Abortion, slavery, and the American right: What is really at stake

Anti-abortionists have for a long time now deftly portrayed their cause as a liberal/libertarian one of protecting the “rights” of “persons.” The contrived obviously character of this maneuver has probably not moderated (little sign of that) but lent itself to the animus and even hate that the cause of protecting lesser “human beings” is given.

The operative notions assume the answer to questions that no one, least of all among abortion opponents, is much interested in discussing. Theyidentify not just as a human being (=a living being that as an entity is a “member” of the human race, an identification based on circular reasoning since what it is for human beings to “be” is not clarified, beyond their inclusion in a set by virtue of biological traits and not subjective states—I will come back to this, as it is important) but as the social and legal beings that persons have been since that term was introduced by the ancient Romans, who used it to mean both legally responsible subjects who can be called on to answer for themselves in a law court, and for theatrical subjects, actors, who present themselves through “masks” that both reveal and conceal a manner of being that is wholly contingent.

It would appear that two rights — that of an adult person, the pregnant mother, and that of the foetus, are opposed in a perhaps tragic manner. But nothing is less clear than that an embryo, whose only participation in the life of human beings that the rest of us know, is a bearer of civil rights of some kind.

The anti-abortion right seized the agenda decades ago in determining what the issue is said to be about. Is there something concealed and unexpressed here?

And why is opposition to abortion so important to the right?

Let’s consider some other features of the problem:
1) A being that cannot assert its own rights must be protected.
2) This is done against the will and desire of another being who can assert her rightist s, the pregnant woman. And it is done by others in her behalf. Most of these others have been men. It will in any case by the state with its coercive authority.
3) This is government policing as ruling on the life and death of persons and being deemed subject to its authority and power, because they are said to be legal persons.
4) The anti-abortionists almost always are defending an idea of “the family” that is (heteronormative and) one of usually patriarchal familialism.
5) The state’s interest here is said to be not the general having of more children or less, but the having of them under the auspices of families of a certain kind protected and promoted by the state.
6) This is of course a state establishment of religion.
7) During the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, many Americans died because of the negligence of our government, because gay men do not usually have “normal” families.

But the crux is this:
8) A body that cannot speak for itself, is spoken for (this is the Roman origin of “responsibility”) by authorities, paradigmatically representing the rule of fathers, and in such a way that this mute body, which would effectively deprived of citizenship were it not that it lacks it as yet as biological capacity (the unborn do not speak our language), is subject (subjected to, and a subject, not a citizen, since it cannot think, speak, or participate, and so is not yet the citizen or the political animal Aristotle says we are; this is the self as responsible, qua owing or needing to obey, subject, but not citizen. And in fact, for precisely this reason, it is meaningless to attribute to it rights.

All that the supposed “rights” of the unborn amount to is the pregnant person’s duty to give birth.

9) There is a similarity here to slavery. Another object historically of great American political and social anxieties and passions. The slave is a subjected body lacking the right to speak and make statements of meaning and consequence (treated as partly true) in the public sphere. This is why slaves were not permitted to learn to read. (Instead, the Bible would be read to them as part of rituals reminding them of their obligation to obey).

The other major analogues to slavery today are imprisonment and psychiatric incarceration. These enslavements require judgments being made to exclude the person who is otherwise included. Many people today face one or the other of these things, or could face them, as the system is set up so that these are among the ultimate sanctions. along with official (death penalty) and unofficial (“rogue” police killing) murders, to which people can be subjected.

So this is why the right loves the anti-abortion cause, even though the constitutional conservative liberalism of limited government that is so popular among conservatives in America, whether there is much realism in the hope of achieving or maintaining such limitations on otherwise often arbitrary and certainly tyrannical power, and of doing this in the traditional ways they believe in.

Just as slavery used coercion freely along with the subjection of a laboring body, to produce value (and by definition, what else does anyone care about? The right to life argument in fact reduces the value and meaning of children and human life to a principle and thus a value at least linguistically) for mastering subjects who want what capital at its more fascistic must want and does: To keep people subjected.

There is here an ideological discourse about one kind of subject, not to be liberated by state power but merely protected by it, and it is used both literally and, perhaps more importantly, allegorically. to argue that citizens are really just subject who must obey the bosses, and, since they have no real say in public matters or even private ones when the capitalist state allied with patriarchal familialism in the false name of tradition (the United States is one of the world’s, and history’s, least traditional societies, whatever people say they believe), just have the duty to shut up, keep working, and do what they are told.

Thus, the deepest and most real meaning of the anti-abortion right is authoritarianism. President Trump, the greatest symbol of authoritarian government in recent American history, understands this. A very unreligious man (not to mention an unethical one, in the strict sense that, whether or not he is guilty of abuses of power or is corrupt, he would appear to have no ethics, or at least not one that could ever require a person like him to give the matter any serious thought), his alliance with the religious right (represented among other things by his Vice-President) makes perfect sense in this way.

In the Baptist church of my stepfather, one popular church song was “Trust and Obey.” That in a nutshell is why the evangelical religious right in America is so important to the Republican Party. Some conservatives think that that is an odd coupling or unholy marriage. I wish that were true.

Reump not ewligion