Considering other points of view, asserted facts and reasoning provides some understanding of why and how people think and draw their conclusions. A New York Times editorial by Erika Bachiochi, a conservative legal scholar, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a senior fellow at the Abigail Adams Institute is staunchly anti-abortion. She has argued that Roe v. Wade should be overturned. She takes comfort in what the the current Supreme Court is likely about to do to abortion rights.
.... over the past two presidential election cycles, I felt a strong sense of relief that I was free from the hard trade-offs of voters in battleground states and could just cast my vote for a write-in candidate.
Yet listening to oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization last week, I realized more clearly than before how grateful I am to those pro-lifers who did what I did not, would not, could not: cast a vote for Donald Trump.
Politics is an art of prudence, and what I regarded as a deal with the devil they took to be a prudential act to achieve an essential end. For ending the abortion regime must be the keystone of standing against the individualistic libertarianism that characterizes our politics, left and right — and privileges the powerful over the weak and dependent. Ironically, and perhaps accidentally and certainly boorishly, Mr. Trump may have brought about what others could not.While oral arguments are no perfect indicator of how the court will vote, Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, all appointed by Mr. Trump, seem ready to join Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito (and perhaps Chief Justice John Roberts) in sending the issue of abortion back to the people to resolve. While Justice Kavanaugh homed in on the Mississippi solicitor general’s argument that the Constitution is neutral on abortion, Justices Gorsuch and Barrett (as well as Chief Justice Roberts) worked to discern if there was any way to uphold the moderate Mississippi ban without striking down both Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. (Both sides agree: There is not.)If Roe goes, the pro-life movement can begin where it left off in 1973, working to convince fellow citizens (especially in blue states like mine) that we owe dependent and vulnerable unborn children what every human being is due: hospitality, respect and care.But it’s not only that. Mr. Trump’s economic populism (at least in rhetoric) blasted through the libertarianism that has tended to dominate the Republican Party, a libertarianism that has made its alliance with pro-lifers one of strange bedfellows indeed. If the Republican Party wants to be of any relevance in a post-Roe world — after all, with Roe gone, those single-issue voters will be free to look elsewhere — it will have to offer the country the matrix of ethnic diversity and economic solidarity that Mr. Trump stumbled upon, but without the divisiveness of the man himself.So what is the path ahead that he has now likely made possible? A post-Roe America will need to move beyond its wrongheaded obsession with autonomy. It will need to align both its rhetoric and its policies better with the realities of human existence and so should work to bring forth a renewed solidarity instead. We humans are not best understood as rights-bearing bundles of desires who progress through life by the sheer force of our autonomous wills. We are beings who are deeply dependent on one another for every good in life — first and foremost for our very existence, as we did not come to be by an act of our own will.The Democrats were once a closer fit for the solidaristic vision, which is why before Roe, pro-lifers once happily made their home in the Democratic Party. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s party was one that long sought to put the culturally essential caregiving, character-shaping work of the home at the very center of the economy, ensuring that families enjoyed economic security while they did that most important work. Democrats once sought a family wage and saw the importance, as the Progressive-era feminist reformer Jane Addams put it, of the “family claim over the social claim.”
But today’s Democratic Party — though rightly intent to provide robust economic support to struggling families — seems also intent to contract out the nurturing of infants and toddlers to “caregivers” rather than attempt to ensure, as their predecessors did, the kind of economic security that enabled (especially) mothers to care for their young children themselves.
Support for the abortion license over the past half century helped transform the Democrats from the party of the family wage to the party of academic, technocratic and corporate elites. The abortion regime has been deeply complicit in preserving a modern economy built not around the needs of families but on the back of the unencumbered worker who is beholden to no one but her boss.Individual and societal reliance on abortion for women’s participation in economic and social life was the linchpin of the Supreme Court’s decision to reaffirm Roe in its 1992 decision Planned Parenthood v. Casey. As such, it was perhaps the strongest argument in the abortion-rights lawyers’ arsenal at the Dobbs oral arguments. But as even Planned Parenthood’s Alan Guttmacher foresaw in a 1968 speech, reliance on abortion as a backup to contraception tends to discourage contraceptive use and otherwise increase sexual risk taking, with women, not men, left to manage the asymmetrical risks.
