Author: Gregory S. Paul

It has not worked.

The prochoice movement opposed by the religious right has been making an enormous mistake. We know that because it is experiencing disaster. That when a solid majority of Americans favor abortion rights Roe v Wade included. It is all too clear that what it has been done in support of women being full class citizens has been gravely defective. It follows that it is time to move on to a more effective strategy.

Defunct RvW rested largely upon the 14^thAmendment principle of privacy as a legal and societal expression of individual freedom from invasive state control in favor of personal responsibility. The thesis is valid, but it is a defensive posture that has proven insufficient to fend off assaults from a dedicated forced birth campaign. The situation is so bad for the sovereign rights of American women that even as Catholic heritage nations like Mexico, Argentina, Columbia and Ireland place their trust in the gender to make the best choice, the USA is reverting to the paternalistic misogyny of the early 1900s.

The women’s right movement must go on the offensive to regain the legal and moral high ground over the force birthers. Doing that requires utilizing two interrelated lines of argument.

The Big Medical Lies

One issue that has for reasons obscure long been oddly underplayed is women’s health as per maximizing it by avoiding pregnancy. The ant-abortion conspiracy promotes the anti-scientific disinformation that first trimester feticides are artificial and therefore bad for mothers, while child birth is natural to the point that the government must force all pregnant women to do what is good for their health physical and mental. Law enforcement must protect an apparently gullible gender from a diabolical abortion industry that is so clever that it somehow seduces many hundreds of thousands of each year — a quarter of the national female population over time – to commit a dangerous unnatural act that is against the wise ways of God’s benign creation. That when not getting an abortion is as easy as simply not going to a provider. Yet many go to great lengths to get to such, sometimes traveling long distances if necessary, knowing exactly what will happen when they do so, yet only a small percentage report having significant post procedure regrets (https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2020/01/416421/five-years-after-abortion-nearly-all-women-say-it-was-right-decision-study).

The cold truth is that nature is not always the best. Modern medicine is the artificial practice that has saved billions of lives from the deadly side of the biological world, including the many risks of pregnancy. Early term abortions surgical and medicinal are over a dozen times less lethal than going through the months long complexities and risks of pregnancy (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22270271) which kills 700 women each year in the US (and the death rate is rising — https://www.npr.org/2021/04/26/990980242/as-pregnancy-related-deaths-rise-in-the-u-s-experts-say-expanding-medicaid-is-ke). And because the latter pumps lots of mood altering hormones into mothers, they are highly likely to experience serious mental distress before and especially after birth, post-partum depression being very common and often serious. Early pregnancy does not involve such hormone loads, and mental trauma is much less frequent after termination. That is why the regrets are rare, of the many women I know who have had abortions none was gravely upset about it. Which makes sense since a woman is making the safest decision when ending a pregnancy as early as feasible. Legally sentencing a woman to bear her pregnancy violates her core medical rights. It’s like preventing someone from taking say statins, or forcing them to smoke or use mind altering drugs.

But there is another major right that the anti-abortion project violates big time. the one that the pro-choice forces have been resisting despite its potential potency.

Religious liberty.

Forced Birth, it’s a Religious Thing

Here’s the fact that is as screamingly obvious as it has irrationally been paid much too little attention by the body politic. Almost the entire movement to render women second class citizens by making them reproductive slaves of the state once pregnant, stems from one source. The religious right. That is a historically rather novel entity formed by a once unimaginable collaboration of conservative evangelical Protestants with the Church of Rome. The anti-abortion project is the core engine of a brazen attempt by one religious clique that constitutes about a third of the population to impose their hardline faith-based beliefs on everyone else. Outside of the Christoright who opposes abortion rights? Nontheists against women’s full reproductive rights are as scarce as hen’s teeth, I personally know of only one. Polling suggests that one in ten atheists are forced birthers, but the sample is small and the figure appears inflated. Many if not most Christians — Protestants, Orthodox, Catholics, etc. of the center-left — favor reproductive choice, along with most Jews and other theists. That alliance of nonrelig0ious and believers form the solid majority who want broad abortion rights to remain in force in all 50 states.

The overwhelming and narrow religious basis of mandatory birth differs strikingly from other conservative causes such as limited government size and power regarding guns and economics, and heavy law enforcement against crimes and drugs. Those secular theses enjoy substantial support outside theoconservatism, including many nontheists — advocates of laissez faire capitalism for instance have included such prominent nonbelievers as Herbert Spencer, Ayn Rand, Milton Freidman, Penn Jillette and Michael Shermer.

The Grand Lie – Why No God Opposes Abortion, It Being the Natural Norm

That feticide has become such a fixation of the religious right is remarkably ironic for a reason too few are aware of. The startling fact is that forcing women to bear pregnancies to term lacks theological justification. The central motivating claim by theoconservatives that they are sincerely merely obeying the dictates of a prolife creator is patently false both on real world and scriptural grounds.

While forced birthers like to go on about how pregnancy ending in birth is natural, what they do not say – in part because most do not know – is that pregnancy ending in abortion is even more natural, by a factor of 3 to 1 or more. Not that many prochoicers know that either, the population at large is perturbingly ignorant about the hard statistics. 

Most conservative Christians are creationists of one sort or another who believe God literally intelligently designed our marvelous species, and that he considers the lives of every one of we special creations to be sacrosanct. There is a big problem with this thesis of the pro-like God. Our often lovely but chronically child toxic planet provides the proof that a life defending creator cannot exist. In the academic journal Philosophy and Theology I was the first to calculate and publish the telling and unsettling statistics that remain scandalously neglected (http://www.gspauldino.com/Philosophy&Theology.pdf). I further detail the problem in Essays in the Philosophy of Humanism (https://americanhumanist.org/what-we-do/publications/eph/journals/volume28/paul-1 & http://americanhumanist.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/03_Paul-SkeptoTheoPt2.pdf). The human reproductive complex is in truth remarkably inefficient and indifferent when it comes to generating new lives. The stats start with how it is well documented that about 100 billion people have been born to date. To that add how medical analysis indicates that about three quarters of conceptions normally fail to come to term — about half or more failing to implant in the first place usually due to rampant genetic defects, the rest are later term miscarriages, many of which go unnoticed (which is a reason why fertile couples may take months to achieve noticeable pregnancies; https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/ivf-roe-v-wade; https://courses.lumenlearning.com/wm-lifespandevelopment/chapter/prenatal-development; additional refs. in my above papers). The human reproductive complex is a Rube Golbergian mess that usually fails – far from the womb being a safe refuge for fetuses, most inhabitants do not make it out alive because they come to a natural early end. As geneticist William Rice states, accidental abortion is “the predominant outcome of fertilization [and] a natural and inevitable part of human reproduction at all ages.” (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326485445_The_high_abortion_cost_of_human_reproduction) — ergo, the violence that is abortion is even more natural than is that of birth. That means something like 300 billion pregnancies have been spontaneously aborted to date. Currently, somewhere in the area of 30,000 spontaneous abortions occur every day in the US, over ten times more than those that are induced. There have been around 60 million abortions in the half century since RvW, the number of spontaneous prebirth deaths has been two thirds of a billion to a billion over the same period in the US.  The noninduced abortion rate can be tamped down some by pregnant mothers living in benign modern circumstances, but not dramatically because little if anything can be done about the core dysfunctions of human reproduction – which ironically appears to stem from our genetic complexity tied to our intelligence and the like, mice do not have a high bioabortion rates. After birth half those born have died as children from a vast array of torturous diseases that infest our biosphere, so some 50 billion kids have not grown up. It is the artifice of disease fighting medicine are other aspects of modernity that has driven juvenile mortality down to a few percent, less can be done about our deeply dysfunctional reproductive system. As I detail in the P&T and EPH studies, it is demonstrably impossible for a supernatural creator that allows hundreds of billions of preadults to die to be prolife.

