Intro to Series Four
The anti-abortion movement is destroying the American Catholic church
“Together, we are the voice for the voiceless. When it comes to abortion, Democrats is a — and you know this, you’ve seen what’s happened — Democrats have embraced the most radical and extreme positions taken and seen in this country for years, and decades — and you can even say “for centuries.”"
-Donald Trump, speaking at the 2020 March For Life
“'bortion, 'bortion, 'bortion, 'bortion"
-Sum 41
There’s an old show tune that begins “You can’t win, you can’t break even, and you can’t get out of the game”; the lyric has also been used to jokingly describe the three laws of thermodynamics, including the nature of energy loss and our approaching entropic doom. As it turns out, the song lyric, as well as the phrase “approaching entropic doom”, provide a succinct summary of the Catholic church’s relationship to the anti-abortion movement.
When I say “the anti-abortion movement,” I’m referring not just to teaching documents from the bishops, but to activists, working in coalition with the broader religious right, to aggressively protest and bring an end to abortion in the United States. Previous G.O.T.H.S. subject Randall Terry pioneered a more confrontational set of tactics for protesting abortion in the 1980s, and while he remains one of the more awful human beings that I’ve researched for this project, the next series is going to look at Catholics who saw his work and life and said “hey, this is a guy we can learn from”.
It was only a matter of time before we got to this topic; abortion has consumed almost all of the political discussion surrounding the Catholic church, like a blob of monster blood in an R.L. Stine paperback. In electoral politics, the bishops sell out church teaching on basically every other issue - immigration, labor rights, health care, not accepting mass death in a pandemic, the death penalty, state violence, prosecuting sexual assault, the list goes on - in the name of getting more anti-abortion justices on the Supreme Court and someday overturning existing precedents on abortion, presumably bringing about some sort of Catholic Xanadu where the unborn are protected by ironclad laws and able to be safely born into an overheated fascist hellscape. The bishops sacrificed a great deal and embarrassed themselves on multiple fronts to get to this point; I don't expect the church to change its teaching on abortion, but I'm saddened every day with everything that the hierarchy chooses to ignore or accept in the name of winning this one thing. I struggled, for a long time, with the question of whether it would even be worth all of that loss if they won.
But then I read about these activists, and I started to think about the question differently. What if, in fact, you can’t win? Attempts to restrict abortion rights, in the modern era, have led to a net increase in unwanted pregnancies and abortions performed. We’ll look at the Mexico City policy, perhaps the single most important U.S. policy on abortion rights in the past four decades, and the continually growing body of peer-reviewed studies showing that it has served to increase abortions worldwide, the exact opposite of what it was supposed to do. Of course, the Catholic who wrote the Mexico City policy, Alan Keyes, is one of the most hilariously inept politicians of all time, has suffered massive record-setting electoral losses when he’s tried to run for public office, couldn’t keep his cable news show on the air for more than six months, and - if you're wondering about the medical expertise of this reproductive health policy wonk - earlier this year was hawking bleach supplements to cure COVID, and had to stop because the feds seized his supply.
That’s why some people turn to coalition building, to build a bigger base around more issues, in the hope that even if you trade off on some things, if you end up getting the policy victories you need on abortion, you can at least break even on the net moral “good” you’re doing in the world. But you can’t break even. The corrosive anti-abortion religious right coalition is going to change you more than you are going to change it. Catholic activist Abby Johnson has a unique life story and unique set of politics, had a chance to steer the movement into something based on radical honesty and compassion instead of an exercise in raw power, and ended up selling that life story to an unhinged Christian filmmaking outfit, and can’t end abortion now because she’s too busy on Twitter talking about how she’s going to buy Goya beans to own the libs.
So it’s not looking great for the Catholic church, and they might benefit from backing off from speaking on this issue for a while. The problem, of course, is that you can’t get out of the game. The damn internet won't let you. As we've covered plenty of times before, there's a horrible, extremely online, right-wing Catholic media apparatus that has always critical of Catholics broadly, and bishops specifically, who don't speak out on abortion every minute of every day. LifeSiteNews, a far-right outrage factory run by unsuccessful Canadian politician John-Henry Westen, started to veer into more conspiratorial thinking about which bishops are part of the Catholic Deep State that needs to be purged, that has now gained the attention of the President. Not the USCCB president, the President of the United States.
Behind these three characters it's easy to find a hunger for power, money, and notoriety that can never be sated, and that definitely isn't worth pissing away your church's moral authority and witness over four decades. But our church is doing it, and they're playing a game that they not only can't win, but can't break even on or leave. Catholics who care about their church need to seriously re-examine the church's relationship to the anti-abortion movement; in the stories being shared over the next three weeks, I hope to help you do that in some small way, and to help show that the church has been severely damaged by this movement, and that this damage far outweighs any gains made in protecting the unborn.
At the very least, the stories will be funny. First piece arrives 8/17; it’s good to be back.