One need not infantilize mothers to acknowledge that strong societal forces can impair their moral vision, particularly for the very young and vulnerable.
One need not infantilize mothers to acknowledge that strong societal forces can impair their moral vision, particularly for the very young and vulnerable.
A s pro-lifers march into a new year with the very real hope of a future without Roe v. Wade, our conversations are beginning to shift. There’s a sense in which, if Roe falls, nothing will change. Abortion mills will still run, church groups will still hold prayer vigils outside their doors, and social conservatives will still need to make the pro-life case. Yet because our social context will be different, the way we speak will be different. The way we write books will be different. One question looms especially large for conservatives in this new landscape: How should we think about legal penalties for mothers who have an abortion? And beyond the legal question, how should we think about their moral culpability?
In his latest monthly newsletter, Aaron Renn accuses the pro-life movement of “moral doublespeak” around this question. He particularly lambastes “Christian white knights” who primarily blame deadbeat men without holding mothers responsible. “Abortion may be a sin,” he writes, “but for a wide swath of pro-life conservatives, women who abort their babies aren’t sinners.” He cites their rush to distance the pro-life brand from Donald Trump’s tentative comments in March 2016 that there should be “some form of punishment” for women who have an abortion. Various public statements from pro-lifers referred to both babies and women as “victims.” Even Doug Wilson’s more nuanced response leaves Renn dissatisfied. His problem is not simply the hesitancy to penalize women as a matter of legal prudence but the hesitancy to assign any moral blame at all.
Renn diagnoses this as a symptom of a broader double standard in American conservative Christian subculture. More often than not, men are instructed to shoulder most of the blame for public ills and private dysfunction. This is disconnected from a cultural reality in which women “shout” their moral culpability more boldly than ever — not just their abortions, but also their divorces. He proposes that a radical shift in rhetoric and strategy is in order, or else conservative Christians will continue to lag behind.
Some of Renn’s points are well taken. Pro-lifers should certainly retire morally sloppy phrases like “women who have experienced an abortion,” which someone reported to Renn from a keynote conference speech. Even the word “victim” should be qualified and nuanced, with the recognition that culpability exists on a spectrum. It’s also generally true that, contrary to popular perception, certain Christian conservative subcultures are too quick to blame and shame men. The conservative virtue of chivalry, taken to an extreme, can infantilize toxic wives and mothers while ignoring wounded husbands and fathers. We can also simply forget how much men need care, which leads us to talk less than we should about counseling men on the other side of unwanted abortions.
Still, elements of Renn’s project are up for debate. To begin with, we should question how well the conservative cause is served by borrowing and normalizing the rhetoric of the manosphere. Renn himself intends to strike a precarious balance between the excesses of feminism and “meninism.” But language matters. By desensitizing readers to code phrases like “white knight,” Renn risks creating a vulnerability in men who will no longer recognize it as a red flag should they fall down a hard meninist rabbit hole. This latest newsletter also unquestioningly recycles the oft-cited 70 percent statistic on the proportion of divorces filed by women, which obscures the fact that the filing party may well not be at fault. (Renn mentions this as a fact about women that “white knight” conservatives “can’t bring themselves” to acknowledge.)
When it comes to moral culpability for abortion in particular, Renn is too quick to underestimate the power of the Planned Parenthood propaganda machine. One need not infantilize mothers to acknowledge that strong societal forces can impair their moral vision, particularly for the very young and vulnerable. As Doug Wilson notes in the blogpost Renn critiques, why else is there such concentrated hostility to ultrasound machines among supporters of abortion? It’s because “they know (and they are right in knowing) that there are many women who would not do it if they saw what they were doing.” Further, there’s room to sympathize with women who do have a moral check but are bullied by a doctor, boyfriend, or family member — even a parent, in some of the ugliest scenarios. Renn acknowledges that the blame is shared in such situations, but it’s unclear whether he still believes all parties should be subject to equal penalties.
As pro-lifers, we need to consider carefully what our primary social goals are. The purpose of punishment for innocent bloodshed is two-fold: to uphold the victim’s humanity and to condemn the perpetrator’s evil. A legal world where abortionists felt the full force of the law would still satisfy the former goal, even if it only partly satisfied the latter. It is true that in many cases, perhaps more than we want to believe, the doctor and the patient have had a meeting of the minds. But proving such a meeting in court of law, and creating a penalty system where the numerous shades of difference among individual cases are appropriately recognized, is another matter.
Examples could be multiplied of murder cases with a victim where a perpetrator escapes on a technicality. In such cases, outrage is understandable, but changing the law around the technicality has been judged more likely to create injustice than keeping it in place. The statement that someone “should” be punished has both a moral and a legal component. A blatantly warrantless search may uncover evidence that should put someone away in the first sense, but not the second. A guilty man acquitted in his first trial should be punished in the first sense, but not the second.
Renn hints that he might be open to this sort of prudential argument, provided that pro-lifers retire some of the movement’s more low-resolution moral rhetoric. Fair enough. But the spectrum of moral blame still contains more shades than Renn appears willing to admit, particularly in a society where so many institutions of church and state have failed to provide sound moral guidance to the perplexed. Granted, the complacent career-woman on her third abortion may not fall among the perplexed. But the 14-year-old girl on the edge of her first abortion, trying to understand what exactly is happening inside her body, is beset by deceptive memes trickling down from the highest echelons of society to the lowest. And all too often, these memes are left unchallenged by priests and pastors who are too timid to speak up and possibly save a life.
Perhaps in saying this, I risk being accused of enabling “white knight syndrome” myself. But real white knights are good for something, after all. In the coming years, we will need more of them, not fewer.