Meanwhile, Casey’s claim that society has relied on abortion for women’s progress at once discounts the legion of anti-discrimination laws passed over the past century — while capitulating to the demands of an increasingly hegemonic market. After all, easy access to abortion (not to mention egg freezing and other technopharmacological interventions) helps businesses ensure that women are readily available to meet the all-encompassing needs of the globalized marketplace, thereby delaying real accommodations for time-consuming (and sometimes unexpected) parenting, especially for those women at the lowest socioeconomic levels in our society.
Such abortion-for-equality arguments are a far cry from the revolutionary vision Betty Friedan and Pauli Murray enunciated in the original statement of purpose for the National Organization for Women in 1966. Therein, one finds not calls for abortion on demand (or abortion at all) but instead for the country to “innovate new social institutions which will enable women to enjoy the true equality of opportunity and responsibility in society, without conflict with their responsibilities as mothers.” The statement urged not only robust anti-discrimination law, which would come to pass, but also better recognition of the “economic and social value of homemaking and child care,” which would not.If the Supreme Court overturns Roe, the pro-life movement will need to redouble the efforts of pro-lifers on the ground who for a half century have offered support, assistance and care to pregnant women and their children, both born and unborn. And crucially, it should call men to task.
But it can also take its rightful place in the post-Trump Republican Party — if the party, especially in red and purple states, can prove itself capable of policymaking on behalf of workers and their families. This will require that Republicans not fall back to doing the bidding of the business class whose own daughters will be, in the near term, anyway, a short flight or car ride away from legal abortion even after Roe.
Unpacking that vision of reality and reasoning
I will assume that Bachiochi is sincere and take her at her word in what she wrote. She starts with the fact that she could not vote for the ex-president. But she is grateful for the anti-abortionists who voted for him did by making a deal with what she calls the devil. That means was to achieve an essential end, namely overturning Roe and getting rid of abortions. This brings up a point argued here repeatedly. Specifically, many Republicans believe the ends justify the means, including voting for the devil. From what I can tell, Bachiochi makes a principled and moral stand. That makes her a rare thing in the Republican Party.
Maybe she will be RINO hunted out of the GOP for calling the ex-president the devil.
Next, she refers to a fetus as (i) the weak and dependent, and (ii) dependent and vulnerable unborn children. That is a standard anti-abortion rhetorical tactic. One humanizes a non-sentient fetus by calling it the weak and dependent or a child and by making pregnant women who want an abortion listen to little fetus heartbeats, even before there is a functioning heart. She does not believe that the rights of the fetus are any less than the rights of the mother. That is open to debate, but in her mind it isn’t.
Bachiochi looks forward with enthusiasm to what needs to be done once the court overturns Roe and Casey. What needs to be done include (i) convincing the unconvinced that unborn fetuses are morally due hospitality, respect and care, (ii) convince the Republican Party to offer the country ethnic diversity and economic solidarity, or a working-class brand of conservatism, and (iii) somehow give economic security to enable especially mothers to care for their young children themselves. Point i sounds like a rather hard sell, but it is legitimate politics. The anti-abortion folks are free to try to convince the unconvinced.
But on points ii and iii, Ms. Bachiochi is way off the GOP reservation. The Republican Party is about as laissez-faire capitalist as it is Christian nationalist. Bachiochi is clearly in the Christian nationalist wing of the party, but the capitalists are not going to accept her advice because of power and money. She is OK with women staying home to raise the children while dad is out hunting for food to put on the table. That is a bit of central Christian nationalist dogma. But providing economic security so mother can stay home amounts to redistribution of wealth. That is contrary to infallible Republican dogma that demands power and wealth to be concentrated with the elite White men and big industry. Can one feel a RINO hunt coming on? Hard to tell.
