The title to this post, But What About the Children, was a common catch phrase on the long-running Simpson’s cartoon on the Fox network.
Whenever the Simpsons’ neighborhood seemed poised to confront a new,
intrusive cultural challenge, the local pastor’s wife could be counted on loudly to lament, “But what about the children?”, giving parody to conservative Christianity’s ostensible concern for the health and well-being of America’s young people.
Monday’s leaked draft of an (apparently?) imminent Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade is now fueling cries of jubilation among the evangelical community that has fought for decades to rid this country of abortion and the tearful tearing of garments among abortion’s distraught defenders.
Even though I am against abortion per se, I am also disturbed at what the social consequences will be if/when access to abortion becomes more restricted. (I also understand that nothing is certain about these things, and the aftermath will be complex and undoubtedly surprising. See the Constitutional, civil rights attorney, Glenn Greenwald’s helpful discussion of these Constitutional issues here.)
Daniel K. Williams fine book, The Politics of the Cross: A Christian Alternative to Partisanship (Eerdmans, 2021), contains a very helpful analysis of abortion in the United States, the evangelical battle against Roe v. Wade, and what should be the Christian church’s response to the issue’s complexities.
[I encourage you to buy the book and read especially chapter three – I do not agree with everything he says, especially in his chapter on marriage and sexuality. I am also shocked that Stanley Hauerwas does not appear in his bibliography! But overall, Williams provides the most balanced discussion of hot button social issues I have yet found written by an evangelical Christian.]
Here are a few short excerpts from The Politics of the Cross (all emphasis mine):
But what most people involved in the abortion debate seem not to realize is that we have largely returned to a pre-Roe past even without a direct repeal of Roe. The number of abortions per year in the United States is now lower than in any year since 1973 [the year of the Roe v. Wade ruling]. . .The number of abortion clinics has fallen by about two-thirds during the past twenty-five years. There are now more than three times as many pro-life crisis pregnancy centers as there are abortion clinics [in this country]. (103)
The primary explanation given by women as to why they want an abortion is that they are too poor to successfully raise another child:
[Pro-lifers are right] in that restricting access to abortion. . . does reduce abortion rates. . . But pro-choice advocates are also right in saying that this method of reducing abortion rates is likely to keep more women in poverty. This suggests that if pro-lifers really care about protecting all human life, including the life of low-income pregnant women, they will not merely try to rescind Roe v. Wade but will instead couple their restrictions on abortion with expanded efforts to provide economic resources to the women whose poverty has been exacerbated by an additional pregnancy. (104).
Fifty-nine percent of women who have abortions are already mothers. . .75 percent of the women having abortions are impoverished or classified as “low income.” (105)
My conscience is deeply troubled by the close connection between abortion rates and poverty in this country.
The majority of women seeking an abortion in this country are moved by, not just a sense of hopelessness, but by the hopeless reality of their desperately impoverished lives. They have no hope that their new baby will have any chance whatsoever at a decent, safe, healthy future in America.
My conscience becomes even more deeply troubled when I remember that the number of Americans now falling into poverty has only continued to grow over the past thirty years.
When this fact is combined with the steady, draconian reduction of family, social services (both public and private) available to poor people today, my blood curdles and I begin to drift slowly in the forbidden direction of supporting Roe v. Wade.
Excuse me, but I find the conservative hypocrisy on this issue stunning.
For if we want to be genuinely pro-life, then we will not only care about reducing abortion, but we will care equally about providing universal health care, especially for mothers and their children, free neo-natal health care, free well-baby home visits, free classes in nutrition and infant care, free pre-school and Head Start programs, especially in poor neighborhoods.
Earlier this year politicians in D.C. fought tooth and nail over the “social welfare” provisions included in president Biden’s Covid Relief bill, ensuring that those aspects of the bill were whittled down to a mere shadow of their original goals.
Both Republicans and corporate Democrats – which is all Democratic Senators and the majority of Representatives – waved the red flag of “increasing the national debt” and “bankrupting our grandchildren!” So, the bill was raped and pillaged until it became a mere skeleton of its original version.
Yet, last week the president asked Congress to approve $33 billion for a new round of military support and arms purchases for Ukraine and our NATO allies.
I have no doubt that the same Senators and Representatives who were previously losing sleep over the nightmare of America’s poor and needy bankrupting the nation, will now happily sign their names to another $33 billion in armament to fight Russia!
Once again, as always, America has deep, deep pockets for war, but instantly becomes penniless and unconcerned when faced with her own impoverished mothers and children.
Every decision is made within a bigger context. Nothing is isolated. Nothing is pristine. Everything is connected.
The way in which those connections influence my actions will always reveal the truth about my moral priorities.
This constellation of recent, national actions concerning Covid Relief, the Supreme Court, poverty levels, and military appropriations lead me to one, inevitable conclusion: American conservatives are no more “pro-life” than the Roadrunner or Bugs Bunny. They are pro-a-particularly-sick-and-twisted-conservative-political-economic-ideology.
I am telling you here and now, Jesus of Nazareth has never been a member of that club. And neither should you.
