Justice Ginsburg has some interesting ideas about Roe v. Wade that might foretell the fate of gay marriage. I was only three or four when the Roe decision came down, so I can’t remember what it was like at the time, but Ginsburg seems to think that abortion rights had all the momentum just as gay rights seem to now. And then Roe settled it and the momentum shifted in the other direction. People older than me can speak to whether her argument makes sense.
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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I’d like to have seen a deeper discussion of her point. The argument she makes is so briefly reported that it’s hard (and I was also too young to be able to gauge the political mood at the time) to get a solid grasp of the argument. I get the basic point OK, but it could stand some fleshing out.
The political mood of the time was that evangelicals approved of Roe V. Wade. The only people opposed to abortion at the time were Catholics, because in the 19th century, the Catholic church invented the doctrine that life begins at conception, which is utterly non-Biblical. Evangelicals only started coming out against abortion several years after Roe v. Wade, when their leadership realized that it could be a useful hot-button issue.
The `biblical view’ that’s younger than the Happy Meal
So Ginsburg’s point doesn’t make any sense. The Supreme Court had no way of knowing that the Christian Right would emerge, with evangelicals (who go only by the Bible) embracing the (utterly non-Biblical) Catholic position that life begins at conception.
Abortion was legal in America until the 19th century, when states started banning it because Protestants became worried that Catholics would start outnumbering Protestants, because they have larger families. It was banned for “racist” reasons, not because anyone thought that there was something wrong with abortion in itself (other than Catholics).
So glad someone else knows the history of abortion in America. Dead on. Also her point is often trotted out and treated as conventional wisdom in the beltway but it has been knocked down many times. Scott Lemieux has had some posts about it over at LGM.
I was 15 when Roe was decided, so I may not be the best source.
But, I did read the NY Times pretty much every day, since I was about 9, and a teacher who was a Russell Baker fan asked our parents to pay for us get the paper on the days he had his column (she had a couple she brought in case kids couldn’t afford one).
And my father was a newspaper junkie, so I guess I fell in with a ‘good crowd.’
And my memory of it, was that the decision was a fairly big deal – but in a good way.
And certainly not like the seminal hot-button issue it became later on.
A lot of people had read about botched abortions that quacks in back-alleys, performed, or women performed on themselves. Many with fatal consequences.
There really wasn’t that big a ruckus for a few years after Roe.
When Reagan started his failed ’76 Presidential campaign, he started courting the Dominionist Born-again Evangelical Christians – and fully welcomed them 4 years later.
And it was THIS issue that was what attracted them to Reagan. Many Republicans had been open supports of women’s abortion rights – George H.W. Bush and his wife, being two of them.
Reagan, who saw the potential the hard-working Christians had for his campaign(s), started welcoming them, to be his ground troops, so he quickly took that on as one of his key issues.
After Reagan had courted them, the real trouble started in the mid-late 70’s – the Evangelicals started to get out of their homes and churches, and started getting involved in the political process – something most of them had been loathe to do, before.
By the late 70’s, Jerry Fallwell, and the other religious misogynistic leaders, were welcome by Reagan.
They hated the fact that women could have any rights to their own bodies, and allowed to make any choices at all.
They wanted complete domination of women, like their good book told them.
I remember, that by the time the 1980 election rolled around, abortion was now a major, major issue.
And, so it has been ever since.
The problem is that many of these Conservatives, who had been against any and every human and civil right’s movements, from The Magna Carta, to The Enlightenment, to slavery, to suffrage, through Civil Rights in the early 60’s, decided that the right of the zygote made them just like human and civil rights advocates like MLK Jr’s.
Plus God was on THEIR side, and THEY were on God’s side!
And the fact that they wanted “Forced Labor” for all pregnant women, didn’t bother them, because they were fighting for the rights of clumps of human cells, and fetuses – and then promptly not giving a sh*t about either the mother, or the child, when it finally left the blessed womb.
This is all about religion, and the subjugation of women.
The American Taliban.
They won’t be happy until we’re all back in the Middle Ages, when “The Right of Kings” ruled the planet.
“Baby, I love you when you’re barefoot and pregnant, walk a few steps behind me in public, get my meals ready for me, and get the kids ready for bed. Now, ‘Get Your Biscuits In the Oven, and Your Bun’s In the Bed!!!'”
Divine right of kings was actually something that mostly developed in the Renaissance and possibly as a way to support political centralization. Many European middle-ages monarchies started as elective (Capet France and HRE for instance) and even when they weren’t they were subject to restrictions from other nobility.
Anyhow, I would be all for divine right of kings if I was the king. But I won’t be. The difference is that makes me want to make nobody king, while these guys are okay with it as long as they can be king of something (their own house). I’d call that small minded, selfish and short sighted.
