Forced Birth: The Moral Hypocrisy of “Pro-Life” America

In 1996, George Carlin stood on a stage and delivered one of his characteristically profane assessments of America’s conservative pro-life movement:

“If you’re pre-born, you’re fine; if you’re preschool, you’re fucked.”

It was funny.

It was on point.

It was also remarkably prescient.

Thirty years later, I have a question.

Do you call yourself pro-life?

Because I’m calling bullshit.

Not because you believe that an embryo or fetus possesses moral value. Life has moral value.

Not because you personally would never have an abortion. Don’t have one.

Not because your religion teaches you that abortion is morally wrong. You are entitled to live according to your religious convictions.

I’m calling bullshit because you don’t get to claim the moral mantle of life while defining the boundaries of your concern so selectively that an embryo is sacred while billions of living, breathing children are hungry, sick, abused, homeless, uneducated, displaced and dying from causes we possess the means to prevent.

You don’t get to insist that a woman carry a pregnancy to term and then oppose the healthcare, food assistance, childcare and education she and the child may need afterward. And then call yourself pro-life.

You don’t get to force a raped woman—or a raped child—to give birth and call yourself the defender of human dignity while treating her suffering as an acceptable consequence of your morality. And then call yourself pro-life.

You don’t get to restrict abortion, attack family planning, threaten access to contraception, elevate fetal personhood and then insist that none of this has anything to do with controlling women.

And you certainly don’t get to invoke Jesus Christ while turning your back on the hungry child, the sick child, the refugee child, the impoverished child and the child dying somewhere beyond America’s borders because keeping that child alive might require something from you. All the while claiming to protect the sanctity of life.

And then call yourself pro-life.

That isn’t pro-life.

That is something else.

That is astonishing levels of hypocrisy.

And perhaps it is time we stopped allowing one of the most successful political branding exercises in American history to define the terms of the argument.

Because this story did not begin with Roe v. Wade.

It did not begin with Casey.

It did not begin with Dobbs.

It did not begin with Christianity.

It is considerably older than all of them.

Throughout most of recorded human history, women have been second-class citizens—when they have been considered citizens at all.

The degree of subordination has varied enormously across cultures and centuries, as it still does around the world today. But the architecture is remarkably familiar.

Control their sexuality.

Control their reproduction.

Control their voice.

Control their bodies.

And perhaps we should stop speaking of women as chattel as though the idea belongs safely to the past. Today’s manosphere brings this ideology crashing into our present.

Take Andrew Tate, for instance, who has built an audience of millions preaching male domination, calling for women to lose the vote, leave the workplace and be forced to reproduce. Heidi Blake’s reporting documented women literally tattooed “Tate Property” and “Tate Owned,” within an enterprise she describes through extensive evidence and allegations of coercion, trafficking, sexual exploitation and abuse.

There is something morally grotesque about a political movement claiming the authority to police women’s sexuality and compel them to give birth while extending sympathy to a man whose empire was built upon the domination, exploitation and commodification of women and girls.

Perhaps that tolerance should not surprise us. Trump never found Jeffrey Epstein’s appetite for young women sufficiently repellent to prevent a years-long friendship. Tate is cut from the same cloth as Epstein: wealth and male power treated as license, women treated as objects upon which that power may be exercised.

A movement cannot credibly cloak itself in moral concern for women and children while finding room within its political tent for men who treat women and girls as commodities.

We may have stopped openly calling women chattel. Yet we have not held society to account for treating them as such.

And underneath much of this history lies a biological reality patriarchal institutions repeatedly turned against women:

Women create human life inside their bodies. Women possess the one biological capacity civilization could not exist without, and instead of giving women greater power over their own lives, patriarchal civilization used that capacity to take power away from them.

Reproduction creates enormous social power. Patriarchal systems responded by transferring control over that power from the woman who possessed it to husbands, fathers, churches and states.

Which brings us to bodily autonomy.

Because there can be no meaningful definition of unalienable rights without it.

If another human being, a religious group, a legislature or a government possesses greater authority than I do over what happens inside my own body, then in what meaningful sense do I possess equality under the law?

Dress that authority in scripture.

Dress it in constitutional originalism.

Dress it in concern for an unborn child.

The fundamental relationship remains unchanged.

If I do not possess sovereignty over my own body, in what meaningful sense am I free?

Apparently, particular members of the Supreme Court are in need of a biology lesson.

In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion rejected the argument that abortion restrictions constitute sex discrimination, relying upon precedent holding that regulation of a procedure “that only one sex can undergo” does not automatically trigger heightened constitutional scrutiny.

