The worst states for children are those with the most restrictive abortion laws, CNN says (story here).
Most of the 21 states with anti-abortion laws waiting for the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade “fall into the bottom half of state rankings on a wide array of measures tracking the well-being of children and families, including childhood poverty, low birth weight and premature births, access to health insurance for low-income mothers, availability of prenatal care and the share of kids enrolled in early childhood education,” CNN says, based on “public data sources.”
Those data also show that among those states, “16 also rank in the top … for the largest share of children living in ‘extreme’ poverty” and 14 rank “in the top half of states for the biggest share of children reporting that they have experienced hunger,” and those states also have the highest rates of infant deaths, CNN adds.
The rankings are the work of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a children’s charity established in 1948 by James Casey, founded of UPS, and named for his mother (details here). To see their report, go here; a color-coded map of the states with a textual table of rankings is on page 21.
This isn’t new information, and has led pro-choice advocates to accuse people calling themselves “pro-life” of hypocrisy. Anti-abortion activists are also accused of ulterior motives. For example, Kristin Ford of NARAL, a pro-choice group, says, “This is not about families. This is not about supporting women. This is about controlling people,” an allegation frequently repeated in liberal circles.
But a Florida law professor who studies abortion issues says the correlation between low quality of life for children and opposition to abortion is an accident of history and coincidental, rather than calculated. CNN says,
“The concentration of anti-abortion statutes in states that produce poor outcomes for kids reflects the changing alignment of politics over the issue since the Supreme Court established the nationwide right to abortion in the 1973 Roe decision, says Mary Ziegler, a professor at the Florida State University law school and author of the recent book ‘Abortion and the Law in America.’ The correlation results from ‘the political realignment about abortion, which took a while after Roe,’ she says.
“Before the Roe decision, Ziegler notes, conservative Catholics provided the core of opposition to abortion; conservative White evangelical Christians came to the cause only later, in part because strategists in the social conservative movement saw it as a way to overcome the historic evangelical enmity toward Catholics.
“That meant the states with the strictest abortion restrictions pre-Roe included many Northern states with large Catholic populations that otherwise supported a substantial social safety net. Heavily evangelical Southern states that traditionally have spent less on families and social services … were among the … states that had somewhat loosened abortion restrictions before Roe. …
“But in the decades since, opposition to abortion has indeed gravitated more toward … White evangelicals, the South, the Republican Party. And that has meant the small-government ideology of those groups has suppressed the talk of supporting families and children that was once more common among abortion opponents, Ziegler says. ‘The anti-abortion movement hitched its star to the GOP, which means that all of the … policy that some in the movement had been interested in — whether it’s helping moms or helping kids — that was just not on the table,’ she notes.”
But even though accidental or coincidental, the hypocrisy is there. It’s common to hear liberals say conservatives’ concern for human life stops at birth, citing for their argument such examples as conservative support for the death penalty, the military draft, nuclear weapons, and Republican warmongering. Among women supporters of abortion rights, the argument about “controlling people” is more commonly seen (photo below).
Another element of conservative hypocrisy over abortion is that they claim to be for individual freedom, but their pro-life position intensely involves telling other people what to do in the most private aspects of their lives.
It’s something of a red herring to frame the abortion debate in terms of children being born into poverty and deprivation. Child poverty, lousy schools, and other characteristics of conservative “red” states are separate issues, and because they’re local issues, there’s really only two ways to deal with them: Intervene with federal programs, and/or live somewhere else. But the right-to-life movement has always framed the abortion argument in moral, and often religious terms; and that being so, it’s not unfair to call out their opposition to child welfare programs, child tax credits, and supporting education as hypocritical. They invite the comparison.
Abortion is a moral question. Pro-choice advocates are more inclined to see it in practical terms, i.e. not being imprisoned in involuntary parenthood, and the forced poverty it often brings, especially for single mothers. But the moral issue is inescapable, because abortion involves terminating life. For anti-abortionists, that’s all that counts. And to them, it’s a moral absolute.
Unlike them, abortion defenders see gradations of morality and competing moral imperatives. For example, they question the morality of bringing a severely deformed fetus into the world as a person who will live a life of extreme disability. They see that, and imposing such a huge burden on its family and society, as immoral. They see forcing a rape victim to raise her rapist’s child as immoral.
People who claim to fight wars in order to prevent larger and deadlier wars already embrace the notion that most things in this world, including all the most difficult things, aren’t — in moral terms — black-and-white, but gray. The Roe v. Wade court wrestled with the morality question and found it damnably difficult. In the end, they waffled, compromised, and resorted to an arbitrary solution.
Seeing the world as black-or-white, or good-and-evil, is a weakness of conservative thinking. This simplicity is what attracted me to conservative ideology in my youth, when I wasn’t yet ready to deal with life’s complexity; and the ambiguity of the real world and the practicalities of living in it is what drove me away from it. Rigid ideology isn’t conducive to making things work. On a philosophical plane, if America is about freedom, and we’re a people who don’t like being told what to do, then the policy consistent with that is letting women control their own bodies, and keeping the state out of these decisions.
Related story: FDA approves mail-order abortion pills, a big win for abortion defenders (story
here).
The amazing thing is that this is an issue at all. Abortion was pretty readily available in the American colonies. The same women who acted as midwives also could perform abortions or knew of ways of plants that could induce an abortion. Most of this occurred in the home. The American Medical Association wanted its members to be the go to for American women and the AMA pushed for actual statutes outlawing abortion as part of their effort in getting American women into the hospital under AMA doctors rather than those ignorant midwives.
Bring back midwives and birthing in the home and the abortion issue goes away. Midwives would insist abortion laws be stricken to protect their profession, and welcome the new contraception through the mail. Though they would like to be able to prescribe it rather than a doctor.
There’s an exception in the Texas law that says legal vigilantes can’t sue midwives for assisting in abortions?