the haughtiest of men can be sensible to women’s abilities and intellects. Yet not all men are comfortable amid talented women, especially if they become competitors. Hence the installation of impediments at every level. Most primitively, it was continual pregnancies and full-time household chores. Of course, this confinement is rarely espoused today. Even so, there remains an awareness of how pregnancies and their aftermath can limit women’s lives. Of course, women now have more choice over if or when to have children. Hence an updating of older constraints.
Something similar is happening in higher education, where men now receive only forty-three of every one hundred bachelor’s degrees, and even fewer at the graduate level. Insofar as those credentials are expected for advanced occupations, women may outpace men in appointments and promotions. Or look at a single school. When Yale admitted only men, it enrolled some 4,800 undergraduates, meaning that this number of men could embark with a Yale degree. Today, with coeducation and a slightly higher enrollment, it admits only 2,800 men and about the same number of women. As a result, out there now are 2,000 young men who once might have been Yale graduates and must now settle for less exalted degrees. To be sure, holding a Lehigh diploma is not the end of the world. But it’s a descent from Yale. These downward trends for men can be multiplied nationwide. Might men want to revert to recurring pregnancies to remove women as competitors?
Igniting the issue allows the GOP to pit two pools of women against each other. On one side are those who tend to be younger and single, or older and divorced, and who seek to enjoy themselves sexually. This was a signal outcome of the 1960s sexual revolution, facilitated by the advent of effective birth control. Yet as noted, the more frequent the liaisons, the greater the chance of mishaps and unanticipated pregnancies. Here a corollary of sexual freedom for women is that abortions be broadly available. Indeed, only with its access can they have self-determination equal to that accorded to men.
Across from them are women, most of them married, who by choice or circumstance lead less venturesome lives. In their view, too much of what is occurring sexually is morally disquieting.
To them, easy access to abortion spurs hedonistic stirrings and imprudent couplings. For adhering to stricter precepts in their own lives, they have paid demanding dues. Yet out there, they see all too many of their gender cavorting with small risk of opprobrium or shame.
Much effort is devoted to parsing voters via conventional demographic categories, like income, education, or ethnicity. But could it be that Republican analysts have taken a more sophisticated turn, looking for indicators that are less susceptible to statistics? Of course, for many, abortion is a moral issue. But it can also rouse people beset by insecurities, anxieties, and anger.
I see no problem with businesses or individuals giving as much politically as they choose. It’s called free speech. (Georgia)
The best way to avoid wars is to be prepared for them. (Georgia)
Wide-open borders are what scare me most. (Virginia)
The recession? Democrats gave mortgages to everyone who wanted them. (Georgia)
Government gives out so much free stuff now, so there’s no incentive to work. (Georgia)
Black Americans are told that capitalism is racism. (Virginia)
Low mobility among African Americans stems mainly from dependence on government. (Virginia)
Lower taxes, less bureaucracy, stronger national security, vigilance against terrorism, greater enforcement of criminal law, and competition in health care. (California)
Private companies do a better job than government agencies can. (Texas)
I’m a decent human being and I believe strongly in the Second Amendment. (North Carolina)