The historical roots of “My body, my choice” invite a political reckoning
The deluge of Dobbs commentary continues unabated, and many see the ruling as turning back the clock. For liberals, this means paranoid fantasies of women confined to the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant; for conservatives it means that America can now be America again. More thoughtful commentators have looked for more precise historical analogies.
The most obvious parallel is not very flattering to the pro-choice side: The conservatives who legislated from the bench to overturn fifty years of pro-Roe rulings acted much like the liberals who in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) legislated from the bench to overturn fifty years of pro-Plessy v. Ferguson rulings that affirmed the constitutionality of separate-but-equal segregation.
Michael Kazin, a highly regarded historian from Georgetown University, offers a historical analogy more friendly to the pro-choice side: Prohibition. At first glance the parallel seems appropriate. In both cases, one group identifies a legally permissible action as morally impermissible and works to impose its morality on an unwilling populace. Kazin is too good a historian not to note significant differences: Prohibition was not imposed by judicial fiat; rather it was instituted through democratic procedures: the very high bar of democracy needed to pass a constitutional amendment (the eighteenth, ratified in January of 1919). This democratic majority proceeded from a bipartisan consensus—the Democratic and Republican parties each had a “dry” wing that supported the ban on alcohol.
Beyond these careful historical distinctions much of Kazin’s piece reads like an anti-Christian screed. It is fair to say that the pro-life movement has a strong Christian component, especially at the grass-roots level. But Kazin errs, and errs egregiously, in reducing Prohibition to its religious component. After recounting the celebratory comments of Christian pro-lifers following Dobbs, Kazin raises the issue of pro-choice resistance and introduces his historical analogy in ominous tones: “A century ago, another mass movement, also driven by religious zeal, faced a similar challenge—and utterly failed to overcome it.” True, many evangelicals supported Prohibition. But the amendment passed because these evangelicals found common cause with secular progressives who opposed alcohol for their own reasons, invoking a scientific language of social efficiency and hygiene much more than morality. This is no small matter, for secular progressives (like Kazin himself) continue to speak the language of social efficiency and hygiene, though much of their focus has shifted from booze to sex.
As a Catholic, I have no sympathy for Prohibition. As a historian, I have no sympathy for willful distortions of the past to serve short-term politics. Kazin’s omission of the secular-progressive dimension of Prohibition serves a broader historical narrative: a morality play that pits the forces of liberation in a secular Holy War against the forces of repression. The Catholics who opposed Prohibition (and there is no minimizing anti-Catholicism as yet another common ground uniting evangelicals and progressives) did so in the name of custom, not liberation. For them it simply made no sense to outlaw a practice as old as time itself, particularly when it offered one of the few affordable respites from the otherwise grueling toil of industrial labor. Bars were centers of sociability and community, one of the few spaces free from the long arm of the job. They were also political centers, closely tied to the urban political machines that offered one of the few avenues for advancement for working-class Catholic men.
Kazin surely knows that Prohibition grew out of a broader nineteenth-century tradition of moral reform that was anything but traditional. Beyond the condemnation of drunkenness, Protestants had had no moral objection to alcohol before the nineteenth century. Space does not permit me to go through the whole history of the Temperance movement, but suffice it to say that the war on alcohol, in both its religious and secular expressions, entailed an effort to impose social control by instilling individual self-control. Reformers envisioned the chaos of industrial capitalism brought to order by a nation of disciplined individuals: thrifty, sober, industrious, self-reliant in all things.
This language of moral individualism, of self-control as a solution to social problems, seems far more at home in the pro-choice movement than in the pro-life movement. To invoke classic sociological distinctions, the pro-choice position assumes an “inner-directed” self, ready to choose among options, while the pro-life position (I speak only for the Catholic version) assumes a “tradition-directed” self, willing to submit to external norms.
It is worth noting that the pro-choice movement grew out of the birth control movement of the early twentieth century. The word “control” speaks to the goal of the movement. I need not get into the ugly eugenics side of the history of contraception; the “control” side is telling enough. Margaret Sanger and other birth control reformers worked to bring sex under the same sort of individual discipline and control that workers had had to develop to accommodate the new industrial work regime. Like today’s pro-abortionists, Sanger expressed sympathy for the plight of working-class women burdened by pregnancies; like today’s pro-choice advocates, she imagined as the goal of contraception an ideal middle-class family life, with fewer children and deeper emotional relationships.
