Imagine that we work at a charity together, and I advocate a policy that will actively hurt what we claim we’re trying to do—and the research is clear on that—and I say that I’m advocating this policy because it will get me in good with the boss. Actually making our world better and helping the people we claim to want to help is less important to me than getting in good with the boss. You’d decide I’m a narcissistic jerk. That would be a correct inference.
People who want to criminalize abortion, who have never advocated the policies that actually reduce abortion, aren’t actually concerned about abortion. We could reduce abortion if we offered easy access to cheap and effective birth control, offered accurate sex education, had universal health care, publicly supported childcare, reasonable parental leave. When I point out to people who advocate criminalizing abortion (and birth control) that there are other methods more effective at reducing abortion, they say that they are more opposed to those policies than they are to abortion.
I want to stop here for a moment. They pass by that quickly, but it’s actually really important. They’re fine with women dying from unsafe abortions. They’d rather have that outcome than women having access to effective to birth control.
So, let’s do the math. Reducing abortion is not their highest priority. They aren’t actually trying to reduce abortion. They are only opposed to safe abortions. More concerning, they are more opposed to women having access to safe birth control (and the various social safety nets) than they are to abortion.
In my experience, what they say is that they are more concerned with doing what God wants than with actually reducing teen pregnancy (Michelle Goldberg’s Kingdom Coming talks about this, see especially 135-6). They think God wants them to lie (that is, say things that are factually untrue but true to their policy agenda), and that God doesn’t care if that lying means people get pregnant, spread STD, or otherwise suffer in ways they wouldn’t have if they had been given good information and good healthcare.
As a Christian, I’ll engage in an aside, and say that, when I argue with people like this, they can never reconcile what they’re doing with Jesus saying “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” They can’t imagine a God who wants everyone held to the same standards; they seem to imagine God as someone just like them, with all their petty hatreds, grievances, and in- out-group affiliations but with superpowers. They think God wants them to reward their in-group and punish their out-group; that is, treat the out-group in ways we would never want to be treated.
Criminalizing abortion means women die. Women with ectopic pregnancies, for instance.
And, just to be clear: they want to criminalize abortion, not reduce it. This is about people wanting to believe that what they’re doing is so right that it will get them good with God, even if it means tragedy for all sorts of people. They don’t care about those other people. They think God doesn’t. They think God only care about them. Their personal relationship with Jesus is an eighth-grade Mean Girl relationship that involves bonding with God on how much they hate someone else.
I think they’re wrong about God giving them moral license. I think God cares about the people they want punished and the tragedies they know they’re causing. I think they’re narcissistic fucks just looking out for themselves, so concerned about their own salvation that they are sociopathic about the people their policies hurt. I think they’re worse than the people more concerned about their own purity than they were about helping a bleeding stranger.