Monthly Archives: July 2022

Pro-life conservative evangelicals erupted into unanimous jubilation at the news of the U.S. Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade. But while united in their celebration, they are divided in their vision for the future of the pro-life movement and unaware of its past.

Karen Swallow Priortweeted, Our work now is just starting: We must help and support moms, dads and babies. Love them all and in so doing making abortion unimaginable.

In an opinion piece for theNew York Times,she argued, We are our brothers and our sisters keepers, and it does take a village to become who we are. In that spirit of community, she recommended a number of whole-life approaches, includinga public policy agenda the Southern Baptist Convention recommended at its 2022 meetings that includes alleviating hunger and strengthening low-income families.

But a closer look at the SBCs public policy agenda shows it also highlights adoption, discrimination against LGBTQ people, and support for faith-based schools.

Many people balked at her statement, including Kristin Du Mez, whoasked Prior directly, If this support wasnt there to actually *prevent abortions* (small-scale pregnancy crisis centers and free diaper coupons if you attend Bible study not withstanding) why should we expect conservative Christians to step up now?

And given the anti-social-justice rhetoric coming out of men like John MacArthur and Voddie Baucham as well as evangelicalisms track record of dismissing social concerns as being woke, CRT, or big government, its understandable that many would be skeptical of Priors vision.

The Gospel Coalitionpublished one piecesaying that whole-life approaches are little more than a lazy slander of the pro-life cause, that they distort pro-life priorities, and are too exhausting even for Superman, among other things.

They publishedanother piececlaiming overturning Roe v. Wade is a story about God.Hehas heard our prayers and used our efforts, andhehas done a great work. Italicizing the words he in an article celebrating the taking away of womens rights seemed odd.

The pro-life conservative evangelical visions for moving forward after Roe v. Wade would seem to be to an attempt to convince evangelicals to embrace social action to a degree they never have before.

Then they publishedanother articlethat claimed: As the church applies a robust ethic of each persons dignity, it requires us to care for individuals holistically. The churchs involvement in adoption and foster care are good examples. Contrary to the criticism that Christians only care about the issue of life up until the moment of birth, a recent study concluded believers are nearly three times more likely to adopt than the general public.

So the pro-life conservative evangelical visions for moving forward after Roe v. Wade would seem to be to an attempt to convince evangelicals to embrace social action to a degree they never have before, to demonize supporting mothers and babies as lazy slander, to offer theological thoughts and praises about the topic, or to promote sexual discrimination, adoption and Christian education.

When we found out in January 2009 that we were having a miscarriage after a number of years of hoping for a baby, Ruth Ellen and I began to consider pursuing adoption more seriously. Like many young conservative evangelical married couples, we longed to be parents as a way to love the vulnerable. And adoption seemed to be a great way to fulfill our desire to be parents while reflecting our theology that God had adopted us.

Little did we know, however, that as good as our intentions may have been, we also were being influenced by an evangelical adoption industry that had been shaped for decades by theologies of patriarchy and white supremacy.

Although slavery and adoption may seem like totally different pictures of the gospel, both converged through patriarchy and white supremacy in the worlds of evangelical education and adoption.

Two of our favorite theologians at the time were John MacArthur and John Piper. While MacArthur believes slavery is the heart of the gospel, Piper believesadoption is the heart of the gospel. And although slavery and adoption may seem like totally different pictures of the gospel, both converged through patriarchy and white supremacy in the worlds of evangelical education and adoption.

But to understand how education and adoption may play a role in conservative evangelicalisms strategy for the future, we need to reflect on how they were formed in the past.

At the dawn of the 20th century, leaders in the United States noticed the falling birth rate of Western nations and began to discuss the problem of race suicide. President Roosevelt warned of this looming danger, writing in a letterto pastor Franklin C. Smith in 1911: To advocate artificially keeping families small, with its inevitable attendants of pre-natal infanticide, of abortion, with its pandering to self-indulgence, its shirking of duties, and its enervation of character, is quite as immoral as to advocate theft or prostitution, and is even more hurtful in its folly, from the standpoint of the ultimate welfare of the race and the nation. You say that your ministry lies among well-to-do people; that is, among people of means and upper-class workers. I assume that you regard these people as desirable elements in the state. Can you not see that if they have an insufficient quantity of children, then the increase must come from the less desirable classes?

