Reproductive Politics

If you missed it, I recommend you read Sarah Terzo's  cri de coeur  about the frustration she faces as someone who is a pro-life atheist. Her experiences confirm that the American pro-life movement is overwhelmingly Christian in orientation. While many non-Christians, atheists, or agnostics likely self-identify as pro-life, my impression is that the activists largely approach reproductive politics as an outgrowth of their Christian faith and theology. Ms. Terzo publishes an absorbing blog, ClinicQuotes , that focuses on the stories and statements of people who have changed from being pro-choice to pro-life. As far as I can tell, her body of work and her methods of activism betray nothing that would make her undesirable as a pro-life ally. Recently Ms. Terzo contacted several 'crisis pregnancy centers' to ask if they would let an atheist volunteer at their center, and they were pretty clear in rejecting her offer of help. I get the impression that she was doing this to...

In the wake of Ariel Castro being sentenced to prison for the next millennium (literally), James D. Conley (an American Roman Catholic bishop)  wrote a column of the "what does this represent about the culture" variety in First Things.  Conley's thesis: Pornographic addiction is powerful, destructive, and all too typical. Ariel Castro’s addiction is no excuse for his actions, but it points to a deep and sobering reality: Free, anonymous, and ubiquitous access to pornography is quietly transforming American men and American culture. Are Ariel Castro's crimes the direct or indirect result of contemporary American porn culture? Readers posting in the First Things  "comments" section raised a lot of thoughtful and pertinent objections to Conley's analysis. I summarize here and add my own thoughts: Are incidents of sexual assault in fact on the rise, and, if so, in a way that correlates with a rise on the use of pornography? Is it possible that incid...

Salon reporter and analyst Katie McDonough wrote a short and interesting article listing what she labeled the top five  "extreme lawmakers behind some of the most draconian reproductive rights restrictions grabbing headlines in recent months." In 2013, all the glory goes to legislators in states that have been in the vanguard of piecemeal assaults on abortion rights: Texas, Arkansas, North Dakota, Alabama, and Arizona. If one is pro-life, the article naturally has little appeal or value. If one is pro-choice and/or an interested observer of the culture wars, then the article has a "can you believe these crazies?" kind of appeal. I am not taking the article too seriously-- it is what it is. Still, Ms. McDonough raises an interesting question. Are what we consider "extremists" in the United States all that extreme? More to the point, how does one define extremeness, and on what scale? One could measure the extremeness of legislators in two ways: ...

Chen Guangcheng is the Chinese lawyer and human rights activist who famously managed to escape house arrest and the country of China to land in New York City and a fellowship at New York University to study law. The fact that he is blind (and quite telegenic in his dark sunglasses) made his escape even more remarkable and compelling. The American dream honeymoon is over. He is leaving New York University after a year and he is looking for a new position, and there are conflicting stories as to what happened. What is more clear is that Mr. Chen is struggling to adjust to the polarized atmosphere of American politics and how that polarization is represented by, and intensified by, divisions over reproductive politics. Mr. Chen's story involves reproductive politics because of his activism against forced abortion and government abuses associated with China's one-child policy. Pro-life activists strongly oppose China's one-child policy in itself. They also are outraged by ...

There are many wings of the pro-life movement, each with its own set of tactics regarding the best way to fight abortion in America. (The various wings or 'streams' of the contemporary pro-life movement are described in Ziad Munson's excellent book, The Making of Pro-Life Activists . ) One wing focuses on conducting activities around existing abortion clinics, to persuade pregnant women to not go through with intended abortions, and to change the hearts and minds of clinic workers. The best current example of the clinic-based pro-life movement is 40 Days for Life, whose signature event is to hold annual, coordinated 40-day prayer vigils outside of abortion clinics across the country.  When not holding their vigils, they organize supporters to have a regular presence around clinics, where they pray and attempt to engage clinic patients and employees. The kind of activities conducted by 40 Days for Life are a much gentler version of the confrontational tactics used by Op...

I'm glad to be back from my long winter break. I hope you have enjoyed the holiday season and are ready to start discussing reproductive politics again. I don't know if you came across this article in The New York Times   on pregnancy centers (sometimes called "crisis pregnancy centers" or CPCs). It does a nice (and fairly sympathetic) job of describing the work of CPCs, which exist primarily to dissuade women from having abortions. CPCs are run by pro-life activists. They advertise in billboards, in phone books, and on the Internet in a way that tries to reach women before they would contact or go to an abortion clinic (or an organization that offers abortion as one option or service of many, like Planned Parenthood). Just as an experiment, imagine you are a pregnant women thinking about having an abortion or considering other options (like adoption) and looking for information. Do a pretend search on the Internet. There is a very good chance that among the many...

