Hey, Girlie You Got Pregnant, Live with It. The Unfortunate Ideology of Pro-Life
American Eclectic posts articles twice a month, on the 1st and 15th. This is the second year of publication; previously published articles can be found on my site.
February 1, 2024
My late wife who died sixteen years ago was an OB/GYN. When she started out in practice, the thought of doing abortions never crossed her mind. I know the abortions she did since we discussed every one of them, as well as the issue of helping women who initially wanted an abortion, but we found a way to help them go to term.
One night we received a phone call from a therapist we knew. The therapist had referred patients to my wife over several years, but this call was different. The therapist had a patient she wanted my wife to see, and she did. About two weeks later, we discussed the abortion my wife had performed on the woman. The patient had gotten pregnant on a dare from her lesbian girlfriends. When my wife first met this woman, what stood out were the stitches on both arms—she repeatedly took a razor blade and tried to bleed to death. There was no doubt that this pregnancy was never going to happen and saving the woman’s life was, unfortunately, the lesser of two evils.
In addition to this abortion there was the woman who came to her and said she needed an abortion because of her husband. She and her husband were not Americans, and he was in the United States in a medical residency program. The couple had a test done to determine the sex of the developing fetus and it was female. The husband threatened to leave his wife in the United States unless she had an abortion—he wanted a son. Another abortion involved a woman who had an affair with a man in her group therapy session and she became pregnant. She discussed with him that she wanted an abortion. His advice was that she should killed herself, because, as he put it, he was “pro-life.” There is no logical thinking here, obviously this showed why he needed therapy.
While I point out these abortions, there were times where we helped women who wanted to carry their pregnancies to term. There were women who came to see my wife and asked if there was something they could take—late in a pregnancy-to end it. I clearly remember my wife telling one patient, “Put your hand on your stomach and feel what is moving around inside you.” She called me and asked if we could put the woman up in our house until she delivered. She was living with her mother, and they had an argument, and her mother was forcing her to move out. Imagine the family dynamics going on here where a mother forces her daughter out of her house late in a pregnancy. We agreed to put her up in a basement bedroom until she delivered and then she moved in with her sister who lived across the country. She stayed with us about five to six weeks.
In the case of another patient, she also wanted a late-term abortion and we again agreed to put her up in our basement bedroom. This situation turned out to be a bit more anxiety-filled than the previous one. Her husband somewhere along the way wanted her to end her pregnancy and the wife, apparently initially agreed to appease him, but then changed her mind. According to the woman, he would take his handgun out place it on the table and spin and said if it pointed at her he would shoot her. My wife kept a rape kit in the refrigerator in case she decided to press charges against him.
In this situation, somewhere over the two to three months or so she stayed with us, she called him and tried to reconcile their differences. Considering that he had a violent tendency and possessed a handgun I was quite concerned. Now that he knew where she was staying, I alerted the police, as well as my neighbors, to be on the lookout for his truck. Our children were all young at the time and the thought of bullets coming through our front window constantly had me on edge. There is a good reason why safe houses where women who need to escape violence can find shelter are often in unknown locations. I was relieved when she delivered and moved to another state to live with family members.
Pro-Life as in someone saying they are against abortion, but their thinking process extends no farther than the end of their nose is not pro-life.
One night my wife came home to tell me about another patient who she told me had her fallopian tubes tied—which meant she could not get pregnant. This perplexed my wife since there was no indication that the woman had suffered from severe endometriosis, a reason for such a procedure. The woman, well into her fifties, told my wife that she had gotten an abortion in the years prior to Roe v. Wade. The process for her to get an abortion was that she needed the approval of a panel of doctors at a hospital in the state where she lived. The doctors agreed she could get an abortion if she had her tubes tied.
I discussed with a doctor who was involved in a Supreme Court case why he started performing abortions. He told me that he was working in the emergency room of a hospital and one night a woman came in and she had taken a coat hanger and tried to give herself an abortion. The unfortunate circumstance was that she was not pregnant but could no longer have children. After that he decided to fly to New York and learn how to give abortions safely. He had an automatic starter placed in his car because he was concerned someone might plant a bomb under his car. Another OB/GYN told me that a prominent pro-life woman, well known in the area, asked her if she would perform an abortion on her daughter. As the doctor explained to me, the woman did not want a “mulatto” grandchild—her daughter had gotten pregnant by her black boyfriend. The doctor did not perform the abortion and often wondered whether the daughter received an abortion.