Her argument that women do not rely on abortion is not credible (to me). The tens of thousands of women who get abortions each year are in fact relying on an abortion to prevent having an unwanted child. Despite the thick clouds of smoke that conservatives spew on this issue, access to easy adoptions or not, women necessarily rely on abortion to prevent an unwanted birth. Adoption access is irrelevant.
Her argument about what the women’s movement in 1966 stood, moms stay home and raise kids, for is interesting. She argues that recognition of the “economic and social value of homemaking and child care” has not yet had tangible economic impact. Who is to blame for that? Not the Democrats. Her own party stand firmly in the way. Is abortion really mostly just about working for capitalists and women would to stay home if they could afford to as she argues? Could the GOP actually be capable of policymaking on behalf of workers and their families, as she hopes? Have women changed from what they were in 1966 and society really is static and she clearly implies?
As a whole, Bachiochi’s facts and reasoning are not persuasive. Some of it is incoherent. Her own party will not lead to the vision of America she advocates. Her Christian nationalism blinds her to what her party really stands for, and it isn’t what she wants. Once Roe is overturned or gutted but left barely alive, the anti-abortion people are not going to come out and do outreach. They have been told and now most believe that pro-abortion people and Democrats generally are evil socialists and communists who want to impose tyranny and make Christianity illegal. On top of those inconvenient truths, her own party sure as death and taxes is not going to make things economically easier for women. Christian nationalist dogma stands directly in the way of that and so does laissez-faire capitalism, i.e., just about the entire GOP ideological framework and mindset.
If one considers her words carefully, one can almost hear a Democrat asking for economic justice. She asserts that “this will require that Republicans not fall back to doing the bidding of the business class whose own daughters will be, in the near term, anyway, a short flight or car ride away from legal abortion even after Roe.” At least she realizes and publicly admits that inconvenient truth about the Republican Party, especially its laissez-faire capitalist wing. That seems to make Bachiochi a heretic in her own party.
Questions:
1. Is this unpacking of Bachiochi’s vision of facts and morality mostly reasonable, mostly unreasonable or is it mostly too hard to tell because reality and and morals about abortion are basically subjective and personal?
2. If one believes that reality and and morals about abortion are mostly subjective and personal, and an anti-abortionist refuses to compromise[1] by demanding the overturn of Roe, does that make them more democratic than authoritarian on that issue, or vice versa?
Footnotes:
1. Leaving Roe mostly intact, not overturned or gutted into near-oblivion, is a compromise between the competing interests in the woman and the state[2] that has stood since the case was decided in 1973. The Roe compromise was to leave the decision to the woman until viability, after which point the state could ban abortion. The alternative of forcing a woman to give birth against her will is no compromise at all. Overturning Roe destroys the compromise and shifts power to the state from the people.
2. The anti-abortion side strenuously argues the state has an interest in protecting the fetus and that state interest trumps the woman's interest in not wanting to give birth against her will. They have to argue that, because that's all they have got that isn't subjective and personal. I do not understood that argument as the anti-abortionists frame it. It just makes no sense to me. The state arguably does have an interest in seeing to it that a pregnant woman does not harm a fetus at any time during a pregnancy after a woman becomes aware, e.g., by taking drugs and bearing a baby that is drug addicted and/or brain damaged. Those harmed babies tend to impose significant burdens on society. But by what facts or logic does the state have any other interest in what a woman decides to do before her fetus is viable? That is why anti-abortionists have to, and do, strenuously argue that the rights of a non-sentient fetus attach from the moment of conception.
The point of viability compromise in Roe has to be rationalized away somehow by anti-abortionists. Attaching constitutional personhood to a fertilized human egg is the core reasoning of what anti-abortionism and its refusal to compromise stands on. I find that reasoning to be deeply immoral because it is authoritarian and logically unjustified. It is a partisan political argument clearly grounded in subjective “religious logic” disguised as secular logic. Words such as God, Christ, and Christianity appear nowhere in Bachiochi’s attack on Roe and abortion rights. Obviously, that is not logical. It is theocratic, not secular and not democratic.
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