Category Archives: Personal Autonomy

What Dobbs Hath Wrought…

Lots of people cheered when our rogue Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade, and began what has turned out to be a flight from constitutional principles–especially the principle that government has an obligation to protect individual liberty and autonomy.

Faux Christians celebrated the obvious fact that the decision was a win for their particular religious beliefs. Those who’d piously pretended to care about religious liberty were delighted when the Court ignored the liberties of adherents of religions that differ on the issue. (It’s been clear for quite a while that the “liberty” these Christian warriors want to advance is the liberty to impose their own beliefs on others.)

Men (and some women) whose worldviews are paternalistic celebrated the Court’s declaration that women would no longer be permitted to govern themselves. After all, those sweet little females were never meant to have self-determination; pesonal autonomy is for men. (Mostly straight and White…)

Dobbs was also welcomed by the legions of authoritarians who believe–in contrast to the nation’s founders–that  government should make life decisions for its citizen/subjects, rather than protecting their right to believe and live as they see fit.

Dobbs was handed down in 2022, so enough time has passed to see whether all that celebrating was justified, or whether the desired results have failed to materialize. A recent essay in the Guardian assessed that “progress.”

Here’s the lede:

Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the US supreme court case that rescinded the constitutional right to abortion, is failing on its own terms. Since the ruling, in June 2022, the number of abortions in the US has risen. Support for reproductive rights is on the upswing. And the rate of voluntary sterilization among young women – a repudiation of Trumpian pronatalism, if a desperate one – jumped abruptly after Dobbs, and there’s no reason to believe it will drop off.

Also rising at an alarming clip are preventable maternal deaths and criminal prosecutions of pregnant people.

The Guttmacher Institute reports that abortions rose 1.5% between 2023 and 2024, on top of a 11.1% increase in the first year after Dobbs. That’s probably a significant undercount, since Guttmacher reports only “clinician-provided abortions”, either surgical or medical (using abortion pills), and doesn’t estimate how many abortions are happening outside the formal healthcare system. As we know, numerous women are obtaining abortion medications directly from suppliers or from the multiple feminist underground networks that have been organized in the wake of the decision.

The essay notes that the 21 state legislatures that, like my own state of Indiana, have imposed total or near-total bans have failed to do anything that might give doctors legal leeway to save the health and lives of pregnant women in medical distress. Indeed, rather than trying to save lives, several are prosecuting pregnant women who handle those emergencies on their own.

The fact that we have seen more abortions, not fewer ones (not to mention increases in pro-abortion public opinion and contraception) has infuriated the anti-abortion activists, who are searching for stronger disincentives. They seem to have settled on more punishment–and have no apparent problem with more deaths among the already born. (Evidently, the death of pregnant women is an unfortunate–but acceptable– consequence of saving the “pre-born.”)

The Trump administration and MAGA want to see more babies. (Fewer immigrants, more “real American” babies…). But if one goal of banning abortion was to produce more of those babies, that’s clearly not working.

Public health researchers saw “an abrupt increase in permanent contraception procedures” – sterilization – following Dobbs among adults in their prime reproductive years, ages 18 to 30. Unsurprisingly, the increase in procedures for women (tubal ligations) was twice that for men (vasectomies).

As the essayist notes, the carrots haven’t been appetizing enough, and the sticks not effective enough, so Red-state legislators “are bringing out the AR-15s.” Republican lawmakers in at least 10 states have introduced bills defining abortion as homicide, and criminalizing both the provider and the patient. The bills are based on “fetal personhood” – the strategy of conferring full legal rights to a fetus from conception. By 2024, 39 states had fetal homicide laws.

While they work toward criminalizing the ending of a pregnancy, anti-abortion lawmakers and prosecutors are making creative use of existing law to punish miscarriages.

A 31-year-old South Carolina woman who miscarried and disposed of the tissue in the trash was arrested for “desecration of human remains”, a crime carrying a 10-year sentence. In March, a woman found bleeding outside her Georgia apartment after a miscarriage was jailed for “concealing the death of another person” and “abandonment of a dead body” for placing the remains in the bin. 

Rational people have always known this movement isn’t “pro-life.” It’s anti-woman.

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The Stakes

Remember that old song lyric, “What’s It all about, Alfie?”

