Our modern culture is one that tells teens that bringing a child to term will wreck their family’s prospects, and mark them as freaks.
Our modern culture is one that tells teens that bringing a child to term will wreck their family’s prospects, and mark them as freaks.
I n the 1990s, after the Casey decision reaffirmed and strengthened Roe v. Wade’s constitutional right to abortion, some conservatives became alarmed by the judicial usurpation of politics and the eclipse of democracy. “Law, as it is presently made by the judiciary, has declared its independence from morality,” warned the editors of First Things. They dared to describe the American government as they found it then as a “regime.” The premise was that the American people still had a connection to God, but that the American regime, increasingly a juristocracy, was imposing morally illegitimate laws that alienated the people from their own government. They asked: What form of resistance was necessary and legitimate for the godly people?
The pro-life and conservative movement did not do anything radical in response to questions posed by First Things. The jurisprudence of Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas inspired the next generation of conservative-leaning jurists, identified and formed by the Federalist Society. Pro-lifers kept voting for Republican presidents, and kept up the pressure to appoint justices whose philosophy required them to overturn Roe. And so it came to pass. In the Dobbs ruling, the juristocracy, was — at least temporarily — beaten back.
And now that the people are governing themselves through legislatures and popular referenda, the law of the land is becoming even more disconnected from morality and natural law.
This week, Ohio’s people voted for a state constitutional amendment that amounts to a pro-life nightmare. Not only does it codify unlimited abortion rights through all nine months of pregnancy, it opens the door to public funding of abortion and may foreclose the possibility of legally requiring minors to obtain parental consent before obtaining an abortion. The pro-choice side won by twelve points. This, in a state Trump won by eight points and the pro-life Republican governor won by 25.
The reaction of pro-lifers to this difficult revelation is multifarious. Some have urged optimism and staying the course. Others are looking for a new set of compromises that can win popular consent even if they only save a small number of children from abortion. Others still are looking for a new vocabulary and language to persuade the unpersuaded public. A handful are just despairing and condemning the American people themselves as immoral. They hear of these majority pro-choice results, and to them it sounds like a blood curse. “Their blood be upon us.”
I think all of these reactions are wrong. Damning the people, or hiring gimcrack consultants to discuss word choices — this is all like debating the construction techniques of sandcastles while a hurricane approaches the beach.
We don’t expect the norms of impartiality and egalitarianism to emerge from tribal cultures that are formed by cousin-marriages. Those norms are literally foreign to them. A man from that culture adopting Western norms in such a context is likely to wreck his family’s prospects, and mark himself as a freak. Likewise, there is no set of persuasive campaign slogans, or compromises, that can overcome the moral lessons that are woven into the modern way of life. Openness to life, as pro-lifers conceive it, is becoming just as foreign and unthinkable in this regard. A pro-life culture is one in which some teenagers become parents. Our modern culture is one that tells teens that bringing a child to term will wreck their family’s prospects, and mark them as freaks. No, the normal, responsible thing is to wait until women are barely fertile at all, and then start to have your 1.2 kids.
Look at our below-replacement fertility rates (1.782 births per woman) and fertility rates around the developed world (Poland 1.38, South Korea 0.84). Attempts to get back up above replacement level with government policy have almost entirely failed. We know that fertility is culturally contagious. Although still below replacement level, religious people in the United States have a higher fertility rate (1.9) than non-religious people (1.6). That’s not just because they are preached at to value family, it’s because they are exposed to more and larger families in their social life. Young people in that context can see how the family way of life can be achieved and managed by peers like themselves. In regions where fundamentalist religion dominates, fertility is much higher, and it inspires higher fertility even among secular people. Look at Israel, where Haredi fertility rates seem to exert an upward draft upon secular Israelis.
Large networks of kith and kin are the support networks most people need to reproduce large networks of kith and kin. They need the nearby in-laws who take turns watching the kids, who babysit, who occasionally share things in common like extra cars while yours is in the shop. Raising kids is a big job. And even among the religious fundamentalists who idealize big families, we parents are consoled and encouraged by just sharing our struggles with each other. It’s also true that having large networks of kith and kin provides not just social benefits but economic opportunities for most individuals; it has throughout history. We may have left tribalism behind, but that doesn’t mean that tribes don’t retain some residual powers in the modern world. Just look at the Romneys.
But if fertility — and the family way of life — is a culture, so is barrenness and atomization. And each year we slip into deeper levels of infertility, the fewer large families exist, the fewer people even know a large family, or can imagine having one of their own.
In the end, pro-lifers don’t have a mere political problem or even, directly, a problem with the American people. We have a problem with the American way of life. That sounds like it’s making the problem bigger. And it is. But this way of life isn’t just a moral offense to the godly few. It’s also plainly unpleasant for the atomized many and unsustainable on the whole. Very soon, it’s going to come into question — or, if you have ears to hear, into Judgment.