Justice Samuel Alito composed the now famous ruling that recently overturned Roe vs. Wade. An important line of argument in that ruling was Alito’s assertion that abortion access did not have a long, established history in this country.
I am not an American historian, but then neither is Justice Alito.
I do know that this particular line of argument has been heavily criticized since its publication. PBS News recently offered a fascinating story covering this “complicated history” in early America.
Obviously, this post is spurred by the recent Supreme Court decision overturning Roe vs. Wade and the many conversations now occurring state-to-state about local abortion laws.
The premise of the anti-abortion (I refuse to use the term pro-life, since it is highly misleading) movement has always been the claim that “life begins at conception.” A secondary entailment of that assumption is the definition of “life” as the existence of a human person.
Let me begin by putting my cards on the table: I used to espouse this view myself. In the past, I have led protesters in prayer near an abortion clinic. But no more. Over the years, I have undergone a slow transformation.
Nowadays,I believe that only God knows when another “life” (see above) begins inside a woman’s body. Pinpointing this arrival of new life into the world is beyond human comprehension.
A human embryo
However, having said this, I also recognize two things. First, I recognize that opposition to abortion has been unanimous throughout Church history, going back as far as the earliest Christian Church fathers (among those who left written records). However, granting this fact still does not answer the question of when life begins.
For instance, some Jewish literature indicates that life was not thought to begin until the mother could feel movement inside of her body. So, terminating a pregnancy prior to that experience would not necessarily be considered abortion by all.
Second, understanding that the fertilization of a woman’s egg (both the egg and sperm are called a “gamete”) begins a process resulting in the creation and eventual delivery, assuming no interference, of a human baby. Whether or not we can say with certainty when life begins does not change the fact that pregnancy is a process that eventually produces a new life.
Thus, it only makes sense that abortion should be avoided as much as possible – yep, I am no longer an absolutist on this point, as I will explain below – as dictated by whatever reasonable concerns are raised by a pregnant woman’s circumstances.
Yes, I know that “reasonable concerns” is a subjective constraint, but it is not my goal in this post to explore that problem. I will only say that the current story of the pregnant 10-year-old Ohio girl, raped and impregnated by her father, raises more than enough “reasonable concern” to justify an abortion, in my mind.
Sadly, Ohio state law is now denying her that humane solution – yes, humane solution – to her tragic plight. That strikes me as terribly wrong.
Rather, in this post I want to explore the inconsistencies that I see in the conservative, anti-abortion position. Inconsistencies which suggest to me either that few conservatives actually believe what they claim to believe, OR they are ignorant, and therefore should remove themselves from this debate about the details of conception, contraception, and pregnancy.
Let’s first remind ourselves of the physiological details that everyone in this debate ought to understand…despite the fact that many, obviously, don’t.
Here is a simplified version:
When the female gamete, the egg, is penetrated by a male gamete, a sperm, fertilization occurs and produces a zygote. Remember that, according to conservative, anti-abortion advocates, this is when life begins, “at the moment of conception.” So, a zygote is a living person, according to this view. No, don’t try to quibble over this. A zygote is either “alive” or it’s not. And we are only talking about one kind of life: a human life.
After about five days of cell division, the zygote becomes a blastocyst.
The zygote or blastocyst continues to travel down the woman’s fallopian tube (coming from the ovary) towards the uterus and takes between four to ten days on average before implanting into the uterine wall.
But not every fertilized egg/zygote makes it to implantation. Implantation seems to be the moment when the blastocyst officially becomes an embryo. The embryonic period lasts for eight to nine weeks. At week nine or ten the embryo becomes a fetus.
The transition from a dependent fetus to an independent baby, capable of living outside the mother’s body, remains a matter of debate, partly contingent on the expanding capabilities of medical technology.
Sometimes the zygote implants inside the fallopian tube creating what is called an ectopic pregnancy. Ectopic pregnancies are dangerous for the mother and are typically terminated (aborted, according to conservatives?) either naturally, chemically, or surgically.
Do you know of a woman, anti-abortion activist who terminated her ectopic pregnancy? I’d love to hear answers to my following questions.
Depending on what study you read, somewhere between 40% to 70% of fertilized eggs never implant in the uterus but are “flushed” from the woman’s body along with her menstrual fluids. In other words, IF life does begin at conception/fertilization, as anti-abortion activists insist, then either God or nature, whichever you prefer, is the greatest abortionist of them all.