Then as now, contraception has at best a debatable track record in lifting women out of poverty, though it very clearly salves the conscience of middle-class reformers who get to claim they care about the poor by supporting contraception (and now, abortion). However, “My body, my choice” is not a slogan likely to inspire care for the poor, or care for anyone else for that matter. If sex really is a matter of personal choice, why should the public pay for its consequences.? To follow Kazin’s Prohibition analogy, do I get to ask the state to pay my bar tab?
Kazin’s deceptive Prohibition analogy assumes sexual autonomy as a natural, neutral norm violated by religious zealots on the Supreme Court. It is, instead, the hard work of a century or more of zealous sexual reformers, aided and abetted by a capitalist social order that increasingly has no need for monogamy, chastity, or perhaps even families.
Sexual pluralism is a fact in America today. We would be wise not to deny it or repress it by fiat from above. At the same time, we must acknowledge that the free marketplace of sex is no more free than the other free markets that have shaped the course of American history. The anarchy of unregulated capitalism in the nineteenth century looked like freedom to the handful of winners on top and slavery to the mass of losers on the bottom. The pro-life movement has aligned itself with those who affirm a market ideal of freedom in every aspect of life except abortion. I can only hope the fallout from Dobbs will show the contradictions of this alliance.
Looking ahead, the best historical analogy for Dobbs remains Brown: a good decision, argued poorly and imposed on an unwilling populace. The historical record following Brown suggests we are in for a very long, hot summer.
Christopher Shannon is associate professor of history at Christendom College in Front Royal, Virginia. He is the author of several works on U.S. cultural history and American Catholic history, including American Pilgrimage: A Historical Journey Through Catholic Life in a New World (2022), available now from Ignatius Press.
“The war on alcohol, in both its religious and secular expressions, entailed an effort to impose social control by instilling individual self-control … a nation of disciplined individuals: thrifty, sober, industrious, self-reliant in all things.”
Wasn’t prohibition actually assuming that individuals couldn’t be trusted with *this* decision, that the state needed to make it for them?
“This language of moral individualism, of self-control as a solution to social problems, seems far more at home in the pro-choice movement than in the pro-life movement. ”
Except that being forced to take responsibility for one’s own choice (that led to becoming pregnant), and society leaving the pregnant individual (and soon-to-be mother) to deal with the consequences of those choices, sounds very much like the language of moral individualism: society leveraging potential consequences to force the exercise of individual responsibility and self-control.
The pro-life position seems just as much to be encouraging, shaping, and ultimately demanding, “an ‘inner-directed’ self ready to choose among options” (and deal with the consequences on their own).
It’s hard to escape America’s gilded cage …
Well, I have to admit that at first glance the analogy fails. After all, Prohibition says “you can’t drink alcohol” while sex reformers say “you are free to do what you wish in your sex life.” One denies, one simply allows. The problem with this contrast is the assumptions embedded in the language of “choice” itself. The promoters of freedom, be it economic or sexual, always insist that they are simply expanding options and not restricting any behavior. I think it is safe to say, at the very least, that these questions of choice are also questions of norms, and the expansion of choice establishes new norms. One may be free to hold on to the old norms, but often under extreme duress with the consequence of marginalization. The small farmer was technically free to continue his way of life in the face of agribusiness, as the corporate farmer was free to pursue his new way of life without needing to declare small farms illegal. Would any historian say that the small farmer and the corporate farmer were equally free to choose their way of life? Was the Populist movement in effect a Prohibition movement directed against agribusiness? Was the labor movement a Prohibitionist movement against corporate capitalism? In these and other areas, new freedoms establish new norms and most people are forced to choose between getting in line with the new norms or accepting social and economic isolation (e.g., rural America today).
To turn to another analogy, would you say that gun control advocates are Prohibitionists, insisting that individuals cannot be trusted with decisions about gun use? To be clear, I support gun control legislation because the current availability of guns has violent social consequences and so cannot be left simplyto a matter of individual choice. Pro-choice advocates on the one hand concede that sexual freedom has social consequences but also want to insist that it remains a private choice. This reminds me of the New Left critique of corporate liberalism: socialize the costs and privatize the benefits.
To be clear as well, if I was not in my original post, I am all for socializing the costs of crisis pregnancies and offering generous social subsidies to promote family life. Your comment assumes that pro-lifers care nothing for women after they have given birth. That is the constant refrain we here in the pro-choice commentary. As I say in my original post, this is understandable given the political alliance that pro-lifers have made, but assumes that pro-lifers are dishonest when they say “love them both.” I heard an NPR interview last week with a couple of pro-life Catholics in Arizona, one a lay diocesan official and one a woman religious from the Sisters of Life. The interviewer began fairly respectfully, just letting each of them speak. Both Catholics offered some version of “love them both” and insisted on the responsibility of Catholic Charities to support women in crisis pregnancies even after the birth of the child. The interviewer kept pushing: how long? how much money? will you get the woman a job? will you make sure the child gets a good education, even to the level of college, etc.? Pro-choicers never have to answer those questions because with their support the child will never see the light of day. Is this really the moral high ground here?