Those of us who are appalled and confused by the administration’s daily abuses of the Constitution and rule of law can be forgiven for losing sight of “what it’s all about.” As usual, Heather Cox Richardson has provided context–and an answer. She points to the obvious: Trump’s economic policies are designed to transfer wealth to the already-obscenely-wealthy from the rest of us–then provides context: “From 1981 to 2021, American policies moved $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%.”

But just enriching the already-rich is only one part of the overall goal. Richardson points to the administration’s gutting of a government that “regulates business, provides a basic social safety net, promotes infrastructure, and protects civil rights and to replace it with a government that permits a few wealthy men to rule.”

The CBO score for the Republicans’ omnibus bill projects that if it is enacted, 16 million people will lose access to healthcare insurance over the next decade in what is essentially an assault on the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. The bill also dramatically cuts Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Plan (SNAP) benefits, clean energy credits, aid for student borrowers, benefits for federal workers, and consumer protection services, while requiring the sale of public natural resources.

It gets worse. (I know, you’re thinking “how much worse can it get?” Trust me.)

Richardson is only one of the observers who pinpoints the real “mover and shaker” behind this assault on constitutional government–Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought. Vought is determined to decimate those parts of the government that are inconsistent with the Christian Nationalist goals outlined in Project 2025, the production of which he directed. As Richardson reminds us,

Vought was a key author of Project 2025, whose aim is to disrupt and destroy the United States government order to center a Christian, heteronormative, male-dominated family as the primary element of society. To do so, the plan calls for destroying the administrative state, withdrawing the United States from global affairs, and ending environmental and business regulations.

Racism is, of course, an essential element of Christian Nationalism, which works to elevate the civic and social dominance of (certain) White Christian males. Vought founded the Center for Renewing America (CRA), which focuses on combating its (utterly phony) version of “critical race theory.” The organization’s affiliated issue advocacy group, American Restoration Action, has a similar mission: to “renew a consensus of America as a nation under God”.  Both groups hope to provide the “ideological ammunition to sustain Trump’s political movement after his departure from the White House.”

It is worth noting that the administration’s war on education and empirical knowledge is an essential element of the Christian Nationalist plan to de-secularize America. The assaults on science, on research, on academic freedom are an indispensable part of the movement to substitute theocracy for a country that respects the intellectual liberties protected by the First Amendment. In service of that goal, Christian Nationalists have worked diligently to redefine “religious freedom” to mean the right of fundamentalist Christians to impose their beliefs on others, and to redefine “free speech” to mean privileging opposition to the “woke” values they abhor.

One of those “woke” values is education.

In my own Red state of Indiana, where performative “Christians” dominate the legislature and self-identified Christian Nationalists hold statewide offices, the assault on education has been unremitting. The voucher program that pretends to honor “parental choice” sends millions of Hoosier tax dollars to religious schools, in what is a dishonest work-around of the Establishment Clause while starving our public schools. More recently, steady assaults on Indiana University–a once-storied and highly respected academic institution–have ranged from political interference with its latest choice of a president–allowing the post to go to an less distinguished (but presumably more well-connected) “dark horse” candidate, to legislation threatening curriculum considered “liberal,” to the more recent and appalling substitution of far-right political operatives (including the odious Jim Bopp) for the choices of alumni on the university’s board of trustees.

Thanks to those assaults–and Indiana’s ban on abortion–Indiana University is losing many of the students who formerly enriched intellectual life on campus.

America is at an inflection point. What is at stake isn’t simply our global dominance (which Trump has already discarded), but our essential domestic identity. America hasn’t been seen as the “City on the Hill” because we embraced fundamentalist religion, but because we aspired to protect individual liberty and civic equality.

We didn’t always live up to those aspirations, but we can ill-afford to replace them with a Taliban-like theocracy.

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The War On Women Continues

One of the constants of Trumpism has been its war on women. Trump himself sees women only as sexual objects; the Christian Nationalists who support him see us as “feeders and breeders”– designed by God to submit to men and produce babies.

I was reminded of MAGA’s war on women when I read that Trump’s “big, beautiful budget” will defund Planned Parenthood, among other obscenities that will differentially hurt women.

During the first Trump  administration, Trump blocked women’s access to health care through legislation, regulations, judicial appointments, and legal action, slashing funding for family planning, rolling back rules requiring employers to offer no-cost birth control coverage, and revoking multiple protections against sexual harassment, sexual assault and discrimination.

Trump II has been more of the same–and then some.