Can you not see that if they have an insufficient quantity of children, then the increase must come from the less desirable classes?

Roosevelt also was concerned about how progressive religious journalism was covering his fear of fewer white children being born, complaining: To me the most horrifying part of this movement is to find nominally religious journals like theIndependentcontaining articles by women and clergymen, apologizing for and defending a theory of conduct which, if adopted, would mean the speedy collapse of this republic and of western civilization. The action of theIndependentin this matter was a scandalous offense against good morals and a cause of shame to men of real religious feeling.

The themes of patriarchy and white supremacy paired with the fear of feminism and non-white people were laying the groundwork for what would be considered the American biblical family.

In an article subtitledEugenic Mythologies and Internet Evangelism publishedinThe Journal of Legal Medicine, Paul A. Lombardo explains how eugenics began in 1873 as a way of saying that physical, mental and moral deficiencies were based in heredity and were passed down predictably within families from generation to generation.

Just asJohn MacArthur arguedthat the inhabitants of Africa were destined by God to be perpetually a servile people to European and Jewish families due to the curse of Canaan in Genesis 9, the promoters of eugenics argued that the intergenerational poverty of Black families was proof that Black families were under the curse of Exodus 20:5, where God promised to visit the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me. A fear spread of problem families, seemingly infected with bad heredity that explained their social failure over many generations that was evidenced in moral evil and social dependency and was used to promote eugenic political policies, Lombardo explained.

The famous evangelist Billy Sunday bought into eugenics, often preaching against one God-forsaken, vicious, corrupt man and woman to breed and propagate and damn the world by their offspring, and arguing that children have a right to be born cleanly into the world and not be damned into the world before birth by a predetermined heritage of blight.

Children have a right to be born cleanly into the world and not be damned into the world before birth by a predetermined heritage of blight.

In his article, Lombardo shows how supporters of eugenics believed a society of sound individuals would stabilize the state; a clean physical race could be the first step to reform.

In a piece titledThe Eugenics Roots of Evangelical Family Values, Audrey Clare Farley adjunct professor of U.S. history at Mount St. Marys University shows how evangelicals promoted positive eugenics after World War II in order to increase the breeding of the fit (able-bodied, middle-class whites), providing a far more respectable face for the movement.

One leader of the evangelical eugenics movement, ironically, was an atheist named Paul Popenoe, who founded the Los Angeles-basedAmerican Institute of Family Relationsin 1930 with the goal of strengthening families by removing what he thought to be obstacles to white reproduction, such as rape, masturbation, pornography, female frigidity, and feminist yearnings. Farley shows how Popenoe promoted complementarian gender distinctions and prohibited inter-racial marriage and homosexual relationships, while training pastors and psychologists to follow his patriarchal, white supremacist, homophobic vision.

One psychologist Popenoe influenced was James Dobson, who served as Popenoes assistant, a detail Farley notes was conveniently not mentioned in Dale Busss book, Family Man: The Biography of Dr. James Dobson.

Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, has been the single most influential figure in shaping the modern American evangelical view of biblical family values through a daily radio broadcast, books, films and online content.

In aLos Angeles Timesarticle titled Childs IQ Depends on Mother from 1968, Mary Barber identified Dobson as the assistant director of PopenoesAmerican Institute of Family Relations. In the article, Barber says Dobson pointed out that everyone is a victim of some degree of impoverishment but the barren surroundings of a ghetto probably is the worst for providing intellectual growth for children.

In another 1976 Los Angeles Times article titled Husbands Advised to Change Priorities, Dobson told wives not to cage their husbands, to be quiet and not run him down, while admitting his views of gender distinctions may sound chauvinistic.

Dobson also applied what he learned at Popenoes AIFR in a 1972 article titled A Successfully Defiant Child Lacks Respect. In theDaily News-Postcolumn on parenting, he said theres no substitute for spanking and that if a little child doesnt obey immediately, then mother tweaks the little muscle between his neck and shoulder.

Dobson still was touting Popenoes teachings as late as 1994 in an article titled Men, Women Differ in Every Cell of Their Bodies, where Dobson named Popenoe and then went on to parrot Popenoes views of gender and sexuality.

Popenoes influence not only included Dobson and the millions of evangelicals Dobson shaped.

