In this edition:
Abortion in art and media
Working with clinic workers
What’s the matter with Kansas?
In other news
Off-topic
As you may have noticed, this email is a week late—in part because I had a death in the family. Apologies!
I haven’t seen “Unplanned,” the big pro-life movie of the season that portrays the story of Abby Johnson, a former Planned Parenthood clinic director who joined the pro-life movement. When I checked, there were no viewings close to me.
I did, however, recently watch the first season of the TV show “Legion,” set in the X-Men universe. One of the mutant characters has powers related to memory, and early in the first season he explains just how extensive his memory is:
“Like I remember my birth. Before even—the womb. You know how loud the heartbeat is? Imagine you could remember being inside your mother’s body, warm and blind and then just this intense pressure and suddenly light”
I don’t have any reason to suppose that this piece of dialogue was written by someone who is pro-life, or even that its target audience would perceive anything pro-life about it. Nevertheless it does contain a pro-life kernel, as it asserts the continuity of identity through the stages of development, which is joined in this imaginary case to a continuity of memory.
Since I haven’t seen it, I can’t speak to the quality of “Unplanned.” Certainly, it is important to tell true, real life stories about abortion from a pro-life perspective, as long as you tell them well. However, it’s also important to go mainstream by producing art or media that doesn’t code as pro-life.
Media can avoid this coding in different ways. For example, the abortion material could be one plot or one episode or bit of dialogue encased in a larger episode or series. A recent episode of Law & Order SVU did this (h/t Leah Libresco Sargeant). Or the work can embody moral or existential intuitions that are in harmony with the pro-life view without explicitly discussing abortion, such as in the movie “Arrival.” ( I’m not claiming that the creators behind these particular works intended to make pro-life art or media, but these products serve as examples of the kind of thing I mean).
C.S. Lewis once wrote, “What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects—with their Christianity latent.” As a universal prescription, either for Christianity or for anything else, this view would be overstated. Both are needed. But as a balancing principle, it’s useful.
Since I brought up “Unplanned”: I appreciated this piece by Leah Libresco Sargeant, which discusses the movie as well as the current work of Johnson’s non-profit organization And Then There Were None (ATTWN). ATTWN seeks both to encourage workers at clinics that provide abortions to leave their jobs and to support them in the process if they do leave:
Most workers, Ricketts told me, come to ATTWN because something in their work “humanizes the baby” and leaves them deeply uncomfortable. But sometimes, the last straw is surprisingly small, like a series of minor conflicts with a supervisor.
Whatever the reason, Ricketts begins by listening, then talks about how the organization can help. “I make it clear I don’t expect anything from them. I’m not expecting them to become pro-life.” The goal is to help the client find a new job. To help them be free to leave, ATTWN will sometimes cover a month of the worker’s former salary.
In the piece, Leah takes a mixed view of the portrayal of Planned Parenthood employees in “Unplanned.” But she valuably suggests that clinic workers seek genuine goods (e.g. women’s health) and that this should inform pro-life interactions with them. There’s a lesson, too, in what Ricketts says about helping them regardless of their views on abortion. We should not cease trying to persuade, but doing that work in an explicit way is not the whole picture.
The Kansas Supreme Court recently ruled, 6-1, that the Kansas state Constitution ensures the right to an abortion. The case in question involved a 2015 Kansas law that banned a particular method of abortion, but under the ruling other abortion restrictions passed in Kansas may also fall.
There may now be efforts by pro-lifers in Kansas to amend the state Constitution to exclude the position of the Court. The state Constitutions of Alabama, Tennessee, and West Virginia have been amended in this way and state Rep. Katrina Jackson (a Democrat who spoke at this year’s March for Life) has initiated this process in Louisiana. On the other side, “at least nine other states have constitutions that specifically protect a woman’s right to an abortion according to state high court rulings,” reports the Post.
The one dissenting judge in the Kansas case is Caleb Stegall, “one of the founders of Front Porch Republic.” You can find his dissent, as well as the majority and concurring opinions, here (h/t Jake Meador). Warning: His dissent contains graphic descriptions of abortion. Other relevant information can be found in the Post story linked above—such as the fact that three of justices were Republican appointees—and in this AP story from January.
If, as it seems, this procedure ban backfired by giving this Court the chance to issue this kind of ruling, this development seems like a cautionary tale for state-level pro-lifers, especially as they seek to enact restrictions by which they hope to test Roe at the U.S. Supreme Court. The composition of that Court is different from the composition of Kansas’s state Supreme Court, but this case is a reminder of the damage that can be done if a ruling goes the wrong way.
In other news:
It should go without saying, in re: the bill in Texas that would reportedly have opened women up to the death penalty for procuring an abortion, that mainstream pro-life groups do not support that.
In the Washington Post, Sarah Pulliam Bailey has a piece on disagreement among pro-lifers over “heartbeat bills.” The piece feels refreshing because it goes reporting generic praise or condemnation of this or that trend on the state level. It recognizes that pro-lifers are real people who may have real disagreements with each other and it seeks to understand what those disagreements are. We need more coverage like that.
A run down, from pro-choicers, of pro-choice friendly state developments can be found here. A PBS piece on medical abortions and the ability or inability of Americans to order the pills online can be found here. As a friend pointed out to me, online access to medical abortion pills should be an important area of focus for pro-lifers.
In late March, the NYT published an obituary of philosopher Mary Warnock, who chaired a committee convened to produce ethical guidelines for I.V.F. in Britain (h/t Leah Libresco Sargeant). One of the suggestions in the committee’s report was that “no live embryo derived from I.V.F. be kept alive if it had not been transferred to a woman or used for research beyond 14 days after fertilization. The committee said it should be a crime to use a live human embryo for research beyond that point.” The reason: “‘We did pick on a number of days after which we understood that the embryo began to develop more swiftly toward becoming a curled-up fetus with a spinal cord and a central nervous system…’”
Off-Topic:
As I mentioned at the start, I recently had a death in the family. My maternal grandmother passed away on Holy Saturday at 99 years of age. She suffered on Good Friday, died on Holy Saturday, and I hope she will be raised on the last day as our Lord was on Easter.
Not too long ago, I read Otherwise, a collection of poems by Jane Kenyon. Two of the poems in it have come to mind in light of my grandmother’s death. One is “In the Nursing Home.” The other is “Reading Aloud to My Father.” I loved the collection, and highly recommend it in general, but especially if you are dealing with sickness, suffering, or loss, either in yourself or with respect to family or friends.
If you have improvements to suggest to this newsletter or leads on stories to include, please reach out to lifecyclesletter@gmail.com