Wacklash
Two years after Dobbs, the anti-abortion movement notices that something feels off.
There has been no shortage of retrospective thinkpieces, both in Catholic and non-Catholic media, observing the two-year anniversary of the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision and the ensuing wave of political battles over reproductive health care. Depending on your perspective, the period since June 2022 has been an incredible era for the cause of life; unfortunately, this would depend on your having the perspective of “guy who has not thought about or noticed anything on this topic at all”. Journalist Jill Filipovic has noted some of the more appalling effects of state-level abortion bans:
A new Johns Hopkins study shows that infant mortality in Texas rose thirteen percent since the passage of their anti-abortion law, far ahead of the nationwide rate change. Filipovic notes that the main driver of this increase was “congenital anomalies. In other words, these are babies who suffered from deadly health problems, but whose mothers were forced by law to carry them, birth them, and watch them die.”
A 2023 report from the Gender Equity Policy institute notes that maternal mortality rates are now 2.5x higher in states with abortion bans than in states without. As a reminder, the United States already has the highest maternal mortality rate in the developed world, due to our unique decision to treat all healthcare as a for-profit business rather than a public service
The Association of American Medical Colleges has observed a swing in doctors applying to residency programs: applications are declining in states with abortion bans, and increasing in states without, presumably because these doctors want to actually learn and provide a full range of reproductive care and minimize their legal risk
Extending the above point to its inevitable conclusion, the state of Idaho, which has a very restrictive abortion ban in place, has seen 22% - 2 out of every 9 - of their OB-GYN doctors leave the state or stop practicing entirely. There are 22% fewer doctors in the state to see pregnant patients, regardless of whether those pregnancies are wanted or not, regardless of whether those pregnancies are high-risk or not
Believe it or not, these effects of state-level abortion bans are not limited to pantsuit-wearing second-wave feminists who are seeking out recreational abortions to enable their consequence-free sexual gratification. Fewer obstetricians and more infant and maternal deaths in your state is bad for every person in your state. It is bad for the families that suffer when a child or parent dies, and wouldn’t have to die if they lived in another state. It is bad for people who want to become pregnant and have kids but can’t find a doctor. It is bad for people who become pregnant and want their pregnancy to go smoothly. It is bad for people with high-risk pregnancies who may need emergency care during their pregnancy. There is suffering and death that can be attributed to the implementation of these post-Dobbs laws. Do the Catholics who have agitated for laws like these have to answer for that suffering?
Yes, and not just because I personally don’t like these people. The writers we’re going to look at are the people that have explicitly said that the best approach to reducing and ending abortion in America, the most important approach, the approach that Catholics should prioritize above all others, that approach that required sacrificing the church’s political and moral credibility on basically every other issue, that approach that made it okay to vote for Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush and Donald Trump, are punitive state-level bans after Roe and Casey get overturned. That is more important than any sort of measures to alleviate poverty, any paid family leave policies, any meaningful reform to the health care system; bans have to be the top priority. These writers have said that the most important thing Catholics can do is fight to make abortion illegal, and making something illegal, to put this in the most basic terms I can think of, means threatening people with the coercive power of the state. It means, depending on where you live, police investigating doctors or patients, arresting them, trying them, and possibly jailing them. That is what people ask for when they ask to make abortion illegal, and they don’t get to claim ignorance on that. You said doctors need to be threatened with jail time, you damn well better have an answer for what we do when doctors start leaving. Should Catholics argue for the passage of laws that have a good chance of increasing infant mortality rates? Increasing maternal mortality rates? Draining the state of doctors? I think it's pretty easy to make the argument that Catholics have an obligation to oppose laws like that, but what do I know, I'm just a guy who has thought about or noticed anything on this topic at all.
I suppose, if I were trying to put myself in the shoes of the writers we’ll be looking at shortly, that the argument I would need to make to defend myself would be some kind of numbers game. Yes, maternal mortality is up, yes, a few hundred babies have died, but it’s ultimately worth it if it reduces the number of abortions in America; the lives of the unborn babies that were saved outweighs the lives we lost as collateral damage to these laws. I’m not saying it’s a particularly good argument - it’s not one that would convince me - but it’s an argument. Nobody that we’re looking at has made that argument. In fact, none of the writers at the two prominent Catholic magazines we’ll be reading today has made any acknowledgement of any of these adverse effects of the laws. They haven’t acknowledged the higher mortality rates, or the impact on the medical profession, or the knock-on effects on all patients, not just the abortion-happy girlbosses that they assume account for 99% of abortion procedures. They have not bothered to notice these effects at all. Well, at least the unborn babies got saved, I guess.