Popenoes influence not only included Dobson and the millions of evangelicals Dobson shaped. He also wrote for Ladies Home Journal, was a guest on conservative evangelical shows, and was cited in Herbert MilesSexual Happiness in Marriage, J. Allan PetersonsThe Marriage Affair, and in Tim and Beverly LaHaysThe Act of Marriage.

Given his fathers atheism, Popenoes son David told the Institute of American Values, My father was no more religious than ever, but (evangelicals) were his new professional and ideological allies and protges.

To that Audrey Clare Farley added, Such history reveals how fears of racial decay have shaped the conservative imagination of morality.

As patriarchal, complementarian, homophobic, narratives of eugenics shaped conservative evangelicalism over the decades, their demand for more children grew.

One such movement was the Quiverfull movement. As Kristin Du Mez details inJesus and John Wayne: Quiverfull women had a critical role to play in birthing an army of God; the culture wars needed as many soldiers as possible. Outbreeding opponents was the first step to outvoting them, and in their reproductive capacities, women served as domestic warriors.

Du Mez pointed out that the Quiverfull movement began gaining national traction in the homeschool movement as the Duggar family grew in popularity due to their TLC show19 Kids and Counting. Combining the reproductive capacities of women with educating children, the Quiverfull movement would provide combatants in the war against Islam.

In an interview withBaptist News Global, Audrey Clare Farley explained how conservatives have tapped into the fear of race suicide and turned to eugenics through education.

It is important to understand that character education has historically been tied to eugenics.

It is important to understand that character education has historically been tied to eugenics. In the early 20th century, the high-water mark of the eugenics era, some racial purists asked if it was possible to form respectable (read: white) citizens by molding their character. Most believed it was impossible. Those with bad genes that is, the poor, disabled, immigrants and people of color could not be made into noble citizens. Character education was really for those who were well-bred. It would help to make the naturally fit even stronger.

Scholars have placed Bill Gothard and Dr. James Dobson within this tradition. Both men targeted conservative white Christians with their ideas about discipline and biblical family values, which were meant to form citizens who could fight evil, secular culture. But, of course, neither Gothard nor Dobson explicitly rejected people of color, and so those BIPOC children who were subjected to their programs were essentially urged to adopt worldviews with roots in segregation and eugenics.

One of the most popular strategies conservatives are using today, and one that was highlighted in the SBCs 2022 public policy agenda, is the issue of school vouchers.

Farley explains: The rise of school vouchers is part of this project. Conservatives proclaim that vouchers enable disadvantaged students and those of color to access a better education. But the rights goal is to bankrupt public schools and divert tax dollars toward academies that indoctrinate youth with rightwing politics the very politics that have stalled racial progress in education and beyond.

And as child liberationist theologianR.L. Stollar points out, for many evangelicals, homeschooling is the perfect option for training these culture warriors because 48 states have no protections for at-risk homeschooled children. These states have fallen into line with total parental sovereignty, giving parents absolute power that has resulted in child abuse and trafficking.

Eugenics received another boost in 1987 through Ben Wattenbergs bookThe Birth Dearth.Ellen Goodman wrotein theWashington Postat the time: Wattenberg is a demographer for the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute and no slouch in the pop sociology division. He builds his thesis on one indisputable fact: Today, with little warning, the total fertility rate of American women has dropped to 1.8, slightly below the replacement level.

The major problem confronting the United States today is there arent enough white babies being born. If we dont do something about this and do it now, white people will be in the numerical minority and we will no longer be a white mans land.

Wattenberg argued that The Birth Dearth is due to low fertility among the middle and upper middle class.He said, The major problem confronting the United States today is there arent enough white babies being born. If we dont do something about this and do it now, white people will be in the numerical minority and we will no longer be a white mans land.

He was especially concerned that a decreasing white population would lead to no longer being able to support the defense systems which are the basis of national power and security.

Goodman interpreted, He outright says that its women who hold the fate of the Western world in their hands. Or, more precisely, in their wombs.

Wattenberg offered three potential solutions. He said we could pay women to have babies, but that unfortunately we would have to pay women of all colors to have babies. He said we could increase immigration, but that unfortunately most of the immigrants would be non-white people. So he argued that the third and best option was to stop abortion. Rememberthat 60% of the fetuses that are aborted every year are white, he said. If we could keep that 60% of life alive, that would solve our birth dearth.