Let’s just use the three examples of individual actions you use above. We need some kind of general language so we can lump some things together. Let’s try calling the alternatives “regulators” and “choicers” as that language highlights the concrete actions each side is promoting:
Regulators would use the state to control individual choice regarding what weapons someone can own and who can own them, whereas choicers would ban the state from interfering in the individual’s choice to own or carry a weapons.
Regulators would use the state to control individual choice regarding what alcoholic beverages someone can have and who can enjoy them, whereas choicers would ban the state from interfering in the individual’s choice to purchase, manufacture, or consume alcohol.
Regulators would use the state to control individual choice regarding whether to have an abortion and under what circumstances, whereas choicers would ban the state from interfering in the individual’s choice whether to continue with a pregnancy or not.
In none of these cases do the choicers use the power of the state / the law to constrain the individual’s choice (you remain free to own a gun or not, to drink or not, to have an abortion or not).
That a culture may develop new norms that push in one direction or another is of course true, but not germane to this discussion, as the American experiment in limited government renounces any legislative responsibility for those realms: We require that you wear clothes when you go out, not that you be fashionable.
Huge swaths of the population choose, for all kinds of reasons including moral ones, not to own a gun, not to drink, and not to have an abortion. All those free-choice refusals are robustly represented in America, have been for generations, and can be expected to remain very popular options.
So, yes, to your question about gun control advocates; of course they’re “prohibitionists,” literally prohibiting people from having certain weapons (automatic weapons, howitzers, switch-blades), preventing certain kinds of people (children, mentally ill, felons) from having weapons, and so forth. They aim to control access to and the prevalence of weapons in our society, and they use the state / law to do it. And yes, certainly, it’s because they don’t trust even generally law-abiding citizens to make their own decisions regarding the use of, say, a fully automatic weapon or a nuclear device. We can’t trust everyone to operate their vehicle wisely, why would we trust them with a howitzer? Have you been to Florida?
But additionally, and quite importantly, I don’t at all doubt the sincerity of some (perhaps many) pro-lifers in their claims to care about the welfare of children and mothers and their wish that society and maybe even the government would provide safety nets of various kinds to relieve some of the difficulties associated with child-bearing and raising. However, I am realistic–and that’s all it is, really–about the possibilities of the United States moving in the direction of state-provisions for the welfare of children and mothers in these circumstances.
That’s just not how America rolls, and it rolls that way even less today than in previous decades. It’s especially not how conservatives roll. However much some pro-lifers may be wishing it could be so, and saying so too, there is no robust movement among pro-life legislators at the national or state level to establish any programs of any kind that would tax productive citizens and redistribute that money to mothers and / or children. Nor, of course, will there be: the most prohibitionist states on abortion are in the south and midwest, and these states are particularly notorious for their hostility–that’s the only word–for caring for the vulnerable at taxpayer expense (see eg the Medicaid expansion provisions of the ACA and how they fared).
While many pro-lifers mifght lament the failures of of their legislators in this regard and wish it were otherwise, there’s simply no reason to believe they’re going to make an insistence on such provisions anything close to the voting priority that overturning Roe-Casey has been for them. Overturning Roe costs the advocate nothing in the pocket-book; supporting who knows how many pregnant women and mothers and children will. It’s not cynical to note that as the cost of any policy rises, it attracts fewer supporters. That’s just how America works, and there’s no reason to think that’s about to change in the age of the Tea Party and anti-mask-mandate riots and etc.
Even were that somehow to change, that’s not where we are now legislatively. The pro-life movement did not pursue and achieve a rollback of Roe and a complimentary set of programs to accompany it. Pregnant women are not in any way having the consequences of their actions eased by society, which is perfectly consonant with American tradition and should be expected to persist. It will be on them, going forward, to consider their options and weigh the consequences. As the old cowboy song has it, “It’s your misfortune, and none of my own.”
