Conservatives no longer care about freedom
Earlier this week, the Arizona Supreme Court dealt the latest blow to women’s freedom by resurrecting a 160-year-old law banning abortion almost outright. Ditching its previous rules allowing abortion up to 15 weeks, Arizonan politicians decided Civil-War era legislation from 1864 would do, which bans abortion in all cases except when the mother’s life is at risk, and punishes doctors who perform abortions as felons with up to five years in jail.
Following the overruling of the landmark Roe v. Wade decision by the US Supreme Court in 2022, which had provided federal protection for abortion, many Republican-leaning states began enacting bans. Abortion is effectively banned in Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming, with other states either significantly restricting access or moving to do so.
Many of these states have so-called “heartbeat bills” – bans on abortion after six week, or when scans can detect a heartbeat. Some are generous enough to allow exceptions for abortion in cases of rape and incest. In Louisiana, one woman was refused an abortion despite a 10-week scan showing the foetus had the fatal condition acrania – missing portions of its skull. In Idaho, an anti-abortion bill enabled some potential relatives of “the unborn” to sue doctors who performed an abortion for damages – even, according to some reports, relatives of a rapist.
But is this a sign that Americans have turned against the pro-choice view? Not quite. A poll conducted by the New York Times and Sienna College in October 2023 found that 59 per cent of registered voters in Arizona believed abortion should be “always legal” or “mostly legal”, as opposed to 34 per cent who thought it should be “mostly illegal” or “always illegal”. The disjunct between the Republican pro-life fanaticism expressed by senior politicians and the feeling on the ground seems clear to see.
In his BBC radio series Things Fell Apart, documentary maker Jon Ronson argues that what he calls the current culture war over abortion might never have happened. Evangelicals, he argues, were largely uninterested in abortion until pop Evangelical scholar Francis Schaeffer and his son Frank began radicalising anti-abortion sentiment – in particular with their film 1,000 Dolls.
Whether Ronson’s rather neat understanding of the culture wars as being the working of one family is true or not, what is clear is that anti-abortion sentiment is an awkward one for Republicans. On the one hand, abortion is seen as a private matter. And much like the Covid vaccine – which many hardline Republicans demanded was a question of bodily autonomy and outside of the state’s purview – abortion is seen by many as a personal choice. You can’t claim to live in the land of the free, the argument goes, where the American dream encourages citizens to forge their own destinies, when half the population is legally forbidden from doing so.
Poll after poll shows that the rhetoric about abortion does not match reality – recent Gallup polling revealed just 13 per cent thought abortion should be illegal in all circumstances. When it came to political identification, 52 per cent of Americans described themselves as pro-choice, with 44 per cent identifying as pro-life – a pretty even divide which has been much the same for the last three decades. The use and abuse of pro-life campaigning by Republicans rings hollow when you realise how cynical it is – who knows what Donald Trump really thinks about abortion? His views seem to have changed as often as his spray tan.
This all would be laughable if it weren’t so serious for American women. Arizonans will now have to travel miles to receive medical care, and many will be unable to overcome the barriers put in their way. This will mean they will be forced to endure unwanted pregnancies. This kind of reactionary view of women’s freedom doesn’t belong in a country that calls itself the leader of the free world. If women aren’t free to make their own decisions, none of us are. It’s time to start calling this barbarism what it really is.