With just a fifth to a quarter of observed pregnancies deliberately stopped, while three out of four pregnancies failing naturally, spontaneous terminations are around ten times or more numerous than women having abortions. That means that the wide belief that it is mothers that are most responsible for preventing little souls residing in genetically unique bodies from enjoying earthly, potentially Godly lives is far from true, it is Mother Nature that is doing almost all of that job. Yet theocons — some of whom burst into tears when thinking about all those babies murdered by abortionists and/or mothers, or yell murderer/s at the latter – rarely or never express the slightest moral concern much less outrage about the vast wastage of the preborn their creator they hope to get boons from is good with, much less oppose the mass death allowed by the deity, while they condemn humans doing the same thing as murderous and evil and demand it stop under the severe threat of law. That is called out and out duplicity. That theocons will cite their inability to oppose the actions of God serves to reinforce the religious nature of their FB project.

Of course the government mandated birth crowd does not want folks to know about the scale of the natural loss of the preborn. They don’t want to know about it themselves. There is no mention of the statistics in the SCOTUS majority opinion. That would not help the case. It would risk aborting it. Not that it is in the minority opinion either.

The mass loss of immature humans that no creator puts a stop to helps explain a stark scriptural truth that birth enforcement adherents evade as much as they can. Neither the Jewish nor Christian texts come anywhere close to proscribing abortions. The ancient texts instruct that if someone causes a miscarriage involving a woman who is not their wife, then the negligent party can be sued by the father who owns the fetus –  feticide is a civil financial property matter, not criminal murder of a human being in the Holy Bible. There is nothing about if a father causes the wife he owns to experience an abortion, or even if the mother terminates her pregnancy. Nothing. On the abortion actually has its positive uses side as long as it constitutes the misogyny theocons favor, there are instructions that when a pregnant wife is suspected of adultery a priest can administer an abortifacient potion – if the pregnancy continues she was not an adulterer. The written entirely by traditional values males Bible does not condemn abortion, it endorses its use to examine the guilt of women. That after all these decades that that direct disproof of the myth that God hates abortion is not common knowledge is a stunning exposure of how slack the does not wish to offend the religious women’s right movement has been. A day after abortion provider George Tiller was gunned down I found on my car a forced birth pamphlet that cited all the Biblical lines that opposed his work. Of which there were actually none, all the quotes were regarding the protection of undefined innocents. That’s high hypocrisy because in the same book God liquidates all the pregnant women and blameless children in a global flood, does the same to those in cities, and orders the ethnic cleansing Israelite warriors to slaughter enmass guiltless captive kids as well as women even when pregnant. The Gospels of Jesus and subsequent texts have nothing to say on what is now alleged to be a matter of immense divine import. Pro-life is faux theology invented out of whole cloth by right wing theists for entirely earthly ideological cultural and political purposes.

The abject absence of scriptural condemnation against abortion illuminates why most Bible believing Protestants, including the most popular evangelical of the day, Billy Graham, had no comment in the immediate wake of Roe v Wade. Then famed Southern Baptist leader W. A. Criswell did opine that he had “always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person, and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.” That was in line with SB resolutions in the early 70s, two after RvW, in favor of abortion rights in cases of rape, incest, fetal deformity and the health mental included of the mother. Governor Reagan had liberalized abortion access in California in the late 60s. During a major 1980 campaign speech to evangelicals he did not bring the subject up, and his forced birth speeches to the anti RvW protests when president were not done in person. The strict sanctity of preborn life back in those days was largely a Vatican thing — it cannot be overemphasized the degree to which the Roman and Lutheran churches despised one another and to an extent still do: a few years ago a couple of evangelicals standing right in front of me bemoaned how a relation who had gone Catholic was now worshipping the clergy, not Jesus.

So why the ensuing and incoherent great evangelical Protestant switch — Graham and especially Criswell evolved into staunch forced birthers — to sociopoliically weaponizing abortion as murder that requires harsh punishment via a new found alliance with the heretical Catholic clergy? That when the evidence that there is a creator power that gives a hoot about conceptions making it to birth is zilch, and mass abortion is more natural than birth, meaning that the all the claims otherwise constitute one of the very biggest falsehoods of our times – the Grand Lie. First a little history.

A Little History

Elitist theocons like those on the Supreme Court live very privileged, cloistered lives in an isolated right wing academic, pseudointellectual bubble that leaves them astonishingly and dangerously ignorant of and/or unsympathetic to things outside their narrow worldview that is indifferent to objectivity. And uninterested in the real world consequences of their archaic ideologies. Thus the incompetent, callous and lying Alito and company in their opinion overturning Roe v Wade that reads as though much of it was written by White male misogynists from the 1200s and 1600s. Which it to a great extent is because the astonishingly archaic thing cites ad nauseam the retro opinions of ye olden times Henry de Bracton and Matthew Hale who back in the day thought along the lines of how witches should not be tortured lest they die before being incinerated, described how to investigate women to determine whether they were still virgins or not, were skeptical of rape charges, and contended husbands owned and could rape their wives.

Many – you know, people who are decent and modern and mainstream – are perplexed by why the opinion that rerendered American women 2^nd class citizens went to the lengths of being such a primitive document that expressly insults and denies the sensibilities and liberties of so many, that even after the draft was leaked and widely derided. But that folks was the point. The snarky Alito wanted to take the grand opportunity to put women in their proper place as they were in those olden times and they must be today under the aegis of hardcore Christianity. That such would anger many is not a problem for him and the other four on the court, they are delighting in having the power to impose their will and that of the Christoright on a nation that needs to understand it must be under the thumb of their Godly dominion. The only people they care about are those who agree with them, to hell with everyone else that being their destination if they do not get right with the Christ of the Bible anyhow.

Funny thing. Alito in his brilliant cynical bias makes is out that Bracton and Hale were staunchly anti-abortion. But even they were clearly OK with it early term. Which makes sense in that so is the Bible they and the populace adhered to. Abortion was the societal and reproductive norm in largely Protestant colonial and early independent America — for that matter, early term feticide has always been very common in societies whether legal or not. The Puritans of yore were not as super repressive and chaste as usually thought, oops pregnancies outside of marriage were fairly frequent. And there were women who after having birthed a bevy of babies did not want to go through that yet again. All the more so because childbirth was very dangerous, about one out of fifty pregnancies killed the mother, which when you work out the fertility rate math means that about one out of ten women who had kids died from the natural event. “Mother” nature is not much kinder to mothers than their young ones. Early term termination with herbal toxins had its dangers, but to a lesser degree. Such abortions were not a concern to the authorities if it was done before quickening. When the all-male founders, nearly all Protestants and Deists, were assembling the Constitution that instituted separation of church and state they never imagined considering feticide, that being a women’s affair outside their manly concerns. The only faction that might have been interested in the issue were the few Catholics. That they made no attempt to mention much less ban abortion was logical because the rest of the patriots would have slapped that down as an attempt to subvert the intent of the 1^stAmendment to keep specific religious cliques from seizing control of governmental policies and vice-versa. Duh. I am not aware of any cases of women being arrested and charged with having an early term abortion in colonial America or the early USA.

There was a set of American women who absolutely did not have any legal access to abortion in the early 1800s. Enslaved Blacks. Their preborn being the property of their owners. Who were fond of raping the women in their possession for sexual enjoyment on their way to financial gain.

In the 1800s going into the early 1900s repression of sexuality and women reached a peak in tune with Victorian culture, often as part of the reaction against the suffrage movement. Also of growing concern was that abortions were killing women, albeit less often than pregnancy. At the same time the all-male and White profession of medical doctors wanted to suppress competition from midwives who often aborted the much bigger money to be made from full term pregnancies. The years after the Civil War saw a general criminalization of ordinary activities such as loitering and vagrancy in order to jail lower class men with a tilt towards blacks to discipline the population (and return to generating create cost free labor). And the nativist eugenics — based on agricultural selective breeding — favored by Protestants (but not Catholics) called for WASP women to bear as many children as possible to prevent the others from dominating the population. As part of this White male power movement laws banning abortions appeared for the first time, and quickly became the national norm (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/05/abortion-in-american-history/376851).