Response to Shannon- Michael Kazin
After reading Christopher Shannon’s critique of my opinion essay published in the New York Times last month, I immediately thought of that famous line by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the eminent Catholic intellectual and politician: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”
Shannon describes my piece as “an anti-Christian screed.” His sole reason for lodging such a fiery accusation: I failed to mention that some “secular progressives” endorsed prohibition as did “many evangelicals.” Oddly, in the very next paragraph, he points out – as I did in the Times – that Catholics almost uniformly opposed the dry cause and that, “as a Catholic,” he retrospectively agrees with them.
I can imagine only two reasons why he would stumble into such a blatant contradiction. Perhaps Shannon – like some fundamentalist Protestants in the past — does not consider himself and his fellow Catholics to be true Christians. More likely, he believes that hurling an inaccurate slur on a website edited by evangelicals will make readers more willing to accept his argument. I hope that is not the case.
What Shannon actually does argue about the nature of the prohibition movement is not all wrong. During the Gilded Age, reformers who blamed the “liquor trust” for corrupting politics and leading workers to oppress themselves with drink did often support temperance, although few endorsed amending the Constitution to outlaw the wicked business all together.
But as a historian, Shannon ought to know that the driving force behind the prohibition movement – which was the subject of my piece –were evangelical Protestants, particularly those organized in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League. It was their decades of grassroots organizing, institution building, and political lobbying that finally persuaded enough politicians to do their bidding. I wonder what these devout men and women would make of a writer, a century later, who believes it’s “anti-Christian” to state the facts about how and why they did it.
Of course, Shannon’s real motive for slashing away, clumsily, at my piece is to rebut my pro-choice views about abortion. This is not the place to engage in that debate, about which I suspect neither of us has anything original to say.
But, on this matter, he does make another historical claim, one as ludicrous as that about the prohibitionist movement was false: Shannon writes that advocates for the right to abortion are “aided and abetted by a capitalist social order” that is, supposedly, the enemy of sexual morality and “perhaps even families.”
If this were true, the great majority of right-to-life activists – and the five Supreme Court justices who overruled Roe v Wade – would be caught in the snares of a massive delusion. As conservative Republicans, they believe it is that same capitalist order which has made it possible for families to prosper, bolstered by a legal regime that gives tax breaks to couples with children and exempts religious bodies from paying most taxes at all. Many of foes of abortion accuse the feminists who launched the movement for reproductive rights – and still lead it — of being “socialists.” That is false, although nearly every actual socialist I know of is also pro-choice.
A historian should refrain from imagining a history that serves his political desires.
Neither Professor Kazin nor I are inventing facts. We are selecting and interpreting them with points of emphasis that reflect our current political concerns. We have both written op-ed pieces, not peer-reviewed journal articles. I will let readers judge the extent to which our political concerns illuminate or distort the past.
Let me begin by clarifying my reasons for the characterizing his essay as “an anti-Christian screed.” I suppose I did let current politics shape my choice of words. Today, defenders of abortion complain of “Christian” influence in politics because the pro-life movement consists primarily of a coalition of conservative evangelicals and conservative Catholics; Professor Kazin begins his essay by invoking this contemporary reality. In shifting to my criticism of his account of Prohibition, it would have been more accurate to use the term “anti-Evangelical,” but I stand by the term “screed” not because of his failure to mention secular Progressive support for Temperance, but because he chooses figures such as Billy Sunday and Carrie Nation to represent Evangelicalism. These are figures who clearly stand as predecessors to the Religious Right and thus create the illusion of continuity between the cultural ambience of Temperance and the current anti-abortion movement. Unlike today, the Progressivism of the early twentieth century sustained a high degree of overlap with a certain kind of Evangelicalism. The female reformers of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (W.C.T.U.) that Kazin mentions in his response are but one example of this Progressive/Evangelical hybrid—one foot in the 19th century world of moral reform and the other in the 20th century world of social hygiene. Opposition to alcohol was about the only thing these women shared with a figure like Billy Sunday. These women were “liberals.” Similarly, Walter Rauschenbusch, father of the Social Gospel (and grandfather of Richard Rorty!) was a Baptist minister, yet also a liberal, as were so many leaders of mainline, northern Protestant denominations. Businessmen at the time may have accused him of illegitimately trying to impose Christianity on the social order, but I cannot recall any historians who have criticized his Social Gospel in the same manner in which they have criticized Temperance.
Kazin’s straight line from Billy Sunday to today’s anti-abortionists also obscures a more complicated trajectory of reform.
