No one wins under a forced birth scenario
I’ve never written about abortion.
I’ve written a column for more than a decade now — a daily column for many of those years — and I was a reporter before that.
My topics have covered the range of human experiences: loss, joy, fear, violence, love, parenting, doubt, grief, people doing good, people being works in progress.
Always I hoped someone would finish one of my columns or stories and think about an issue, place, person or group of people a tiny bit differently than they thought before.
I always want to hold up something for us to look at together, knowing we will each walk away with our own impressions, but hoping those impressions will be informed in a slightly new way.
Abortion has always struck me as a topic for which that is impossible. I know hearts and minds change in all sorts of ways on all sorts of matters.
But abortion feels like an exception, and I have never felt up to the task of wrestling with it in writing.
But the leaked Supreme Court draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade betrays such a galling disconnect in our national priorities that I’m compelled to dive in.
If the draft ruling stands, the United States is poised to become a country that forces women to have babies that we’ve shown no willingness to invest in. Absolutely no one wins under this scenario.
The United States spends 0.2% of its gross domestic product on care for children 2 and under, according to an October analysis
by The New York Times, which comes to about $200 a year for most families. Norway spends close to $30,000 annually. Germany spends more than $18,000 per year.
On the list of 17 Nordic, European and South American nations, we come in dead last for early childhood spending.
American parents receive zero weeks of government-mandated paid parental leave, unlike parents in 40 other nations. More than three-quarters of civilian workers in the U.S. lack access to paid family leave through their employers, according to National Partnership for Women & Families data.
One in four moms returns to work within two weeks of giving birth, according to an Abt Associates/in These Times analysis of Department of Labor statistics.
This is all despite ample, unwavering scientific evidence of the brain development that occurs during a child’s first three years of life — more brain development than will happen over the rest of their entire lives.
I wish that science informed our laws and policies, rather than whatever dogma is compelling the Supreme Court to restrict women’s bodily autonomy, which is, after all, what this is really about.
As TV writer Leila
Cohan tweeted in a nowviral thread, shortly after the draft opinion was leaked, “If it was about babies, we’d have excellent and free universal maternal care. You wouldn’t be charged a cent to give birth, no matter how complicated your delivery was. If it was about babies, we’d have months and months of parental leave, for everyone.
“If it was about babies,” Cohan continued, “we’d have free lactation consultants, free diapers, free formula. If it was about babies, we’d have free and excellent childcare from newborns on. If it was about babies, we’d have universal preschool and pre-k and guaranteed after school placements. … It’s not about babies. It’s about punishing women (and all people with uteruses) and controlling our bodies.” Precisely.
Maybe you’ve seen the quote by Methodist pastor David Barnhart that’s making the rounds again, thanks to the Supreme Court leak. Barnhart, from Saint Junia United Methodist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, originally shared it in a 2018 social media post, according to Snopes.com.
It’s a beauty.
“The unborn are a convenient
group of people to advocate for,” Barnhart wrote. “They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don’t resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don’t ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don’t need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don’t bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn.
“You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus, but actually dislike people who breathe. Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn.”
Powerful words. We’d be wise to hold them up and let them inform the way we rally, spend, volunteer and vote in the coming weeks and months.