Another example of how abortion affects every aspect of American politics: A United Nations treaty to ban discrimination against people with disabilities [the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, or CRPD] went down to defeat in the Senate on Tuesday in a 61-38 vote.    The treaty backed by President Obama and former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kansas) fell 5 votes short of the two-thirds needed for confirmation as dozens of Senate Republicans objected that it would create new abortion rights and impede the ability of people to home-school disabled children. (Source: The Hill ) Note that 61-38 means 61 Senators voted for  confirmation of the CRPD. (Treaties, by constitutional requirement, must be passed by a two-thirds vote in the Senate.) The treaty was signed by President George W. Bush, and President Barack Obama, and has been signed by more than 150 countries and ratified by more than 120. Seven Republican Senators, including John McCain,...

In Nevada, a county judge was fighting with the parents of a mentally-impaired adult woman over whether she should abort her pregnancy. I wrote an earlier post summarizing the case and the issues involved.  The Associated Press now reports :      A Washoe County district judge has decided against forcing a mentally impaired Nevada woman to have an abortion after all the parties involved reached a tentative agreement to help her through her high-risk pregnancy.        The 32-year-old woman's legal guardian told KRNV-TV on Wednesday that Judge Egan Walker had agreed that the woman wants to carry the pregnancy to term and that the evidence doesn't show it's medically necessary to abort the baby.        After taking the abortion option off the table, Walker said he plans to hold additional medical evidentiary hearings in the weeks ahead to determine the safest way to proceed. It is hard to know what motiva...

After reading American pro-life books, articles, blogs, and news sites for a while, one starts to notice recurring narratives: assertions, stories, themes, and ideas that are worked into whatever is being discussed. Taken as a whole, these narratives draw a picture of the world view of pro-life activist. I started working on a list, and I thought I'd share it with you. Items are in no particular order. Take a look and let me know what you think.  Pro-life narratives: Abortion causes breast cancer. This is an example of how abortion does not empower women, but harms them.  Many women who have had an abortion deeply regret it. Women are fooled into thinking that an abortion is what 'they' want, when in fact they will come to realize that they have been exploited.  There has been an increase in the abortion rate since, say, the 1950s, and that is due to the 'sexual revolution,' including the invention of birth control pills and the promotion of a culture ...

I would say the answer is "no." Most of the people I know who are interested in politics are still digesting and analyzing the 2012 election cycle, which, to many people's surprise (and, for some, despair), went Democratic/liberal on several fronts: President, Senate, state races, state initiatives on same-sex marriage and marijuana, and taxation in California. All of the Republican candidates who made controversial statements about abortion (Akin, Mourdock, Walsh, and Koster) lost their races. And so on. Especially in the amplification chamber of the contemporary 24/7 media, it is normal to over-read election results. In this case, while I do think the election is a wake-up call to the Republican party-- or should be a wake-up call-- there is nothing that occurred in this election cycle that cannot be fixed-- fixed, that is, if the Republican party and conservatives don't under -read the election results. Looking at reproductive politics specifically, people w...

The pro-life movement may have lost the most recent battle-- the reelection of President Barack Obama-- but they are winning the war of hearts and minds. So says Michael J. New, professor of political science, frequent contributor to conservative publications, and data-driven critic of studies that support pro-choice policy positions: I want to encourage you not to despair. We continue to make good progress. In fact, I would argue that our biggest successes during the past twenty years have neither been political nor legislative. Our biggest success story is that we have succeeded in changing the hearts and minds of millions of Americans. What is his evidence? First, he notes that the number of abortions performed annually (NB: the ones of which we are aware) have declined "from 1.6 million in 1990 to 1.2 million in 2008." This could be for any number of reasons, but Professor New attributes it "partly to the state level pro-life laws we have passed." Profes...