Well, ok then.
How about, “The Divine Right(s) to be Caesar!” 🙂
Caesaropapism! The Emperor! Christ’s Vicar on Earth!
That may be, but the fact remains that the “divine right of kings” was basic doctrine, supported/invented by the Catholic Church. It was designed to set back any revolutionaries, just as the Constitution does now.
Yes, eventually it outlived its usefulness.
I am probably younger than CUNDG, but I remember that abortion was not a huge deal in the 1980s among anyone but nutballs. It became more mainstream to be anti- as the right gained momentum during Clinton.
We punkers were ahead of the game in some ways, for our age. We had bands openly denouncing the likes of Falwell very early on… Jello Biafra is, in many ways, an eerily accurate prophet.
Here’s one difference: Gays are more publicly out of the closet today than are women who’ve had abortions. If that continues, then I suspect the “backsliding” on gay rights in the next few decades won’t resemble what’s happened with abortion rights since Roe v. Wade.
Great point. Being gay doesn’t get you arrested these days (mostly), so there’s much less pressure to just shut up.
Abortion had been legalized in CA before Roe, but it was closer to the current state of legalized marijuana in CA today than the full equality for same sex couples in several states. Essentially, women and their doctors had to lie about a danger to their life/health to access an early term abortion. Roe brought more honesty, safety, and access for CA women. Eliminated an unnecessary step in the process, one that wasn’t easy and was time consuming.
c u n d gulag’s narrative of the history accords pretty much with my recollection.
My mother subscribed to Ladies Home Journal and McCalls, which, in addition to covering fashion and the like, also covered issues of moment to women. As I read everything I could get my hands on, I read them too. They frequently carried stories and articles about the savagery of back-alley abortions and were unabashedly for legal abortion, more from as a women’s health issue than as a feminist one–neither mag could possibly be viewed as a crusading feminist outlet.
I think massappeal is on the mark regarding the politics of gay marriage. It is clearly working its way up from the bottom and is therefore much more likely to be seen as a done deal with it actually becomes a done deal. In contrast, when Roe v. Wade was ruled, the efforts to force states to approve it stopped as having been made irrelevant.
It was only later that it was seized as an issue by the Republicans. The history shows that, as far as the Republican Party was concerned, this was a tactical step, not an expression of conscience. It presaged the cynicism, duplicity, and falsehood that has now become its standard practice.
http://www.pineviewfarm.net/weblog
It’s the difference between playing offense and defense. If you are playing defense, you are simply trying to keep what you have. If you are on offense, you are trying to get more.
To keep the abortion rights we have now, we will have to go on offense. And that means an unabashed statement that abortion is a good thing and must be retained.
I sure wouldn’t put it that way. No pro-choice people I know think abortion is a “good thing”. It’s at best an agonizing decision that women have the right to make for themselves.
Agreed. It’s a NECESSARY thing that must be retained.
“Good” and “bad” are subjective, indefinable terms. “Necessary” is defensible.
Millions of us know it is a good thing. We are not mothers before we choose to be.
There were several issues for American thought during the era of the fight for abortion rights, over-population of the world, the notion of Peace, the manners of Integration (Fair Housing, etc.) and the wider ideas of Feminism.
The “comptrollers” of right-wing had to stop the inter-linking of issues so people didn’t need to think- need a single hot button issue that could be easily that required no thinking and spawns rabid emotion exclusive of empathy. Abortion is murder. They found it and it continues drown out humanist conversation and rationalizes patriarchy, gun rights, gender prejudice, education, adoption, torture… While it successfully masks the corruption of the right money machine.
Abortion rights were increasing before Roe, just as marriage equality is spreading now. But the moral calculus is different. Abortion was never popular in “red states” (or whatever they were called in the ’70s), just as gay marriage isn’t popular there now.
But abortion did offend people who saw it as infanticide. Whether abortion is infanticide is obviously open for huge debate, but no one can debate that infanticide is “bad”.
Tough to see where the equivalent energy is on gay marriage. The overwhelming response to marriage equality has been “is that it”?
I’m sure evangelicals and the Catholic hierarchy will continue to piss and moan about it, but in the end, few will notice a difference.
Do you have any evidence that abortion was less popular in red states than in blue states at the time Roe v. Wade came out? As I said in my post above, up until a few years after Roe, evangelicals were not opposed to abortion, because the Bible clearly states that a fetus does not become a person until it is born. To quote an evangelical professor (link in above post):
So I see no reason why abortion would have been “never popular” in red states. I suspect this is a modern liberal myth.