The result. A little over a century ago the Christoright owned these United States. Well over nine out of ten were Christians, nearly all conservative. It was a popular culture of imposed Judeo-Christian “virtue.” A pious, dour repressive hyper misogynist, racist Christian Dominion patriarchy in which women were second class citizens required to wear heavy clothing even at the beach, and mandated to remain nonsexual until marriage in which husbands could legally rape their wives and she had no legal choice but to bear the child – that by the way helps elucidate why modern forced birthers are often not concerned about if a pregnancy resulted from nonconsensual sex. The draconian Comstock laws banned mailing information on contraceptives in flagrant contradiction of the Bill of Rights. This Christofascist equivalent of Muslim Sharia culture of severely repressed sexual liberty had to have a heavy government hand to it. Lacking the force of law to keep people in reproductive line, most folks feel free to have way too much fun for the likes of the power craving forces who enjoy imagining they know what it best for all of us, feckless women especially. Note that the Dour Culture was to a fair extent a White matter, Black culture was less uptight, as reflected in the advent of the “sex music”, jazz that quickly gained a following among a frustrated White youth.

The rather Taliban like mainstream Christian scheme began to unravel what with women (mainly White) getting the vote, and the first sexual revolution of the Roaring Twenties. That unprecedented loosening of sexual habits was never entirely beaten back by the right, but as late as the 1950s women were still expected to be virgins on their wedding nights who then became stay at home housewives, access to contraceptives remained limited, and abortions forbidden. With blue laws keeping most retail closed on Sundays three quarters of American were church members according the Gallup, as virtually all professed a belief in God.

Since then it’s all gone to theocon hell. Even in the 50s the hot black culture continued to infiltrate the White majority via the first wave of rock-and-roll – previously black slang for intercourse. What was Elvis doing up there on the stage with his pelvis? Seeing the way things were going Billy Graham started his mass crusades to try to restore America to its righteous ways.

That did not work.

Nowadays, with women being emancipated, first class citizens free to have sexy fun, sinfully tempting females strut down streets in minimal clothing. Sex outside marriage is actually the accepted societal norm. Marriage rates are down while divorce rates are sky high – that started with the WW 2 generation in the late 60s BTW — including among conservative Christians. Birth rates are below replacement level – that when many on the right oppose the immigration of nonWhites that’s needed if an expanding population is to help grow the economy. On the networks people can say screw when not talking about hardware. Then there is cable and the web. Most women have careers. The great corporate project to convert pious frugal church goers into hedonistic materialists and digital social media addicts has succeeded spectacularly as Gallup tracks church membership plummeting from 70% at the beginning of the 2000s to 50% today (https://news.gallup.com/poll/341963/church-membership-falls-below-majority-first-time.aspx; Gallup also observes that belief in God is going into a nosedive https://news.gallup.com/poll/393737/belief-god-dips-new-low.aspx) as White Protestants are a fast shrinking minority, the religious right that once ran the country has been reduced to a widely disparaged subgroup, and the nonreligious balloon by an amazing tenth of the population each decade (for a look at that see http://americanhumanist.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/art-1-Paul-The-Great-and-Amazingly-Rapid-Secularization-of-the-Increasingly-Proevolution-United-States.pdf). Even Republicans are becoming less religious for Christ’s sake — listen to how the Trumpites swore like sailors as they stormed the capital, and denounce Biden with vulgarities Richard Pryor style.

Their Real Goal

That is what the forced birth movement is really about. A return to Christosharia. Having lost the mainstream culture big time over the last century theocons have no viable means to recover it by persuasion, and deep down they know that bitter fact. All those Graham et al. crusades, religious TV channels, megachurches, and Christian rock are getting nowhere with the mainstream. What are they to do in their desperate power trip to return the country to the good old days of largely White righteous Christian domination?

It’s obvious. Try to do what worked up to the 1920s, and see if reapplying governmental coercion will get America back to its straighter laced Godly ways. There is nothing else for them to do. This invidious strategy to employ laws to achieve religious aims requires the high grade hypocrisy of theoconservatives who love to proclaim individual liberty while decrying government power when the latter promotes what they see as ungodly secular-liberal values, but to without batting a cynical eye deploy said government power to lever America back to something like it was in the 1950’s. When father knew best and the good and subservient women properly behaved themselves sex wise and raised their many kids whatever number their husband desired and heaven forbid could not terminate their sacred pregnancies and the churches were packed on Sunday mornings rather than folks hitting Walmart and Home Depo.

It has not been a meticulously hidden secret, occasionally the truth has been let out. The president of the U. S. Catholic Conference of Bishops Jose Gomez has railed against secular liberal movements such as social justice, wokeness, intersectionality, and critical theories that have arisen in recent years as part of an effort to “suppress any remaining Christian influences” and replace “traditional Christian beliefs.” How about the Louisiana lawmaker whose new government enforced birth bill describes human life as “created in the image of God” and to hell with that 1^st Amendment separation of state and church thing. That’s a clear enough clarion call of the dire need to try to recapture the culture by as desperate means as necessary.

That’s the FB leadership. What about those on the street? The ultimate aims of the movement are further exposed by what mandatory birth advocates say when they are not reading a script. During what proved to be the final Washington DC annual protest against RvW, an antiabortion demonstrator told NPR’s Morning Edition that, after denouncing some for getting abortions to afford a trip to say the Bahamas, that he thought “at the end of the day, we should trust in God and trust that taking someone else’s life isn’t worth [it] – we should rather live in poverty,” and people should not have sex outside of marriage. Among Whites of those who wish to see abortion fully outlawed about two in three want to see American declared a Christian nation based on their invented Biblical principles (https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/05/20/white-christian-nationalism-buffalo-abortion — interestingly, a substantial chunk of those who favor a Christian America are not practicing Christians in this fast secularizing nation, but they think Christian identity and heritage is a good thing).

That those cynical Christofascists go on about the dire danger of Muslims imposing Sharia law in the US– absurd when there are so few Muslims in this nation – is a classic example of projection in that it is they who want to impose Christosharia on the population, and they are in much better position to do so, at least in red parts of the country.

So. How to get the government back under the blessed control of the theocons? You used to have to be fairly sneaky about doing that. Think Charles Boyer. Openly admitting that the ultimate goal is to use the state to bring back the good old theoconservative days by banning abortion et al. would intensify majority opposition, while undermining the legal case for making a private procedure that the Puritans were OK with into murder.

