The Great Replacement and the Racist Opposition to Abortion Rights
Reproductive rights in the US were never very strong. 90% of American counties lack an abortion provider already, and the future looks grim in comparison. What is behind the push to end abortion?
The US is on track to become something akin to a developing country, where women are expected to have many more children and consequently exercise fewer rights. In many of these poverty-stricken nations, women are seen less as citizens equal to men and more as brood mares to keep the population plentiful, as they were in bygone eras when infant and child mortality were much more common than today. The birthrate in less developed countries is significantly higher than in economically advanced nations, due largely to three relatively recent developments in women’s rights: “fewer deaths in childhood, greater access to contraception, and more women are getting an education and seeking to establish their careers before—and sometimes instead of—having a family.” The replacement birthrate necessary to keep the population from shrinking is considered to be 2.1 children per woman; the US rate is currently 1.7 and is expected to continue falling as new concerns such as climate change add to an existing overall decline. The birthrate is cratering, and it is not likely to get any better any time soon.
Falling birth rates are in fact a sign of progress for a number of reasons, as argued in this opinion piece from NBC:
For decades, U.S. women have reported that far higher fractions of their births occurred before they wanted or after they had had as many children as they wanted, compared to women in other rich countries. As access to highly effective contraception in the U.S. has improved, this rate — and the difference between our rate and the rate in similar countries — has declined. And these declines have been linked to our falling fertility rates. Surely a country that prides itself on people's living their lives as they see fit would see this as a success?…
Women have gotten the message. Declines in fertility have been concentrated among younger Americans. Teen fertility has declined by more than 75 percent in recent decades, all the way down to 15.3 births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 19 last year, from 61.8 births per 1,000 in 1991. Importantly, waiting to become a parent doesn't mean never having a baby. Until the pandemic, fertility at older ages was rising. In 2018, 85 percent of women had become mothers by age 40 to 45, compared to 80 percent in 2006.
None of this is to absolve the US or the West in general of its role in creating the conditions of economic hardship and political repression that lead to increased childbirth and a lack of family planning in poorer nations (our relative wealth is in fact highly dependent on this predatory relationship), nor to portray them as backwards or inferior to our way of life. Indeed, treatment of women and LGBTQ+ individuals the world over is lacking even in the putatively most advanced nations with the healthiest economies, and a large contributor to this regressive tendency is the fascist need to keep the population growing to account for the demographic needs of capital (which depends on an ever-increasing growth in profits), the military, the church, as well as the maintenance of social programs and the supply of young workers to care for and support the aging population. These “collective” problems will more and more frequently win out over what will be misattributed to selfish, individualistic concerns about rights; in the same way that the war in Ukraine and high gas prices were recently deemed more important than even attempting to combat the existential threat of climate change, the Supreme Court’s revealing citation of a CDC document containing the phrase “domestic supply of infants” in its leaked Roe decision is only the beginning. As the population dwindles, the burden on women in Western nations will come to resemble that found in developing countries, and they will be asked to set aside their rights as well as their health for the good of the population. But this will not be just any population: the recent turn against abortion rights is racist in nature as well as generally regressive.
This looming demographic angst is the only real explanation for the recent turn against Roe v. Wade and the otherwise incomprehensibly malicious elimination of legal abortion exceptions for rape and incest. From The Guardian:
No-exception laws, once too harsh even for anti-abortion Republicans, gain traction across US
Extreme anti-abortion groups are now emboldened to fight for laws that ban ending pregnancies conceived in rape or incest
Republicans were largely dismissive when, in 2019, a small group of extreme anti-abortion activists called on the party to reconsider its “decades-old” view that laws restricting abortion in the US ought to exempt victims of rape and incest.
It simply went too far, the party’s House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, argued at the time, to support absolute abortion bans that did not offer protection to women and girls who had been raped or were the victims of incest.
But there has been a sea change in Republican thinking since then.
At least 11 US states – including Alabama, Oklahoma, Missouri, Arkansas and Texas – have passed legislation that bans abortion without any such exceptions. Where Republicans once believed that absolute bans were unpalatable and “toxic” with voters, the party’s legislators have now adopted the language once promoted by the most extreme anti-abortion activists in the country who say any such exceptions are “prejudice against children conceived in rape and incest.”