In June 2020, Kevin DeYoung entered the fray. He wrote an article called Its Time for a New Culture War Strategy seemingly ignorant of the entire culture war strategy his movement had been using for the previous century. He was very upset that the Supreme Court defined sex to include sexual orientation and gender identity. And just like the homophobia that had permeated the eugenics movement, DeYoung had enough.

DeYoung has been one of the most vocal leadersagainst social justice, joining the likes of Owen Strachan, John MacArthur and Voddie Baucham.

He said: Heres a culture war strategy conservative Christians should get behind: Have more children and disciple them like crazy. Strongly consider having more children than you think you can handle. You dont have to be a fertility maximalist to recognize that children are always lauded as a blessing in the Bible.

After arguing against birth control, DeYoung said: Do you want to rebel against the status quo? Do you want people to ask you for a reason for the hope that is in you? Tote your brood of children through Target. There is almost nothing more counter-cultural than having more children.

There is almost nothing more counter-cultural than having more children.

Then with the stroke of prophetic vision, he concluded, The future belongs to the fecund.

To be fair, he did briefly mention loving God, people and the truth. But the thrust of his article was not about love, but about getting your wife constantly pregnant with a ton of babies.

Just as eugenics attempted to shift toward a positive message after World War II, the evangelical adoption movement attempted to shift toward a more positive branding in 2007, led by the likes of Rick Warren. As Kathryn Joyce notes, Promoting adoption would help rebrand U.S. evangelicals from moral scolds to childrens champions.

In the spirit of DeYoung, one evangelical leader said evangelicals should get as many people in the church to adopt and adopt as many kids as you can.

The way these adoption agenciesspoke negativelyof the birth mothers and families mirrored the way the promoters of eugenics spoke negatively of minority mothers and families through the 20th century. And as Chrissy Stroopdetailed, the result of this missionary project was corner-cutting and human-rights abuses that would lead to severe trauma that can never be erased.

Farely told BNG There is absolutely a connection between the ideas of Popenoe, Wattenberg, DeYoung, and some proponents of evangelical adoption: All view the family as a means to promote whiteness. For Popenoe and Wattenberg, the goal was very explicitly to outbreed people of color. For DeYoung and many adoption proponents, an acceptable outcome is rearing children who carry water for whiteness as culture warriors. In the latter scenario, a Black or brown child can be made to support the racist politics and theology of white evangelicalism, which have so devastated communities of color around the globe that families within those communities are forced to give up their infants to more advantaged and in many minds, deserving families.

There is absolutely a connection between the ideas of Popenoe, Wattenberg, DeYoung, and some proponents of evangelical adoption: All view the family as a means to promote whiteness.

To be fair to evangelicalism, the problems here are much bigger than evangelicalism. Unfortunately, the leaders of conservative evangelicalism like to present themselves as preaching the objective universal truth outside of culture revealed by God in the Bible. But they are seemingly unaware how their supposedly objective truth is culturally situated in a broader culture of white supremacy.

Farely pointed to other Christian groups as well: In the last few decades and especially the last few years, white Catholics have also taken pains to induct children of color into the logic of white supremacy. Beyond crusading against BLM and CRT, many bishops, priests, school leaders and parents have pushed the narrative that racism is a spiritual problem, rather than a social one. As religion scholar Matthew J. Cressler hasdemonstrated, this narrative can be traced to Catholic segregationists. When throwing bricks at civil rights activists failed to stop desegregation, white Catholics appealed to a supposedly God-ordained division between the spiritual and political realms. As in Protestant circles, then, the rhetoric of colorblindness only emerged as a means to obstruct Black advancement. Yet Catholic children today are taught this way of thinking flows from the gospel.

With the overturning of Roe v. Wade, evangelicals are focusing on assimilation by adopting babies and educating them into their vision for the world. They believe this strategy is going to save the eternal souls of babies and win a culture war they are waging.

But while young couples should be encouraged and equipped to care for the vulnerable, they need to realize that doing so within the adoption and education industries of evangelicalism is promoting a patriarchal, complementarian, homophobic, physically and spiritually abusive narrative of white supremacy that has been forged by presidents and pastors alike for more than a century.