The fallout from the failure of Temperance did help to widen the gap and ultimately sever the ties between northern liberal Evangelicals and southern conservative Evangelicals. The two groups clearly parted ways on the next frontier of reform, sex, but today’s pro-choicers stand in a line of social reformers with roots in earlier liberal Christian groups such as the W.C.T.U. Like the Prohibitionists, Margaret Sanger was not above invoking anti-Catholicism to gain support, or at least silence, from Protestants on the issue of birth control. Catholics opposed birth control for the same reasons they opposed Prohibition: both seemed against nature, or at the very least against custom. Given the historical analogy that frames his essay, Kazin implies a parallel between Catholic opponents of Prohibition and the “pro-choice” movement of today. If this was not his intent, I apologize for my misreading.
The biggest reason of all for lodging this “fiery accusation” is the journalistic context in which Kazin published his piece: the New York Times op-ed page. Since Dobbs, that venue has featured weekly, sometimes daily, attacks on the decision as an unconstitutional imposition of private religion on the American public. If Professor Kazin did not intend his article to be included in the “Amen Chorus” of that hymn, again, I apologize for my “clumsy” reading.
Finally, to my last “ludicrous” claim that pro-choicers stand at the vanguard of the capitalist social order. I confess that I do see the pro-Dobbs Supreme Court majority, along with a good part of the current pro-life movement, as “caught in the snares of a massive delusion.” I point to that in my criticism of the pro-life/libertarian alliance in the current Republican Party. The historical standard by which I judge this alliance delusional is the pre-Roe, pro-life movement in which Catholics combined opposition to abortion with a broader concern for social justice, particularly the plight of the poor. This position reflects what was then, in Catholic circles, coming to be called a “consistent life ethic.” I stand open to correction from Professor Kazin on this point of history. If he finds the ideal offensive or deficient, I suppose there is little I can say to persuade him otherwise.
I do hope, however, that despite our irreconcilable differences on abortion, Professor Kazin and I might come to some agreement on the terms of post-Dobbs politics. I ask that Professor Kazin and other supporters of “choice” concede that the issue abortion is more than simply one of personal freedom, but a conflict between ways of life. The capitalist order did once depend on a certain kind of family model for stability—the bourgeois family, a “haven in a heartless world,” in which the drastic reduction of family size would enable the intensive child-rearing necessary to develop the individual self-control and moral autonomy needed to orient oneself through a world with few dependable external guides. Yes, conservatives still tend to invoke this family ideal, particularly in the version of its last gasp during the 1950s. Liberals remain tied to the rhetoric of family yet tend to invoke varieties of “Brave New Families,” be it the celebration of black matriarchy in 1970s sociology or gay marriage today. Conservatives push for policies that subsidize their vision of the 1950s family; liberals support policies that support their newer visions of family, most of which assume generous support for childcare so that women have maximum freedom to pursue jobs and careers outside of the home. Conservative support for their model of the family is undermined by their hostility to government support for anything; liberal support for “choice” flies in the face of their barely concealed contempt for women who wish to stay at home “baking cookies,” in the infamous words of Hilary Clinton.
Is there room for all? Is family pluralism possible? The historical record is not very encouraging. The Reagan era saw the rhetoric of “family values” ascend to the mainstream of Republican politics while all the trends conservatives considered anti-family—divorce, working mothers, etc.—continued to advance. This is the historical reality by which I judge today’s cultural conservatism “delusional.” I suppose I am enough of a Marxist to say that family structure reflects economic structure. Family diversity requires economic diversity, a deep pluralism far beyond anything on offer by today’s proponents of “choice.” I hope that Professor Kazin could at least agree with me on that.
This was a very interesting discussion. Generally I love to listen to such discussion or read them. However, when it comes to pro-choice v pro-life, I feel that there is something missing from the discussion. And it might have been missing when considering prohibition might be similar to the Dobbs decision.
There could be arguments that prohibition was meant to remove alcohol from the equation in work life and family life so that both could be unencumbered by drunk workers and the costs to industry due to lack of efficiency. But on the ground, the pressure for prohibition seemed to come from a very basic need; the survival of the family, and perhaps society as a whole.
As to the issue of pro-life v pro-choice; seems to always address the women who are pregnant and may consider abortion; and the tiny life. The person who is missing in this discussion is the man who had an active part in bringing about that tiny life. Broad discussions go on about how to assist or not assist the single mom after the baby is born. But where in this discussion is baby’s father. Where are the supports to encourage the putative father of the baby to care for and actively assist in the life of this child? I am not focusing on the arguments for or against abortion in the case of rape, in case of the health of the women. These are difficult and are profoundly heartbreaking and challenging ethical issues.
I would love to sit in your classrooms to learn more from an academic perspective; great ideas and policy can be born there, but for me the questions are here at ground level.
Thank you