To try to rewin the culture wars via the law they have smartly gone on the sociopolitical offensive by putting a peculiarly lethargic prochoice side on the public relations defensive, to the degree that even many liberals agree that the feticide that has always been common should somehow become uncommon. That abortion should be a hard and sad and infrequent choice consistently avoided by preventing unwanted pregnancies in the first place, rather than by barring terminations. It’s the abortion should be legal but rare line, rather than rare because it’s illegal. Both are naive fantasies – and lies — that have never been achieved and never will be. Early term abortions are the norm in all societies because they involve a modest collection of cells whose humanity is problematic and mainly propounded by extremist theocons, they are fairly easy to do, in secret if necessary, and are not as dangerous as is pregnancy to the mother. At least a fifth of observed pregnancies are terminated, whether that being in advanced democracies with the excellent safe sex education and child care programs that the center-left wants to see operative here in the US, or where the procedure is illegal and riskier (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343147586_Unintended_pregnancy_and_abortion_by_income_region_and_the_legal_status_of_abortion_estimates_from_a_comprehensive_model_for_1990-2019). This is in stark contrast to murder, which is rare in many nations including most democracies — that these gun laden United States are the exception is pertinent because most who claim to be prolife support the widespread distribution of firearms that is the primary people killing device (https://secularfrontier.infidels.org/2022/06/the-real-murder-inc-americas-killing-fields-courtesy-the-gun-industry-that-cannot-get-by-without-the-rampant-murder-they-create-and-the-enthusiastic-help-of-the-religious-right). Because murder involves a patent human being, can be difficult to do, produces an awkward corpse that is hard to secretly dispose of, and those who have been born are usually noticed to have gone missing, outlawing intentional homicide is correspondingly practical because only it renders only a tiny fraction of the population criminals while keeping the event highly atypical – there are under 4000 homicides in western Europe per annum for instance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate), many dozens of times less than feticides. Whatever success is or is not achieved by criminalizing the latter, it does not make much actual difference because the great majority of conceptions will continue to naturally abort, so what is the point? That when making abortion illegal means turning a fifth or more of knowingly pregnant women into lawbreakers each year, and a quarter to a third of all women over their lives, while saving only one in ten of the preborn who will die anyhow, but injuring or killing a number of pregnant women in the punitive process. It is probably not possible to drive yearly American abortions below a few hundred thousand whatever the methods used. Prohibiting abortion works about as well as banning alcohol, and we know how that turned out. A basic legal tenant is that all legitimate laws must be reasonably practicable to implement — the stop the abortions folks like to compare themselves to the abolitionists, but mass enslavement can be ended simply by eliminating all laws that enforce bondage, leaving all slaves free to up and walk away from their masters — birth enforcement does not meet that feasibility criterion. Prochoicers, use that fact.

The theocon Grand Godly plan to try to overturn modernity is simple enough. Having concocted the notion that abortion is against the will of a prolife Lord Creator contrary to all worldly and scriptural evidence, make the private procedure illegal. Killing off RvW was by no means the end of the journey, that step being about half way up the FB ladder. The top goal is ban the procedure nationwide when the Repubs next control the Federal government, and/or as a form of outright murder by extending personhood to conception or fetal heartbeat perhaps via SCOTUS – that such is the ultimate Forced Birth aim is now obvious despite the gas lighting claims otherwise by some but not all prominent anti-abortionists – with RvW out of the way they are becoming quite open about their ultimate aims (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/02/roe-abortion-congress-fourteenth-amendment). The day of the glorious ruling former VEEP and hopeful POTUS Pence among many said that continuing on to a nation of forced birth is the new splendid target. Don’t imagine that the FB movement will keep up the pretense that they don’t want to see women who have abortions, or are suspected of such after having a natural abortion, while not be subjects of arrest – that makes no sense if induced abortion is murder.

That doing so is not likely to actually protect enormous numbers of preborn is not the critical necessity. That would be very nice if it happened in the opinion of many theocons, but with miscarriages already the norm in God’s nature saving the little preborn is not really such a major deal. Some of them admit it – GOP state representative Andrew Sorrell said even if abortion is illegal that it would not stop them, that not being “realistic, anything you make illegal there’s going to be a black market for. There’s a black market for drugs, there was a black market for alcohol during Prohibition.” Exactly. The true activism driving societal hope of most forced birthers is that by making those who terminate pregnancies into criminals and/or at least subject to financial suits, that fear of having abortions will help tame wanton American women to be less willing to be get it on with men outside of holy matrimony. The idea is to deter, discipline, punish and subjugate women into being both more chaste and fecund as the arrogant power hungry theocons want them to be. It’s the fear and shame factors of the rights massive national social engineering project. To that add putting strictures on contraceptives to further boost the righteous mission to reChristianize America – Catholics especially like that. That doing so may well increase induced abortions due to more unintended pregnancies is not the theoconservatives driving concern (with supreme irony, yet another side effect of protection reduction is a great increase in the rate of natural abortions because the latter are so much more common than successful births – but they don’t care). But trivia of that sort cannot be allowed to get in the way of the majestic design to renormalize the Christofascist sexual tyranny of yore. There is always some diversity in a movement, and some socially less extreme force birthers are realizing they have been duped by the crusaders (https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/05/11/karen-swallow-prior-abortion) — it is similar to how some of the “moderate” Taliban who were promising that they would not mistreat women again when they took over Afghanistan have been swept aside by the core of the extremist group now that they have returned to their misogynist power. There are those who are very against abortion on grounds theistic, but because they are also against big government think that the state should stay out of the matter (my Goldwater fan father was like that). But those folks (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/25/abortion-opponents-celebrate) don’t count to the hardline FB crowd.

The schemes of Christofascists to push women into being proper theists are not just aspirationally hopeful via making compulsive birth a deterrent to women not being divinely virtuous. There are growing efforts to set up mandatory birth enclaves in which single pregnant women who cannot get legal abortions and desperately need maternity help will be pressured by their circumstances to retreat to (http://thewashingtonpost.newspaperdirect.com/epaper/viewer.aspx). There they are and will be the target of heavy duty theocon propaganda designed to make them into women of God. State power will be used to boost church power.  love

In 1900, 1950 and 1970 if a wife was impregnated against her will by her husband she had no legal option other than to give birth; why would the religious right want that to be true again in this century? As well as cut back access to contraceptives?

The prochoice side often wonders – often with breathtaking naivety — why those opposed to abortion want to also cut back on the use of sex education and protection that can suppress said abortions. That is because abortion reduction is not the real point, lifestyle alternation is. Get that? That women will be injured and killed by unsafe outlaw abortions and by mandated pregnancies is not a great concern of the birth forcers — those wayward women should have known better than to get pregnant out of wedlock in the first place, and if raped oh well, the growing soul inside them takes priority to its reproductive vessel who needs to understand their Godly prolife duty yet again never mind that the conception is at far greater risk of a natural death. The fear of getting pregnant without abortion as a readily accessible and safe solution is meant to deter doing the sex thing for the fun of it thing. If raped by her husband well what is the problem in the first place, why was she not doing her wifely duty – like in Pakistan, or in England in 1700 or 1300. If a woman who would have gotten a legal termination if she could because it is safer than not having one happens to die from what seemed like a normal pregnancy oh well that’s too bad, it’s God’s Will anyhow, and if she was right with Christ she is in a better place so what is the big problem. That the forced birth laws are going to make it intrinsically harder to deliver proper prenatal care even to those women who are fine with being with child and thereby increase mortality rates of both the person who has the womb and its contents is acceptable because such side losses are well worth the larger project to bring women to pious compliance. The wastage of pregnant women is well worth the glorious aims of the prolifers.

Prochoicers also often ask why those promoting forced birth do not seem all that interested in dramatically improving the level of government assistance to mothers to make them less interested in pregnancy termination in the first place. Dear reader, not providing such aid is an integral part of the great project. Which is to push all American sexually active women to be virtuous dependent wards of their pious husbands. Handing new moms aid from the feds and states would only serve to encourage them to stay single or if married not be sufficiently in control of the hubby in direct opposition to the ultimate goals of government mandated birth, while expanding the power and reach of the secular government. And it lures women away from the religion based charities designed to instruct the gender to be obedient wives – that is why there are efforts underway in red states to increase government support for privately run pregnancy crisis centers that are operated by conservative Christians. For the same reasons, abortion banners are delighted that forcing women to bear children whether they like it or not has been shown to seriously degrade the income earning potential of the gender – all the more reason for females to get hitched. The keeping of women dependent on bread winning male providers is one of the reasons a big chunk of the religious right favors small government over big, and free markets over socialist policies, lest the latter degrade the religiosity of the population as it has done in the developed democracies.  

When the forced birth crowd waxes about how they want to shower those with unwanted pregnancies with their support and love, it is the manipulative cloying “love” and aid of a hyperpaternalistic and arrogant right wing Christians who think they know what is the Godly best for everyone and are itching to use the law to impose their societal authority and will on all who disagree with them. It is the pseudo love of forced obedience and compliance. It is about controlling self-righteous power that dismisses the feelings of those who do not comply as sinful, not truly caring.  