Ah, shit, wait, that was the last thing: the number of abortions in America has been increasing since Dobbs, and that’s something that these guys have all noticed. It’s not increasing because of Dobbs, but I marvel at the Sophocles-esque irony of these assholes pushing and sacrificing for five decades to get a Supreme Court decision overturned, only to find that the numbers are still moving in the wrong direction, and that everyone now hates them much more openly than we did back when we had more rights. The reactions of Catholic media to the politically disastrous post-Dobbs years - lost elections, ballot measures enshrining abortion in state constitutions, slowly increasing support for strong legal protections on reproductive care - are very instructive. These reactions reveal an inability to distinguish between a more abstract moral debate and the specifics of legislative policy, which have life-or-death consequences and require a far better grasp of details and context than moral debates do. Their reactions tell us what these guys prioritize, what they pay attention to, and who they think their enemies are. Their reactions tell us what we need to care about in order to protect ourselves and those we love.
We're looking at two Catholic magazines today. One magazine has, I would argue, a response to the post-Dobbs era that is well-meaning but still inadequate; they get a C-minus for effort. The other magazine is First Things.
In their July/August issue, America magazine is running a piece by their editorial board titled “There will be no perfect abortion law. But the pro-life movement can still make progress.” The piece is better than the title suggests, because the title suggests the collective Society of Jesus, in the face of rising infant and maternal mortality rates, shrugging and going with “pobody's nerfect”. That's not what the piece is saying, although it's not not what the piece is saying. The piece seems to be arguing that some of the more hardline legislative bans have ended up having an adverse effect on public opinion of the anti-abortion movement, which is true. But we should still have those bans, just, you know, don’t go crazy with it:
“The editors of America have long held that while abortion is a moral evil—the consistent teaching of the church since the time of the Apostles—the question of its legal status in the United States, under our Constitution, belongs properly to state legislatures…Unfortunately, the zeal by some legislators in the current political moment to ban abortion at all costs—in some cases without nuance or consideration for the hard cases that inevitably arise in any moral calculus—has galvanized opposition to restrictions on abortion as much or more than it has helped convince Americans to respect the lives of the unborn…Pro-life advocates are often focused on minimizing the set of exceptions to abortion bans in those states where they can get laws passed rather than tackling the harder problem of how to convince voters—who keep rejecting restrictions on abortion at the ballot box—that abortion can be safely and justly regulated and limited at all.”
People are really turned off by the zeal, guys, we need a little less zeal here, just be cool about including some exceptions in the laws, the opposition is because of the zeal and not because of the additional mothers and children dying. Now, the America piece does frame up the current state of abortion fights as an improvement over the pre-Dobbs era:
“In its recent unanimous decision, the Supreme Court demonstrated that, regardless of the political alliances and machinations that produced its current set of justices, it appears serious about getting out of the abortion business. The pro-life movement should welcome that restraint, which it spent almost 50 years advocating and organizing to achieve, even if it means that the road toward legislation protecting the unborn heads steeply uphill…What is needed, far more than a perfect abortion law, is a clear focus on the moral failure of a society in which abortion rates are rising rather than falling, in which too many women feel afraid, unable or unwilling to carry pregnancies to term and welcome new life into the world. The pro-life movement should evaluate the laws it fights for on the basis of whether or not they help us have that conversation.”
Putting aside that it’s completely nuts to say that the Supreme Court is getting out of abortion cases when they decided two high-profile cases this term - and when both of those decisions were remands that mean we’ll almost definitely be seeing these same issues in front of the Court again in the next year or two - I am going to give America some credit; in both this piece and the editorial board’s original piece from the 2022 term when Dobbs was decided, the editors “recognize[d] that unborn life cannot be defended solely by legally restricting the availability of abortion. We therefore continue to call for increased support for policies to help pregnant women and families with children, especially from the pro-life movement, to reduce the incidence of abortion.” And that’s true! If you’re “pro-life”, you need to care about more policy than just bans. I’m glad they acknowledge that.