Trump has decimated boards that administer workplace anti-discrimination laws, rescinded prior Executive Orders against discrimination, reduced enforcement of the Pregnant Workers Act, and undercut civil rights and anti-discrimination laws across the government, with anti-DEI efforts front and center. The administration has cut funding for research on women’s health, erased vital information from federal websites, and eliminated the Gender Policy Council. It proposes huge cuts to Medicaid, SNAP and other programs disproportionately depended upon by women and children. (There’s much more at the link.)

All of these measures are part of the Right’s hysterical resistance to culture change.

A significant minority of Americans feel existentially threatened by the progress of women and minorities. That progress challenges their worldviews, their beliefs about the “proper” order of the world. Trump was elected by those hysterical people. Even those who recognized his personal repulsiveness supported him because he promised to reverse what most of us consider social progress– to turn back the cultural changes that so frighten and infuriate them.

I wondered what research tells us about whether government can reverse cultural changes, so I looked into it.  

Studies tell us that such efforts face significant structural, social, and generational resistance. It turns out that entrenched social changes are really difficult to reverse. Shifts of attitudes about race, gender roles, sexuality, and religion occured over generations, and as a result, contemporary perspectives on individual autonomy and diversity are unlikely to be reversed.

 
 
 
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Old Truths

Important notice: Due to the cold, the rally on January 20th has been moved to Broadway United Methodist Church, 609 E 29th St, Indianapolis. Indoors.

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.Several weeks ago, the Indianapolis Capitol Chronicle ran an article in which the author mused about civics instruction. She had come across the 1930 edition of a civics textbook, and noted that its focus on community responsibilities seemed very different from today’s preoccupation with individualism.

The book starts with this preface (and yes, I took photos while at the table): “It is generally agreed today that the main reason for the existence of schools is to help our pupils to become good citizens. Our schools teach the three R’s because everybody needs those tools in order to act intelligently in his relations with his fellow man. It is no less important for the pupil to learn that his life must be lived in close association with his fellow men, and to profit by the experience of human beings in regard to these relations.”

In those few introductory words lies the conundrum that faces all societies: how do we protect the political, religious and philosophical autonomy of the individual while building safe, orderly and supportive communities?

Several years ago, I made a speech in which I considered that question. As I said then, there is an African proverb to the effect that it takes a village to raise a child. Implicit in that saying is the question at the heart of political philosophy: What should that village look like? What is the common good, and what is the nature of social obligation? What sort of social and political arrangements are most likely to promote and enable what Aristotle called “human flourishing”? And perhaps, more importantly, do we live in an era when such questions have largely been abandoned?

That simple introductory paragraph from a long-ago textbook reminds us that our public schools have two vitally important tasks: first, giving children the intellectual tools and skills they will need, not just to negotiate the economic world they will inhabit, but also to lead richer, more fulfilled and considered lives; and second, equipping them for the responsibilities of citizenship.

Over the past few decades, there has been a very unfortunate narrowing of emphasis to just one portion of that first responsibility. Critics of public education have focused almost entirely on the subjects needed to produce a workforce–on giving students the skills they’ll need to compete economically. The sorts of instruction that will help them flourish, that will give them the insights and understandings that will help them create rich and enjoyable lives–music and art and literature–have been relegated to the sidelines or eliminated entirely, dismissed as “frills.”

Worse, the various educational “reforms” that have been pursued have ignored the second important purpose of public education–preparing students for thoughtful and engaged citizenship in a complicated and increasingly diverse society.

Not only have our public schools neglected the proper teaching of American history and government, the vouchers that facilitate evasion of the First Amendment have sent thousands of children to religious schools, most of which ignore civics instruction and deepen tribal commitments rather than helping students understand the complexity–and necessity– of seeking the common good and wrestling with the imperatives of our national motto: e pluribus unum.

Too many of our legislators, here in Indiana and elsewhere, confuse education with job training. They are most definitely not the same thing. We are impoverishing generations of students by depriving them of sustained contact with the liberal arts and with the enduring questions that separate thinking humans from automatons. By neglecting instruction in government and citizenship, we have contributed to the widespread ignorance that continues to elevate so many unfit and unstable individuals to positions of power. It isn’t just Trump–there are plenty of other examples at all levels of government, certainly in Indiana.

Finding the “golden mean” between too much emphasis on individualism and too much emphasis on community and conformity has never been simple. That search for a proper balance between individual rights and the imperatives of the common good is fatally compromised when a significant portion of the population remains uneducated because those responsible for education policy don’t know (or care about) the difference between educating students and training them.

