The political stupidity of the GOP’s 6-week abortion bans

When Roe v. Wade was overturned last year, the pro-life movement and its almost entirely GOP political allies could have redoubled their attention toward creating the necessary circumstances to facilitate the “culture of life” for which Pope John Paul II called back in the 1990s.

Republican politicians could have built on Americans’ majority support for second-trimester abortion bans, while both touting and creating the kinds of family benefits and services that make it easier for the modal woman seeking an abortion (late twenties, already a mother, some college credits, unmarried and low-income) to consider nurturing rather than ending the life of her unborn child.

Instead, after the Supreme Court sweepingly overturned Roe in defiance of Chief Justice John Roberts’s wise incrementalism (which would have upheld Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban but left Roe otherwise intact), Republican lawmakers in red states have heedlessly followed suit: passing and signing six-week abortion bans in total defiance of both common sense and political self-interest.

Thus, the GOP is all but ensuring that the culture of life to which the pro-life movement ostensibly aspires will remain permanently beyond our grasp.

Six-week abortion bans are bad policy because they are inherently unenforceable in the absence of a level of intimate invasiveness that violates women’s privacy. More than 50 percent of abortions today are effectuated with pills. Meanwhile, more than 80 percent of abortions occur before 11 weeks gestation, and thus are eligible to be effectuated with pills.

Although a federal judge in Texas ruled in early April to suspend the use of mifepristone, which is commonly used in medication abortions as well as in miscarriage care, the Supreme Court has temporarily blocked this ruling. Meanwhile, anti-abortion groups continue to pursue litigation with the object of banning this multi-use medication that is responsible in part for most of today’s abortions.

How do the Republican lawmakers churning out these six-week abortion bans and the pro-life activists supporting them envision legally enforcing these policies? In an era of online shopping and easy mobility across state and national borders, the medications that induce abortion will remain accessible even if they are technically banned — just like lots of substances that are or have been technically illegal.

Moreover, and more fundamentally, at six or seven weeks of pregnancy, many women are just finding out that they are expecting a baby. Excessive amounts of caffeine or alcohol, along with roller coaster riding and any number of herbal concoctions that have been used to quietly and secretly terminate unwanted early pregnancies since the beginning of time, can be responsible for the end of a pregnancy in these early, delicate weeks.

Before about 11 weeks of pregnancy, a mother-to-be hasn’t yet gained any weight, and no outside changes are visible. And yet, morning sickness and exhaustion often consume her. She is at the mercy of her own body’s natural processes. And so is the baby growing inside her — no matter what the laws say or how callously or capriciously they are wielded against some fraction of pregnant women.

It is a sad fact of unforgiving nature that these first trimester iterations of preborn life are, pragmatically speaking, so delicate as to be beyond the reach of human laws. Thus it has always ultimately been, and thus it will always be.

As in the case of many facts in our fallen world, that this reality can lead to tragedy does not make it any less a reality.

So, in the end, the only way to effectively save the vast majority of aborted babies in the United States is to convince their mothers to give birth to them. And that’s where the political stupidity of the GOP’s six-week abortion bans becomes truly unmatched.

That Republican lawmakers are showing such zeal to pass extreme anti-abortion measures that are unlikely to significantly impact the number of abortions in the U.S. while neglecting to demonstrate a similar commitment to the kinds of pro-poor, pro-family policies that might actually both save and better some pre-born lives makes the average American – who is uncomfortable with abortion but also with first trimester abortion bans – less rather than more willing to engage the moral, philosophical and practical arguments of the pro-life movement.

The old quip about people who are pro-life from conception to birth is made manifest in politicians who spend all this energy and political capital on the symbol of draconian abortion laws and precious little on the substance of anti-poverty, family support programs that might actually reduce the abortion rate.

Normal, non-ideological people who see the pro-life movement increasingly allow itself to become consumed by exactly the kind of monistic zealotry that many of its broad supporters (this practicing Catholic mother of three included) have always deplored are never going to recognize the fundamental and non-ideological truth of pro-life reason and morality. If this is what the pro-life movement has become, those outside it will just tune it out. I am pro-life; and, frankly, I find it increasingly impossible to do anything else.

Since the 1970s, the pro-choice side of the abortion debate has won the culture war, despite Americans’ continued discomfort with abortion. That’s mostly because the governing reality of consumer choice in all things – which ultimately governs both sides of our polarized political spectrum – has become the dominant fact of American life. Hence, in our rapidly secularizing and polarizing society, parenthood has come to be viewed as just another lifestyle choice.  

Still, pro-life lawmakers have an opportunity to capitalize on a unique combination of contemporary factors to start the slow work of changing hearts and minds on the question of first trimester abortion. Those factors include Democrats’ wildly unpopular pro-abortion extremism, technological advances that can reveal even first trimester fetuses to us in new ways and some Republicans’ new willingness to at least consider working-class voters’ economic priorities.

Instead, so far, the GOP’s senseless policies and ruinous politics are rendering any possible dawn of a culture of life further away, rather than nearer at hand.

 Elizabeth Grace Matthew is a freelance writer, an America’s Future Foundation Writing Fellowship alumna and a Young Voices contributor.