Scenes from a slow civil war on women
Jeff Sharlet posted a long thread on Saturday reflecting on reporters’ initial reaction to his use of the the term “fascism” in “The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War.” One element dovetails with a post I’d already prepped from Jessica Valenti’s “Abortion, Every Day” substack.
“The anti-abortion movement is launching a national campaign to trick women into carrying doomed pregnancies to term,” Vessica Valenti wrote in October in a post titled “Calculated Cruelty.” She summarized it in a followup post on Friday and cautions that the movement has moved upstream of abortion clinic protests to targeting prenatal testing that might reveal fatal fetal abnormalities:
The short version, though, is that a coalition of the most powerful anti-abortion groups in the country are working together to ban abortion in cases of fatal fetal abnormalities, and to do away with the prenatal testing that provides those diagnoses. They’re not just targeting legislation, but individual women—embedding themselves in hospitals, doctors’ offices and anywhere else patients might be getting bad news about their pregnancy.
Worst of all, these groups are calling it “prenatal diagnosis counseling” and perinatal hospice care*—manipulating women in their most vulnerable life moments under the guise of offering real help. That characterization is also politically strategic: it means that when Democrats oppose funding to anti-abortion groups that lie to women about their fetal diagnoses, the GOP can claim that they’re actually callously refusing women counseling and care.
Crisis pregnancy centers are going underground, Valenti suggests. Or rather, planting “moles” inside traditional medicine. The anti-abortion movement “has rejected ‘viable’ and ‘nonviable’, and is working to get legislators and medical professionals to do the same” to further sow confusion. But more than that.
“The goal isn’t just to confuse and mislead people about their pregnancies, but to divorce abortion from healthcare—bolstering the lie that abortion is never necessary to save someone’s health or life,” Valenti writes.
The cruelty of what this means in practice cannot be overstated. Because conservatives’ strategy to stop women from ending doomed pregnancies isn’t just legislative—it’s about ensuring individual patients never know the truth about their diagnoses in the first place.
Consider the heartlessness it takes to go to someone who has just been given the worst news of their life and then lie to them about what it means. Or to keep that information from them entirely: one of the goals of this initiative is to make it difficult, if not impossible, for pregnant women to get prenatal tests at all.
What does this look like?
This week, The Catholic Spirit spoke to Dr. Robin Pierucci, a neonatologist who works with Be Not Afraid, one of the groups behind this anti-choice campaign. I want you to read what she says to patients who have just found out that their pregnancies aren’t viable: “Congratulations.”
“I love reminding them that the first diagnosis is, ‘it’s a baby,’ and no other diagnosis ever negates diagnosis number one. The baby is inherently valuable and worthy of our love.”
I’m going to say this with all the restraint I have in my soul: I cannot believe someone hasn’t knocked this lady out. I mean really. Congratulations??
The effort is organized. They are drafting legislation and pushing for federal and state funding for “perinatal hospice nurses.”
Valenti cautions, “Republicans know what they’re doing. They know that their laws will hurt and kill women. And for all their rhetoric about saving babies, they also know that more infants will die as a result of this work.”
Don’t ever let people forget that Republicans are willing to watch women and babies suffer and die in service to their cause. And their cause has never, and will never, be us.
Getting back to Sharlet, in addition to a “mythological past rooted in grievance,” several other myths are central to fascism: family, purity, whiteness, “cleverness” (transgressiveness as displays of courage), and “a reverence for violence as a purifying force, as an exhilarating, even titillating experience.” The recipe employs conspiracy theories as a binder.
Did I leave out misogyny?
Another feature that will be present if it’s fascism: misogyny, not just as a constant, but as an element of a purity-based nationalism. I call it gender nationalism.
Sharlet admits that in writing “The Undertow … I used to think full-fledged fascism wan’t possible in the U.S. Not because of democracy; because of fundamentalism. The missing ingredient, I thought, was cult of personality. We’d never switch out Christ for a man. I was wrong.”
Sharlet summarizes:
So, “fascism”: A “purity” myth. A nationalist myth. Misogyny. All concentrated in a cult of personality, sanctified thru violence deemed not only necessary but thrilling, a militant eroticism.
The point of “The Undertow” is that so much of this movement is operating below the radar. The New Apostolic Reformation, as Paul Rosenberg reminded Salon readers last week, does the same. Researcher Fred Clarkson warns that this is deliberate, “They are wily because they are worried that the rest of society will figure out who they are and what they are up to.”
Valenti might concur regarding funding anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers.