The issue they will rarely discuss is why \u2013 really, why<\/em> \u2013 their opponents think, feel, and act the way they do. \u00a0Every now and then someone poses this question, but the query evokes a pre-programmed answer based on the opponents\u2019 faults of character \u2013 their alleged prejudice, ignorance, fanaticism, and domination by demagogic leaders.<\/p>\n This sort of Q&A reminds one of the angry question often asked of an opponent or of someone misbehaving: \u201cWhat\u2019s wrong<\/em> with you?\u201d\u00a0 The answer, inherent in how the question is framed, is \u201cYou! \u00a0Your faults of character are what\u2019s wrong with you.\u201d However, there is another way to inquire.\u00a0 A parent may ask a child who seems upset, or a friend may ask a troubled friend, in a voice radiating concern, \u201cWhat\u2019s wrong with you?\u201d\u00a0 Such a question requests information rather than mounting a personal attack.\u00a0 It presupposes a valued relationship and searches out the causes of the other\u2019s thoughts and actions without assuming that they are already known, much less that they are discreditable.<\/p>\n Suppose, then, that we ask why anti-abortion activists (AAA\u2019s for short) think and act as they do?\u00a0 Many participants in this movement are not accustomed to marching around with signs, cheering on speakers, or confronting opponents in the street.\u00a0 What brings them now to participate in demonstrations, lobby office holders, and devote time and energy to this Cause?\u00a0 The pre-programmed answer here is religious ideology, or a type of secular conservatism that embraces the same \u201crights of the unborn\u201d values as those promulgated by various religious groups.\u00a0 But we can frame the question more concretely by asking what problems, issues, or unsatisfied needs promote the AAAs\u2019 passionate identification with the unborn and their relative indifference toward the dilemmas faced by many pregnant women.<\/p>\n This identification, it seems to me, is a key to AAA thinking.\u00a0 Whatever religious ideology may instruct the activist about the beginning of life, the personhood of the fetus, and so forth, there is a purely emotional component to his\/her stance that involves a powerful, if not overwhelming, empathetic feeling for the tiny creature implanted in the womb. This identification even creeps into Justice Samuel Alito\u2019s opinion in the Dobbs<\/em> case, which quotes the Mississippi legislature\u2019s assertion that most abortions after 15 weeks employ \u201cdilation and evacuation procedures which involve the use of surgical instruments to crush and tear the unborn child,\u201d and concludes that the \u2018intentional commitment of such acts for non-therapeutic or elective reasons is a barbaric practice, dangerous for the maternal patient, and demeaning to the medical profession.\u201d[i]<\/a><\/p>\n Leaving aside the legislature\u2019s largely fictitious reference to the dangers of abortion to the mother, the statement accurately reflects the feelings of most AAA\u2019s that deliberately damaging the fetus is an intolerable (\u201cbarbaric\u201d) outrage.\u00a0 Pro-abortion activists have long noted that calling the fetus an \u201cunborn child,\u201d and picturing it by a sort of anticipatory morphology as a bouncing baby that happens to have not yet exited the womb, intensifies one\u2019s sense of connection with it as a \u201cperson.\u201d[ii]<\/a> \u00a0But this pictorial sleight of hand alone does not produce the sense of emotional identification just noted.\u00a0 That sense is generated above all by the fundamental situation of the fetus, which is one of extreme vulnerability to superior power.\u00a0 Whether a cluster of cells in early pregnancy or a nearly born human later on, the creature in the uterus is helpless, defenseless, and totally dependent for its existence and sustenance on its maternal host.<\/p>\n Not only that, to use one of the adjectives most favored by AAA\u2019s, it is \u201cinnocent.\u201d\u00a0 The fetus\u2019s innocence is related to its powerlessness and dependence; since it has no ability to make decisions or to act on its own, it cannot make bad decisions or undertake wrong actions.\u00a0 As a result, the activist gets to have his\/her ideological cake and eat it, too.\u00a0 The fetus is not enough of a person to make decisions, but it is person enough to be declared innocent, as if the characteristic of sinfulness or innocence were not a corollary of independent (i.e., born, plus a year or two) personhood.\u00a0 Again, however, the logic or illogic of ideology has little to do with one\u2019s identification with the tiny creature in utero.\u00a0 \u201cInnocent,\u201d in its simplest definition, means having done nothing to deserve destruction or suffering.\u00a0 This gives a moral coloration to the fetus\u2019s fundamental powerlessness and passivity, which remains the most profound basis for identification with it on the part of many adults.<\/p>\n The psychological sources of this identification remain relatively unexplored.\u00a0 Still, it seems clear that, for many people, identifying passionately with a helpless, dependent being subject to vastly superior, indifferent power is not a random reaction or a simple application of some religious dogma.\u00a0 Future research is likely to show that many who identify with the \u201cunborn child\u201d conceive of themselves<\/em> as helpless, dependent beings, and as the actual or potential victims of powerful figures who have no love or concern for them.<\/p>\n A psychoanalyst might seek the source of this self-conception in the activist\u2019s family history, but what is most germane for us is his or her social<\/em> history.\u00a0 The villain of the anti-abortion narrative is the biological parent who refuses to be a nurturing, protecting, responsible mother or father \u2013 one who chooses to satisfy his\/her own needs rather than those of the future child. \u00a0In sociopolitical terms, we can understand the \u201cparent\u201d as a ruling authority, a familial stand-in for the government.[iii]<\/a> \u00a0The AAA narrative points symbolically to a government that at best neglects its powerless subjects, and at worst manipulates and exploits them while securing the rulers\u2019 own interests in property, status, and power.<\/p>\n Note that we are not talking here about some sort of conspiratorial delusion, but about the lived experience of many (if not most) subjects of modern state and federal governments.\u00a0 Most governments are<\/em> \u201cbad parents,\u201d and the effects of their neglect, incompetence, and self-interest are especially evident among people living in poorer communities and rural or deindustrialized regions of developed nations like the U.S.A.\u00a0 For the same reason, many of those who populate the anti-abortion movement favor unrestricted gun ownership because they do not trust the state to protect them from criminals or, indeed, from its own armed agents.\u00a0 Many AAA\u2019s subject themselves to the authority of intolerant and backward-facing churches because in those communities, at least, they find a modicum of attention, caring, and mutual aid.<\/p>\n In short, many who identify with the unborn do so because they know what it feels like to be held of no account and to be subject to abusive and capricious authority. They are not deluded in the sense that they fantasize an unreal oppression; their neglect and mistreatment by private corporations and public bureaucracies is real enough.\u00a0 But they are seriously mistaken about the sources and nature of this oppression, and these mistakes can lead to delusions, such as the belief that evil people \u201cstole\u201d the presidential election of 2020 from Donald Trump, or that genocidal \u201cfemiNazis\u201d (the late Rush Limbaugh\u2019s nasty neologism) seek to murder as many potential babies as possible.<\/p>\n Where the issue of abortion is concerned, the great mistake is to identify other victims of a profit-driven, dehumanizing, structurally violent social system as one\u2019s oppressor.\u00a0 In the AAA narrative, the enemy is a college-educated, urbanized, irreligious \u201celite\u201d linked to private sources of wealth (i.e., the high-tech and non-energy corporations), and favored by bureaucratic power. The cartoonish personification of this foe is the promiscuous woman (abetted by a complicit man) who uses abortion as a form of birth control. \u00a0For many AAA\u2019s the image is also racialized, since rates of abortion are higher among women of color than white women, but the error goes beyond misogynist or racist biases.\u00a0 It rests above all on a refusal to hold the U.S. capitalist system responsible for a growing host of social, political, and spiritual ills\u00a0 ranging from endemic urban poverty to decaying rural communities, and from schools that don\u2019t teach and jobs that don\u2019t pay a living wage to families that can\u2019t stay together and racial and ethnic groups that can\u2019t live peacefully together.<\/p>\n Traditionally, Americans don\u2019t like to admit that there could be anything seriously wrong with the so-called \u201cfree market\u201d system and the political institutions that support it.[iv]<\/a> \u00a0They would rather blame social problems on people of bad character than on a socioeconomic system that, year after year and decade after decade, enriches a few people, impoverishes millions, generates unprecedented social inequality, and considers it more important to fund the world\u2019s strongest military machine than to satisfy people\u2019s basic needs. \u00a0If a mother aborts a potential baby because she doesn\u2019t have a decent job or the education needed to land one, or because she doesn\u2019t have the emotional and financial support provided by a viable family and community, many conservatives consider this evidence of her perverse moral values or bad character. \u00a0They don\u2019t ask why one of the world\u2019s richest nations doesn\u2019t make it possible for everyone to have the jobs, education, and community support needed to guarantee genuine freedom of choice.<\/p>\n But why should AAA\u2019s ask this question when their pro-abortion opponents can\u2019t seem to ask it either?\u00a0 In fact, many pro-abortion activists (PAA\u2019s) tend to personify and exculpate the system exactly as the AAA\u2019s do.