Pro-Life is filled with abstract thinking—save the developing fetus and nothing more. The ideology of pro-life has severely hurt women. I am not making a case that Roe v. Wade needs to return, I am making the case that now that all those pro-lifers got what they wanted, they own it, and they need to fix it.
A former student who became a lobbyist for a pro-life organization told me of discussing increasing Medicaid funds to help women who were pregnant carry their pregnancies to term. As she explained it, cutting Medicaid funding increased the number of women seeking abortions. This was a situation that occurred when Roe v. Wade was still the law of the land. Unfortunately, she said the state legislators she met with were often uninterested in her position and wanted to cut Medicaid funding as well increase hurdles to make receiving an abortion more difficult to receive. Obviously, the narrow-mindedness of the state legislators was on full display.
Many states have Alternative-to-Abortion programs, which, on paper, are designed to help women avoid abortions and go to term. Most of these programs are complete nonsense—money funneled to organizations that try to encourage women to not get an abortion, but not much practical help. One study pointed to 18 states as of September 2023 that have Alternative to Abortion programs. Kansas in 2024 will add to this number. Texas created an Alternative to Abortion program in 2015. By 2023, more than $100 million budget was approved for a two-year budget with more than 100,000 women helped. One study stated, however, regarding the Texas program:
[T]he Legislature has required information about what the program has accomplished. It wasn’t until 2017 that lawmakers began requiring a public report on what contractors do with the money. The subcontracting process is “secret,” one lawmaker said. And state health officials don’t track how many abortions are prevented by the program. The abortion rate has steadily declined in Texas and the U.S. for decades, making it hard to decipher what, if any, role Alternatives to Abortion has played.
“I don’t know if this is untouchable by design,” said state Rep. Bobby Guerra, D-Mission. “If they have good outcomes, I would think that they would be proud of sharing that information.”
Archbishop William Lori leads the Catholic Church’s alternative to abortion program. He stated regarding the overturning of Roe v. Wade, “This is not the moment to celebrate. I'm not celebrating. This is a moment for steadiness, for staying the course, for increased compassion, for increased services.” I would like to believe the archbishop is not a lone voice in the wind, but I have my doubts. While the Church has a national pregnancy aid network, critics point out that they are ill-equipped and underfunded to provide the extensive services needed to help. The head of Catholics for Choice (a pro-choice organization) stated, “I don’t think they have reckoned with what the ramifications are going to be in a post-Roe world. The amount of care and social work and life skill training that these women need is massive."
In May 2022, Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco denied communion to then Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, since she was pro-choice. An interesting development since, apparently, his view of pro-life is as narrow as I point it out in this article. Republicans certainly hoped that would help them, and the archbishop made no attempt to look beyond preventing abortion. I saw this as a lost opportunity, why not deny communion to Republicans in Congress who move to cut childcare programs and link abortion and childcare, but that was too much to expect from a religious leader with a narrow view of pro-life. The archbishop’s stance ran counter to Pope Francis who advised the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops against adopting a policy that would have denied communion to President Biden, who is Catholic, because he supports pro-choice.
In the Fall of 1989, Andrew Puzder published an article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch which addressed the need for the two sides on abortion to find a way to come together. Puzder was the former CEO of CKE Restaurants and Donald Trump had nominated him to be Secretary of Labor, but Puzder withdrew his nomination after it became clear Republicans lacked the votes to confirm him in the United States Senate. At the time that Puzder wrote his article, he was an attorney in St. Louis. That article led to a meeting with a pro-choice and pro-life activist, which laid the groundwork for an organization aimed at bridging the abortion divide. Common Ground was the organization that was created to bring the two sides together. I frequently brought the minister who ran the organization to campus to discuss with my students how the organization functioned. The minister pointed out that several women representing the two sides got together and went over cases where a woman wanted to take her pregnancy to term but needed financial help to continue her pregnancy. In addition, since many of these women exist on incomes below the poverty level, help was needed after giving birth. The minister stressed the difficulties of these meetings since maybe ten women wanted help, but the organization could only raise funds to help one. Unfortunately, there is a side to conservative thinking that charities can replace the capability of government to assist people in need, fantasy thinking at best.
Common Ground spread to cities other than St. Louis. Dallas and Milwaukee were among cities with chapters and the official title of the organization became Common Ground Network for Life and Choice. In 1994, a meeting of the different chapters took place in Washington, D.C.
