Abortion — which has claimed the lives of 63 million preborn babies since 1973 — provokes some measure of righteous indignation among American evangelicals. One progressive journalist, however, believes that they should have the opposite response.
In reaction to Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization — a Supreme Court case regarding the state of Mississippi’s ban on abortions past 15 weeks’ gestation — Jessica Glenza of The Guardian wrote an article blasting “white, evangelical anger” over abortion. In essence, she argued that state legislators’ attempts to restrict “abortion access” have made 2021 “the most hostile year to abortion rights on record” — even though “about four in five Americans believe abortion should be legal, at least in some circumstances.”
“The religious right in the US has been laying the foundations of this decisive challenge to abortion rights for years,” she said of the Dobbs case. “According to historians and researchers, it has taken decades of political machinations for the campaign to reach this zenith. The movement has intersected with nearly every major issue in American politics for the last five decades, from segregation to welfare reform to campaign finance.”
While arguing that the pro-life movement was born from “Republican operatives” channeling evangelicals’ “collective anxieties” away from segregation and toward “defense of the fetus,” Glenza observed that the issue of abortion boosted election turnout among American Christians. She links evangelical disdain of abortion to racism — for example, by asserting that President Ronald Reagan casted “the politics of reproduction through a new racist prism” while using the term “welfare queen.”
In the next breath, however, Glenza mourned that “young, poor people of color will disproportionately suffer, forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term” if Roe v. Wade is overturned by the Supreme Court. Glenza added that such an outcome is “so severe” that “human rights advocates” — namely, Safe Abortion Action Fund board member Tlaleng Mofokeng — “have said state abortion bans would violate United Nations conventions against torture and place the US in the company of a shrinking number of countries with abortion bans.”
In an interview with The Daily Wire, James Silberman — communications director of Free The States, a Christian organization seeking the immediate abolition of abortion — pointed out that there is a “demented irony in claiming that young people of color will suffer if abortion is abolished.”
Indeed, “more black babies are murdered than born in some parts of the country.”
“One side of the abortion debate is rooted in outright white supremacy, and it’s not those who oppose abortion,” said Silberman. “Planned Parenthood was founded almost exclusively by eugenicists including KKK Exalted Cyclops Lothrop Stoddard.”
Silberman also responded to the fact that four in five Americans support abortion in some circumstances, even though roughly half of Americans call themselves “pro-life” — a phenomenon discussed by the new documentary A Storm Comes Rolling Down The Plain, which Free The States helped to produce.
“This is a function of the establishment pro-life strategy rooted in compromise,” he argued. “Many of those who pray for and celebrate ‘moderate restrictions’ will come to understand those restrictions as what it means to be pro-life.”
“We must stand on conviction and pass laws consistent with the truth, lest we come to believe lies. We must demand the total and immediate abolition of abortion.”
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.