Rick Pidcockis a 2004 graduate of Bob Jones University, with a bachelor of arts degree in Bible. Hes a freelance writer based in South Carolina and a former Clemons Fellow with BNG. He recently completed a master of arts degree in worship from Northern Seminary. He is a stay-at-home father of five children and produces music under the artist name Provoke Wonder. Follow his blog atwww.rickpidcock.com.

Related articles:

What has John MacArthur actually said about race, slavery and the Curse of Ham? | Analysis by Rick Pidcock

Kristin Du Mez explains white evangelicals and abortion on NPR show; Ed Young preaches Mothers Day sermon on abortion

Our Father: A quiverfull of racism and anti-reproductive rights | Opinion by Erica Whitaker

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There's a straight line from eugenics to 'biblical family values' to white supremacy and the anti-abortion movement - Baptist News Global

Its no wonder many people are wary of behavioral genetics. The field, which examines how the DNA were born with affects our behaviors, has been hijacked by eugenicists, white supremacists, and run-of-the-mill bigots as a way to justify inequality for minorities, women, poor people, and other disadvantaged groups for over a century.

But anyone interested in egalitarian goals should not shy away from the field, argues psychologist Dr. Kathryn Paige Harden. Instead, they should embrace it as a tool to inform policies that promote equality.

Follow the latest news and policy debates on agricultural biotech and biomedicine? Subscribe to our newsletter.

Genetic research has even been used to justify eugenics: the belief that genetics indicate a natural human hierarchy that determines ones social value and standing. Eugenicists have advocated for sterilizing or otherwise attempting to eradicate individuals or entire cultural groups deemed genetically inferior or unfit due to their genes.

In response to this historic misuse, many people and organizations with egalitarian values have chosen to ignore, degrade, or ban funding for research on genetic and biological differences.

Dr. Harden takes the opposite stance. Despite or perhaps because of this historic misuse, she argues that people interested in equality cannot ignore genetic differences. To do so would allow the misinterpretation and abuse of genetic research to go unchallenged.

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Continued here:

Viewpoint: In response to historical misuse of genetics to defend eugenics, some egalitarians call for defunding. Here's why that's not the solution -...

On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court, dominated now by a bloc of six arch-conservatives, overruled Roe v. Wade. Under the ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization, the states are now free to make abortion illegal, and to shut down whatever abortion clinics still remain in conservative states. The decision was and will remain controversial.

The abortion issue has been much disputed from the moment Roe v. Wade was decided, although a significant majority of Americans support legal access to abortion, at least in the first trimester. Public opinion, in fact, has never run as strongly in favor of abortion as it does right now. Yet, in many states, abortion was severely restricted, even before this latest decision. A pregnant woman in these statesand soon in perhaps as many as half of the statesis (in effect) forbidden to terminate a pregnancy. By government fiat, that individual is ordered to carry her baby to term. Legal abortion will no longer be possible, except in cases where the pregnancy is life-threatening to the mother. Illegal abortion will become more common, as will interstate travel to seek abortion services in a friendlier state. But for some people, a states ban on abortion will result in a forced pregnancy and, if she and the fetus survive to term, a forced birth.

Many of those women, in states without legal abortion, will be poor; many will be Black or Brown; many will be minors. Women with money, time, and freedom of movement can, at least for now, escape to another state to exercise what used to be a constitutional right. People from Texas can go to New Mexico. Women in Indiana can cross the border into Illinois. Many will do this, though some states have indicated they intend to pass laws trying to prevent this type of travel. But many who would have sought an abortion in their home states simply will not be able to travel to find care. The legislatures of right-to-life states are willing, even eager, to force pregnant women, whatever their age, class, or race, to go through pregnancy and give birth. Only days after the Dobbs decision was issued, media reported a story of a 10-year-old pregnant rape victim who was denied an abortion in her home state of Ohio under the states draconian new law that had just taken effect. Some of the state laws go to great lengths to ban all abortions; they have no exceptions for pregnancies caused by incest or rape; and certainly not for hardship, poverty, or the fact that the fetus is suffering from severe or even lethal defects that might lead to stillbirth or death shortly after birth.