And why is the question whether abortion is infanticide “obviously open for huge debate”? There is no question here at all, because abortion is not infanticide because of the meanings of the words “abortion” and “infanticide”: an embryo or fetus is not an infant.
And current religious practices reflect that view. AFAIK, even Catholic and fundy churches don’t attempt to “rescue” fetuses so they can give them last rites and a proper Christian burial. If they did their cemeteries would be overflowing with used tampons.
You cite the same moral reasoning and objections the evangelicals had to alcohol. But, this time they will be satisfied with outlawing abortion in the red states. Also, I don’t see how the evangelicals will be able to respond to technology. What will Plan B or contraception look like in 5 years? How will they stop someone in Canada or Mexico or maybe India from using FedEx to ship Plan B to Birmingham?
I don’t see the similarity between objections to abortion and to alcohol. Evangelicals were against alcohol because it led to drunkenness and hence bad behavior on the part of men.
As for Plan B, it does not produce abortions, so it is just a form of birth control. It’s true that the most extreme anti-abortionists are against birth control as well, but most aren’t.
Based on this and other things you’ve written, I’m only about a year older than you. I remember the first time I saw a pro-birth picket line. It had to be between 1978 and 1980, which corresponds with the rise of the Religious Right. Of course, I had to ask what “abortion” was.
I have read, in a number of places, that evangelicals retreated from partisan politics after the Scopes trial. I don’t know if that’s true or not. Jerry Falwell is known to have claimed that the “awakening” of the Religious Right is due to Israel’s 1967 victory being seen as divine intervention, a view that I think can safely be dismissed as bunk.
What really stirred up the evangelical anthill was an attempt by the IRS to revoke the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University, as a result of their policy on interracial dating. They couldn’t very well campaign openly on that issue, of course, so they looked for another wedge issue. They considered divorce as an issue, but rejected that, since it’s dangerous to condemn a sin you can see in the mirror. Finally, someone suggested abortion, since it could be so easily spun as “murder”.
We can read this story today because Paul Weyrich confessed this history in 1990 to Randall Balmer, who was accidentally invited to one of their DC shindigs.
Yep, Randall Balmer wrote the book on this.
It’s remarkable how vehement some right-wing evangelicals are about abortion being murder, being completely ignorant of the history of their own religion. Also, the reason they think it’s wrong is that the Bible says so, whereas the Bible says the opposite. Thus evangelical’s views on abortion need to be treated with no respect whatsoever: their whole view is a completely artificial construct, having nothing to do with Christianity.
Interestingly, C. Peter Wagner, a leader of the New Apostolic Reformation admits that the Bible does not say that abortion is murder. He just thinks that they got a revelation to that effect (even though according to him, revelation cannot go against the Bible, only supplement it, whereas the “abortion is murder” doctrine does go against the Bible).
Ginsburg’s comment is disappointing. I agree that “right to privacy” was a weak brick to build on, but Ginsburg seems to wish for a more general application while she wonders whether the whole thing was a good idea at all. The Court is supposed to be about justice, not political strategy. It seems naive to think that leaving the question to the states would have blunted the opposition. I wonder what she’d say about using “judicial restraint” to leave voting rights or civil rights up to the states? It just doesn’t parse.
I’ve thought for a long time that gay activists made a huge mistake in framing the issue as “gay marriage” instead of working to get the government out of marriage while validating legal contracts between any couple that wants to take on the rights and responsibilities of a civil contract. After which they could go to any body they want to do the marriage thing if that matters. But sentimentality ruled the day, and now we’ll see endless attacks over the government “pushing gay marriage”. This makes the Scotus decision much more burdened by competing “rights” than a simple fight for equal contracts would have been. In spite of that, gay marriage will win the day — but it could have been easier and avoided providing such an effective target for the wingnuts.
Marriage as a term holds too much weight. Many leftist gay rights advocates I know hate marriage as a whole, which I definitely sympathize. However it means so much to our society that once gays say “we’re married,” a lot of people see it differently, justified or not.
Women were dying by the thousands. Motel maids walked into blood-drenched rooms where a desperate attempt to end a pregnancy had occurred. Wire coat hangers were a symbol of the fact that women will do anything to control their own bodies.
I have a magazine article published in 1961 that estimated up to 2 million abortions as compared to 4.25 million live births a year. It further estimated an annual 5,000 pregnant women killed by abortionists.
– The Saturday Evening Post, May 20, 1961
The only comparable event to that in our history is when AIDS was killing people that the elite were totally unconcerned with.
The Supremes had to act eventually to stop the slaughter. Why quibble over the wording? Justice Ginsburg’s sheltered life permits her to wish that the rest of us could patiently wait for the tides to bring us what we need. She needs to notice there are other people who are just as deserving of the same rights that she herself possesses. That’s justice.