When Roe v. Wade was overturned last year, the pro-life movement and its almost entirely Republican political allies could have redoubled their attention to creating the necessary circumstances to facilitate the “culture of life” for which Pope John Paul II asked in the 1990s.
Republican politicians could have relied on Americans majority support for second-trimester abortion bans, while promoting and creating the type of benefits and family services that facilitate it modal woman seeking an abortion (late twenties, already a mother, some college credits, single and low income) to consider parenting rather than ending the life of her unborn child.
Instead, after the Supreme Court radically overturned Roe in defiance of the wise incrementalism of Chief Justice John Roberts (who would have upheld Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban but left Roe intact), the Republican lawmakers in red states have followed without care: pass and sign. ban on abortion for six weeks defying both common sense and political interest.
Thus, the GOP is all but ensuring that the culture of life to which the pro-life movement ostensibly aspires remains permanently beyond our reach.
Six-week abortion bans are bad policy because they are inherently unenforceable absent a level of intimate invasiveness that violates women’s privacy. More than 50 percent of current abortions are performed with pills. Meanwhile, more than 80 percent of abortions occur before 11 weeks of gestation and are therefore eligible to be effective with pills.
Although a federal judge in Texas decided in early April to suspend the use of mifepristonecommonly used in medication abortions as well as miscarriage care, the Supreme Court has temporarily blocked this sentence Meanwhile, anti-abortion groups continue to pursue litigation aimed at banning this multi-use drug that is partly responsible for most abortions today.
How do the Republican lawmakers who enact these six-week abortion bans and the pro-life activists who support them think about legally enforcing these policies? In an age of online shopping and easy mobility across state and national borders, abortion-inducing drugs will continue to be accessible even though they are technically banned, as will many substances that are or have been technically illegal.
Also, and more fundamentally, at six or seven weeks into pregnancy, many women have just discovered that they are expecting a baby. Excessive amounts of caffeine or alcoholalong with roller coasters and any number of herbal concoctions that have been used silently and secretly terminating the first unwanted pregnancies from the beginning of time, can be responsible for the end of a pregnancy in those early and delicate weeks.
Before about 11 weeks of pregnancy, an expectant mother has not yet gained weight and no external changes are visible. However, morning sickness and exhaustion often consume her. You are at the mercy of your own body’s natural processes. And the baby also grows inside her, regardless of what the laws say or how cruel or capricious they are against some pregnant women.
It is a sad fact of unrelenting nature that these iterations of the first trimester of the prehidden life are, pragmatically speaking, so delicate as to be beyond the reach of human laws. That’s ultimately how it’s always been, and that’s how it always will be.
As with many events in our fallen world, the fact that this reality can lead to tragedy does not make it any less real.
So, in the end, the only way to effectively save the vast majority of aborted babies in America is to convince their mothers to give birth to them. And this is where the political stupidity of the GOP’s six-week abortion bans becomes truly unparalleled.
That Republican lawmakers are so eager to pass extreme anti-abortion measures that are unlikely to significantly affect the number of abortions in the United States, while neglecting to demonstrate a similar commitment to the kinds of pro-poor and pro-life policies family that could actually save and improve some lives makes the average American, who is uncomfortable with abortion but also uncomfortable with the first-trimester abortion ban, less willing to engage in moral arguments , philosophical and practical of the pro-life movement.
The old joke about pro-lifers from conception to birth manifests itself in politicians spending all this energy and political capital on the symbol of draconian abortion laws and very little on the substance of family support programs against poverty that could actually reduce the rate of abortions.
Normal, non-ideological people who see the pro-life movement becoming increasingly consumed by exactly the kind of monist bigotry that many of its broad supporters (including this practicing Catholic mother of three) have always deplored will never recognize the truth. fundamental and not ideological of pro-life reason and morality If this is what the pro-life movement has become, outsiders will just tune it out. I am pro-life; and frankly, I find it increasingly impossible to do anything else.
Since the 1970s, the pro-choice side of the abortion debate has won the culture war, despite Americans’ continued discomfort with abortion. This is mostly because the reality that consumer choice in all things governs, which ultimately governs both sides of our polarized political spectrum, has become the dominant fact of American life. Therefore, in our rapidly secularizing and polarizing society, parenthood has come to be seen as just another lifestyle choice.
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Still, pro-life lawmakers have an opportunity to capitalize on a unique combination of contemporary factors to begin the slow work of changing hearts and mind on the issue of first-trimester abortion. These factors include Democrats very unpopular pro-abortion extremismtechnological advances that can reveal even first-quarter fetuses to us in new ways, and the new willingness of some Republicans to at least consider the economic priorities of working-class voters.
Instead, so far the GOP’s nonsensical policies and ruinous politics are making any possible dawn of a culture of life further away, instead of closer.
Elizabeth Grace Matthew is a freelance writer, American Future Foundation Writing Fellowship alumna, and Young Voices contributor.
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