Eugenic Ideas and American Law

Abortion law has a fairly long history. The opinions in Dobbs go into this history, in enormous detail. Lawyers and historians have documented the many errors the majority makes in its cherry-picked and sometimes erroneous recounting of history. But even if the facts they rely on were accurate, there is a way in which the majority simply fails to get the story right. Arguably, the intellectual and political background of abortion law is almost the exact opposite of what drives the antiabortion movement today. Criminal abortion bans in the United States date to the late nineteenth century in many states. Prior to that time, abortion was hardly regulated at all. But the movement to impose criminal bans had a social connection to the eugenics movement. The point of the movement was to prevent the wrong people from giving birthpeople who were considered criminal, or degenerate, or feeble-minded. It was not to force them to carry a baby to term; but not to carry it in the first place.

At the time, the eugenics movement was flourishing. It had many backers in high places; and it was considered, by many scholars, to be supported by the lights of modern science. The basic idea was simple: research showed (it was thought) that crime, perversion, feeble-mindedness (a term commonly used in laws at the time), and general rottenness, were genetic traits; they ran in families; they were handed down from generation to generation. As we elaborated in more detail in a prior column, there was an entire field of science devoted to proving that these various traits were hereditary. Although many are familiar with the horrific eugenic practices in Nazi Germany, those ideas originated in the United States. Degenerates multiplied like rabbits, or so the eugenicists argued. Unless something was done, the country might be swamped with them. Society needed reproduction to be centered among the respectable; among good people, educated people, people healthy in body and mind. The eugenics program thus had two prongs: to encourage the right people to have babies (positive eugenics); and to prevent the wrong people from having children at all (negative eugenics).

One way to shut off the supply of bad babies at the source was to sterilize their potential parentsthose likely to produce bad seed. Indiana passed the first sterilization law in 1907. It applied to residents in state institutions. If a committee of experts felt it was advisable, confirmed criminals, idiots, rapists and imbeciles, could be sterilized. Californias sterilization law was enacted in 1909. California was one of the most enthusiastic states in this dubious business. Thousands of young Californians, in state hospitals, were sterilized before 1940. Sterilization laws were controversial; but they were mostly upheld by the courts. The Supreme Court weighed in in 1927, in the notorious case of Buck v. Bell. Carrie Buck, who was white (and poor), was said to be the daughter of a feeble-minded woman, to be feeble-minded herself, and the mother of a feeble-minded child. The Court, in a short and snappy opinion, gave its approval to Virginias sterilization law. As Oliver Wendell Holmes put it, three generations of imbeciles are enough. Sadly, the burden of these laws fell mostly on poor women and women of color, who were sterilized on the basis of the flimsiest evidence, or no evidence at all. Carrie Buck, in fact, was a woman of normal intelligence; and so was her daughter.

In addition to the involuntary sterilizations that were authorized by law, many women were sterilized against their will and sometimes even without their knowledge by doctors who simply implemented their own social beliefs with a scalpel. The Mississippi appendectomy is a term used to describe the practice common at some teaching hospitals in the South of giving poor, black women hysterectomies without informed consent.

In addition, state legislatures took steps to tighten their marriage laws. Some states eliminated so-called common-law marriage. These were informal marriagesno witness needed; no marriage licensethat were perfectly legal in many states. The problem was that the state had very little control over these marriages. The newer marriage laws now piled on formalities, including blood tests, and the marriage codes made people ineligible to marry if they had certain traits or diseases believed (often incorrectly) to be heritable. The general point was to prevent unfit people from marrying (and presumably having children). In Washington State, for example, under a law passed in 1909, no common drunkard, habitual criminal, epilectic, and no imbecile or person who was feeble-minded; or who had a venereal disease, was entitled to get married.

This was the negative prong of eugenics. And while it certainly made life difficult for many individuals, it did not have much overall effect on the birth rate. The positive prong of the eugenic program was more difficult to implement than the negative prong. You could hardly insist (say) that graduates of elite colleges had a positive duty to get married and produce as many babies as possible. That was clearly not feasible. But one small step was possible: a crack-down on abortion. Indeed, laws against abortion became more restrictive in the late nineteenth century. There were many reasons for this development, but eugenic ideas were at least partly responsible. There were prominent abortionists who catered to upper-class women. The most notorious, perhaps, was the woman who called herself Madame Restell, in New York City, who lived in a mansion and charged high prices to her wealthy clients. Madame Restell and other abortionists were accused of a kind of crime against traditional Americawhite Protestant America. The lower classes, it was felt, were producing baby after baby; middle-class women on the other hand were killing or preventing babies from being born. This was one of the cardinal sins of abortion; it was weakening the stock of good, solid American babies.

