Anti-abortion laws are built on anti-abortion lies. Lies about things like who has abortions, how abortions work, how women’s bodies work and how fetuses develop. The lies pave the way for the laws.
There are the old lies, like the ones suggesting that the women having abortions are careless hussies (51% of abortions are to women who were using contraception; 59% are to women who are already mothers; 75% are to poor and low-income women). Lately, there’s a huge new lie making the rounds, that women and doctors are conspiring to kill babies at birth and calling it abortion. This is a lie that encourages conservatives to regard pregnant women and medical caregivers as potential ruthless killers who should be hemmed in with yet more laws targeting them. While a lot of older abortion lies were distortions and exaggerations, this one is a complete and dangerous fabrication.
At a late April rally in Wisconsin, Donald Trump said: “The baby is born. The mother meets with the doctor. They take care of the baby. They wrap the baby beautifully, and then the doctor and the mother determine whether or not they will execute the baby.” (Apparently the closest thing to this far-fetched scenario is when babies are born with fatal problems and, at the discretion of the parents, receive palliative care rather than often tortuous interventions that will delay their inevitable death.) Fox host Ainsley Earhardt amplified the lie, saying :“I think it backfired on those Democrats when they all said you can have an abortion even after the baby is born or kill the baby after the baby is born.”
This kind of procedure has never been considered abortion, but it’s a framework that helps portray abortion at any stage for any reason as murder.
Crucially, this new lie may have contributed to a climate in which lawmakers in Georgia and Alabama were willing to criminalize medical caregivers and make them subject to new kinds of scrutiny. Under a new Alabama law, as CNN put it: “Any physician who is convicted of performing an abortion in the state would be a Class A felon – the highest level in Alabama.” The 10th anniversary of the murder of abortion provider George Tiller in Wichita, Kansas, just passed; in late 2015 a white gunman with a history of domestic violence shot up a Colorado Planned Parenthood, killing three parents of young children and injuring several others. He called himself “a warrior for the babies”. Planned Parenthood provides abortions and, as the nation’s frontline supplier of reproductive healthcare, including contraception and sex education, prevents them.
Around the time that this myth of infanticide was being promoted, House whip Steve Scalise, a Republican from Louisiana, had a “born alive discharge petition tracker” on the top of his official government webpage. It is part of a campaign suggesting that abortions result in live births of viable fetuses who are then killed or allowed to die. The huge majority of abortions take place before the embryo or fetus is viable outside the womb; fetuses emerging from abortion procedures alive are extremely rare, but there are federal and state laws regulating these cases, often framed in ways that make them sound both more common and the consequences more homicidal. In Minnesota in 2017, for example, out of more than 10,000 abortions, three live fetuses were recorded, but died soon after.
There’s another lie built into a lot of the new bills: the idea that they stop the abortion of fetuses with heartbeats. In actual fact, so-called “heartbeat bills” would also apply to embryos that haven’t yet become fetuses and whose cells haven’t yet multiplied or formed complex organs, including a fully formed heart. These bills seem designed to influence public imagination, not accurately register development in utero. Despite that, the Georgia law is supposed to “provide for advising women seeking an abortion of the presence of a detectable human heartbeat”.
Some fear the new laws may lead to more widespread criminalization of miscarriages. There are about a thousand cases to date of women whose miscarriages have been criminalized; Jezebel reported last month: “Black women and low-income women are more likely to be arrested for these pregnancy-related charges.” Up to 20% of known pregnancies, perhaps half of all pregnancies, according to a 2018 study, result in miscarriage. Criminalizing them would mean that women having sex with men would run the risk of being treated as murderers for common biological events beyond their control. In that world, it’s conceivable that if the authorities know you’re pregnant, thanks to medical visits (or fertility apps), you run the risk of being charged with the “crime” of having a miscarriage or an abortion, which would be an incentive to avoid healthcare services.
Like many other states’ new laws, the Georgia law bans abortion at a stage of pregnancy so early some women don’t know they’re pregnant and if they do find out, they will have to move fast to make the deadlines. So abortions will remain available, but under increasingly impossible terms because of abortion laws driven by stories about things that don’t actually happen.
Some abortions are to complete the process of a miscarriage to protect the mother’s life; the 2018 Irish abortion referendum overturning the ban on the procedure was prompted in part by the death of a woman, Dr Savita Halappanavar, who was having a miscarriage, was denied a medically necessary abortion as long as there was a fetal heartbeat, even though the fetus would die anyway, and who developed a fatal infection as a result.
Meanwhile, Texas is in the process of passing a law that will make women into living coffins, forced to carry dying or doomed fetuses to term. The Texas Tribune reports: “The Texas Senate passed a bill on Tuesday that would ban abortions on the basis of the sex, race or disability of a fetus, and criminalize doctors who perform what opponents call ‘discriminatory abortions’. Current state law prohibits abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, but there are certain exceptions, such as when the pregnancy is not viable or the fetus has ‘severe and irreversible’ abnormalities. Senate Bill 1033 would do away with those exceptions.”