“It is our view that the value of human life is not determined by the circumstances of one’s conceptions at birth,” said one letter by proponents of absolute bans. “A child conceived in rape is still a child.”
While most of the laws have been blocked by US courts for now, the expected reversal of Roe v Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that made abortion legal in the US, would almost immediately, or as soon as practical, put the bans into effect.
It means that in many states, restrictions on reproductive rights will be more extreme than they were before Roe was passed nearly 50 years ago.
There is also the issue of contraception: the same rightists who oppose abortion rights tend to oppose easy access to birth control and family planning. It is tempting to explain this as a general opposition to any sexual activity not for the purposes of biblically-sanctioned procreation, but most religions are tolerant of abortion rights, with the major exception being evangelicals. This backlash against reproductive rights is also disproportionate in its severity (Americans are having half as many abortions now as they did in the 1980s), another aspect of its ascendancy that requires further explanation than political opportunism or some sort of religious revival. The vast majority of abortions take place very shortly after pregnancy, and the kind of gory destruction of viable fetuses used in anti-choice scare tactics is vanishingly rare. In fact, even before Roe’s imminent destruction, many US states already lack meaningful access to abortion services and more closely resemble the aforementioned developing countries:
Some abortion providers have held their own in hostile states for decades. Take Dr. Alan Braid, the Texas OB-GYN who has been practicing for 45 years and recently defied the state’s near-total abortion ban. Doctors like Braid will need to retire eventually, but many feel they can’t as their retirement could mean the loss of a clinic. Five states have only one clinic remaining, meaning one doctor’s departure could cut off abortion access for an entire state or region. In 2020, one of Ohio’s nine abortion clinics closed due to a doctor’s retirement. A decade ago, the state had 15 abortion providers. Now it has only eight. Had Yellowhammer not purchased the Alabama clinic and recruited Torres, it, too, might have closed, leaving the state with just two clinics. “The weight of doing abortions in rural areas is falling upon the shoulders of very few people,” said Dr. Iman Alsaden, medical director of Planned Parenthood Great Plains and fellow with Physicians for Reproductive Health. “People who do family planning fellowships tend to stay in big urban academic centers because they are then training other fellows, and they want to do research.”…
The provider shortage begins with training. Less than half of medical schools offer students hands-on clinical experience with abortion. Even post-graduate training for OB-GYNs often fails to include abortion: A 2018 survey found that only 64 percent of OB-GYN residencies include routine abortion education, despite the fact that they are required to do so in order to be accredited by the American Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME). Students who are interested in abortion care but in residencies where such training isn’t offered often have to pursue special fellowships after they graduate. Additionally, “many state institutions have in their charters that they cannot teach about abortion and other forms of comprehensive reproductive health care,” Alsaden said. The result: Even though 97 percent of OB-GYNs in private practice say they encounter patients seeking abortion, only 14 percent offer abortion care.
The disproportionality and viciousness of the attack is telling. As is happening with the backlash against LGBTQ+ rights, reproductive rights in the US are hardly overpowering, and the fact that a few minor victories are courting such a reaction speaks to a deeply held underlying prejudices of their opponents and to the weakness of the premise that the fetus is a distinct being that can be said to be under any kind of meaningful attack. This fetus is, according to all valid medical science, a part of the mother’s own body, no different than a tumor whose removal is medically necessary in many cases. We would never argue for the rights of the tumor against the rights of its host, and the only possible argument in defense of limiting abortion out of concern for fetal rights is religiously motivated (“god tells us that fetus is alive and should therefore be protected from the moment of conception”) and therefore irrelevant for the purposes of any real process of deliberation in a pluralistic society. When this argument inevitably fails or is rightly ignored, anti-choice campaigners will explicitly fall back on tyranny of the majority: “most people consider the fetus to be alive in a way that is worth according rights, so it must be true.” The latter is an explicitly amoral realpolitik argument comparable to “love it or leave it” kinds of patriotic sloganeering. Behind it is a growing nervousness about birthrates in general and of the white race in particular, which was the topic of the last entry, “The Enablers of Mass Murder.” The gunman who killed 10 people in New York was a believer in the great replacement theory, which holds that “native” (usually a code for white) Americans are being replaced politically and demographically as the hegemonic group in the US. A startling one third of Americans agree that this is a concern.