That the Christoright is not doing all that much prep for an explosion of births when abortion is banned does have a perverse logic in that most who want to terminate their pregnancies will find a way to do it, so why bother.

The Race and Minorities Factors

The Christoright project to return America to Godly traditionalism of the type when Ike was president is accompanied by a host of other schemes designed to try to reassert the toxic White Christian Dominion over the nation. It is about sex and race. Thus bashing those, mostly Black, who have taken a knee during the National Anthem (which was written by an advocate of slavery and trashes Black rights which is a reason it was not made the NA until Lost Causers succeeded in the 1930s but that is another subject), evicting views on alternative sexuality and Common Core and liberal social-emotional learning out of public schools and libraries, is sending state investigators to inspect families with trans kids, is going after corporations for standing up for nonconservative social values, and denounces Woke Culture, the 1619 Project, BLM and intersectionality in an effort to protect the delicate sensibilities of White theocons from the history of Ameroracism. Of course LGTBQ lifestyles and rights gay marriage included is in their sights as they are making clear with their heavy duty red states campaign to harass and suppress nonhetero lifestyles. It is a vast campaign of picking on and bullying vulnerable others to help intimidate a dismayed center-left into irrelevance and compliance under the thumb of the ChristoWhiteRight. The combined assault on sexual and racial minorities is why reproductive rights are widely supported by White supremacists and advocates of replacement theory, including some who are not all that Christian in their beliefs and lifestyles. That returns us to the eugenics factor that has long been a motivator of government mandated birth for White women at a time when American Whites are reproducing at a rate well below replacement level as nonWhites rapidly expand their portion of the population by reproduction and especially immigration.

The Rape Nonexception Factor

This is a good place to further explore how the callous indifference of the hard right to rape that has a yet again ingenuous center-left wondering what the hell is going on with these ethically retrograde Christofascists fits in with their traditionalist plans. In their twisted logic a woman who is truly Godly and virtuous cannot be raped to pregnancy because she will not dress or be provocative or intoxicated in a manner that entices a man to sexually assault her, and if one does he will not be able to achieve penetration because of her not being sexually aroused. In that theory only a woman who is sufficiently loose and in some way desiring the assault can be impregnated – remember if you will how during the 2012 election cycle some GOP pols made statements to this effect (https://www.politico.com/story/2012/08/akin-legitimate-rape-victims-dont-get-pregnant-079864 — and these people are now in charge of the show). The slander of women as the foolish temptresses is not at all novel, it goes back over millennia as per the story of sinful and seductive Eve and the apple. As vile as this deep patriarchal attitude appears to today’s ethical westerners, the traditional misogynist opinion was the norm in many societies until the modern feminist movement, and used to be used by defendants in rape cases. In some current societies a woman who was and claims to have been raped risks harsh penalties for her wantonness. At the theocon Liberty University female students who file a sexual assault complaint with school authorities are likely to find themselves charged with violating strict school rules banning sexual and related activity. It is the intent of many forced birthers to revive the legal concept that rape that can and does lead to impregnation is always a false claim. It follows that it is never justified to allow an abortion that resulted from a “rape” – incest included – that never truly occurred because she really wanted it.

The (White Baby) Adoption Incentive

FB advocates note that 2 million couples say they would like to adopt children, but not enough are available, and preventing abortions in favor of forced birth would solve both problems at the same time. The trick is that there already are over 100,000 children who cannot kind find new parents, so in real world terms there already is a surplus. Many of the couples who say they want to adopt but are not willing to take who is available are Whites looking for White babies. So banning abortion is yet another example of White privilege via a form of eugenics enabled by government enforcement, in this case enslavement of White mothers as reproductive vessels of the state. And the even supposedly vast pool of couples waiting to adopt would be tapped out in a few years if the frequency of the procedure is dramatically cut back.

Liberty for Godly Theocons, Ascendency over Secular Liberals

So do not be fooled, coming even close to actually stopping abortions is not the end goal of the forced birth agenda, making it legally and physically hard to do being part of a more important greater scheme. In concert with weaponizing the induced abortions that are dwarfed by those accommodated by any creator as an act worthy of criminalization, they use the sacred theme of All-American Religious Liberty to facilitate discrimination against those the religious right does not approve of, especially all those who are not life time monogamous heterosexuals, and allow theocon medical providers to deny reproductive services they do not sanction – do note that conservative calls for liberties religious and otherwise are carefully crafted to most favor their liberties, for others not so much. Specific to the issue herein, SCOTUS has ruled in favor of red states that force abortion providers in violation of their free speech and religious rights and medical autonomy to inform clients of often false antiabortion information, while overturning blue state regulations that compel under handed mandatory birth clinics to openly inform their clients that they are expressly anti-abortion in nature because that breaches their free speech and religious rights. Got that one? And make divorce more difficult and less frequent. And don’t you pay any mind to how evangelicals denouncing masking and vaccines to protect schoolkids from covid yet further reveals how “prolife” Protestants do not truly care about young lives. And how the right demanding the liberty to not protect themselves, their children and others from covid as a prochoice position is directly contrary to their no choice about pregnancies.

Do observe that bringing deadly viruses to heel does nothing to bring back that old time culture. Banning abortions just might in theocon minds.

Not wanting to overly spill the theoproject beans when it comes to their true aims, birth enforcer theists I chat with are prone to start out saying they just want to save all the innocent preborn. When I ask why, they often claim it is murder. When I ask why they think that, they proclaim it a sin against God. After I point out the reasons that cannot be so – including how a million or so unborn naturally die off every day on the planet, and how the Bible is abortion friendly when it is misogynist — they then resort to vaguely complaining about the decay of society and the need to bring the majority back to the good solid and sound traditional morals that are good for them. Exactly.

Up at the level of the theocon power elites the protestations by Thomas, Alito and Barrett that the conservative wing of the court does not have a larger sociopolitical agenda in mind were proven to be prove to be PR window dressing designed to mislead with comforting false assurances while they proceeded to do what they needed to do to get rid of that pesky RvW and move on to bigger fish. We know that because with the winds behind their SCOTUS sails there is increasingly open talk from the justices and the hard right about overturning judicially and by legislature just about anything center-left when it comes to privacy and sexuality and speech about such – maybe some of those Comstock Laws were not such a bad idea. About time red states can be in charge of contraceptives use. And whatever happened to that wonderful Hayes Code? Do we really need movies coming out celebrating the gay lifestyle for instance? Do we?

This giant sociopolitical power play centered on making abortion illegal got underway as the feminist movement inspired successful EPA opponent Phyllis Schlafly to proclaim that “feminists were promoting abortions instead of families” in 1972, and the Dem presidential candidate McGovern was labeled the “Triple-A candidate: acid, abortion and amnesty. While evangelical views of and actions against RvW were initially disorganized, by 1976 the practical political weaponization into a wedge issue was underway with the GOP convention inserting government mandated birth into the party platform, and passing the Hyde amendment. Matters really ramped up as the Feds starting cracking down on funding racist private religious schools. The first born-again Baptist POTUS Jimmy Carter proved much too liberal – he backing stopping federal funding for theocon colleges practicing racially discriminatory policies to the fury of the Christoright, but they could not complain too much for that — for increasingly fearful and enraged evangelicals. To their growing horror and bitter anger they realized that the second rock and drug driven sexual revolution of the 60s and 70s they so loath/ed, plus the similarly odious new wave feminism, were settling into being the national norm and their permanent sociosexual nightmare. Roe v Wade being a big part of the problem which is certainly has been.

Also firing up the evangelical forced birth movement was the spectacular rise in the percentage of pregnancies being terminated, in the early 1980s it would peak at a third which is atypical by international societal norms. Likewise, STD infections soared in America even as they remained much lower in other sexually progressive nations. That was happening because American youth was not being taught the in-depth sex education that is the standard in other western nations, so teens and twentysomethings were overly using early term legal abortion as a form of contraception.