However, “bans alone are not going to end abortion” is also the same position that I was able to articulate when I was 17, and I would hope to find a more sophisticated read on the situation in a magazine run by Catholicism’s most learned-ass priests (to use the term coined by Saint Ignatius). The church - and, as we’ll see in a moment, at least one of the editors at America - are getting exactly the laws that they have advocated for, and are writing “wow, we’re not winning hearts and minds, everybody really seems to hate these laws”. The natural next question that follows should be “why does everybody hate these laws,” and the easy answer to that question that these guys haven’t bothered to ask is “because these laws are killing people.” The people arguing against abortion bans are not doing so because the zeal of the anti-abortion movement is off-putting (although it is very off-putting), or because of a few weird edge cases; they are doing so because, regardless of their own desire to end a pregnancy, those bans can cause them to lose their doctor, or lose their baby, or lose their fertility, or lose their lives, at levels that can be measured by peer-reviewed medical studies. The editors of America still think legislatures should be making these decisions, that we can all just hash out a good version of a law that inserts the coercive power of the state into the healthcare system, that there is way to make pregnancy more likely to kill you by a more reasonable amount, that “the best hope—albeit a narrow one—for better political discourse on abortion remains removing the obstacles of Roe and Casey and returning the issue to the normal order of legislative politics.” But abortion bans, in an era where stories of death and denials of care are now far too common, are so wildly unpopular that the anti-abortion movement is attempting every single end-around to avoid any sort of representative democratic process whenever possible. “The normal order of legislative politics” remains out of reach for the anti-abortion movement.
The editors of America are trying to take a reasoned, principled stance on policy, without any sort of understanding of how policy is made, who it affects, and how those people are affected. And their response, two years after Dobbs, is “I guess we still haven’t cracked it.” Now, saying “we don’t exactly know what the right combination of policies is, we’re not policy guys, but we gotta try our best and see what we can do” is a perfectly reasonable thing to say at the beginning of a political fight. It is a completely unacceptable thing to say fifty years into that fight, long after the church has tossed its credibility on every other issue into the furnace of Trumpism, after multiple election cycles where the bishops have officially taught Catholics that ending abortion is a preeminent political priority and spent the church’s money trying to push through laws exactly like this.
And also, at least one of the guys saying it does have a vision of what the perfect policy would be. You already know that, of course, because we already read an essay by America senior editor J.D. Garcia-Long, lamenting the loss of Arizona’s 1864 total ban on abortion, which almost certainly would have had the same adverse effects on mortality rates and healthcare access, but which Garcia-Long considers “one of the most pro-life laws in the nation”. That it was passed before Arizona was a state, that it was drafted by a Civil War-era child rapist, that similar bans in other states are having horrifying effects on their populations, is not something that Long-Garcia acknowledged and then dismissed. He just doesn’t seem to notice it at all. It’s possible he’s just completely unaware of these things, but he got to write a column saying that this law is a good law, and then two months later, he got to sign off on a different column saying “wow it’s hard to write a good law huh”.
I’m being hard on the guys who run America because they’re Jesuits, and I am a product of Jesuit education, and I happen to think that education was very good at getting me to think critically and ask probing questions and anticipate arguments and articulate my feelings about complex issues very well. And none of that is coming from the editorial board of one of the most prominent Catholic magazines in the country. I did not cherry pick around the quotes where they explain what a good maternity leave policy looks like, because they don’t say anything about that. I did not cherry pick around the quotes where they lament the deaths brought about by the policies that they said were important, because they don’t say anything about that, either. I would argue that any magazine that regularly publishes takes on abortion policy has a non-negotiable responsibility to be aware of these things and show that they are aware of these things when their board is publishing multiple op-eds on the issue. At my Jesuit high school, I learned that there are important differences between abstract moral debates and bloody policy debates, and I sincerely hope that the editors of America learn this as well someday. We should demand better than this from our Catholic media.
Ok: now I’m going to show you something worse.
