So in response to my last post, one of my followers reached out and had a very good conversation with me in my PMs, which led to this post.
To be clear, I am prolife and have been my entire life. And it’s because of these beliefs that I’m here to say: we as a movement need to get our house in order.
Let’s start with a couple basic assertions:
1. The pro-life movement has a fascism problem.
2. Abortion is a bandaid on social problems that the pro-life movement, on a whole, has not taken an active part in solving.
3. Assertions #1 and #2 make the pro-life movement hypocritical.
1. The pro-life movement has a fascism problem.
I’m not saying that the broad majority or even a majority of pro-lifers are fascists. What I am saying is that the movement, as a whole, is way too comfortable having fascists in it. There is no better evidence than that Marjorie Taylor Greene herself was on the stage for the latest MFL speech portion.
Let’s talk a little about what fascism is. Robert Griffin famously defined fascism as “palingenetic ultranationalism.” That is to say, it is a form of ultranationalism—extreme nationalism that places itself above all others, such as by promoting patriotism as the ultimate virtue or by insisting one’s own country is inherently superior to others—which relies on a palingenetic myth. The palingenetic myth is that the country once experienced a golden age from which it has since fallen, and that a revolution of some sort is necessary to “rebirth” it into a new golden age.
Griffin theorized that this myth could be a powerful source of energy in acquiring voters to the fascist party who had otherwise become disenchanted by traditional politics. These followers will follow a strongman figure who claims (key word there) he will fight the establishment by any means necessary (including force) and bring them into a glorious tomorrow of national rebirth. All internal disagreement against this mighty hero is viewed as weakness or, worse, heresy, which must be excised from the fascist party.
Palingenetic myth + ultranationalism = fascism.
This should sound familiar to anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock for the last six years. To prove my point, think of a recent slogan which invokes national rebirth into a new golden age.
Yeah. I didn’t even have to say it. And that’s the problem.
The violence inherent to fascism comes from the fact that this golden age never existed, and perpetuating support for the ruler and his upper circle requires cultivating absolute loyalty. This is done getting the lower-tier followers very, very angry, and then pointing them at an “enemy” to expel all their anger at—after all, nobody questions their leader in the middle of a “battle,” and to do so is tantamount to “treason.” This enemy, usually, is one or multiple groups of social minorities, who can be blamed for the “downfall” of the country from its golden age. While the supporters target this minority group, the ruler and his upper circle continue to enjoy the angry mob’s financial and social support, and when of course the new “golden age” fails to develop, any people who point this out are culled from the support group and the ruler merely shifts the target to some new minority who was secretly behind it all.
Think about how quickly, for instance, hatred over the last few years has shifted from Mexicans to Muslims to Asians, depending on what the political situation required. It’s a shell-game. The perfect future is always just out of reach, under the next targeted minority, no really, we promise.
Now that we understand what fascism is, we can identify some important things about it:
1. Conservatives are particularly vulnerable to it. There’s an important difference between believing some or even many things from the past were important and should be maintained, and thinking that the past was a perfect era which should be returned to—but that distinction tends to get blurred during times of fascist ascendancy.
2. Believers in “traditional family values” are particularly vulnerable to it. This is for essentially the same reasons as point #1. Whatever that term means to you—and it can have a whole range of definitions from the neutral to the sexist—if you believe in something along those lines, you have already been identified by the fascists as a target for their propaganda.
3. Angry people who want to be part of a revolutionary change are particularly vulnerable to it. One of the wild things about fascism is that it often attracts a very similar group of people who might otherwise get involved with more left-wing or progressive forms of activism: anger at the current system is an important driving factor of fascism, the same as any other revolution. And a lot of terrible ideas can be “justified” when people are angry.
At this point you might be thinking to yourself, “FFcrazy15, are you telling me that every Trump flag I’ve seen at a pro-life march is a fascist flag?”
Is it a flag promoting palingenetic ultranationalism at the expense of minority groups?
Yes. Yes it is. And therefore, it has absolutely no place, no place in the pro-life movement.