That actually worked out very well for the right. By pushing against sex-ed and protection use on the pulpit of traditional values they got the very high abortion rate that while they denounced them, they could exploit as ungodly murderous immorality and proof of societal decay – along with all the STD infections — boosting their political fortunes. It has been a strategy as clever as it has been effective.

But for the crafty scheme to operate the evangelicals and hardline Catholics had to suppress their age old acidic theological enmities to ally under the united banner of Muscular Christianity in order to better face the growing cultural and political secular threat, and with the aid of strategists such as Paul Weyrich and his born again buddy Jerry Falwell, turned to their great grandfatherly hero and divorcee Reagan who rarely attended church. But was the first POTUS candidate who took a hardline for forced birth. Then the mediocre preppy Bushes. And now their manly man Trump who as their misogynist, racist, hard talking and chronic lying King Cyrus does their God’s will never mind his boorishly indecent, adulterous, dump the old aging wife in favor of the new babes persona. “Manly” Christianity is not pretty.

After all, God works in mysterious ways.   

To sum up what theocons are up to, being a minority the largely White religious right is trying to force convert the nation into a theocratic autocratic Christian Dominionist republic in which the once traditional and dismally normal, and now retro radical and drearily oppressive, hard right mores are imposed on the majority for their own good. It is a classic and anti-democratic Tyranny of the Minority that cares not one wit about the opinions and desires and well-being of those they desire to bring to societal heel. That they are a minority striving to dominate the majority means nothing to them. Nor do they truly care about the legitimacy of SCOTUS among the American majority that theocons believe should all become theocons, and those who do not need to be under their wise thumb – what they do fear to some extent is a backlash of the majority that may for instance expand SCOTUS to negate a hardcore bench. But they had to sink RvW so they must run that risk. They cannot care because if they give any ground their project of national domination is moot. All the sincere stories by women who have had to obtain abortions often at great effort, or not been able to obtain one sometimes with terrible consequences, mean little to ardent abortion opponents no matter how trying the circumstances up to rape and incest because what happens to nonconservative women has no import to them and threatens their success (such stories are important for swaying fence sitters and rallying the troops as they work to normalize the procedure). The women’s marches? They mean nothing to them. The heartbreak, dismay, anguish, anger, outrage, fury, fear, anxiety, that the majority of American women feel in the wake of being stripped of their right (as per https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8w5tH902MFw). Means nothing – other than sadness of those too willful to follow their dictates — to the dedicated FBs who know what is true and best based on their supernaturalistic speculations. Persuasion is not their modus operandi because that does not work the FB argument being barren, raw power is their means of control. There is therefore no compromising. And to be fair the prochoice side cannot give any ground from their side when it comes to early term abortion — either women are full class citizens, or they are reproductive wards of the state once sperm merges with egg inside their suddenly no longer sovereign bodies.

(Some note that abortion regs are not as open in some other democracies as they are in principle under RvW. In those nations a major religious right is not using forced birth laws to convert the nation, and many Christofascists are against FB laws. And those tight regulations are problematic in any case.)

The incredible, reckless extremes to which the theocons will cheerfully go have been laid bare by the Texas et al. stratagem that employs citizens as cash collecting birth enforcers, forming a snitch society out of Constitutional grounds characteristic of the authoritarian regimes theocons pretend to despise as they work to set such up.

Are You Kidding? The Rank Immorality of the Religious Right

It is as incredible as it is galling the degree to which those who pretend to be deeply moral belong to institutions that are all too often the opposite. It has long been proven that the Catholic priesthood was extensively involved in sexual assaults on children, that the higher echelons of the church protected them from criminal prosecution for decades, and the Vatican has yet to fully address the issue. It is now known that the Southern Baptists clergy has long been engaged in the same blend of extensive sexual criminal activity followed by cover up (https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2019/february/southern-baptist-abuse-investigation-houston-chronicle-sbc.html).

This when the hard right is inventing tales of liberal Democrats being involved in a mysteriously hidden pedophile/cannibalism cabal – and clear case of evasion via projection.

That the super arrogant people involved in these profoundly corrupt institutions dare to even consider lecturing others on issues of morality, much less use law to impose their Godly views on the rest of the population, is appalling, outrageous, and never should be allowed. To that add that two of the Christocon justices have had serious charges of sexual impropriety thrown against them, with both denying with angry charges of unfairness against them. Yet here they all are having stripped women of their intimate reproductive rights and 1^st class citizen status.

How Theocons Did It

A very big reason a disciplined minority movement has gotten so far pushing the Grand Lie they invented out of whole scriptural and biological cloth to the national forefront with shocking success is because they are doing one thing very right — voting at high per capita rates — while a major portion of a perpetually electorally slack center-left has treated voting as a maybe will do it or maybe not option, rather than the urgent civic duty of all citizens it is. Young adults who are prone to be progressive are particularly likely to not vote. As a result theocons outvote the rest of us by about 10% per head, enough to reinforce the right leaning bias of the Senate and electoral college, which in turn allows the GOP to better control the election system – this is why the demographic predictions of permanent and solid Emerging Democratic Majority predicted a couple of decades ago has yet to come to pass. Thus a White House the theocons hold about half the time while winning the popular vote only once after 1988, a closely divided Congress that flips back and forth, a 6/3 SCOTUS, and most states run by increasingly fanatical Republicans. The one thing theoconservatives do dread is the center-left finally getting their electoral act together and making the Democratic Party the dominant party of the nation and most states, and if necessary reformulate the Supreme Court to bring it more in line with majority opinion.

How We Blew It

In contrast to the theocon’s methodical and effective, offense-based operation to deny sexual and reproductive rights as part of a relentless, mammoth cultural war, the center-left has treated abortion as an important but not really extremely urgent issue that had been largely left to a weakening SCOTUS minority to take care of as best it could thank you, using the same justification utilized in RvW half a century ago without producing additional logical legal arguments. That being such a bother what when ancient and correspondingly reckless Ginsberg who refused to preserve the legacy of her seat by resigning in 2013 and her liberal court comrades would take care of matters. Right? Compare that to how a younger Sandra Day O’Conner strategically retired when she knew she would be replaced by a theocon. When Ginsberg was balking at getting out when the getting was good did the reproductive rights community lean on her to put the ability of women to not be forced by the government to continue their pregnancies to birth over her desire to not be a retiree? No. Why was it that while abortion opponents regularly harassed clinics and patients, the prochoice folks rarely showed up in similar much less bigger numbers to counter demonstrate? (Kudos to the volunteers who escorted patients into the clinics.)

The amazing failure of a less organized and too defensive women’s right movement to push religious rights as a key need for protecting the gender from forced birth has been as illogical as it is remiss to the point of being disastrous. A basic strategy of a movement is to go on the offensive by turning a core argument and the language of the opposition into a weakness that now hurts them more than it helps. But, like most factions, liberals like to live in a comforting cultural bubble within which such internally reinforcing progressive clique code terms as personal autonomy and sexual freedom are deployed to defend reproductive rights. Such speaking to the choir dialectics, while they have a lot of truth to them, have obviously not done enough to undercut the theocon argument, a new direction is badly needed. Yet in the only major opinion journal article looking at using religious freedom to defend abortion rights I know of, a brief news commentary in The Atlantic in 2016. the reluctance of the pro-choice side to utilize the Establishment Clause of the 1^stAmendment due to cultural discomfort was covered, and the ensuing improbability of such ever being done observed. Liberals just don’t like all that chat about religion and liberty, that’s right wing stuff. Which is a reason that the astonishing and potentially crippling to the FB’s fact that the Bible actually endorses abortion is barely known. That would be fine if abortion rights were secure. But they are not. Just repeating the same old same old to the masses and to the courts is hardly likely to recover the situation. Time to adjust tactics and talk 1^stAmendment. Take the right’s terminology such as their favorite word liberty, particularly religious liberty, and throw it right back at them. As per how gays used the conservative themes of family values and marriage to seize the legal and public relations high ground. And things are changing on an informal basis – I have been noticing of late that prochoice advocates are starting to ad-hoc state that having the intimacy of their reproduction coming under the control of the religious right as a gross denial of their religious rights – liberal Christian Joy Reid on MSNBC has been prone to doing so — something I had not heard often before if ever. It was that combined with the deteriorating national situation, the rapidly approaching SCOTUS cases, and my work on the natural mass losses of the unborn, that caused me to produce this piece.

