Abortion and the Helen Lovejoy Republicans
Cutting through the nonsense on a contentious issue…
The Alabama Supreme Court has just ruled that “frozen embryos should be considered children.” While this has created at least some controversy amongst Republican Party officials (Donald Trump has come out against the decision), “Republican legislators in conservative states [are] already planning to push bills that would declare that life begins at conception – a stipulation that could have severe legal consequences for fertility treatments,” according to the New York Times. The Times observes that what are dubiously referred to as more “moderate” Republicans are being “undercut by their conservative, Christian allies in statehouses, who saw the fall of federal abortion rights as the beginning of efforts to ban the procedure and related reproductive medical care.”
Apparently, this now includes IVF. Former Arkansas Republican Jason Rapert, president of the “National Association of Christian Lawmakers,” a group that promotes “Biblical principles” through legislation, told the Times that “We’re very happy” about the Alabama ruling, since “It further affirms that life begins at conception.” This tracks with longstanding rhetoric we’ve heard from those who brand themselves “pro-life,” who insist that their noble opposition to women’s reproductive care simply stems from their deeply-held commitment to “the right to life.”
I call people like this “Helen Lovejoy Republicans,” after Helen Lovejoy, the wife of Reverend Lovejoy from The Simpsons, a character famous for over-the-top wails of, “won’t someone please think of the children!”
The reason I compare such people to a cartoon character is because that’s about how much respect they deserve. I’m sick to death of the Christian Right constantly invoking lofty moral principles on this issue, and I’m even more exasperated by the milquetoast responses to them. Their pretentious claims need to be blown out of the water, not treated with kid gloves.
First off, it’s obvious that the GOP and their Christian backers couldn’t care less about “life.” Every single one of their policy positions makes life more miserable for everyone. They oppose Medicare for All, they oppose paid maternity leave, and they oppose food stamps, free school lunches, or any other form of “welfare” that would help poor children stave off hunger (something that upwards of 9 million American children suffer from!). Such stances also call into question their supposed embrace of “family values,” since each of the things just mentioned would make it considerably easier to sustain families in the first place.
And given that the GOP are typically even more enthusiastic than their Democratic colleagues (which is saying something) when it comes to supporting hideous, life-destroying atrocities overseas – Ted Cruz recently declared, with conviction, “I condemn nothing that the Israeli government is doing” – one cannot help but wonder whether they are sincerely guided by a genuine commitment to “the sanctity of life.” Their real philosophy was more accurately summed up years ago by George Carlin: “if you’re pre-born, you’re fine; if you’re pre-school, you’re fucked!”
Civil libertarian Nat Hentoff once elaborated on this in the documentary Lake of Fire:
There ought to be a consistency of people who are pro-life. There was a man named Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago. He’s now dead. He came up with a phrase that I always liked; it was called the “seamless garment.” If you’re pro-life, he said, you ought to be against capital punishment, you ought to be against war, you ought to obviously be against stocking up and manufacturing weapons of war, and you ought to be against the kind of politics and the kind of administration that creates and sustains and increases poverty. Cause the people who are poor, their lives are severely diminished. I like that theory. Not all pro-lifers agree with that.
Indeed, almost no “pro-lifers” agree with that. Their actual views are of a rather different sort. It is important to understand where this manic obsession with abortion on the Christian Right comes from, because a look at its genealogy shows that it is the furthest thing from humane as it is possible to be.
In her 2019 book The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, Katherine Stewart reminds us of an important history that has been largely forgotten: “that Protestants by and large did not oppose abortion rights fifty years ago, and neither did many Republicans.”1 Indeed, prior to the late 1970s, “abortion battles…did not divide the religious against the secular, nor did they divide one party from another.” Instead, “political battles over abortion in state legislatures pitted Catholic antiabortion lobbyists against Protestant proponents of abortion law liberalization, with most Republican legislators siding with the Protestants.”2 The historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez agrees, noting that while “Catholics had a long history of condemning abortion, even when women’s lives were at stake,” and that “some fundamentalist pastors agreed” despite being unwilling to cooperate with their Catholic brethren, “most evangelicals were far less certain.” Indeed, “As late as 1971, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution urging states to expand access to abortion.”3 The context for this surprising (to our 21st century ears) history deserves to be better known.
Following the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision making segregation illegal, “a number of white families in southern states wished to avoid sending their children to integrated schools,” so “schools of choice,” which Stewart notes was “a euphemism for private schools that were, in effect, white-only,” began to spring up to cater to this demand.4 These “segregation academies” were largely run by churches and religious organizations. Today the Christian Right is keen to obscure its intimate embrace with racism and segregation, but the history is unavoidable. The Christian Right, led by figures like Jerry Falwell and Bob Jones, was always “closely involved with segregated schools and universities.”5 Indeed, when Jones gave radio sermons with titles like “Is Segregation Scriptural?”, wherein he declared that “God is the author of segregation” and that integrationists were “Satanic propagandists” and “religious infidels,” he was hardly speaking as a fringe outsider.