\u00a0 That is, they see the anti-abortion forces as their <\/em>oppressors, not as fellow victims of a predatory system that thrives by exporting industrial production, \u201cburning over\u201d rural and de-industrialized regions, refusing to guarantee wage levels or annual incomes, and driving deep wedges between older and newer sectors of the working class.<\/p>\n Most PAA\u2019s have so little consciousness of themselves as working people in the world\u2019s most inegalitarian industrial state that they define their enemy in purely ideological and cultural terms as fundamentalist \u201crednecks\u201d or knee-jerk Roman Catholics, never asking the question that begins this essay: Why<\/em> do anti-abortion activists think and act as they do?<\/p>\n For the same reason, many of them tend to accept the AAAs\u2019 definition of themselves as an educated elite, far more culturally developed and \u201cwith it\u201d than the gun-toting, church-going primitives of the Red States.\u00a0 Up to now (although this may be beginning to change), few PAA\u2019s seem to have realized that their position as relatively privileged workers \u2013 workers without unions! \u2013 can be undermined in a very short time by the vagaries of an essentially unregulated market. \u00a0Similarly, few seem to have understood that women\u2019s right to choose, while as precious as free speech and other fundamental human rights, will still be limited in practice by the all-powerful demands of this same market system.<\/p>\n One reason that so many pro-abortion activists have been willing to entrust this right to courts is the unspoken assumption that political democracy and the rule of law can function in a healthy manner no matter how plutocratic and anti-social the system that produces basic goods and services may be.\u00a0 This illusion must end if we are to deal intelligently and humanely with issues as important to women\u2019s lives and health as reproductive rights.\u00a0 Women need to be sovereign over their own bodies, a principal which is already impelling PAA\u2019s to fight necessary political battles in the states and at the national level as well as in the courts.\u00a0 But pro-abortion forces must also recognize that their opponents are genuinely hurting, even if they misidentify the sources of their pain.\u00a0 PAA\u2019s and AAA\u2019s have a common enemy, if they would but recognize it: a system that promotes inequality, thrives on scarcity, dissolves the bonds of family and community, and generates endless \u201cculture wars.\u201d<\/p>\n Abundance equally shared can make the tribal conflicts that plague us now seem obsolete. \u00a0It\u2019s time to find a better way to organize our social and economic affairs.<\/p>\n NOTES:<\/strong><\/p>\n [i]<\/a> Dobbs v. Jackson Women\u2019s Health Organization<\/em>, 597 U.S. _____ (2022) at p. 15<\/p>\n [ii]<\/a> See Brian Callender, \u201cThe Power and Politics of Fetal Imagery.\u201d The Lancet<\/em>, 10\/2\/21.\u00a0 https\/\/: www.thelancet.com\/journals\/lancet\/article\/PIIS0140-6736(21)02129-2\/fulltext<\/a><\/p>\n [iii]<\/a> The theme of state authority as the symbolic parent was well developed by the Critical Theorists Wilhelm Reich (in The Mass Psychology of Fascism<\/em>, 1933, Farrar, Straus, 3rd<\/sup> Ed., 1980) and Herbert Marcuse (in Eros and Civilization<\/em>, 1936, Beacon Press, 8th<\/sup> Ed., 1974).<\/p>\n [iv]<\/a> But see Reid J. Epstein, \u201cAs Faith Flags in Government Many Americans Want to Upend the System.\u201d New York Times, <\/em>July 13, 2022. https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2022\/07\/13\/us\/politics\/government-trust-voting-poll.html?searchResultPosition=2<\/a><\/p>\n __________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n Abundance equally shared can make the tribal conflicts that plague us now seem obsolete. \u00a0It\u2019s time to find a better way to organize our social and economic affairs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[2885,229,1731,1639,70],"class_list":["post-216687","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-editorial","tag-abortion","tag-activism","tag-left-politics","tag-right-politics","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216687","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=216687"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216687\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=216687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=216687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=216687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/Richard-E.-Rubenstein-e1512383079779.jpeg\")
<\/a> <\/em>Richard E. Rubenstein is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a> and a professor of conflict resolution and public affairs at George Mason University\u2019s Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter Center for Peace and Conflict Resolution. A graduate of Harvard College, Oxford University (Rhodes Scholar), and Harvard Law School, Rubenstein is the author of nine books on analyzing and resolving violent social conflicts. His most recent book is <\/em>Resolving Structural Conflicts: How Violent Systems Can Be Transformed (Routledge, 2017).<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"