Mark Movesian, on a blog at First Things , examined the Fox News exit polls from the 2012 election, and found that voters who self-identified as Catholic voted for President Obama 50-48%. Mr. Movesian notes the seeming oddity of this, given that the Catholic hierarchy has done its very best to make life issues, especially the health care contraceptive mandate, the primary determinant of a Catholic person's vote. What explains the exit polls? Here are some possibilities. Movesian suggests that the exit polls do not necessarily mean that Catholic voters, by a narrow majority, reject the Church view of the contraceptive mandate and other reproductive issues. Instead, like other voters, they may have looked at the whole package offered by President Obama and the whole package offered by Mitt Romney and gone for Obama despite whatever reservations they have about life issues. Another explanation is that Catholic voters, while uncomfortable in general with abortion and contempo...

A sad and complicated legal case is brewing in Nevada. Elaine Bauer is a mentally-disabled woman in her early 30s who has the mental capacity of a six-year old, epilepsy, and additional health problems. She lives in a group home in Reno. She is thirteen weeks pregnant. The circumstances under which Ms. Bauer became pregnant are unclear. Apparently, Ms. Bauer "has a history of wandering away [from the group home] and having sex. . . . In the past, the woman had been given a birth control injection, but its side effects presented her with health complications, so it was discontinued" ( Reuters ). Articles published in LifeSiteNews (links below) go into more detail about Ms. Bauer's daily life and offer a slightly different take: For whatever reason, they report, she was allowed to leave her group home, and when she did, she would go to a local casino and a truck stop. Assuming this to be accurate, I cannot for the life of me understand why someone with the mental cap...

National Public Radio produced an insightful analysis of why reproductive issues are so prominent in this presidential campaign and why Mitt Romney's views are being variously pitched-- by his own supporters-- as very pro-life on the one hand and moderate on the other. The very-pro-life vs. moderate oscillation is pretty easy to understand: Romney's overriding goal is to be elected, and so he is pitching different messages to different audiences. This is a specific example of a classic campaign phenomenon: the tension between saying things that fire up one's base (which is good for voter turnout and donations) and saying things that win over moderate and independent voters (that need to feel comfortable with the candidate). Normally this is done by focusing on different issues for different audiences (foreign policy for one audience, social issues for another), or changing one's tone while saying essentially the same thing. On abortion and contraception, Romney has...

The New York Times  recently ran a profile on Charmaine Yoest, who is the head of the pro-life group Americans United for Life (AUL). In the pantheon of pro-life groups, AUL is one of the organizations that focuses on lobbying, legislation, and lawsuits, as opposed to, for example, direction action at clinics ( 40 Days for Life ) or electoral politics ( Susan B. Anthony List ). Yoest and her organization are a good example of pro-life activists who put on a moderate public face while remaining as conservative as ever. For example, Yoest and AUL frame their legislative policy concerns as not just about the unborn but also about the effect of abortion on women-- including pregnant women who might have an abortion if they were more freely available. So, for example, the AUL helped design and push the "Abortion Patient's Enhanced Safety Act" and the "Women's Health Defense Act." That's not to say that pro-life concerns about women are not genuine. M...

Do the unborn feel pain? If so, when? And what does it mean for abortion rights? William Egginton, a humanities professor at Johns Hopkins, analyzes the debate in an essay for  The New York Times . There are several reasons why pro-life activists and legislators want to establish, scientifically, that fetuses feel pain at some point in the gestational process-- and, by extension, would feel pain during an abortion. Egginton believes that pro-life legislators are using fetal pain to prove that the unborn possess fully human consciousness. This would lead, supposedly, to the unborn being declared legal and constitutional "persons" with rights. Certainly, pro-life activists and legislators want the unborn to be legal "persons." But I'm not sure that this is the primary attraction of fetal pain research and legislation. This kind of activism serves an important political purpose just by convincing people that fetuses feel pain in the act of abortion. A maj...

According to Angela Franks, it has. Dr. Franks is the director of theology programs for the Theological Institute for New Evangelization at St. John's Seminary in Boston. She is also the author of a (critical) book on Margaret Sanger. I saw her give a talk on October 15 at Clarion University of Pennsylvania, where she was hosted by Clarion Students for Life, the Newman Association, and the Clarion Muslim Students Association, among others. If you follow the pro-life movement and know something about the Catholic view of sex and relationships, much of what Dr. Franks said would sound familiar-- her views clearly track with Catholic doctrine. Her presentation, however, did not mention religion at all. Instead-- perhaps hoping to connect with an audience beyond people of faith-- her presentation was grounded solidly in what she referred to as "sociological" evidence. Focusing on young people (18-23), her primary observation was that casual sex and "serial monog...