But the Christian Right was paralyzed with fear that “the Supreme Court might end tax exemptions for segregated Christian schools.”6 When the IRS indeed began to threaten the public subsidies being allotted to the “segregation academies,” religious leaders began meeting with representatives of the more established conservative movement, which was eager to defend them. “But,” Stewart notes, “they had a problem…building a new movement around the burning issue of defending the tax advantages of racist schools wasn’t going to be a viable strategy on the national stage.” Somewhat surprisingly, it was decided that the issue of abortion was the best way to unite evangelical (and some Catholic) activists with an increasingly reactionary GOP establishment.
According to the historian Randall Balmer, “It wasn’t until 1979 – a full six years after Roe, that evangelical leaders…seized on abortion not for moral reasons, but as a rallying cry to deny President Jimmy Carter a second term. Why? Because the anti-abortion crusade was more palatable than the religious right’s real motive: protecting segregated schools.”7 Indeed, Stewart emphasizes that “contrary to myth, when the Supreme Court handed down its decision on Roe v. Wade, many secular and religious conservatives responded with delight.”8 Stewart concludes that the “modern pro-life religion that dominates America’s conservative churches and undergirds a variety of their denominations is a political creation.”9 I would emphasize that it was an extremely vile political creation at that, given that it was designed to defend public/government subsidies to segregated schools.
When contemporary self-righteous conservative Christians start to blather about “the sanctity of life,” they should be forcibly confronted with this history – indeed, many of them are probably unaware of it – since it reveals that their “sacred” beliefs are little more than the byproduct of a campaign waged by racist southerners to preserve segregation at all costs. As is so often the case in American life, thought-control has played a major part in shaping popular opinion, unbeknownst to most people, who are manipulated into thinking that they arrived at their ideas out of genuine conviction, not carefully concealed cultural conditioning.
Of course, tracing this history still leaves the beliefs themselves unscathed. That the “pro-life” position originated from relatively recent, racist political machinations, rather than any deep commitment to principle, does not directly impact the truth of the idea that abortion is the equivalent of murder. It’s critical, then, to interrogate that belief. So I am continually surprised, and a little annoyed, when so many people who support women’s reproductive freedom respond to claims that abortion is the moral equivalent of infanticide by invoking “women’s rights,” or “choice,” or insist that “it’s between a woman and her doctor.”
I, too, believe that the decision should be between a woman and her doctor, and that it is no one else’s business. But I wouldn’t believe this if I thought that abortion was literally the same thing as murder. If I thought that a woman and her doctor were plotting to murder a toddler, I would absolutely intervene to stop it, and I would be justified in doing so. That is why the standard arguments about “choice” and the like don’t work when engaging with people who think like this – the claim that abortion is the same thing as homicide is what must be challenged.
To fully explain why it isn’t homicide would require a far longer post than what I can realistically accomplish here. For those interested in a sufficiently lengthy exploration, I recommend the Current Affairs essay “Abortion and the Left,” which does a magnificent job exploring the many nuances of the issue, in a way that is refreshingly dissimilar from standard talking points.
That said, we can briefly state the basics. Philosopher Peter Singer explains in Lake of Fire that everything that makes it wrong to murder a human adult – they have hopes, dreams for the future, can experience pain, want to go on living, etc. – does not apply to zygotes, blastocysts, embryos, or fetuses (up to a given point). While they are “alive” in the scientific sense of the word, they do not have the same rights that adults or grown children do. At least, they don’t insofar as those rights would impede the rights of the mother, who is a fully developed, thinking, feeling being with interests and needs.
Or, as one commentator succinctly put it,
the zygote, blastocyst, and embryo in fact pose a major challenge for the conservative view of abortion, because to treat their destruction as equivalent to a homicide appears an absurdity. It means that entities at very early stages of human development—those without sentience or even the rudiments of a nervous system—must be treated as equivalent to the rest of us, despite feeling no pain, having no thoughts, and being such a rudimentary entity as to make a frog or hamster appear godlike. Does this really make sense? Why does the fact that the entity has unique genetic material make a dispositive moral difference?