More than that, if anti-abortion activists were serious about this belief, then why are these abundant “natural abortions” not being memorialized? Does anyone do this? Please tell me if you know.
Wouldn’t it make sense, both logically and morally, that every woman, anti-abortion activist – at least those who are still menstruating and capable of becoming pregnant – who believes that life begins at conception, ought to collect her monthly menstrual fluid in a bag for burial?
I am serious and not in any way trying to be flippant. That may sound foolish, but why? Does anyone do this? I really want to know. And if not, why not?
If you truly believe that life begins at fertilization, then it only makes sense, and conforms to the moral imperatives of honoring all life, to see those 40% to 70% of fertilized but unimplanted zygotes as “preborn babies” (to use the manipulative, propagandistic lingo deployed by certain activists).
In which case, every one of them deserves a decent burial with a headstone. Right? And, if not, why not? Please explain this to me and help me to understand. I have never heard of anyone doing this. Why?
This brings us to the question of miscarriages.
I am well aware of how extremely traumatic a miscarriage can be for everyone involved. In no way am I trying to be cavalier or callous. Nevertheless, we all must take the full implications of our moral positions with all seriousness.
If life begins at conception, then every miscarriage is a naturally occurring abortion which ends the life of a pre-born baby. This must be true at whatever stage in pregnancy the miscarriage occurs.
Obviously, this conviction is at the heart of what makes the experience of a miscarriage so very, very heartbreaking for those women who experience one.
So, let’s think this through together.
How many anti-abortion advocates who experience a miscarriage insist that the remains of their miscarriage be buried with a funeral and a headstone?
Perhaps some people do this. I don’t know? Do you know of any? I am asking questions for the purposes of logical and moral consistency. I would love to hear some answers from my readers.
In any case, miscarried fetal tissue is the remnant testifying to a human death, if human life does begin at fertilization. In which case, it is deserving of a memorial. How many conservative Christians name their miscarried fetuses and visit their graves?
Perhaps some do, which is wonderful. At least, they are showing real moral consistency.
Naturally, these questions also apply to those state legislatures that are talking about criminalizing the morning after pill, which chemically prevents the zygote from implanting into the uterus. Perhaps these activist legislators argue that this type of “abortion” is not a natural occurrence, so it is different from the 40% to 70% of fertilized eggs that are flushed naturally with a woman’s menstrual fluid.
But anyone making that argument is also underlining the importance of memorializing and properly burying those “flushed” zygotes…on a monthly basis. How many of these legislators do this themselves? I suspect the answer is, none.
But, why not? And, if they don’t do this, then aren’t they being hypocrites by criminalizing the morning after pill? I’d say they were.
The only logical response I can see to any of my questions is to say that “the degree” of life involved in these different events varies according to the developmental stage of the effected zygote, embryo, or fetus. So that, even though “life” begins at conception, certain stages of that “life” can legitimately be terminated, whether by nature or by human intervention, without the need for memorializing, burial, naming, or celebrating because they are “less alive” than they would be at other stages.
But if this is the case, then we have all agreed to the existence of those subjective matters regarding the “reasonable concerns” that make some abortions acceptable, depending on the mother’s circumstances (see above). Yet, these are the very concerns over a woman or a girl’s well-being that the average anti-abortion activist refuses to recognize.
This, my friends, is a major problem in this position, as I see it.
Christians need to think clearly and consistently, especially when the lives and future prospects of young girls and women are all at stake.
We need to follow the moral implications of our beliefs and behaviors all the way through to the very end, consistently, without fudging for personal preference.
Furthermore, we have no business applying moral directives to other people’s lives when we are not following those directives ourselves.
Personally, I don’t see any of these matters being taken seriously by the Religious Right; at least, not in the public conversation.
That’s a big problem for the anti-abortion movement.
When making a major decision, it is always important to know all sides of the argument at issue, as well a the consequences of change.
Now that Roe vs. Wade has been overruled, it’s worth remembering what used to happen to women who sought (illegal) abortions prior to 1973.
Before abortion’s legalization, the cleaning agent called Lysol was commonly used to induce abortion.
It was often fatal.
Why would anyone do such a thing? Curiously enough, Lysol was subtly marketed as a (secretly) safe abortion method.
Though I am not “pro-abortion,” I certainly understand why so many women are now angry and upset. The majority of women who seek abortions are married and poor.
