In 2006, the ultra-right conservative, Christian fundamentalist Amy Coney Barrett, later appointed to the US supreme Court in 2022, signed her name to a newspaper ad taken out by an anti-abortion group. The ad condemned what the group characterised as “abortion on demand”, further declaring support for “the right to life from fertilization to natural death.”
Experience shows, and a swift google confirms, that the same people voicing these supposedly Christian values in support of the rights of a fetus over that of a pregnant woman also support gun rights and state executions.
They are also, in my personal experience, spectacularly short on irony. Evidently they miss the paradox of calling for “the right to life from fertilization to natural death” whilst simultaneously claiming a right to carry guns and potentially kill someone long before their natural death (and tragically in some cases, not that long after fertilisation), along with holding a belief in the death penalty as a form of justice (with one fundamentalist Christian once telling me that if someone innocent is executed by mistake, the responsibility is not on the state and death penalty advocates but is just one more crime the real murderer will need to answer for when he meets the Lord. The real murderer, they argue, will in effect have committed two murders by remaining silent when an innocent person is condemned to death in their place.)
How is it possible to retain such starkly opposing stances on the right to life within the same mind and remain balanced and sane? Although by some appearances it does look that in some cases many who hold these beliefs do not quite manage it, as we find with the likes of Sarah Palin, Marjorie Taylor Green, and indeed Coney Barrett herself, her unflinching eyes unnerving anyone who needs to see the occasional glimmer of a soul. (Of course we have left out Donald Trump and roughly half of the Republican party).
The paradox is easily solved when we realise this is not about principles, ethical convictions, or upholding the supposed will of an imaginary god. It is, as we have by now come to recognise, about power and control. The reason there is no internal psychological tension – meaning they c an sleep at night – in those who openly advocate such extreme and opposing beliefs that deny others their rights is because they do not care about rights, principles or in particular about being consistent in what they advocate. If they did, they would immediately see the paradox of such a position and never adopt it. To them the anti-abortion stance is not about protecting life but about controlling it, in this case controlling women by controlling their bodies.
The control of woman has of course a long history, traced in particular to the very foundations of religions millennia ago. Fundamentalists and conservatives often cite the religious, eschatological reasons for opposing a woman’s right to choose, though they have tried to re-frame the tone of the discourse from one of denial of a woman’s right to choose to protection of the life of an unborn fetus, which on their reckoning has more rights as a person than the pregnant woman carrying it.
To anyone reasonable and fair not to mention humane, a pregnant woman has vastly more person-hood (by virtue of having existed longer, being more complex etc.) and therefore rights as a person, than a fetus that may not even be viable. There is and must be room for sentiment and sensitivity in considering the potential life and potential person-hood to be terminated; but it is not life and person-hood as we know it to be in the life and person of a pregnant woman.
For those who find this very difficult, I would suggest that it is even possible to say that yes, the fetus is alive and probably, even very likely, has some degree of person-hood. But this life and this person-hood, though there is a potential for it to become a most beautiful and loved being, cannot in anyway take precedence over the greater, established and vastly more complex life and person-hood of the woman carrying it. A pregnant woman’s life and person-hood are incomparably more important than the potential life and person that she, and she alone, carries and therefore has the right to eventually give life to, or not.
This is not even to talk about the evils of rape and incest, medical complications, and sometimes the hard decisions a woman must make to protect a potential life from undue unhappiness, misery and perhaps great suffering under unsupportive circumstances, and perhaps even abuse at the hands of the father or others, should that potential life be born.