This is what needs to be explained when GOP fanatics make ridiculous accusations that abortion clinics are dungeons of child murder. And as I noted above, viewing anti-abortion crusaders as pure and noble defenders of the precious little children is absurd anyway – we need only take a look at where these people stand on every other issue to see that they don’t really care about the things they claim to care about – children, families, or the “sanctity of life.” Articulating these important points is far more effective than invoking stale cliches about “choice,” which are not going to convince anyone who subscribes to the “mothers are murdering their children” line of thought.
Indeed, I’ve always felt that “pro-life” and “pro-choice” are terrible slogans if one aims to understand what the controversy is about. Taken as an abstract value, detached from a conversation around abortion, “life” is sacred and beautiful; who the hell wants to be against “life?” By contrast, when I hear “choice,” I think of my ability as a consumer to select between things like crunchy, less-crunchy, or smooth peanut butter – hardly something I or anyone else deeply values. This is why I never refer to myself as “pro-choice,” but instead as “supportive of women.” And I don’t refer to abortion opponents as “pro-life,” since they’re clearly not, as we’ve seen. I call them “anti-life,” or, to once again invoke Carlin, “anti-woman.”
To continue to mindlessly invoke “choice” is to cede needless ground to the anti-abortion crowd. Consider the way The American Conservative’s Emile Doak describes the pro-abortion viewpoint:
The pro-abortion position…is built on the edifice of a very different moral vision [than that of the anti-abortion position]. Here, autonomy and choice are the determinants of moral value. That which is freely chosen is good; man derives his moral agency, and therefore his dignity, from his capacity to exercise autonomy. That which is given, whether through tradition or nature, is suspect and subject to the will. Therefore, the moral agency of the woman (or of the woman who chooses to identify as a man) necessarily trumps any claims the embryonic baby may have, and abortion becomes an essential guarantor of her continued autonomy.
In this framework, one can see how abortion is…the ultimate bedrock of the progressive vision. There is no more innocent person than the baby in the womb, and therefore no more heinous attack on human dignity than that baby’s murder. On the other hand, there is no clearer impediment to autonomy than the obligation to live with the natural consequences of promiscuous choices and to care for an unwanted child, and therefore no more essential right to protect than the right to abort that child when needed.
There’s a lot that I could say about this, but time and space constraints necessitate that I restrain myself. First, note the shoehorning-in of a reference to gender identity, despite the fact that it has nothing to do with the issue at hand. Second, note that “baby in the womb” sounds a lot more compelling than “embryo in the womb,” even though the latter is more accurate. This is a common deceptive tactic that needs to be exposed. The fact is that “about 80 percent of abortions in the United States occur at nine weeks or earlier,” with “much of the imagery that people see about abortion com[ing] from abortion opponents who have spent decades spreading misleading fetal imagery to further their cause.” Indeed, an actual image of what an aborted 9-week pregnancy looks like stands in remarkable contrast to what “babies in the womb feel pain” billboards mislead people to believe:
Third, and most relevant to my point, Doak claims that “the pro-abortion position” is built on a particular “moral vision;” one where “autonomy and choice are the determinants of moral value,” with abortion functioning as the “ultimate bedrock” of this vision.
Literally no one who is in favor of a woman’s right to bodily autonomy thinks that “autonomy and choice” alone determine moral value. None of us adhere to a “moral vision” that is anything like what Doak describes – one need only listen to a 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign speech to find out what underlies the “progressive moral vision.” That said, I can understand why Doak is writing about progressives in such terms. There’s more than a passing resemblance to the cliched way many supporters of women’s reproductive health speak (“choice,” “safe, legal, and rare,” etc.), particularly when forced to condense their remarks to accommodate the nuance-destroying language of cable news soundbites. Until an effort is made to break free of such stultifying language handicaps, the opponents of women’s freedom will have a lot to work with.
That said, they would have a lot to work with even if the rhetoric around “choice” was to disappear overnight. Just because the Christian Right’s opposition to abortion is a relatively recent “political creation” doesn’t mean that it has no earlier antecedents – it most certainly does. Stewart notes that the Catholic Church has long taken a harder line against abortion (the Church banned it “at any stage of pregnancy by canon law in 1869”),10 and that, to some extent, this opposition has been present, to varying degrees, in other denominations. It has often manifested itself in the idea of “ensoulment,” which holds that the soul enters the egg at the moment of conception when the zygote is formed. “Ensoulment” enjoys considerable support in many religious circles to this day. The idea provides considerable justification for opposition to abortion. However, those who support women’s reproductive rights rarely challenge the idea directly. Just as they cling to rhetoric around “choice” when confronted with claims about abortion being murder, they do themselves another disservice by failing to interrogate “ensoulment.” This is a missed opportunity, since “ensoulment” is an unsupportable idea with no evidence whatsoever that can be dispensed with fairly swiftly.
