‘Pro-life’ agenda will be deadly
After a hyperconservative U.S. Supreme Court struck down reproductive rights in June, a few anti-abortion advocates began to think about what a future without the right to abortion would look like, especially for poor women. That small group had the clarity of mind and the consistency of principle to conclude that poor women needed a stronger social safety net if they were going to be forced to give birth to more children.
But that tiny collective of principle has lacked the power and the passion to make changes for poor families. Even as a federal judge in Texas is considering a petition to overturn federal approval of the abortion pill — medication that is used in more than half of abortions — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has released a new report showing that the rate of maternal mortality in the United States rose sharply in 2021, with Black women disproportionately affected. (Maternal mortality is a death associated with pregnancy, either before or after birth.)
The maternal mortality rate has been climbing steadily over the last three decades. That is a problem rarely mentioned by anti-abortion zealots even though the U.S. has the highest maternal mortality rate of any developed nation, according to the Commonwealth Fund. You’d think that a faction that wears the mantle “pro-life” would care about women dying from causes associated with pregnancy.
Instead, radical anti-abortion activists have plowed their energy into further restricting abortion access by trying to ban the abortion pill, campaigning for a national abortion ban and taking their crusade abroad. In South Carolina, Republican legislator Rob Harris has introduced a bill that would subject women who have abortions to the death penalty. He and his allies have continued a movement focused on forcing women to have children they cannot afford, while it abandons those children as soon as they leave the womb.
According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, nearly half of women who get abortions live below the federal poverty level, and another quarter are in nearpoverty. With their access to abortion blocked in almost half the states, those women will be forced to carry their pregnancies to term. (Unlike more affluent women, impoverished women in states banning abortion don’t have the resources to travel for reproductive care.)
For decades, nothing about the “pro-life” movement has suggested that its members were actually interested in the lives of people outside their circle.
These unwilling mothers need access to good medical care, which would help curb the rate of maternal mortality. Their children also need access to good medical care, but the states that raced to ban abortions are often the same states that have refused to expand Medicaid, which provides health insurance for impoverished families.
My home state of Alabama, for example, had the sixth-highest rate of maternal mortality and the fourth-highest rate of infant mortality in 2021, according to a report from the United Health Foundation. Mississippi, which, like Alabama, raced to pass harsh restrictions against abortion, had the highest rate of infant mortality of any state and the third-highest rate of maternal mortality.
The dismantling of Roe didn’t prompt conservative state legislatures to expend their energies on securing better medical care or housing for poor families or on finding ways to ensure that poor children get better child care. The current priority of Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey is using federal COVID funds to build new prisons.
After Roe was overturned, conservative Christian writer David French, a longtime abortion opponent, wrote of his “disquiet” — a fear that the anti-abortion movement wasn’t ready for what should have followed its victory. “The commitment to life carries with it a commitment to love, to care for the most vulnerable members of society, both mother and child. But life and love are countercultural on too many parts of the right. In a time of hate and death, too many members of pro-life America are contributing to both phenomena,” he wrote.
He was right — and he should not have been surprised. For decades, nothing about the “pro-life” movement has suggested that its members were actually interested in the lives of people outside their circle. At least now, their hypocrisy is crystal clear.