Why Is the Pro-Life Movement Silent on What's Happening in Flint, Michigan?
In Flint, Michigan, lead-poisoned water has long been wreaking havoc on the city’s citizens, saddling children with physical and cognitive deficiencies, and possibly contributing to an outbreak of Legionnaire’s disease. According to a new study, it’s also killed fetuses: Flint’s fertility rate (the average number of births per woman) is way down, even compared to other Michigan cities and controlling for demographic characteristics including race and educational attainment. It’s not, researchers say, that the women of Flint are suddenly getting pregnant much less often; it’s more likely that these numbers reflect a stark increase in miscarriages and fetal deaths. With so many in-utero deaths caused by poisoned water, one would imagine this would be a key moment for pro-life activism – a health crisis that impacts the same fetuses pro-lifers say they want to save.
And yet we have heard not a peep from the biggest “pro-life” organizations in the United States.
National Right to Life has nothing on their website about the crisis. They had time to tweet about the Handmaid’s Tale, but not this fetal death and miscarriage study, which has been making headlines in major national newspapers. The American Life League and Students for Life seem to have plenty of time to bash Planned Parenthood (an organization that has been handing out clean water to Flint residents), but not to give a fetus-killing epidemic a mention. Even Flint’s own Right to Life chapter fails to mention poisoned water on its website (although it does list a fundraiser featuring music from “The Gospel Side of Elvis”). On their Facebook page, they’ve advertised a Pro-Life Pumpkin Contest, but not posted on an epidemic of fetal death in their city. The Pro-Life Action League is planning a disruptive vigil in front of a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado, but has nothing on its website about mothers losing wanted pregnancies in Michigan – in response to an email query about whether the group has done any advocacy on behalf of Flint residents, the organization’s head, Eric Scheidler, said he was “saddened” to hear the latest news and that he “would encourage parents who lost a pregnancy due to lead poisoning to file wrongful death suits, as provided for under Michigan law,” before turning back to Planned Parenthood. “At the same time, I can't help reflecting on the painful irony that during the years when lead poisoning was killing some unborn children in Flint, Planned Parenthood was killing hundreds more at their Flint Health Center,” Scheidler wrote. “How can we say that unborn children have a right to be safe from poisoned water, while simultaneously denying they have a fundamental right to life? The pro-life community in Flint will continue to advocate for the right of every unborn child to be protected from harm, whether from lead poisoning or from the intervention of an abortionist.”
He did not name any work his group was advocating for or any ways they were providing assistance to Flint mothers, children, and fetuses poisoned by leaded water. Emails to the rest of the organizations named in this article went unanswered by press time.
This is a too-common pattern: Those who say they value human life seem to focus only on those pregnancies women choose to end. And that tells us a lot about the “pro-life” movement. While most pro-lifers do undoubtedly care about fetal life, that care is wrapped up in knotty views on religion, sexuality, and women’s roles in society. It seems the crux of opposition to abortion isn’t just the rights of the fetus or the question of when life begins; it’s women getting to be decision-makers over their own bodies, and how that has upended centuries of gender norms and feminine obligations. When women get to decide when and whether to have babies, it frees us up to make other decisions in our lives as well – to pursue an education, to marry for love instead of to avoid social stigma, to follow a dream. To traditionalists, who think life is best when societies are organized into gender-disparate nuclear family units – dad as the breadwinner, mom as the homemaker – these changes are unsettling indeed. But in an increasingly feminist society, where many people think these shifts are positive, opposing them isn’t a great political strategy. And so the focus on the fetus gets ratcheted up, and the debate turns on the right to life rather than a woman’s right to her physical self.
After all, if this was just about life, wouldn’t we see pro-life groups focused on fetal life outside of circumstances when women are making their own reproductive choices? Yet we don’t. Wouldn’t we see major pro-life groups supporting contraception, which prevents unwanted pregnancy and by extension abortion? Yet no major pro-life groups do. Wouldn’t we see pro-life protesters picketing and harassing IVF clinics, which destroy embryos, as viciously as they target abortion clinics? Yet they don’t – at most, pro-life organizations have a page on their website opposing stem-cell research or embryo destruction, but the bulk of their resources remain focused on abortion. Wouldn’t we see pro-life groups championing generous government aid and universal health care for poor children and their mothers so that babies can thrive, kids can grow up healthy, and families don’t have to struggle? Yet we don’t.
It’s not just that pro-life silence on fetal deaths in Flint is hypocritical (although it is). General disregard for fetal life except when women get to be the decision-makers is a feature of the pro-life movement and a core component; opposition to women having power over their own bodies seems to be its reason for existing. For the pro-life movement, women’s own needs and desires are inconvenient, and so we are routinely erased – except for when pro-lifers are claiming that abortion hurts women (while abortion is often a difficult decision and some women wish they had chosen differently – something that is true of most choices human beings make in life – most women don’t regret ending their pregnancies). A movement that professes to care about life but is more concerned with ascendant female power doesn’t have much time for the nuances and complexities of women’s lives: Women for whom another child would be a financial crisis. Women for whom a child would be a tether to an abuser. Women who read a positive pregnancy test and see their dreams recede past their grasp. Women who, every single day, choose to continue pregnancies, or not. Women all around the world who end pregnancies under dangerous and sometimes deadly conditions, because the pro-life movement got its way in their country.
And, of course, women whose health and lives were compromised well before this latest study from Flint came out – women and their children who have been drinking poisoned water in Michigan, but also women, men, and children across America whose lives are made sicker, more painful, and shorter by our still-lacking social welfare and health care systems. Flint has been in a federal state of emergency since January 2016. Now poisoned water is killing embryos and fetuses, the beings pro-lifers claim to advocate for, that they say are the most vulnerable and in need of protection. If they truly valued human life, the powerful and well-connected American pro-life movement would have been as up in arms about poisoned water as they are about Planned Parenthood giving women birth control.
The women of Flint didn’t just lose pregnancies to poisoned water; they lost them to political indifference. Including stunning silence from the movement that claims to value them most.
Jill Filipovic is the author of The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness. Follow her on Twitter.
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