That abortion as a 1^stAmendment religious right was not inserted into Roe v Wade from the get go is as understandable as it was a long term mistake. A half century ago the illegality of abortion was seen as a relic of old fashioned Victorianism mixed with male MDs having wanted to knock midwives out of business. Most mid 20^thcentury doctors were in contrast horrified by the constant stream of women into the health care system suffering from botched abortions, with some 200 dying each year. And among religious sects only the Roman Church was consistently government mandated birth, Protestants being all over the map even among the evangelicals. So there was little or no thought given to addressing the religious issues back in the day. Since then mandatory birth has moved to front and center to the CathoProtestant theoconservative struggle to reorder the national society, and it is nearly entirely their thing. And the reliance on one section of the Constitution, the 14^thAmendment, has proven dangerously narrow. So hitting back by going on the attack when it comes to the religious and health aspects of the confrontation has become obvious and imperative.

A factor in not citing religious freedom has been a legal oddity. The theory is that while having an abortion may not be forbidden by a woman’s non/religion, ending a pregnancy is not required by her worldview, so she is not protected by the 1^st Amendment from being forced to continue on to birth. Odd. Should that not mean that while praying in public may not be forbidden by a person’s theism, doing so is not required by their faith, so s/he is not protected by the 1^st Amendment from being prevented from praying in public? Anyhow, countering that legal sleight of hand, makes it all the important to formally demonstrate that the stop abortions movement is a part of greater religious scheme to massively remake the nation into a Christoright dominated country in which the power of the government to pressure women as individuals and culture at large to conform to the mores of the religious right.

How to Win

I am not a lawyer, but one does not have to be one to know that a basic legal strategy when presenting a major case is to make it as broad-based and multi-faceted as possible. For one thing, that maximizes the possibility that at least some or one the arguments seals the legal deal and wins the day. Even better, multiple lines of argument can reinforce one another, making the entire package more difficult to dismiss. Consider the following. A possible fear of citing religious freedom as a defense of abortion rights is that theocons could then use that precedent to promote religious freedom as justifying discrimination against the LGTBQ, and those seeking reproductive services. But that premise is weak because of the lack of harm to the bigot. When someone does not want to provide service to a person who is not a monogamous heterosexual, they are not actually physically harmed if they are compelled by law to do so. For example, if — as once was very common — a person holds a sincere belief that blacks or Jews are in some manner defective in the eyes of God, and that justifies their refusal to treat the latter equal to Whites, then having to do so because of the Civil Rights Act does not result in real damage being done to the bigot. So the CRA is constitutional. If a pregnant woman is forced to go through her entire pregnancy, then she may die or be badly injured as per the stats previously detailed. Medical exemptions that allow those threatened with injury or death to terminate pregnancies is far from sufficient because such often do not manifest until late in the pregnancy, when an abortion is itself risky to the mother. And her risk of serious mental distress from a long term pregnancy is many times higher. The medical risks of pregnancy alone are sufficient to ban forced birth. But the combined religious, privacy, and medical rights of persons to not be pregnant (however they became so) are most powerful when they are used to support one another.

If theists proclaim it is their religious right to not aid reproductive practices they think a God rejects, then by that criteria a pregnant woman can proudly declare that as far as she can see any overseer of a planet that has with no apparent concern of that entity terminated countless billions of preborn is fine with her doing the same. Or there is no creator in the first place. Religious liberty is not just about the freedom to be religious as one wishes the way one wishes, it is the freedom from theism theoconservatism included. It follows that the state and/or snitches preventing her from controlling what is happening inside her is moral and legal madness and barbarity that violate her Constitutional rights in enormous spades. One advantage of advancing abortion as a religious right will be to force theocon judges to reveal the extremity of their quasi legal inconsistency if they so tilt the scales of justice in favor one set of theorights over the other, exposing their rulings as bad law. That sets up the legal brief for constitutionally overturning forced birth laws.

Late is better than never, and time is a wasting. So what needs to be done to recover the situation in court and voting booths? Along with the standards of full citizenship via autonomous reproductive privacy rights for women, begin to focus on the religious and medical liberties of handling one’s own pregnancy without interference from hardline theoconservative based government edicts or Christoright empowered vigilantes as a key Constitutional right under the First Amendment. Do that by building the following case. And use it now that RvW is overturned.

The Founders who wrote the Constitution did not consider the issue, and had an abortion ban been raised by Catholics it would have been rejected at some point as an obvious contravention of the 1^stAmendment. Nowadays government mandated birth laws are an unacknowledged insidious conspiracy from one religious world view designed by right wing Protestants and Catholics to above all else to try to massively reformulate the national culture to fit their traditional faith-based image. Although they won’t openly admit that, there is abundant public theocon discourse to present as evidential exhibits. The religious nature of antiabortionism is directly exposed when they say that their – i. e. theocon – values concerning preborn life are behind the laws they advocate. As for the narrow religious view of birth enforcement a few scholars such Barbara Pfeffer Billauer (https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmjowl/vol23/iss2/6) are documenting how forced birthism is limited to a narrow set of religious doctrines, while many others have disagreed, going all the way back in history, rendering forced birth laws a violation of Constitutional religious right (in contrast to murder which is condemned by all mainstream cultures). It is time for the women’s right cause to get off its liberal sensibilities duff and pay close attention to such meticulous academic work.

So, when and where the Muscular Christianity birth forcers win their case, then only one religious opinion on the matter becomes legally operative on all fertile women to the exclusion of all others regardless of their a/theist opinion on their pregnancies. That when imposing that extreme hardline view on women of differing a/theologies denies them control and maximal safety of their bodies for extended periods. Such theologically idiosyncratic laws lack practical secular justification on the following grounds. The status of a zygote or an early term fetus as a human being is very dubious and held nearly entirely by theoconservatives, and aborting them does not have significant adverse impact outside the body of the woman. Emphasize the sheer impracticality of enforcing a feticide ban, and actually suppress abortion rates to low levels even via draconian decrees. That means that birth enforcement is a waste of law enforcement resources that will make millions of women miserable and/or criminals while maximizing their medical danger from either pregnancies gone bad or the numerous illicit abortions that will inevitably ensue, all the while massively interfering with the deepest privacy of persons. Far more so than the mask and vaccine mandates most theocons are out of the blue rejecting as outrageous violations of personal liberty. This when there is a major effort to relieve an already overburdened law enforcement and court complex.

The deeply disingenuous and misogynist nature of government paternalism on such a colossal scale is all the more true because the persistent claims by anti-abortionists that their reproductive regulations are intended to serve the interests and safety of pregnant women regardless of her opinion on the matter, are the opposite of actual medical truth, and violate their religious and medical sovereignty when their religious views are compatible with ending pregnancies. Making this yet all the truer is that mandatory birth for “alleged” victims of rape/incest is part of a depraved project to decriminalize rape by legally rendering it something that cannot happen to a proper and chaste woman who does not want to have her virtue sullied, much less be impregnated. Racism is also involved in the forced birth movement because minorities are more opposed to and afflicted by abortion restrictions than Whites. So is eugenics in that preventing White women from failing to reproduce remains a goal of some forced birthers. Then there is the sexism of targeting the commonly discriminated against female gender with such draconian restrictions that no man has to put up with and many men which to impose. Because abortion banning laws are evidentially imbedded in a large scale religious sociopolitical agenda they blatantly violate the Bill of Rights on multiple fronts. Core rights that cannot be trumped by the religious right via government authority to force those who are prochoice nontheists or theists to give birth, just as the state cannot force women to abort their pregnancies.