Fascism is a problem in our movement. If it’s not, why is Marjorie Taylor Greene allowed at the Pro-Life march instead of getting booed off stage? Why is Abby Johnson allowed to publicly espouse racist beliefs about cops profiling her own son without being called out by the movement to the point of having to make a public apology?
Why is Donald Trump himself acceptable as a speaker at the March?
Excise it. Get rid of it. Or it will destroy us.
2. Abortion is a bandaid on social problems that the pro-life movement, on a whole, has not taken an active part in solving.
Sex leads to pregnancy. Consenting adults having sex should be aware that they might become pregnant with a human being, and unless they are willing to respect the rights of that human being, they should not have sex.
Now that that statement is out of the way: this country does not make it easy to be a parent.
One of the great failures of the modern prolife movement is the utter failure to acknowledge that abortion is a bandaid on real systemic issues. It’s a horrible bandaid that involves transferring oppression from one person to another, but it’s a response to actually existent problems.
Among those problems are the insane costs of healthcare and health insurance in this country, racism, rising housing costs, increasing income disparity, lack of federally mandated paid maternity and paternity leave, lack of affordable daycare options for parents, inability of most households to survive off a single income, the fact that we still do not have a living wage minimum in this country, and the utterly sexist expectation that a woman has to biologically function like a man in order to have a career and life outside the home.
These issues combine together to create an absolutely hellish experience for lower-income households and single parents. Consider a recently married couple that relies on a dual-wage income to pay their rent and necessities and are currently saving up for a house. What exactly are their options in the case of an unplanned pregnancy? If the wife has paid maternity leave at her work she might be in luck, able to take the necessary time to safely have her child and bond with it before returning to work, but if she doesn’t she’ll have to take two weeks off of work at least to have the baby (losing essential pay in the process), and then she’ll have to find and pay for daycare, which can be expensive. If the couple is lucky they have health insurance through their jobs, and the birth might cost almost four thousand dollars; if not, hospital bills can run into the tens of thousands of dollars for the uninsured. The couple will also have to choose between owning a house someday and providing for their child’s college fund.
I’m not making this scenario up. This is me and my husband’s scenario, if we have an unexpected pregnancy. This is real life for many people. And I’m not even touching the ways that pregnancy is infinitely harder for women of color or women who work labor or service industry jobs, women who flatly do not have the money for daycare, or whose jobs do not provide insurance, or whose husbands and partners have not stuck around to help raise the child.
And these women cannot “go get a better job.” Let me be clear about that. “Getting a better job” requires a college degree or at least specialized training, which is expensive and takes up working hours that those women need to be using to make rent money. If you don’t believe me that poverty is a self-perpetuating cycle, play the game “spent” here. I dare you.
The response to this from many pro-life activists has been Pregnancy Resource Centers (PRCs). And while I would never decry the wonderful work done by these centers, the fact of the matter is that they cannot bear the weight of a whole broken system. We should not be EXPECTING them to bear the weight of a whole broken system.
When pro-abortion activists say that we “only care about the baby before it’s born,” this is what they mean. They don’t mean that you don’t give to charity. They mean that you don’t care enough about babies and their mothers to fix the broken system that makes these people vulnerable in the first place.
We cannot charity ourselves out of this mess. The system itself has to change. And many pro-lifers, selfishly clinging to their conservative identities over their desire to help real mothers and children, have actively refused to consider that anything about the way America treats women, pregnancy, and working-class families has to change.
It needs to change. Or else more babies are going to die. And we as prolifers will be just as, if not more, responsible for letting it happen than those desperate women who choose abortion.
3. Assertions #1 and #2 make the pro-life movement hypocritical.
Fascism is inherently incompatible with pro-life values. So is the current state of American life for most working- and lower-class families.
If we as a movement are not actively working to eradicate hateful ideologies from our movement, and anti-human anti-family factors from American life, then we as a movement are being the worst kind of hypocrites.
We need to stop pretending like we can just show up at a march once a year with a couple of colorful flags and scarves and call it activism or a “pro-life revolution.” It’s not. It’s a field trip. Real activism means taking a look at the root causes of serious issues and working out how to solve them, even if it costs us socially, even if it costs us personally. Anything less is performative. Anything less is self-aggrandizement.
Anything less puts the blood of children on our hands.