Prior to Common Ground, two sisters who supported the opposing sides on abortion began to work with a member of Operation Rescue, an organization that often protested in front of abortion centers. The three women meeting together eventually led to 31 women meeting in San Francisco who represented the opposing sides on abortion. This organization also adopted the name Common Ground. They developed a brochure that included the organization’s motto, “lower the fence at least enough to look into each other’s eyes.”
The hope that this movement, this organization, would spread, and grow did not happen. The minister in St. Louis who I invited to campus, told me after the organization folded, she felt the emergence of the pro-life movement focusing on ending what they saw as “partial-birth abortion” played a vital role in ending Common Ground—an ideological perspective had gotten in the way of working together for the greater good.
Partial-birth abortion is a term filled with ideological overtones. As one article stated:
"[P]artial-birth" is not a medical term. It's a political one, and a highly confusing one at that, with both sides disagreeing even on how many procedures take place, at what point in pregnancy, and exactly which procedures the law actually bans.
A senior director of medical services at Planned Parenthood of America added:
People who oppose abortion have made up terms—such as 'partial-birth abortion' and 'late-term abortion'—to further stigmatize ending a pregnancy. To be clear: There is no such thing as an abortion up until birth, and 'late-term abortion' is not a term used by reputable health care providers.
Here is where ideology has a way of stifling how to address solutions to problems. No doubt a number of pro-lifers tend to see themselves as conservatives who also oppose what they see as “big government.” There is no reason to involve the government in helping people who need assistance although private organizations cannot raise enough funds to help all those who need assistance—a strait jacket ideological perspective guarantees that pro-life stays where it has always been: Punishment for women unfortunate enough to get pregnant who did not want to be pregnant.
The Supreme Court case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), which overturned Roe v. Wade (1973), could have added conditions to states moving to severely limit or end abortion. The opinion in Dobbs could have taken a condition as argued by a fictional Supreme Court justice in a TV movie that addressed abortion, Swing Vote (1999, starring Andy Garcia). Garcia played Justice Joseph Kirkland and the movie focused on an abortion issue in Alabama. Kirkland makes a statement that is insightful and contrasts with the Dobbs opinion. As the movie reached a climatic conclusion Kirkland stated, “Alabama has a right to regulate abortion but only as part of a comprehensive plan for child care.” The Dobbs opinion completes ignores the women who are affected by this Supreme Court decision.
This is not, again, an argument to restore Roe v. Wade, it is an argument that pro-life is not pro-life, it is punishment and misery hiding behind a nice label. Do not use the term pro-life to describe people who are simply opposed to abortion without thinking about the consequences of their victory over Roe v. Wade and what needs to be done to now address the consequences of a Supreme Court decision.
Notes
Joseph Cernik, “Abortion in Movies Provide Insight into a Sensitive and Contentious Issue,” The Artifice (August 6, 2019): https://the-artifice.com/abortion-movies/
Devin Dwyer, Sarah Herndon, and Isabella Meneses, “Without abortion, pregnancy aid programs face surge in demand,” ABC News (June 25, 2022): https://abcnews.go.com/US/abortion-pregnancy-aid-programs-face-surge-demand/story?id=85701064
Jeanneane Maxon, “Fact Sheet: State Alternatives to Abortion Funding,” Charlottle Lozier Institute (October 13, 2023): https://lozierinstitute.org/fact-sheet-state-alternatives-to-abortion-funding/
Shannon Najmabadi and Carla Astudilo, “An anti-abortion program will receive $100 million in the next Texas budget, but there’s little data on what’s being done with the money,” The Texas Tribune (June 8, 2021): https:// www.texastribune.org/2021/06/08/texas-abortion-budget/
Darragh Roche, “As Pelosi Denied Communion by Bishop, What Pope Said on Refusing Eucharist,” Newsweek (May 21, 2022): https://www.newsweek.com/pelosi-denied-communion-bishop-pope-eucharist-1708843
Julie Rovner, “’Partial-Birth Abortion’: Separating Fact From Spin,” NPR (February 21, 2006): https:// www.npr.org/2006/02/21/5168163/partial-birth-abortion-separating-fact-from-spin
Emily Shiffer, “There’s No Such Thing as ‘Late-Term Abortion’-Here Are the Facts,” Parents (December 15, 2022): https:// www.parents.com/pregnancy/my-body/pregnancy-health/theres-no-such-thing-as-late-term-abortion-here-are-the-facts/