It’s difficult to know what evidence there could possibly be that “souls” somehow manifest themselves in newly fertilized eggs. It’s a very strange idea. But, assuming for the sake of argument “that every three-day-old human embryo has a soul worthy of our moral concern,” we are confronted with some vexing dilemmas. As Sam Harris has noted, “Embryos at this stage occasionally split, becoming separate people (identical twins). Is this a case of one soul splitting into two? Two embryos sometimes fuse into a single individual, called a chimera. You or someone you know may have developed in this way.” Harris rhetorically but nonetheless sensibly asks, “Isn't it time we admitted that this arithmetic of souls does not make any sense? The naive idea of souls in a Petri dish is intellectually indefensible.”11
Furthermore, Harris observes that “It has been estimated that 50 percent of all human conceptions end in spontaneous abortion, usually without a woman even realizing that she was pregnant.12 In fact, 20 percent of all recognized pregnancies end in miscarriage.” Such simple medical facts are apparently unknown to those who brand themselves “pro-life,” and they are absolutely devastating to religious arguments against abortion, since it would appear that the human body was designed to terminate fertilized, “ensouled” eggs. As Harris bluntly concludes, “There is an obvious truth here that cries out for acknowledgment: if God exists, He is the most prolific abortionist of all.”13
Misguided notions of child murder combined with crazy ideas like “ensoulment” may well explain much of the opposition to abortion. But there’s a third motivating factor which animates a good amount of the Christian Right’s opposition – one that they are normally politically savvy enough not to announce too loudly, given how unpopular it would be if it were widely known. Nonetheless, every once in a while, movement leaders will come out and say it openly. To wit, Ryan Anderson and Alexandra DeSanctis, in their book Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing, are refreshingly candid about what drives their opposition to the practice:
Making abortion unthinkable will be possible only when our society finally comes to terms with the disaster of the sexual revolution. So long as we fail to reckon with the damage done by widespread acceptance of sex outside of marriage—whether in the form of hookup culture or adultery—there will continue to be demand for abortion. Abortion is the ultimate backstop for “free sex” because it enables adults to engage in sex solely for pleasure and without commitment, erasing the consequences—their child—by means of lethal violence. A recovery of a sound sexual culture is the ultimate foundation for a culture of life.14 [emphasis mine]
Here we have a very frank admission that old-school, prudish Christian fears about sex having a purpose other than procreation are driving the anti-abortion movement. As I said, though, you won’t see them acknowledge this too often, since it “gives the game away,” as it were - in more ways than one. For one thing, it provides yet another reason to think that the whole “sanctity of life” idea is something of a charade. DeSanctis and Anderson describe children as mere “consequences,” as if their primary value is to serve as obstacles to sex. This also sheds light on why abortion opponents are increasingly opposed to birth control as well, something that makes no sense if their concern was merely the protection of fertilized eggs. Such prudery also shows that the anti-abortion crowd are puritanical zealots – the kind of people you hope you don’t get seated next to on a flight – and that they are eager to use a coercive government to enforce their values on everyone else.
That is why their actual beliefs should be made widely known - the ideas are not popular and never will be. Their cause can only persist so long as the rest of us allow their deceitful rhetoric to go unchallenged. It is imperative that we challenge it, since their crusade, clearly, shows no signs of slowing down.
According to Buddy Pilgrim, “an activist and businessman” focusing on eliminating access to abortion, “we cannot stand before a righteous and holy God and say, ‘I voted for a pro-abortion candidate because I liked their economic policies better.’”15[xvi]
Grandiose claims like this will be inherently convincing to people who are unclear about what the medical realities of the situation are. “But choice!” is an ineffective response to such statements. On the other hand, “you’re a medically illiterate, prudish, unwitting product of a racist campaign to subsidize segregationist schools,” is a devastating one. There is no reason to avoid responding like this. Now that the American Taliban are coming for IVF, contraceptives, and who knows what else, there is no excuse to play nice. Do not let them assume the moral high ground, because they have no claim to it. The appropriate response to their ideas is to give no quarter.
Stewart, The Power Worshippers, 56
Ibid, 66
Kirstin Kobez Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, 68
Stewart, The Power Worshippers, 62
Ibid, 61
Ibid, 61
Ibid, 63
Ibid, 67
Ibid, 69
Ibid, 65
Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation, 30-31
This is confirmed by the University of California San Francisco Center for Reproductive Help, which concurs that “In nature, 50% of all fertilized eggs are lost before a woman's missed menses.”
Harris, Letter, 38
Quoted in Nathan J. Robinson, “The Arguments Against Abortion Do Not Make Sense,” Current Affairs, 5 July 2022
Quoted in ibid, 74