The modern abortion controversy could hardly be more different. Eugenics no longer has any scientific credibility. Sterilization laws have been repealed or struck down. The class and race issue in the abortion controversy has been, in a sense, turned upside down. The abortionist is no longer someone like Madame Restell, catering to upper-class women who refused their duty of becoming a mother. Todays abortionist is a medical doctor, working for Planned Parenthood, or in another clinic, and using a procedure or a medication that is both safe and effective. The burden of abolition has fallen, and will fall, not on rich women, but on poor women and minority women, particularly as the cost and distance necessary to travel for care will both skyrocket. And those same groups will be the ones with more forced birthsadded on top of the disproportionately high rates of maternal mortality and morbidity they already suffer due to inequity in our healthcare system. And the core of the movement to abolish abortion is a moral and ideological cluster of ideas, which are in essence, deeply religious, and which are spearheaded by those religions that are traditional and dominated by men. Indeed, male domination, and resistance to the womens movement, is at least implicit in some aspects of the anti-abortion movement.

No Justices of the Supreme Court say, or are willing to say, that they are opposed to abortion because, according to the dictates of their faith, abortion is murder. What they can and do say instead is that Roe v. Wade was incorrectly decided (the Courts abortion jurisprudence is explored in more detail here). Abortion, according to the majority opinion, has no basis in constitutional law. That body of law provides no support for a constitutional right to obtain an abortion. Moreoverand this is crucial for the majoritya right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nations history and tradition. This may be true; but is obviously irrelevant. Are equal rights for women deeply rooted in American history and tradition? Not at all. Nor is racial equality deeply rooted in history and tradition. Modern civil rights law is precisely a rejection of the main line of American history. If the only rights the Court is willing to recognize are those that are deeply rooted in history and tradition, not much would be left of modern free speech jurisprudence, or due process of law.

Supreme Court decisions on matters of constitutional law almost always dip into the jungle of legal history. Conservative justices insist that constitutional decisions must be historically grounded, that is, based on the text of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Fourteenth Amendment, or whatever clause is at issue. But rummaging around in the past is rarely enlightening. The legal history of abortion, as we indicated, provides very little guidance for today, because the context in the past was so different from the context of our times. Indeed, history points if anything in the opposite direction from Dobbs. No court today, including the Supreme Court, would accept a statute that allowed people to be sterilized against their will without, at the very least, an exacting process to determine the need for it. Yet in 1927, in Buck v. Bell, the Court accepted an approach to involuntary sterilization that showed total disregard for the individuals bodily autonomy and right to reproduce. Overruling Roe v. Wade is, in a way, resurrecting the mindset of Buck v. Bell. It allows the state to control womens bodies in an analogous way: by forcing women to carry unborn children to term against their will. If we accept the idea that Buck v. Bell is no longer good law, then it is hard to accept the idea that a state should be able to make a womans choice to terminate her pregnancy a crimecertainly not at the point when the preborn child is a small clump of cells.

Justice Alito, after claiming that abortion is not deeply rooted in our history and tradition, goes on to say that, on the contrary, an unbroken tradition of prohibiting abortion on pain of criminal punishment was the norm up to the time of Roe v. Wade. The tradition was hardly unbrokenbefore the enactment of the criminal abortion bans, abortion was either unregulated or banned only well into the second trimester. But what is more significant is that the tradition rested on legal and social bases which were, as we tried to argue, substantially different from the legal and social concerns of today.

The plain fact of the matter is that Dobbs is a political decision; it is a decision that pleases the religious right; and which pleases one political party much more than the other. (It terrifies many others.) To be honest, most key decisions of the Supreme Court are political decisions. They come out of political contexts, and they have political and social consequences. Justices are nominated and confirmed in our times because the President who nominates them expects them to make the kind of decisions the President wants. Historical evidence does not provide solutions to hotly contested issues, especially when it is constructed by those with an agenda and without the training to decipher historical evidence. The majority in Dobbs called Roe v. Wade egregiously wrong from the start. It is entirely possible that some future Court will pin that label on Dobbs.

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To Be or Not to Be a Mother: A Timeless Question with New Urgency - Justia Verdict