Roe
Before I wade into this stream of consciousness with all its crocodiles, I’ll just summarize my own thoughts on “the abortion issue.”
First of all, I think calling it an “issue” and dividing up the teams as “pro-choice” and “pro-life” is, and always has been, a case of dueling propagandas, and each team has been intentionally myopic and, therefore, deeply dishonest. That’s what happens when the Law gets involved, because Law isn’t only blind, it’s universalizingly stupid. Policy, or law, is the view from outer space which cannot see the details of the actual lives lived down on the ground. It cannot account for those details, and therefore it cannot respond to those details without confronting the grievances of the categorical imperative. For the overwhelming majority of women who have considered abortion, then rejected it or had one, it was never as abstractly simple as pro-choice or pro-life. For most of those women, there was (and still is) a context — usually a dreadful, harrowing, lose-lose context — that to the law is as invisible as a molecule to the naked eye. Any discussion of this “issue” that tables the context is a pernicious lie, regardless of your team.
Policy “debates” aren’t debates, they’re war — always with its bodyguard of lies. Check your ethics at the door.
Secondly, as a Christian and as a Catholic, I have opposed the criminalization of abortion, not because I am “pro-choice,” but because I am anti-constantinian. The church’s deformed history with the state began with its juridical turn, with what Illich called “the criminalization of sin.” If the church wants to prevent abortions, it must do so through love and charity, not with the sword of a shabbos-goy-state.
As a mere citizen of the US, on the other hand, I already have a pretty good idea how criminalizing abortion will turn out. Some problems are not rectified, but exacerbated, by the law. Back alley abortions were a real thing.
“Pro-choice,” nonetheless, is an idea rooted in the greatest of liberal modernity’s lies — that of homo economicus, the self-reliant, self-sustaining, self-isolated, self-making, and self-owning “individual.” The same principle that underwrites the autonomous, proprietary body underwrites all the reasons people will give to let pregnant women in dire straits tumble into abuse, desperation, and poverty. She’s not my problem because I, too, am autonomous and without duties and obligations not of my choosing.
The criticism that “pro-lifers” care about abortion but not mothers and babies is far too often true, and far too often entangled with prior commitments to authoritarian patriarchal restoration (and not infrequently plain racism). Moreover — and this is a discussion all its own — the “life” in pro-life is an abstraction, an idol that, again, tends to instrumentally serve prior political commitments. I’ll let David Cayley state the case that “life” is an idol, with his mentor Illich, so we don’t drive miles down a different road. You can also find my argument in this long book review, just hit the “find” function and type in “Barbara Duden.”
So, now I’m positioned; an easy target — fire away.
What now? What of this new period? What’s it done to our political landscape?
The first thing that occurs to me, looking over the ever more unstable and storm-ravaged American political ecology, is that without Roe, both of the moribund, corrupt, and generally useless political parties are losing their raison d’etre. Whether this augers ill or more ill, who can say? I’ve started looking at old political podcasts, one-year old, two . . . four; and whether right or left, what characterizes both is that their prognostications mostly turn out to be wondrously wrong.
Tentatively, however, I’ll risk saying that the Democrats — just based on a forty percent increase in the cost of living — will lose their proverbial asses in 2022, and the Republicans will as rapidly as possible try to consolidate those gains through voter suppression and gerrymandering. They’ll likely be unable, however, to address the deeper problems that account for that forty percent increase in the cost of living, or any of the other pessimistic trajectories of political economy — and without Roe, which accounted for an unknowable, but I believe substantial, number of single-issue Republican supporters. I’ve known some. They dislike a great deal of what the Republican Party has promoted; but they saw abortion as a kind of holocaust. So that constituency will soften for Republicans, and the party will be left exposed when it proves as incapable of addressing the crises of liberal decomposition as their counterparts.
Democrats, on the other hand, who’ve been steadily sinking for a decade, even with massive Wall Street backing, are led by a culturally senile and incompetent technocratic gerontocracy. Their formula has been, if our tactics failed, then the solution is to apply more of those tactics — tactics that have only been effective at crushing the aspirations of a weak left flank. The only reason they scraped out the win (with far less than they expected) in 2020 was with the help of a black swan — the pandemic.
As to those ever-more-transparent “tactics,” the “pro-choice” Democrats will not move to legalize abortion through the legislature. They will cynically (and again, transparently) use abortion as a political cudgel (save it for the elections) . . . which will fail, because of the fait accompli in the Court. Their main appeal to many voters who recognized the deep corruption of this Wall Street party was, “Boo! Supreme Court” Abortion!”
The only thing they can pray for now — in this case prayer is the last refuge of scoundrels — is another run by the boogeyman, Trump, who’ll be 78 years old with his brain even further rotted by decades of uncontrollable narcissistic venality.
The Democratic Party has become such a steaming pile of liquid shit that it can’t maintain support without pointing to a stronger smell. They can defeat Bernie Sanders and Nina Turner, but they can’t beat the Republicans. They certainly can’t pose as the more liberal party any longer, except around some petit bourgeois cultural issues, after years of strengthening the security/surveillance state and becoming the party of perpetual war.
It’s hard to be optimistic about any of it. Like some of those desperate women who find themselves pregnant in the worst possible circumstances, we’ll be facing a whole menu of lose-lose options.
Post-Roe, here we go.