As explained by Aaron Tang (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/10/26/middle-ground-abortion-that-originalists-should-embrace) the original Constitution, and the 14^thAmendment in association with how most state laws at the time did not ban abortion before quickening, support the right to early term abortion. That abortion is an nonenumerated right contradicts the majority SCOTUS thesis that the courts should stay away from the issue.

The profoundly theistic nature of the criminalize abortion movement is not being entirely ignored. Some atheosecular organizations filed amicus briefs explicitly to that effect in relation to the Mississippi case this December (https://www.au.org/sites/default/files/2021-09/AU%20Amicus%20Brief%2C%20SCOTUS%2C%20Dobbs%20v.%20Jackson%209.20.21.pdf; https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/19/19-1392/192717/20210917120823669_Dobbs%20Final%20Brief.pdf). These petitions do a good job of detailing some of the clear cut religious statements and court briefs by forced birth theists. They not expressly detail how antiabortionism is part of a greater open conspiracy to remake the nation. In any case the religion factor must not be a legal issue raised just by nontheists, it must be mainstreamed. (A large number of center-left entities have submitted briefs to the top court, whether any cite religious freedom and how I do not know.) Pertinent to that need, one of the briefs very notably cites a 1989 opinion by Justice Stevens that has gone little noticed noting that government bans of abortion violate the Establishment Clause, that is an important mainline legal precedent by a SCOTUS jurist without an a/theistic bias to build upon.

Another legal angle that should be considered is that a woman who is required to carry a fetus for months against her will is a reproductive slave of the state as was the norm for enslaved Blacks, which violates the 13^th Amendment. And there are the equal rights for women issues.

In tandem, cite the mass death of youngsters to disprove the theocon pretense that they are merely doing the urgent bidding of a life loving creator. Same for the absence of compulsive birthism in scripture. Their real aims are much more theosocietal. And further seize control of the rhetoric war by saddling the prolife cause with the stark term forced birth, as well as mandatory, compulsive, etc., on a regular basis. That is exactly what they are trying to enforce. For a rare and especially eloquent example of a woman who deliberately says forced birth see Kate Manning’s detailing of the odium many women have for government mandated pregnancy and why see https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/31/antiabortion-laws-are-forced-birth-laws. Manning equates being sentenced to give birth to the cruel and unusual punishment it is for many.

Very importantly, Jews in Florida are the first to officially and explicitly take on abortion bans as denying their theological religious rights as being persons who are not Christocons. They must just be the start to present such court cases – atheosecular groups should join in the effort by one means or another. What is missing from the Florida suit is an explicit description and opposition to abortion limitations being part of an explicitly theistic movement with intentions of religiously altering the nation. Such should be the norm in such legal petitions.  

That the minority dissent to the overturn of RvW (https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf) makes no mention of the religious bias of forced birth laws was seriously disappointing, all the more so because Justice Sotomayor brought up the issue during the oral arguments. I may be missing something but that seems a big mistake not to introduce the issue in a major way when the opportunity arose. It looks like the Florida and other suits that directly confront the courts with the subject will be needed to get this legal ball rolling towards the highest judicial levels – perhaps the liberal justices were presuming that will provide the opportunity, but one fears that the theocon majority will avoid the awkward problem by simply refusing to hear the cases.

Also remiss has been the mainstream news media that has been negligent in investigating and exposing the deep, extremist motives driving the opposition to legal abortion, and from that informing the nation of what they are up to. Do not, for example, merely ask an anti-abortion activist or politician if they do not want an exception for rape and why, and when they issue the standard line that they think the fetus is precious take that as a complete answer and move on to the next query. That is exactly what they want. Example. The day RvW was overturned NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly interviewed the long term forced birther former governor of Mississippi (https://www.npr.org/2022/06/24/1107531593/former-governor-whose-bill-was-at-the-center-of-roe-ruling-reacts-to-scotus-deci). In the process he made it blazingly clear how he saw banning abortion as a religious matter, opining that any woman considering a pregnancy termination not banned in the Bible must “kneel and pray to God, who is the God of everyone.” He had handed the reporter the perfect exceptional opportunity for her to press the Christoright politician by asking if he and allies were not then violating the 1^st Amendment by denying the religious rights of nontheocons. Instead, Kelly in standard interview mode moved on to the regular line of how many pregnant women are in circumstances that are difficult, allowing the former governor to gladly come back with the usual FB theme that adoption is an option. Big opportunity missed. So. At long last pin the FBs down by asking if they think rape and abortion laws need to be revamped as part of a greater scheme to remake society along traditional lines. That will put the forced birth advocate in a bind — if they say yes then they will reveal their real plans and provoke harder opposition, if they say they no they may turn off their base, and if they dodge the question they risk doing both. Do not simply ask an FB is they think women who have an abortion either by their own hand or by the actions of another if they think women should be jailed for homicide. They will do a gaslight dodge. Follow up by asking the person if they will entirely oppose the criminalization of women, or if they will be OK with such if and when that happens. Same for the nationalization of abortion bans. The media needs to get on the coverage ball and do their jobs.

Is going on the offensive by bringing true religious liberty to the forefront of the pro-choice argument, going to abort the forced birth campaign in the next few years? That by compelling abortion stoppers to realize that they – seeing as how they claim to put such high priority on religious liberty and therefore should respect those who claim to be expressing such when they have an abortion — are manifestly and erroneously violating the theoliberty of theoliberals and nontheists? Considering their boldly self-sided view of liberties to date best not to hold one’s breath. But do not wave away the medium and longer term potential to seriously damage and perhaps someday sink antiabortionism in legal venues and public opinion. Consider how pushing marriage rights for all couples worked for gays over years, not long decades. There are theoconservatives who deeply oppose abortion, but see banning it as big government imposition of a religious belief on citizens that strip women of their liberty. Reinforce that opinion. Most critical is for the solid majority who favor women being full citizens to vote at least at the per capita rate as do those who want to use reproduction to remake American women into unsullied subservient theocons. That can render forcing birth into a fundamental violation of a pregnant woman’s religious liberty and medical needs.

Appendix: Will the Force Birth Scheme Work?

For all the fondness the religious right has for the 1950s, it was actually a massive failure for their movement. The 1950s were not even traditionalist. The White flight of Caucasians living in nuclear families in detached housing out the burbs was radical. Prior to then most lived as extended families in rural or urban settings. The decade was actually highly sexualized what with the likes of Marilynn Monroe, Jane Russell, the Miss America contest, Playboy, the sex thrusting of Elvis the pelvis and salacious lyrics of Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis. The Comstock laws were on their last legs and the Hayes Code was on the way out. It was the 50s parents that raised a large chunk of the baby boomers that would go wild in the 60s, as their parents initiated the divorce boom that is still running. The secularization and social liberalization forces of corporate consumer modernity were well underway and the right wing churches under the Aegis of Billy Graham and Cardinal Sheen could not prevent.

That abortion was illegal in the 1950s did not preserve traditional cultural, social and religious values over the long term — the 2^nd sexual revolution was already well underway when RvW came along. For that matter the Comstock Laws et al. did not stop the 1^st sexual revolution of the 1920s, and Prohibition actually helped promote it. It is very possible if not probable that reimposing forced birth laws and other legal rollbacks of nontraditional mores will fail to reconstitute the deity fearing, old fashioned, prudish society the theocons so want to impose on the country as the American Majority thumbs their noses at the prigs.

That is the optimistic view. The pessimistic alternative has the Christoconservatives proving able to impose autocratic minority rule on the nation. In that case they may be able to use harsh government power, even beyond that seen in the 1800s going into the early 1900s, to subdue the opposition.

Time will tell.