It seems unlikely anyone is seeking an abortion because of the race of the baby, but it does tie into the myth that abortion is part of a eugenics campaign, though US supreme court justice Clarence Thomas just made that charge. (The Washington Post cited “seven scholars of the eugenics movement; all of them said that Thomas’s use of this history was deeply flawed”.)
Sometimes the mostly white, mostly male legislators pushing these lies seem like amoral strategists. Sometimes they just seem like idiots. NBC reports: “The new bill currently introduced by Republicans in the Ohio state house would preclude doctors from pursuing the standard of care in cases of life-threatening ectopic pregnancies” – when a fertilized egg grows outside of the uterus – “and ban private insurance companies from covering it by calling it an abortion and forcing them, instead, to cover a re-implantation procedure whether the woman wanted that or not”. Except you can’t save an ectopic pregnancy, but by delaying abortion you risk letting the mother die. So this is a bill to force a procedure that doesn’t exist to save an embryo or fetus who’s doomed while risking the life of the mother who can be saved. It isn’t pro-life, but it is pro-lie.
Michelle Alexander made a really important point in the New York Times, recently: all that palaver about exemptions for rape just mean that rape victims who want abortions will have to try to prove they were raped. Given how rarely men are convicted of rape, and how slow and intrusive and hostile to victims the legal process is, one can imagine the fetus reaching preschool age or maybe kindergarten or possibly law school before the court case is concluded.
It is another way to intrude into women’s lives and terminate their rights. It puts women’s lives in the hands of law enforcement and entangles medical decisions with bureaucracies and regulations. And under the Alabama law, there is no incest and rape exemption: the 11-year-old raped by her father will be sentenced to nine months pregnancy with all the health risks that entails, as well as the horror.
Women’s reproductive rights activists have been noting for decades that it would be easier to believe that anti-choice politicians cared about babies if they supported prenatal health, maternal healthcare, early childhood development and education and other resources that support the wellbeing of mothers and children. But you can go further than that. Two scholars noted in the New England Journal of Medicine 18 years ago that “homicide was in fact the leading cause of mortality during pregnancy and the first postpartum year, accounting for one out of five deaths. Simultaneously, a study in the Journal of Midwifery & Women’s Health found that an astounding 43% of maternal deaths over eight years in Washington DC, were homicides.”
One key way to address this would be gun control, but of course anti-abortion and gun control are often brought to us by the same people, and together the two positions seem to be about unlimited, unfettered power for men, who own and use guns (and kill people) at much higher rates than women. Pew reported that in 2017, “white men are especially likely to be gun owners: about half (48%) say they own a gun, compared with about a quarter of white women and nonwhite men (24% each) and 16% of nonwhite women”.
Anti-abortion advocates have often suggested that an unwanted, unplanned pregnancy is somehow a thing malicious women do on their own. There are intentional, wanted pregnancies achieved through sperm donors and in-vitro fertilization, but pretty much every other pregnancy is due to a person injecting sperm into a person with eggs through penetrative vaginal sex. There may be cases where the carelessness is hers, there are cases where it’s his, there are cases where careful precautions fail, or where wanted pregnancies go terribly wrong.
What we don’t talk about often enough is how blurry the boundaries are, how often women are cajoled and pressured and lied to in order to allow, for the sake of penile pleasure, unprotected penetrative sex that can result in pregnancy. The last time I heard a story about a man who violated the agreement to use a condom was last week. The idea of holding men responsible for unwanted pregnancy is beginning to take hold in some quarters. Imagine if those who impregnate were held as responsible as those who are impregnated. It’s a slippery slope, since the decision to terminate should belong to the pregnant person, and of course the goal should not be to criminalize anyone. But recognizing that no one gets pregnant alone and many pregnancies are as much the responsibility of the person with sperm as the person with an egg might be interesting.
An extraordinary story hit the news the other day. “A police report says a south Mississippi lawmaker punched his wife in the face after she didn’t undress quickly enough when the lawmaker wanted to have sex.” Republican representative Doug McLeod allegedly bloodied his wife’s nose, she bled all over the bed and floor, and fled the room, and the police were called. (He has said reports mischaracterize what happened.) It’s hard to regard the kind of sex he intended to have as consensual, if a frightened partner was punished for not obeying orders with enough alacrity. It’s a little window into the kind of marriage in which women have little bodily self-determination, in which their decision to use birth control or refrain from sex during their most fertile time may be overridden. I looked up McLeod; sure enough he had introduced a “fetal heartbeat” anti-abortion bill earlier this year.
Reproductive rights are what make women in their fertile years able to participate fully in public and economic life, to have the same bodily sovereignty men take for granted, to be free and equal. I believe the hatred of abortion is often because it makes women free and equal, and it is often advocated by people who show no interest in the health of infants or wellbeing of children. Or women. And at this point, in science, facts and truth. Their lies pave the way for their laws.