Read that again.

A procedure only one sex can undergo.

But somehow a law regulating that procedure has nothing meaningfully discriminatory about its effect on that sex.

The legal distinction may be tidy.

Biology is considerably less cooperative.

Only one sex becomes pregnant.

Only one sex can be compelled by the state to remain pregnant.

Only one sex can be required to surrender the use of its body for months to sustain another developing human life.

Only one sex undergoes childbirth.

Only one sex faces the medical complications of pregnancy.

Only one sex can die because the government required the pregnancy to continue.

So spare me the fiction that this has nothing to do with the sex of an individual.

And there is another rather glaring omission.

Where are the compulsory bodily consequences for men?

Dobbs created no corresponding requirement that a man’s body be used to sustain the life he helped create.

He cannot be forced to risk his health or his life to bring the pregnancy to term.

His body cannot be commandeered for months to sustain another human being.

After birth, he may be legally required to provide financial support.

But even then, the state is compelling his wallet.

It is not commandeering his body.

A man can simply disappear.

We generally recoil from the idea of forcing one human being to surrender the use of their body to keep another unquestionably already existing human being alive.

We don’t ordinarily force fathers to donate kidneys to their children.

We don’t forcibly extract bone marrow.

We don’t compel blood donation.

Even when another person’s life hangs in the balance, bodily autonomy carries enormous moral and legal weight.

Whatever moral claims are made on behalf of the fetus, the coercion being imposed upon the already-existing person cannot simply disappear from the ethical equation.

You cannot claim she ceases being a person because another developing potential human being exists inside her.

She then becomes an incubator.

She then becomes a host.

She then becomes public property.

She becomes less entitled to bodily sovereignty because of someone else’s moral code.

Now remove every abstraction.

Forget constitutional theory for a moment.

Forget political parties.

Forget theology.

A man rapes a woman.

Or worse still, a man rapes a child.

He has already taken control of her body once.

She becomes pregnant.

And then the government arrives.

Not to restore the autonomy stolen from her.

To take it from her again.

Think about what that means.

The rapist makes the first decision about her body.

The state makes the second.

The rape may have lasted minutes.

Its reproductive consequence can last a lifetime.

And then we have the audacity to call this morality.

And then when the pregnant person is herself a child, the moral obscenity of the coercion becomes almost impossible to hide.

A child is raped.

A child becomes pregnant.

And adults who call themselves defenders of children tell her that she must now endure pregnancy and childbirth because their morality requires it.

The child is not the moral wrong.

The coercion is. And when sexual violence is overwhelmingly committed by men, the coercion is complicit.

None of the decisions around whether or not to carry a child to term are made in a vacuum.

For me, none of this is entirely theoretical.

When I became pregnant with my youngest daughter, nearly everyone around me pressured me to have an abortion.

My circumstances at the time resembled a Dateline episode.

I chose to have my daughter.

I chose it.

Those words matter.

I remain profoundly grateful that the decision was mine.

Under different circumstances, I might have made a different choice.

I don’t know.

And neither does anyone else.

My daughter is not evidence that every woman should make the choice I made.

She is evidence only of my choice and the right to make my choice.

I do not have the right to make that decision for another.

And I certainly do not have the right to hand that decision to the government and allow it to make the choice for both of us.

That is what pro-choice means.

It does not mean pro-abortion.

It means recognizing another woman has moral agency.

It means accepting that I cannot know everything about her pregnancy, her health, her relationship, her trauma, her finances, her existing children, her future or what she can endure.

It means possessing enough humility to understand that I do not hold ownership over another’s body.

Bodily autonomy should be an especially easy concept for conservatives.

For generations, American conservatism has warned us about the dangers of an intrusive state.

Government should be limited.

Individual liberty should be protected.

Families should make their own decisions.

Government bureaucrats should stay out of private life.

Except, apparently, when the citizen has a uterus.

Then government can enter the examination room.

Government can regulate the pregnancy.

Government can restrict the necessary medical procedure.

Government can determine how sick a woman must become before her physician may intervene.

Government can compel childbirth.

Government can substitute the moral judgment of legislators for the judgment of the woman living inside the body and the physician standing beside her.

Apparently government is dangerously intrusive when it regulates business, property, taxation or firearms—but not intrusive enough when it regulates the interior of a woman’s body.

That isn’t limited government.

It is selective authoritarianism.

Sometimes the principle is absurdly subjective.

Government should leave me alone while making you behave according to my values.

“The only moral abortion is my abortion” exists as an indictment for a reason. Circumstances suddenly matter when the pregnancy is theirs; other women are still expected to obey their moral code.