First Things, I’ve missed you so much. Thank you for running another “symposium” where you get the best and brightest minds in conservative religious politics together to discuss the issues of the day, I still have fond memories of the time you did that back in 1996; Colorado had just legalized gay marriage and you devoted an entire issue to “maybe we just shouldn’t have democracy anymore?”, leading to the embarrassed resignation of at least three of your editors. Now you have a new symposium, looking at the past two years of post-Dobbs politics, to really dig into the nitty-gritty of policy and morality. As the intro puts it:
“The end of Roe also revealed an American public wedded to abortion as a pillar of “reproductive freedom.” This sad fact puts the pro-life cause in a difficult political position. How can we protect the unborn in a society transformed by the sexual revolution? What is the proper scope of principle, and what of prudence? Where can our pro-life witness be most effective? We asked First Things writers and pro-life leaders to address the uncertain future of pro-life politics after Dobbs. Their reflections are presented in this symposium. We have important thinking to do. This is a start.”
Is some of this “important thinking” appalling and incoherent? Yes, obviously, it’s First Things. But! Still! The most surprising part of the “symposium” is that there are possibly three full (albeit short) pieces that are actually not disasters. Michael Burbidge, the bishop of Arlington VA, writes a totally reasonable piece advocating for the church’s “Walking With Moms in Need” program. Carl R. Trueman, a religious studies professor at Grove City College, also makes the perfectly acceptable point that “We conservative Protestants have not done a good job of thinking about abortion in a broader ethical context.” O. Carter Snead, a law professor at Notre Dame, basically makes the same argument that America does, but actually uses the phrase “in the realm of law and policy”, acknowledging that, you know, that’s a realm that requires a specialized approach.
Now, I said three pieces were not disasters. I almost said four, because a piece by Princeton law professor Robert P. George started out with so much potential, by recognizing what literally everyone except for the anti-abortion movement has known for years: that Donald Trump doesn’t actually care about this issue very much at all:
“Trump’s message to his pro-life supporters boiled down to (and here I’ll translate for you), “Hey look, gals and guys, I upheld my end of the deal I made with you in 2016. Roe v. Wade is gone.” But now, with the demise of Roe activating the Democratic Party’s extremely pro-abortion base, a politician’s being genuinely pro-life—working for actual legal protection for unborn babies—appears to be a heavy political liability. So, Trump’s message is this: “I’ve got to get elected to save the country, so I’m not going to do anything to protect unborn babies. Whatever the states want to do about abortion—permit it, forbid it, permit it up to fifteen weeks, permit it up to birth—is fine with me.”...So, it is incumbent on pro-life Americans to acknowledge the tragic fact that we do not have a pro-life presidential candidate representing a major political party in 2024.”
Unfortunately, professor George then appears to hint at the need for a second civil war:
“Whether Trump wins or loses, the future of the pro-life cause depends on whether there is a prominent Republican leader who is prepared to do today what Abraham Lincoln did in the face of the barbarism so fiercely defended by the Democrats of his day: defend the dignity of all members of the human family.”
Ah well. It’s still a slightly better take than the incoherent ones put forth by the First Things contributors who aren't academics, like Mollie Ziegler Hemingway, editor-in-chief of The Federalist (“Over Six Months Since Putting the ‘Black Crime’ Tag on Our Stories”), who argues that the anti-abortion movement still faces an uphill battle because “corporate media are motivated by love for abortion…Nearly everything the corporate media, Democrats, and the abortion industry say about unborn children and motherhood is a lie,” which seems incoherent on the surface, and then still incoherent under the surface. Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America (“Over Six Months Since Our Last Study Retraction”), claims that “we must show compassion. Nearly 70 percent of women who’ve had abortions say their abortions were unwanted, coerced, or not in line with their values,” but she doesn’t say where that number comes from, and, well, her organization makes stuff up sometimes. Ryan T. Anderson of the Ethics and Public Policy center claims that “Pro-lifers are for the most part locked out of, or forced to be silent in, every elite sector of society. The one venue in which you can be an outspoken pro-lifer and not pay a price is politics,” which is standard conservative grievance politics, but also funny, because “outspoken pro-lifers” are so clearly paying political prices right now that, again, their presidential candidate is saying “guys if we want to win we have to stop caring about this”.
