The consequences of the belief that “life begins at conception”
How many times has Cathy McMorris Rodgers (U.S. Rep. from eastern Washington, CD5) sworn in public and in private that she believes and will vote in accordance with her belief that “life begins at conception”? Her brand of Fundamentalist Christianity demands that as an article of faith. Every Republican on the general election ballots in eastern Washington this November has at some point declared the same thing. (Some few have cleverly dodged the question by claiming that making laws restricting women’s freedom to make medical decisions about their own bodies isn’t a local issue—but now, post Dobbs, it is an issue at all levels of government.)
“Life begins at conception” is an article of faith to which every Republican candidate attests to energize their base voters. The controversy over abortion has been the linchpin of the Republican-generated culture wars for half a century. During those fifty years, women—and men who respect women’s intelligence and autonomy—could still vote Republican (or not vote) knowing they were safely shielded from the logical consequences of the doctrine that “life begins at conception” by the Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade(1973). Under the protection Roe offered, rooted in a right to privacy, a right recently gutted by the Republican-packed Supreme Court, the consequences of the doctrine “life begins at conception” could fester away in Republican dogma without the broader electorate needing to pay much attention.
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Almost no woman under the age of sixty in this country today has personally experienced a society in which women are not trusted to privately make the most personal medical decisions a woman ever faces. Every mother and grandmother—and every father and grandfather who respects women’s intelligence—everyone who remembers the era before Roe v. Wade needs to share their stories with their children and grandchildren and exhort them to vote in November to keep us from returning to the pre-Roe era.
Here’s one of mine. My very first steady girlfriend Marianne and I broke off our relationship not long before I left Wisconsin to go to college in 1968. Years later she told me this remarkable story: Marianne, it turned out (to my surprise), did not have the benefit of the detailed “birds and bees” talk from her parents that I had from mine. After we broke off our relationship she got mixed up with an older bus driver on whose bus she rode daily in Milwaukee. She (they?) succumbed to the hormones coursing through the veins of a teenager, and, to her surprise and dismay, she became pregnant. Once she realized what had happened—and once it was clear that the sperm contributor to the conceptus would take zero responsibility—she faced a United States in which abortion was illegal and illegal abortion was potentially deadly. Her parents’ finances were limited—but obtaining a safe abortion was essential to her and her parents, who by this time fervently regretted that their daughter had not received more explicit sex education. They offered to cover the bill for an odyssey that makes crossing a state line to obtain an abortion seem tame. Marianne, 19 years old and alone, flew from Milwaukee to Tokyo, Japan. In Japan suction abortion was (and is) legal, safe, and widely available. In Tokyo, in a country where she could neither read or speak the language, she obtained an uncomplicated abortion. This was no medical “holiday”. There was neither time, money, nor the will to go sight-seeing. Marianne was back in Milwaukee in what felt like a whirlwind, she and her parents safely relieved of a totally unwanted pregnancy—and what must have been thousands of dollars (in today’s dollars).
One doesn’t need to look back any further than the sixties to glimpse an American legal and social structure in which women were seen as second-class participants whose reproductive decisions were made for them by hospital medical boards and paternalistic physicians. A friend of mine, Jane Bowen, the widow of Dr. Channing Bowen, a prominent pediatric cardiologist in Spokane, is now almost ninety-seven years old and sharp as a tack. At my considerable urging she recounted to me her personal experience of the patriarchal culture to which the “life begins at conception” Republican political candidates would like to see us return.
After giving birth to four girls in seven years (1953 to 1959), Jane, then in her mid-thirties, sought a sure method of preventing further pregnancy. She requested a tubal ligation of her obstetrician/gynecologist. He refused as a matter of course. Jane was told by Dr. Tom Gilpatrick, a family friend, that there existed an unpublished formula among the OB/GYN doctors, a formula that considered age and number of babies already birthed, a formula that had to be met before an OB/GYN would consent to performing a tubal ligation. Caring for four young girls at age 35 wasn’t enough, according to the patriarchal standards of the time, just the sort of thing that would resonate with Tucker Carlson and the folks who listen to him spout about “replacement” by being out-bred. Jane, even with the agreement of her physician husband, would not be permitted to have a tubal ligation. She would have to rely on something else (abstinence in the context of marriage?) in a time when abortion was illegal and contraception was neither as effective nor as widely available—even for married couples—as it is today.
For Ms. Bowen, this experience of bald-faced patriarchy spurred her to become one of the instigators of the new Planned Parenthood Clinic in Spokane—originally intended to help make contraception, sex education, and women’s health care more widely available. (Locally, abortion services weren’t offered by Planned Parenthood until the early 1990s when I was on the board, by which time persistent harassment by extremists had succeeded in limiting community availability of legal abortion under Roe.)
In the post-Roe world a vote cast for any “life begins at conception” Republican—which is all of the local Republican candidates—risks an eventual return to the patriarchal society that existed before Roe. Assemble your stories and tell your children and grandchildren what it was like. See to it that they register and understand the importance of their vote this November.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry