As of this writing, more than 80,600 Americans have died from Covid-19, the disease caused by the new strain of the coronavirus. Twelve thousand of that total died in the last seven days alone. The rate of death has increased from less than 2,000 a day now to more than 2,500 a day. We are likely going to see about 100,000 deaths by week’s end.
The more governments push people back to work, the more people are exposed to disease, sending the daily death toll higher. While all leaders must find a way to balance public safety and economic order, Donald Trump and his confederates aren’t bothering to search. GOP governors in states like Georgia have not only dismissed his “reopening” guidelines; they have inspired his administration to abandon them.
Republican governors know sending Americans back to work is almost certainly going to worsen the pandemic in the absence of a viable vaccine. They are moving forward anyway. In doing so, they are in essence telling their constituents that government isn’t going to nanny you. The state isn’t going to second-guess you. They are saying that private decisions of life and death are not the government’s to make. They are yours.
This of course flies in the face of the Republican Party’s monolithic opposition to abortion. If private decisions of life and death are yours to make, not the government’s, why are Republican-controlled states doing everything they can to outlaw abortion so that a private decision of life and death is the government’s to make, not yours?
Moreover, if “the unborn” have a “right to life,” why don’t the already born have that same and equal right? If a fetus isn’t a cluster of cells but a person constitutionally protected under the 14th Amendment — if abortion is a civil rights issue, as anti-abortionist claim — isn’t the onus on the government to protect that right? Isn’t “reopening” economies, and sending some to their doom, a violation of that right?
It’s tempting to quip that the pandemic has turned the Republicans into a pro-choice party (life and death decisions are yours and yours alone). That’s clearly false, though. Truer, I think, is the pandemic has revealed something about the GOP’s stance on abortion. It doesn’t make sense, because it’s not supposed to make sense unless you’re in on a game whose real goal has nothing to do with the rights of “the unborn.” The point is controlling women — or punishing them for experiencing “illegitimate” sex.
This isn’t news, obviously, and it shouldn’t take a pandemic to reveal the moral and legal absurdities of the “pro-life” movement. Think about it. If a fetus is a person, as the anti-abortionists claim, what are they really saying? They are really saying that the government can and should force one person (the mother) to give another person (“the unborn”) access to her body with or without her consent. Flip this around and you have an argument nearly refusing to recognize the moral profanity and legal crime of rape.
But the absurdity doesn’t end there. If there’s a such a thing as a “right to life,” and if a fetus is a person with a constitutional right to access the body of another person for the purpose of living, why not the already born? For instance, if I need a new kidney to avoid dying, and you have one to spare, can I call on the government to force you to surrender one ? A reasonable person would say hell no, but the “pro-life” movement might accept such absurdity if accepting it led to the goal of controlling women and what they choose to do with their bodies, especially their individual freedom to say no.
I hope it’s clear I’m not defending murder (which is one of the moral knots pro-choice people must untie once they concede that a fetus is a person). I am, however, defending abortion as it stands for the benefit of people indifferent to it. The pandemic isn’t going to move partisans, but it might show people on the fence that the argument isn’t about the child so much as the mother’s body, and the argument says less about the rights of “the unborn” than it does the rights of the already born, which include men.
The “pro-life” movement asks us to take seriously a certain set of moral premises, which the movement itself doesn’t take seriously. If it did, Republican governors like Greg Abbott of Texas would not rush to “reopen” his state knowing with a certainty that doing so will increase the likelihood and daily rate of death, not only violating the right to life but falsely suggesting he now believes a women’s body is hers to control.
Since the “pro-life” movement doesn’t take its own premises seriously, all it’s doing is practicing the politics of the occult — it doesn’t make sense, doesn’t intend to make sense, is hostile toward sense-making, and, to the degree that it does make sense, makes sense only to people already in on the movement’s true political objective.
The pandemic isn’t going to change the minds of “pro-life” partisans.
But at least it can reveal their politics of the occult.
John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.
Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global
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Released: 11 May 2020
Word Count: 864
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