But the last word in the symposium, of course, goes to First Things editor R.R. Reno. We all remember R.R.; at the very beginning of the COVID pandemic - like the very beginning, back when we had no idea how serious this was and were all disinfecting our groceries and worried that our families were going to die - Reno argued, adamantly, that there needed to be absolutely no public health mitigation measures at all. No masks, no social distancing, nothing. We all had to keep our lives exactly the same, and whoever died of the plague died of the plague, so be it: Now, Reno is a devout Catholic and loudly proclaims that he is pro-life, but he squared that circle pretty quickly: “pro-life” is not about “life”, it’s only about banning abortion. There are many things more precious than life:
“Everything for the sake of physical life? What about justice, beauty, and honor? There are many things more precious than life. And yet we have been whipped into such a frenzy in New York that most family members will forgo visiting sick parents. Clergy won’t visit the sick or console those who mourn. The Eucharist itself is now subordinated to the false god of “saving lives.”…A number of my friends disagree with me. They support the current measures, insisting that Christians must defend life. But the pro-life cause concerns the battle against killing, not an ill-conceived crusade against human finitude and the dolorous reality of death.”
“Pro-life” has nothing to do with life, it’s only about abortion. But, as Reno argues in this new “two years after Dobbs” symposium, “pro-life” is also, sometimes, not about abortion:
“…responsible action is also necessary, and it “requires leaders to do what can be done politically to restrain wrongdoing.” Under these strictures, the positions adopted by Donald Trump and other politicians who must reckon with the support for abortion among American voters cannot be dismissed immediately as betrayals.”
Do it, R.R. Say nothing matters or means anything and you just kind of have to not care about ending abortion sometimes:
“Pro-life legislators in the Roe era had to function under a legal regime that gave little scope for meaningful measures to protect the unborn. Today, those running for office face significant democratic constraints. We should never tire in our witness, but it is not possible to pass laws that run counter to the desires of voters, or at least not enduring laws. Our immediate task is to stabilize today’s volatile politics of abortion in a fashion that is maximally protective of life, given electoral realities. As we do so, we need to be clear in our thoughts and words: Abortion is a moral evil, and whatever compromises we strike are temporary.”
Look, yeah, Donald Trump obviously doesn’t support the same goals that we do, but he wants to get elected, and sometimes that’s okay, guys! We’re pro-life, which means we need to do everything we can to ban abortion. But also, sometimes, we’re just not going to do anything and will just have to compromise. Democracy is going to get in the way, because nobody likes what what the pro-life movement is trying to do, for some reason. But pro-life is not always about life, it’s about abortion. Pro-life is also not always about abortion. It’s kind of a vibes thing, if I’m being honest.
I might honestly be going easy on First Things, easier than I went on America. But that’s because everyone at First Things is an idiot and I don’t expect very much of them to begin with.
According to the best and brightest minds in the movement: the Catholic anti-abortion movement is about policy, except the policy is bad, so we actually don’t like that policy, we like a different policy, but we don’t know what that policy actually is yet. Also we don’t actually know if the policy is bad, we haven’t checked. But the Catholic anti-abortion movement isn’t about policy, it’s about winning hearts and minds, except we’re not winning hearts and minds so we just kind of have to force this policy through, the policy which is not bad, possibly. Donald Trump is selling out the anti-abortion movement, so he’s not our ally, but also we’re going to have to compromise, so he might be a good ally here for passing our policies, or maybe winning hearts and minds, which will, of course, require some compromise. Also we cannot compromise on anything, the stakes are too high and the media exists to promote abortion. And we need to counter that if we’re to bring about a culture of life. It’s not about life.
It’s about power, it’s always about power, and when it’s about power, it doesn’t have to be about anything else for more than five seconds at a time. When it’s about power, you will be surprised at how little else it even pretends to be about, and how little the well-meaning “whole life” people matter in the debate when they don't have any power at all. So protecting health care and protecting people’s rights is not about winning an argument or showing up to a symposium, it is not about trying to understand how the intellectual luminaries on the other side think, because they are not intellectual luminaries, they are not thinking, and also they’re not even sure about the terms of the debate that they set.
It’s about power, it’s about having power to stop them, it’s about having more power than they do. People are voting and protesting and striking and organizing and sacrificing to build that power right now, in states across the political spectrum, and they are articulating a clearer vision of a country where health care is protected and policy is democratically guided by the people it affects, and we can be part of that. It is a hard fight, and there are tragedies happening every day, but I still take heart in this: the other side had a fifty year head start to get their shit together, and they’re falling behind.