Do you notice anything about the clips of pro-choice demonstrators peacefully protesting about Roe v. Wade? To me the protesters all look like white girls from selective colleges. You don’t see any ordinary American commoner women. And you don’t see any welfare moms from the ’hood.
The point about abortion politics in the USA is that the pro-choice side is driven by educated women in the educated elite. And the pro-life side is driven by ordinary middle-class commoner moms.
I have actually experienced this face to face as I ate breakfast at a hotel just down the street from the US Supreme Court where the Dobbs appeal was being considered. It was December 2021, and the hotel was full of abortion protesters, for and against.
At one point I heard two pro-life women mixing it up with a pro-choice woman. The pro-life women were quoting Bible verses and the pro-choice woman was talking about “my spirits.”
Which is exactly what I would expect. And you know what? They agreed to disagree; nobody called in their mostly peaceful protesters to get in the faces of the other women at breakfast.
Now, I believe that we have abortion politics today because of the situation of educated class women, that I call People of the Creative Self in my reductive Three Peoples Theory.
Modern feminism proposes that women should not be merely wives and mothers, but should have careers, as men do. That’s all very well, but that means that women can’t get married and have children until they have completed their education and begun their career. It means that, for 10-15 years after puberty, an educated woman really can’t have children.
And yet, in today’s society she is expected to have sexual relationships during college and early career.
If I were an educated woman, and I had internalized the feminist culture that I had been carefully taught, and I knew that I wanted a college education and a career before starting a family and that I should aim to become an “independent woman” as proposed by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, and that I was expected to “put out” — in the classic phrase of Blanche in A Streetcare Named Desire — I would want abortion as a backstop.
Without that, life would be too “stressful.”
But hey, ladies, what is so wrong with the common law tradition that criminalizes abortion at “quickening?”
Women who are People of the Responsible Self do not see the world the way that women in the educated class see it. For them, as ordinary commoners, maybe immersed in their Bible verses, life, the universe, everything, revolves around marriage, family, home, children. Paid work? Sure, but work is work. And it’s nice to earn money after the children are grown, and be around other women, and give back to the community.
For Responsible women marriage and children are at the center of life. So having sex with a man who isn’t committed to fathering your children is an abomination. Aborting a child you have conceived with the man you love? Unthinkable.
In other words, there is a great religious and cultural gulf between the project of life for a woman in the educated class and the project of life for a woman in the commoner class. What makes life meaningful for an educated class woman is her education and career. What makes life meaningful for a commoner woman is the family she created.
It is the beginning of wisdom in our ruling class to understand this, to accept it, and to allow America to be a place where both kinds of women can live their lives.
But whatabout the women who are People of the Subordinate Self? What is their relation to abortion?
Obviously, down the ages, poor women that had unwanted children usually abandoned them, either by exposure or by killing them. Many were left at churches: foundlings. Up to 40 percent of live births ended up as foundlings raised by the church at the local orphanage. And up to 90 percent of those died in the first year. See this piece at Quillette. It’s pretty obvious: if a mother can’t afford to keep the baby and a relative won’t take the baby, then mothers tended to abandon the baby and hope that someone would take the baby and raise it.
Today, of course, poor women get an abortion. Is that a good thing? Probably not. In any case, because of the “present orientation” of lower class life, poor mothers are going to make decisions at the last possible moment. So, if they don’t have abortions and they can’t afford or don’t want to raise the child, then society has to “do something” if we don’t want such children abandoned or withering away in orphanages.
So what do we do? How about going back to the common law, where abortion after 16-20 weeks was criminal, and abortion before then was shameful?