Fewer Rights Than a Corpse

Abortion in the Bible Belt

It’s hard to tell exactly why voters vote the way they do. They often tell pollsters what issues are important to them, and the economy frequently ranks number one. But there aren’t always specific questions about what that means to the person saying it, and the economy isn’t equally motivating to everyone. To some, it’s about whether they have a job, while others are worried about the stock market, and many others, when questioned, list issues only tangentially related, like immigration.

In my time back home, I’ve met and reconnected with a number of people who sometimes sound like Bernie Sanders gearing up for a revolution on economic issues, but they’re ardent Republicans. They don’t say exactly why, but the issue they bring up most frequently, unbidden, is abortion. “OMG, are you serious, there’s birth control abortion is WRONG!” greeted a friend of mine in the comments section of her political post on Facebook. “I can’t bring myself to vote for someone that is for killing babies,” read another. (No one kills babies.) In other posts, friends are calmly working to convince their friends that voting for the Democratic party is the best pro-life position—abortions numbers go down under Democratic presidencies, though it’s not clear exactly what policy is at work there—and that the Democratic nominee, Joe Biden, values the life of the unborn. (Never mind I guess about who values the lives of the living, as Covid-19 tears through the state.) Abortion is the line for some voters in the middle, the issue past which they cannot be persuaded.

Growing up, I heard that abortion was wrong constantly, even from the pulpit of my otherwise comparatively liberal Methodist church. Friends were reflexively anti-abortion. There are a number of reasons for this, but you can sum them up as culture and structure—people oppose abortion on religious grounds, there aren’t many clinics available to perform them, and the pressure on young women to become mothers is extreme. The average age of first-time pregnancy for women here is 22, as opposed to 26 nationally. When women have children at young ages they can also finish their families young, and then choose the most effective methods of long-term birth control, like tubal ligation. Fifty-nine percent of the women who have abortions already have children, but if you’ve had your tubes tied after your last pregnancy because you could afford it or because your husband agreed to it, you’ve already found a way to avoid childbirth. Those are choices enacted at different times, but the result is the same.

A world in which women do not have children at young ages, who focus on other life goals or just don’t want to start families early, is a foreign one in small, insular communities like mine. Indeed, Arkansas is one of the most staunchly anti-abortion states in the country: 60 percent tell the Pew Research Center that it should be illegal in all or most cases. Other states with similar numbers are also in the South. I do not have children, mainly because I just never have. I’ve never been pregnant, either, that I’ve known of. I’ve had other things to do, and it wasn’t a priority for me. I will be 41 this year, and so my options are sunsetting, if they still exist. I have a million regrets about the tiny things in life—I should have been nicer to this or that person, I should have found time to reconnect with someone before he died—but none about the big choices. As time goes on, though, I’ve only become even more strongly in favor of abortion rights than I was as a young woman with an infinite array of futures before me. With age, I’ve seen the ways our bodies start to fail us slowly, and I live in fear of being forced to carry a pregnancy to term regardless of any problems or health issues I have, regardless of my circumstances. My life is my own, and I built it and love it. Sally Rooney, the Irish author, wrote about Ireland’s now-reversed fetal personhood laws for the London Review of Books in 2018, noting how opposing abortion assumes the opposite:

Yes. Pregnancy, entered into willingly, is an act of generosity, a commitment to share the resources of life with another incipient being. Such generosity is in no other circumstances required by law. No matter how much you need a kidney donation, the law will not force another person to give you one. Consent, in the form of a donor card, is required even to remove organs from a dead body. If the foetus is a person, it is a person with a vastly expanded set of legal rights, rights available to no other class of citizen: the foetus may make free, non-consensual use of another living person’s uterus and blood supply, and cause permanent, unwanted changes to another person’s body. In the relationship between foetus and woman, the woman is granted fewer rights than a corpse. But it’s possible that the ban on abortion has less to do with the rights of the unborn child than with the threat to social order represented by women in control of their reproductive lives.

I don’t know if these voters will make a difference this election, as our country rushes to make the mistake Ireland just reversed; the staunchly anti-abortion voters are already solidly in the Republican camp. But it’s something to remember as we go forward, in the ways that we think about remaking the world and rebuilding and renewing society. We should seek to increase the size of the world in which people understand the beauty of having options, of bodily autonomy, and of being the author of your own life story, instead of forcing you into what your culture as prescribed for you.

What I’m Reading:

The New York Times has Trump’s tax returns, finally. The information will be released in articles over the next few days and weeks. They’ll likely raise as many questions as they answer, but it’s still a critically important release of information.

Cute Animal Pic of the Week:

As long-time readers already know, I help out an older friend who rescues animals, Gary’s Adoptable Dogs. He is now caring for the results of puppy season, all of the unwanted and stray litters dumped on the sides of the roads or in fields, left to roam and trouble neighbors who send them away, or otherwise abandoned. Every summer and late fall there are loads of two-, three-, and four-month old puppies looking for forever homes. Here are two chunky ones.