Pro-life

At the conservative Christian schools I attended from kindergarten through the end of undergrad, I became familiar with two types of believers: the knuckle-draggers and the nuance-mongers. The knuckle-draggers didn’t swear or drink. They watched dumb faith-based movies like God’s Not Dead. Secular music was suspect. Any engagement with the products of mainstream culture was accompanied by a humorless and formulaic discussion of how said opus fit into a “Christian worldview.” And when election time rolled around, they didn’t have to think twice. Only one issue mattered. Democrats wanted to kill babies, so voting anything other than a straight GOP ticket was out of the question.

Justice Samuel Alito’s leaked majority opinion in this Supreme Court term’s marquee abortion case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, ought to be applauded by pro-lifers. In many ways, the opinion represents an epochal triumph for the conservative legal movement that I, despite being a clear part of, have often been quick to criticize. If Alito’s five-justice coalition holds — and it remains an “if” until the moment the opinion is formally released — then the decades-long architects of the movement will deserve credit for finally fulfilling one of the movement’s raison d'êtres, the overturning of the odious Roe v. Wade decision.

From the UK Spectator this week comes a pair of essays by Douglas Murray and Melanie McDonagh praising the American abortion debate. That debate can be difficult to admire when you're standing at the bottom of a culture war looking up. But as both Murray and McDonagh note, at least here in the States it's expected that we'll disagree about abortion, whereas throughout much of Europe it's regarded as a settled matter. Why is abortion in America still such a live issue? One reason, I think, is that in most other first-world countries it's been the subject of democratic deliberation, with people finding middle ground through their legislatures or referenda.

Not too long ago, pro-choice activists wished for abortion to be “safe, legal, and rare.” Their argument was that no one was really pro-abortion but that the procedure was a morally complicated but regrettable necessity. In fact, they would have been insulted by the label “pro-abortion." The reaction to the leak of a Supreme Court opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade shows those days are long past. Take, for example, a tweet from a rabbi scolding those who claim that “nobody is PRO-abortion!” Comparing abortion to an appendectomy, she answers her imagined interlocutor: “Both are life saving medical procedures Why wouldn’t I be ‘pro’ a life-saving medical procedure?

“Everybody want to know what I would do if I didn’t win,” said Kanye West, the only 2020 presidential candidate to truly grapple with the horrors of abortion, as he accepted his award for Best Rap Album at the Grammys in 2005. He paused. The room was silent. Then Ye dropped the bomb: “I guess we’ll never know.” The crowd erupted in applause. That’s the energy I felt Monday night at the Supreme Court as the world learned a majority of justices was prepared to strike down Roe v. Wade. You’ll find no nuance here. The pro-choicers lost, and I’m going to inject 500ccs of their tears straight into my veins. Cope and seethe. At around 9:30 on Monday, I was already in my pajamas, settling in for a quiet night with my wife. Then she showed me her phone.

A strange abortion story is unfolding in the nation’s capital. In March, several outlets began reporting that DC police had found “five fetuses” in the home of “anti-abortion activist” Lauren Handy, who is a member of the “Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising group.” The PAAU is not exactly what one thinks of when it comes to pro-life activism. According to its website, the organization is “committed to radical inclusivity while magnifying secular, feminist, liberal, and LGBTQIA+ identifying pro-life voices, especially those belonging to people of color.” Amazingly, it also claims to have collected 115 fetuses from a Washington, DC clinic's medical waste. It has to be one of the more bizarre news stories of 2022.

In the months before and after the 2020 presidential election, I was ready to take the blackpill. I had become convinced that our culture was on an irreversible decline into ever greater depths of progressive depravity and that reactionary politics would only make things worse. Trump had poured fuel on the fires he was supposed to be extinguishing. Every institution that had been neutral in 2016 was overtly woke by 2020. Even as he was emboldening the left, Trump was also corrupting the right. People I love were becoming crude, cruel, and cultish. The Christian right had utterly beclowned itself at the Jericho March.

If you read one book this fall, make it The Handmaid’s Tale TV show. And then don’t read another book, ever again, if you want to remain au courant on Twitter. Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel, and the more recent Hulu series, which depict a futuristic America called Gilead where women are treated as breeding chattel, have become a political obsession. They're used as a kind of shorthand by the trendy left for the medieval theocracy my fellow pro-lifers and I are supposedly hammering together in our spare time. This totalitarian state is evidently being built over the scaffolding of the lawless Randian anarcho-syndicate we were accused of building just a few years ago. But then those kindly old ladies praying rosaries outside abortion clinics are nothing if not adaptive.

The battle to overturn Roe v. Wade is nearly over. The battle to end abortion is about to begin. When the Supreme Court declined to block a Texas law banning abortion after six weeks, the pro-life movement won its first significant victory in decades. Next year, SCOTUS will rule on a Mississippi law that directly challenges Roe v. Wade. If Roe survives, the fight to overturn it is over, at least for our lifetimes. Abortion as a constitutional right will become truly settled law. If Roe falls, or is narrowed, the fight will turn to the states. Either way, the war is about to enter a new phase, and to that end pro-lifers should keep three things in mind. 1.

A striking curiosity of American life is that the names of legal cases can insinuate themselves into everyday dialogue. None more so, of course, than Roe v Wade, the 1973 decision where a majority-liberal Supreme Court extracted from the Constitution’s protection of life, liberty and property a constitutional right to abortion: absolute in the first trimester, qualified in the second, and, in rare cases, even in the third. In a 1992 fine-tuning exercise, the rule was re-written as a right to abortion unless and until the foetus was viable at about 24 weeks. But the principle remains. Southern and rural states always saw Roe v Wade as a liberal aberration. Three years ago, Mississippi, where public opinion remains obstinately pro-life, threw down the gauntlet.