Wishing I didn't feel compelled to write this
Pitching in with the mandatory opinion after Dobbs v Jackson
TL;DR - a rare bout of certitude on a hot button issue, because I'm having feelings and worries and it seems to be a personal foundational issue
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Progressives have a choice following Dobbs v Jackson.
They can build a movement to persuade enough voters to appoint leaders who will restore access to legal abortions. Fortunately for them there is an impressive precedent in the campaign that established abortion rights in Ireland. What a gift that is.
Or they can march in the streets shouting "scream your abortion", post memes on Twitter depicting dead supreme court justices or firebomb churches and assault people.
Of course feelings run high on both sides and such behaviour is understandable. But understandable is not equivalent to effective. Scaring people into submission or keeping their views to themselves worked well in areas like gender activism but it won't this time.
The sense that many of us, on the less-fashionable-than-the-liberal-leftish left, have of activist groupishness being essentially inwardly serving (it feels good to signal your values and ensure good standing within your circles) will now be tested on a new and bigger scale. With stakes as high as they come.
Organising is dirty, grinding work requiring deep patience and resilience. Take it from someone who never had the heart to do it, but has read some history about how the exploited and oppressed working classes of the west won improved labour conditions. In contrast, the progressive leftish has been cannier in some ways by reinventing academic inquiry in the humanities, getting jobs in the media and infiltrating unelected but powerful organisations before suddenly presenting new ‘realities’ as a fait accompli.
Suddenly, though, they have a problem that requires winning the hearts and minds of voters.
I want them to win this one for all kinds of reasons. I am the father of a young woman and the thought of her being forced to carry a child to term regardless of the circumstances that gave rise to its existence - or its prospects - fills me with resentment. And relief that she is British-born and British-resident. Not that I need the reason of being a father to have this opinion. But it brings some viscerality into what would otherwise be an abstract moral question.
The well-rehearsed arguments against compulsory childbirth seem to me so self-evidently reasonable that I won't dignify the insistence on foetal rights having higher standing than the rights of women with any more words on the matter. This includes edge cases of a genuinely horrific quality (which, interestingly, I was never aware of until quite recently).
But I worry that they won't win. I worry that they'll actively alienate everyone who has misgivings about abortion, or no strong views either way, by waging a physical and psychological war on everyone outside their group.
Whether or not you think that this is a reasonably founded fear depends on how familiar you are with the culture war as it is waged in the United States. It depends on the media you consume and whether or not it throttles inconvenient information about burning churches, physically assaulting pro-life people, viable infants with their heads mashed in and the daubing of pro-life organisations' buildings with threats like 'If abortions aren't safe then you aren't either'. It's going to depend on people not hanging around outside a judge's house, intending to kill them.
When the shoutiest activists, academics and blue tick Twitter media people start asserting that the interpretation of the US constitution in Dobbs v Jackson is emblematic of patriarchal and evangelistic fascism rather than a revisited legal judgement that throws the choice on abortion regulation back to the democratically elected representatives of individual states there won't be a sudden change of heart among people who sincerely believe that foetuses are people with a full set of unassailable rights from the get-go.
What will happen is retrenchment. And the reality is that there will be incentives among progressive influencers to up the ante on the rhetoric rather than take stock, because that stuff is popular and exciting. It will get those activists attention, as I'm already seeing with mini essays on LinkedIn about the need to somehow dismantle every facet of conservative thought. Because abortion is just one aspect of a far grander conflict and so, you see, you can't just focus on this immediate and pressing problem or you're missing the point about the arc of history. Or something. Expect a smattering of intersectional theory along similar lines to 'there is no climate justice without trans justice' being vigorously promoted on the socials. Stuff that leaves ordinary people cold, confused or dismissive.
There will be some interesting sideshows though. Such as how 'woke capitalism' reacts. Etsy and PayPal recently banned a biologist for selling mugs through those platforms with 'Reality's Last Stand' written on them. Will they stop doing business in Tennessee when its automatic abortion ban comes into force 30 days after the Dobbs decision? Will Twitter ban lawmakers in North Dakota for harming innocent women? I’m betting they don’t.
This feels like the moment when the rubber hits the road. Several decades of impressive progress for American leftish liberals feels like it suddenly ran into the sand on The Big One and there will be a lot of shock as the reality of this sinks in. (My personal hunch is that the decision was leaked in advance to take the sting out of this moment, for what that's worth). Will third wave academic and digital feminism make peace with second wave feminists who don't accept people with penises in women's prisons? Can they even work with TERFs. What will a coalition with men look like, after men have been lectured so frequently as an entire class on having no right to an opinion on what women should be allowed to do with their bodies? Because they're men.
Will enough people realise that (in the words of the late British MP Jo Cox) we have more in common than that which divides us and stop atomising into myriad special identities to wage the necessary campaign to avoid girls and women coming to harm, babies to briefly exist in suffering then die and unwanted children to come into being? There are lots of social posts calling for allies to speak up.
But I am not an 'ally'. I am a human who always had a choice that I want all humans to have.