Below is an excerpt from an article in The Atlantic Magazine written by Caitlin Flanagan, titled “The Dishonesty of the Abortion Debate” originally published in December 2019:
We will never know how many women had abortions via this method, or how many died because of it. Why was Lysol, with its strong, unpleasant smell and its corrosive effect on skin, so often used? Because its early formulation contained cresol, a phenol compound that induced abortion; because it was easily available, a household product that aroused no suspicion when women bought it; and because for more than three decades, Lysol advertised the product as an effective form of birth control, advising women to douche with it in diluted form after sex, thus powerfully linking the product to the notion of family planning.
In a seemingly endless series of advertisements published from the ’20s through the ’50s, the Lysol company told the same story over and over again: One woman or another had “neglected her feminine hygiene” and thereby rendered herself odious to her husband, leaving her “held in a web of indifference” and introducing “doubt” and “inhibitions” into their intimate life. It was illegal to advertise contraception nationally before 1977, so the Lysol ads performed a coy bit of misdirection—they said that if women didn’t douche after sex, they would lose their “dainty,” or “feminine,” or “youthful” appeal. The implication was that sex made them stink, which revolted their husbands. However, women in the past knew what women of the present know: Having sex doesn’t make a woman stink, and the only necessary items for keeping clean are soap and water.
Read with this in mind, the ads appear rife with coded references to the idea of contraception. One woman’s doctor has told her “never to run such careless risks” and prescribed Lysol. Another is told by her doctor that failing to douche with Lysol could “lead to serious consequences.” Many of the ads stress that Lysol works “even in the presence of mucous matter,” a possible reference to the by-products of intercourse; some promote the fact that it “leaves no greasy aftereffect,” probably a reference to the vaginal jellies that some women used as birth control.
A doctor tells one woman, “It’s foolish to risk your marriage happiness by being careless about feminine hygiene—even once!” This is the language of contraception: something that must be used every single time, that can lead to serious repercussions if skipped even once, that one should never be careless about. The “doubts” introduced to the marital lovemaking, and the “inhibitions,” are not the result of stink; they are the outcome of there being no reliable form of birth control and the constant anxiety that sex could result in an unwanted pregnancy.
There are dozens of these ads on the internet, where they forever shock young feminists. I’ve seen so many of them that I thought I knew all of their tropes and euphemisms. But this summer I came across one that stopped me cold. It was a simple image of a very particular kind of female suffering. The woman in this ad was not caught in a web of indifference; she was not relieved because she had been prescribed Lysol by her doctor. The woman in this image has been “careless”; she is facing the “serious consequences.”
In a single panel, we see a line drawing of the kind of middle-class white housewife who was a staple of postwar advertising, although invariably the products she was selling were of use and of interest to women of all socioeconomic classes and all races—this product in particular. Her hair is brushed and shining, her nails are manicured, and she wears a wedding ring. But her head is buried in her hands, and behind her loom the pages of a giant calendar. Over her bowed head, in neat Palmer-method handwriting, is a single sentence: “I just can’t face it again.”
There’s a whole world in that sentence. To be a woman is to bear the entire consequence of sex. And here is one woman bearing that consequence: a married woman—probably with other children, for this is a matter of “again”—who for whatever reason is at her breaking point.
Boom unable to face one more pregnancy? Start making a list of the possible reasons, and you might never stop. Maybe she’d had terrible pregnancies and traumatic births and she couldn’t go through another one. Maybe she had suffered terribly from postpartum depression, and she’d just gotten past it. Maybe her husband was an angry or violent man; maybe he had a tendency to blame her when she got pregnant. Maybe she had finally reached the point in her life when her youngest was in school and she had a few blessed hours to herself each day, when she could sit in the quiet of her house and have a cup of coffee and get her thoughts together. And maybe—just maybe—she was a woman who knew her own mind and her own life, and who knew very well when something was too much for her to bear.
His discussion of the Court’s rulings about “qualified immunity” for the police makes for chilling reading. Qualified immunity means that the police cannot be held liable, i.e. they cannot be prosecuted or sued for damages, by those they injure.
In other words, the police can violate your Constitutional rights with impunity whenever they like as they like. Leaving us, the citizens whose tax dollars finance our local police force, without any recourse for damages suffered during an encounter with the cops.