When the body politic lacks a common understanding of their society’s foundational principles, culture warriors and plutocrats are enabled, and tribalism threatens to bring down the entire edifice of legitimate government. That is arguably where we find ourselves right now, and the sustained assault on American education–an assault that has hollowed out the very concept of education– is at the very heart of our impending Trumpian disasters.

We are reaping the whirlwind.

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The Patriarchal Backlash

Supporters of the draconian abortion bans passed by Red states like Indiana like to pooh-pooh allegations that those bans are part of a “war on women.” But a woman’s ability to control her own reproduction is absolutely essential to her ability to participate equally in economic and civic life, and depriving her of that control is a major goal of those who want to take America back to patriarchy, to a time when women were subservient.

MAGA’s war against women doesn’t stop with abortion bans and restrictions on birth control. The Guardian recently reported on Republican proposals to cut a variety of federal subsidies that disproportionately help women.

As they prepare to take control of the White House and Congress next month, conservatives are eyeing cutbacks to federal programs that help tens of millions of women pay for healthcare, food, housing and transportation.

The ferocity of the backlash to women’s growing equality raises obvious questions: why is it that the United States, with our vaunted celebration of individual rights and civic equality, has never had a female President, as other countries have? Why are women still under-represented in our legislative bodies, compared to numerous other countries?

Recently, Yascha Mounk posed those questions to Alice Evans, a scholar who focuses on them. Evans has a book coming out titled “The Great Gender Divergence,” and her observations are instructive.

Evans noted that there are wide differences in labor force and leadership participation across the globe.

Across Scandinavia there is a very strong share of female representation. In Latin America there are 11 legislative assemblies which actually mandate gender parity, and you’ve just seen two women fight it out for the presidency in Mexico.

When Mounk asked Evans to speculate about why these differences exist, her explanation began with a history of women’s emancipation that was very similar to the one Morton Marcus and I offered in our book From Property to Partnership.

As she noted, in 1900, much of the world was very patriarchal.

Our Enlightenment, our scholars, our scientists, our parliaments, and our judiciary were incredibly patriarchal, a total sausage fest. But then there is a big disruption, and I do think economics and politics are important here. So over the 20th century, skill bias and technological change are ramping up demand for skilled labor. That happens across the world. These factories open up and women seize the economic opportunities they create. It’s also mediated by technology: When women have contraceptives they can control their fertility, further their education and then build careers.

So what accounts for the striking differences in female political and economic participation across the globe? Culture. Especially the persistence of patriarchal cultures, where male status depends upon “protecting” women and keeping them submissive, and where a “husbands’ status is contingent upon them being the breadwinner and women remaining at home.”

The interview is wide-ranging, and focuses largely on the situations of women in countries where male resistance to female empowerment is far more powerful and effective than in the U.S. But Evans’ observations about culture–especially patriarchal culture–have obvious pertinence to America, where our citizenry includes a wide variety of subcultures, many of which are patriarchal to a greater or lesser degree. 

There has been a lot of hand-wringing over the fact that Trump pulled more than the expected vote percentage with some traditionally Democratic-voting constituencies. Pundits have offered various theories, almost all based upon policy differences, ignoring  the likely effect of the “macho” elements of some of these cultures, and the corresponding belief that women are unfit for the Presidency. Then there is the influence of fundamentalist religions, virtually all of which circumscribe the role of women. The recent resurgence of White Christian Nationalism is at least partially a backlash against  the growing role of women and gays in American society.

Project 2025 proposes an agenda that is thoroughly paternalistic and patriarchal, and anyone who thinks the Trump administration won’t try to impose its provisions on American society is, as they say, “smoking something.” (The extent to which his chosen clowns, conspiracy theorists and buffoons will succeed is a different question.)

James Davidson Hunter coined the term Culture Wars back in 1992. It was an apt phrase then, and it is even more appropriate now. The divisions between modernists and “traditionalists,” between urban and rural Americans, between resentful Whites and people of color are all essentially cultural. 

Today’s “cold civil war” isn’t between Republicans and Democrats. (Face it, there aren’t any real Republicans anymore.) It’s a culture war between a MAGA movement that wants to reinstate a racist, homophobic, patriarchal society and those of us who want to live in an inclusive 21st Century.

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