We might wonder how women throughout the US are able to tolerate such a preemptive assault on their rights, considering that safe access to healthcare is the basic condition for the enjoyment of any other rights—pregnancy is dangerous enough, and unsafe abortions will still take place when the law forbids safe ones.
Who supports reproductive rights, and why? The most significant predictor of support for reproductive rights is almost a tautology: those who identify as Democrats are far more likely to support abortion than those who identify as Republicans (“39% of Republicans believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases versus 89% of Democrats”). Other factors such as education, religious beliefs, and income play a comparatively small role, as does race and gender. The last category is surprising as it appears that women are not significantly more likely to support their own reproductive freedom: “women are slightly more likely to support abortion than men, with Pew finding 62% of women want abortion to be legal versus 56% of men.” This is less significant a difference than race. Why would women oppose abortion? The question is somewhat patronizing, because it assumes that women are purely self-interested and should automatically support any rule that appears to benefit them, even at the potential expense of others. Additionally, women voting against what appears to be their own interests is not unique—the less well off in the US do this all the time. The poor who vote in this way might be genuinely convinced to vote for Republican candidates who favor economically regressive policies because they agree with them about culture war issues and find that pursuing those hidebound goals is worth the loss of economic opportunity or for some other reason. Similarly, women are not a monolithic entity and might be motivated by other causes; assuming they are confused in some way if they don’t all support reproductive freedom is as much a form of chauvinism as the act of limiting those rights in the first place.
But if it is not self-interest, religion, or social security concerns fueling this growing opposition to abortion, what is? If demographics were the only concern, there would not be an attendant growing fear of racial replacement—concerned states could just invite young people from overpopulated or fast growing countries to supplement the aging workforce in the US in the short term (instead we are adopting increasingly xenophobic border policies, also against our own interests). In the long term, with birthrates falling throughout the world, this solution would no longer work:
Others point out that the problems of low fertility may get thornier when the overall size of the population begins to shrink. “What happens to mortgages in a country where real estate depreciates like a used car because the population is falling and we need fewer and fewer houses all the time? We’re totally unprepared for that,” said Lyman Stone, a demographer and research fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, a conservative-leaning think tank. And given enough time, said Dr. Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, below-replacement fertility leads to the extinction of the human race. “Eventually, you run into a problem,” he said. “It’s not a sustainable solution.”
Since no country has had low fertility rates long enough to experience its full effects, the debate over all this remains theoretical. “It takes a while to work its way through the population,” said Murray. Even countries like Japan, where the population is already shrinking, still benefit from a growing global labor force from which to draw workers and a growing global marketplace in which to sell their wares. And countries like the U.S., Canada and Australia rely on net immigration as well — and could probably continue doing so for decades if they choose to embrace it. But birth rates are falling practically everywhere, and the global fertility rate is expected to fall below replacement level sometime between 2050 and 2100. The consequences of low fertility will be different when the whole world is experiencing it.
The root cause of anti-abortion fervor in the US is a fear of the loss of white majority and white hegemony, set against the backdrop of a declining overall birthrate brought about by widely available education, access to birth control, and a greater focus on human rights and equality. It is no accident that the American states set to abrogate reproductive freedom are the same ones that have the worst record with issues of racial prejudice and segregation: these are same people who fear replacement by the more and more populous Other and are flailing about for a solution, not caring who is harmed in the process. In these states, education, access to birth control, and equal rights are also under attack—if these lead to a lower birthrate, and they aren’t willing to supplement the population with the aforementioned Other, then in the minds of rightwing politicians in these states, a return to developing country status is necessary.
As the earth’s environment continues its man-made free fall and climate change brings about food scarcity, increasingly common disasters, and political upheaval, the racist mob will grow ever more fascist and authoritarian. Abortion is not the first human right to fall to this tide of extremism, and it will not be the last.