The hypocrisy is astounding.

And then we arrive at contraception.

This is where the argument that this political project is solely about protecting fetal life begins to fracture.

If preventing abortions were truly the objective, reliable contraception should be among the movement’s greatest allies.

Prevent unintended pregnancy.

Prevent the abortion dilemma from arising.

Reduce the number of abortions.

Simple.

Yet factions within the same conservative religious movement have attacked contraceptive mandates, family-planning programs and particular methods of contraception.

And suddenly the question changes.

This is no longer merely about whether a woman may end a pregnancy.

It becomes about how much control she should possess over becoming pregnant in the first place.

Reliable contraception did something revolutionary.

It began leveling the playing field.

It allowed women to separate heterosexual sex from compulsory motherhood in a way men had always enjoyed biologically.

It allowed women to enjoy sex because they enjoy sex.

That should not require an apology.

There has always been something particularly revealing about the fixation of religious fundamentalism on women’s sexuality.

What she wears.

Who she sleeps with.

Whether she is a virgin.

Whether she is married.

Whether she uses contraception.

Whether she becomes pregnant.

Whether she remains pregnant.

Whether she gives birth.

Whether she conforms to someone else’s definition of motherhood, marriage and family.

For a movement supposedly dedicated to keeping government out of people’s private lives, it spends an extraordinary amount of time trying to make government extremely personal.

And now, those in the “pro-life” movement are raising the stakes.

Fetal personhood raises a much larger question.

If an embryo or fetus becomes a legally independent person whose interests can compete with those of the woman sustaining it, pregnancy potentially changes the woman’s relationship with the state.

Then the questions multiply.

What medications may she take?

What medical treatments may she receive?

What risks may she assume?

What happens when she miscarries?

When does ordinary behavior become legally relevant because it might affect fetal health?

When may her own doctor’s medical judgment be overridden?

The questions are not some far-fetched concerns. These questions are already being asked. Women have been suffering from coerced medical treatment, restricted freedom and even incarceration because of drug use or a stillbirth.

And eventually:

What happens to women who aren’t pregnant but could become pregnant?

Once potential pregnancy becomes a legitimate basis for restricting behavior, medication or medical treatment, women of childbearing age potentially occupy a legal category men never enter.

A man’s bodily sovereignty is continuous.

A woman’s can become conditional upon her reproductive capacity.

If my government possesses greater authority over my body because I was born capable of becoming pregnant, then I do not possess the same bodily sovereignty as a man.

I am a different class of citizen.

And once another person’s moral or governmental claim to my reproductive capacity supersedes my claim to my own body, the distance between citizen and chattel becomes uncomfortably small.

But bodily sovereignty is only the beginning.

There is another price attached to compulsory pregnancy that its advocates rarely include in their moral accounting.

A woman’s economic freedom.

Pregnancy does not occur outside the rest of her life.

She may be finishing high school.

Attending college.

Beginning a career.

Supporting other children.

Living paycheck to paycheck.

Escaping an abusive relationship.

Force her to continue a pregnancy and you have not merely determined what happens inside her uterus for several months.

You may have altered the trajectory of the rest of her life.

Pregnancy can complicate employment.

Childbirth requires recovery.

Infants require care.

Childcare costs money.

Caregiving costs time.

And while conception requires two people, those consequences remain profoundly unequal.

And after insisting that she give birth, the same political culture frequently tells her that raising the child is now her responsibility.

Find childcare.

Pay the rent.

Buy the food.

Keep your job.

Don’t become dependent upon government.

Don’t expect taxpayers to raise your child.

You wanted her to have the baby.

But you wash your hands of any responsibility for the children born into the world.

The inequality reaches women who may never become pregnant at all.

Consider two equally qualified candidates for a demanding job.

One man.

One woman of childbearing age.

The employer is legally prohibited from discriminating against her because she may become pregnant.

Good.

But biology still exists.

The employer knows the man will never become pregnant.

Reproductive autonomy is not some boutique concern disconnected from women’s rights.

It is one of its foundations.

The chain is brutally simple.

Control reproduction.

Constrain education.

Constrain careers.

Constrain earnings.

Constrain wealth.

Constrain independence.

Economic dependence has always been one of the most effective mechanisms for keeping women subordinate.

Multiply the lost opportunities across millions of women and reproductive coercion stops being merely a women’s issue.

It becomes economic policy.

And spectacularly stupid economic policy at that.

Then the baby is born.

And suddenly the political urgency becomes strangely quieter.

I know something about this part too.

I chose to have my daughter.