This is exactly what we can expect from conservative, pro-corporate judges who care more about the protection of institutional power than the rights and freedoms of anonymous individuals.
Pro-life my ass.
It is another example of the ongoing class warfare that characterizes American society — and why the working-class continues to lose.
For those who don’t think any of this is a big deal, remember the old definition of a liberal: a liberal is a conservative who just got mugged (in this case, by the police).
Below is an excerpt from Balko’s piece. He explains the contested history of qualified immunity; it is well worth some focused attention:
The Supreme Court, having created the problem of qualified immunity to shield
United States Supreme Court
police from being held liable for their misconduct, keeps refusing to fix it.
This week, the court declined to review an especially outrageous ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit involving a Denver man who was detained for recording a traffic stop, then had his computer confiscated and searched.
No one doubts the man, Levi Frasier, had the right to record the stop. To date, six federal appeals courts have ruled there is a constitutional right to record police officers in public, a sentiment shared by the overwhelming majority of constitutional scholars. No federal appeals court has ruled the other way. In fact, the law is so well established that the officers in Denver were trained that citizens have such a right, and to respect it.
Yet the 10th Circuit ruled that because that circuit had yet to rule on the matter, the right was not yet “clearly established.” In a truly remarkable sentence, the court added, “It is therefore ‘irrelevant’ whether each officer defendant actually believed — or even in some sense knew — that his conduct violated . . . the First Amendment.”
In my last column, I looked at the origins of qualified immunity, the court-created doctrine that makes it extremely difficult to sue police officers for abuse and other constitutional violations. . .
George Orwell famously wrote, “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.” In defiance of everything we know about violence and state power — and for that matter most of human history — somehow, the Supreme Court has decided that the boot deserves more protection than the face.
I am sure that almost everyone knows by now that, all across the country, Republican state legislatures are proposing a variety of new election laws
Journalist, Mehdi Hasan
that will effectively disenfranchise large numbers of voters, particularly the elderly and people of color.
The Supreme Court has just upheld the legality of two such laws in Arizona.
In contrast to the CBN anchor, Gordon Robertson, who simply vents his spleen against “liberals” while misrepresenting everything at stake in these current voting rights contests, Mehdi Hasan provides a well-informed discussion (approximately 13 minutes) of what is at stake in this Supreme Court decision.
Let’s remember some important details crucial to understanding the context of the court’s decision.
The gutting of the 1965 Voting Rights Act began in 2013 when the Supreme Court invalidated the provision requiring Southern states to seek federal approval for any intended changes to their state’s voting laws. This pernicious ruling, which Justice John Roberts defended by saying, “Our country has changed,” opened the barn door of voter disenfranchisement and let all the ghost horses of Jim Crow run loose again.
Consequently, the conservative lament about the dangerous feds who are working to “take control over state elections” (watch the CBN link above) is ahistorical malarkey. The Voting Rights Act gave the federal government supervisory and enforcement power over every state proposal for a change in its election laws. What is happening now is the step-by-step destruction of that crucial supervision. Do we really need another reminder of the many ways Southern states effectively denied their African-American citizens the right to vote? Excuse me, but John Roberts is a bone-head. No, it is clear that America has not changed, Justice Roberts.
Republicans recognize that there is a direct correlation between the numbers of people who vote in an election and the likelihood that they will lose. Donald Trump admitted this himself during his reelection campaign, acknowledging that if everyone was allowed to vote, Republicans would never win another election. It is not rocket science to figure out that the current slate of voter restriction proposals is intended to suppress citizens’ access to the voting booth. These bills are being called “the new Jim Crow” for very good reasons. The Republican party is working to ensure that they will not lose the next presidential election, pure and simple.
Finally, ALL of these voter restriction proposals are premised on a lie. Time and again Republicans defend their odious proposals as admirable efforts to “protect v0ter integrity.” They then proceed as if Trump’s mountain of lies about significant, nation-wide “voter fraud” were all accurate and substantiated. In other words, these voter suppression proposals are being offered to correct a non-existent, mythical problem. (Read the latest report identifying this problem written by a Republican state legislator in Michigan). They are a modern, political equivalent of medieval practice of blood-letting — let’s kill the patient with a thousand cuts while pretending that we are doctors!
The leaders in the Republican party continue to march towards authoritarianism, proving day after day that they really do not believe in democracy or the right of every citizen to vote.