I then raised her without support from her father.

I worked.

I tried to provide for her.

And five separate times, I lost childcare because the state subsidy that was supposed to make it possible for me to work failed to pay the childcare provider.

There is much more to that story.

It belongs somewhere else.

But I notice that theology suddenly changes when the life requires something beyond coercion of women’s bodies.

American Christian Evangelicalism has played an enormous role in creating the political machinery that overturned Roe and continues pushing abortion restrictions.

So let us speak plainly.

Not about every Christian.

Not about every Evangelical.

But about the political movement that has wrapped itself in Christianity while pursuing governmental power to impose its particular moral code upon everyone else.

You cannot invoke Jesus Christ to force a woman to give birth and then dismiss feeding her child as government dependency.

You cannot proclaim the sanctity of life inside the womb while treating healthcare for the human being who emerges from it as a handout.

You cannot worship a man whose teachings repeatedly direct attention toward the hungry, the sick, the poor, the stranger, the imprisoned and the rejected—and then construct a political theology in which compassion becomes suspicious precisely when compassion requires collective responsibility.

You cannot preach family values while creating conditions that make it harder for mothers to support families.

You cannot preach personal responsibility while absolving men of any remotely equivalent physical responsibility for the pregnancies they help create.

You cannot demand that a woman sacrifice her body for your moral convictions and then complain that helping her feed the resulting child costs too much.

And you cannot tell me that your God gave you the authority to make that decision for her.

That isn’t pro-life.

It isn’t even particularly Christian.

It is compulsory pregnancy wrapped in scripture.

The unborn have become the perfect political constituency.

They require no school funding.

No childcare.

No housing.

No independent healthcare.

No college tuition.

They express no inconvenient political opinions.

And most importantly, protecting them before birth requires the greatest sacrifice not from the person proclaiming their sanctity—

but from someone else.

The woman.

Once the child is born, protecting that life becomes expensive.

And suddenly the sanctity of life acquires budgetary qualifications.

And spare me the answer that Christian charity fills the gap.

Yes, churches feed people. Christians foster children, operate shelters, support struggling mothers and give generously to charity. That matters.

But charity is not a social safety net.

Charity is voluntary, uneven and dependent upon someone being there to help. It can pick up some of the pieces. Public policy determines how many pieces are left scattered on the floor.

You cannot use the power of government to force a woman to remain pregnant because preserving life is supposedly a collective moral imperative, then declare sustaining that life a matter for private charity once the child is born.

If life is sacred enough to compel birth through law, then its sanctity must also be reflected in our laws after birth—in healthcare, food security, childcare, housing, education and protection for the vulnerable.

Your politics are a moral act too.

A society reveals what it considers sacred not simply by what its citizens voluntarily give, but by what it collectively refuses to allow happen to another human being.

If you demand government enforce the sanctity of life before birth while voting against the social structures necessary to protect that life afterward, you are not defending the sanctity of life.

Being pro-birth is easy.

Being pro-life is expensive.

Being genuinely pro-life requires something from all of us.

Forced birth requires your hypocrisy.

And that is why I utterly reject your label: Pro-Life.

A moral concern for life that begins at conception and ends at birth is not a pro-life philosophy. It is a philosophy of compulsory pregnancy.

And when that philosophy also seeks to restrict women’s ability to prevent pregnancy, it becomes something larger still.

It becomes a system governing female sexuality.

Female reproduction.

Female economic independence.

Female bodily sovereignty.

Female citizenship.

And calls the control pro-life.

I don’t accept the branding.

Actual reverence for life contains humility.

Fundamentalism replaces humility with certainty.

And certainty married to political power becomes coercion.

You are entitled to believe abortion is wrong.

Don’t have one.

You are entitled to believe life begins at conception.

Live according to that belief.

You are entitled to believe God commands you to carry every pregnancy.

Then carry yours.

But the moment you use the power of government to force another human being to surrender sovereignty over her body to your understanding of God, you have crossed a line.

You are no longer merely practicing your faith.

You are exercising dominion over someone else.

Choice does not require approval of another woman’s decision.

It requires a recognition that her life does not belong to you, your moral code or your government.

Control is not protection.

Dominion is not sanctity.

Forced birth is not righteous.

Forced birth will not save your soul or anyone else’s.

And a philosophy that reveres the fetus while abandoning the woman and the child has forfeited the moral right to call itself pro-life.

Forced birth should be something we only read about in The Handmaid’s Tale.

Perhaps George Carlin put it simply in his own profane way.

Thirty years later, the hypocrisy he named is considerably more obscene.