The coming Christian Nationalist Surveillance State?

This stuff is heavily intertwined with the increasingly militant patriarchal, mysogynistic "Christian Nationalism" movement (link to prior posts). These people are obsessive where it comes to outlawing abortion and otherwise eliminating reproductive rights.

 

Jus' fer grins: Search "Atwwod" on my blog. 

 

A couple of relevant new reads:

Just begun reading those. 

Below, I watched this documentary live on CNN last night. They've yet to post it to YouTube. It was outstanding. Detailed, nuanced, forthright.

 

 

Related interview with Pamela Brown:

 

 

BTW, below, you may be aware of the Fundie religious activism of our Secretary of War.

 

PROFESSOR MICHELE GOODWIN

In the twenty-first century reproduction translates differently across class and race lines. On inspection, examples abound in this context, but assisted reproductive technology (ART) provides a particularly provocative illustration of my point. In that sphere, liberty and risk translate into a multi-billion-dollar industry, where a woman’s reproductive possibilities resemble a candy store of options: freedom to purchase ova and sperm in her local community or across the country and world, in vitro fertilization, preimplantation genetic diagnosis, intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) of ova, embryo grading, cryopreservation of ova, assisted hatching, embryo transfer, day-five blast transfers, and more. This dizzying array of options is mostly unchecked by federal and state regulations, leaving physicians and their wealthier patients to coordinate pregnancies according to personal choices. 

Technology facilitates a degree of leisure associated with some of these practices, as a few options described above are easily coordinated from the comfort and privacy of home. Functionally, then, with the click of a computer button, an intended parent may purchase sperm, rent a womb, buy ova, and select a clinic to assist in the harvesting, implantation, or embryo development processes. For wealthy women (infertile or not), reproductive privacy and freedom are tangible concepts in uninterrupted operation. Noticeably, there is little, if any, state regulation or interference in this domain, despite considerable risks, poor health outcomes, and miscarriages associated with some of these medicines. 

By contrast, recent criminal prosecutions targeting destitute pregnant women illuminate another reproductive space, where the threat of state intervention through punishment and extralegal retribution overarch pregnancies and compromise the physician-patient relationship. In this alternate reproductive realm, public regulation trumps expectations of privacy. Undeniably, in the United States a poor pregnant woman’s reproductive options are deeply constrained and contested. For example, a woman’s poverty and drug dependence or use during pregnancy might result in heightened legal consequences, including the threat of life imprisonment, birthing while in jail, and even shackling during labor, depending on the state in which the pregnant woman resides. 

A poor woman determined to carry a pregnancy to term often unwittingly exposes herself to nefarious interagency collaborations between police and physicians, quite possibly leading to criminal prosecution, incarceration, and giving birth while in highly unsanitary prison conditions, sometimes without the appropriate aid of hospital physicians and staff. But make no mistake, all women should be wary of the political mobilization against reproductive health, rights, and justice. 

Today, it is not uncommon for a headline to feature a tragic story about a woman giving birth alone in a jail, without the aid of anyone, let alone medical staff. This is what happened to Diana Sanchez as she screamed and “writhed on the small bed inside her cell … gripping the thin mattress with one hand,” as she tried frantically to free a leg as the baby was crowning. A Washington Post headline captured her experience this way: “Nobody Cared”: A Woman Gave Birth Alone in a Jail Cell After Her Cries for Help Were Ignored, Lawsuit Says.”

Sadly, these are not outlier incidents, but rather what has bled into the soil of reproductive politics in the United States, which now uses pregnancy as a proxy for punishment, particularly against poor women. The depth of state-sanctioned cruelty targeted toward poor pregnant women seemingly has no boundaries in contemporary American politics…

Goodwin, Michele (2020). Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood (Preface). Kindle Edition.  

APRIL AJOY

1. America Is the Best 

Once upon a time, a group of the greatest, strongest, handsomest, and manliest men set out on a holy quest. These men fled the tyrannical country of England to start a new country, where they would have the freedom to worship Jesus how they wanted. These great men, who were basically Christ’s disciples 2.0, embarked on a journey to fight for their religious freedom. 

They loaded up on ships that sailed across the ocean on this God-ordained mission. Sure, some may have technically brought enslaved people with them, but it was a different time. And they treated them with the utmost respect, kindness, and love. 

And sure, some people technically already inhabited the new land, but they didn’t really count because they weren’t Christians. They needed Jesus. And the people in the colonies, set up by the righteous men from England, helped these native people have a much better life—because they now had Jesus to comfort them on the Trail of Tears (we don’t really need to talk about that, though, because again, it was a different time). 

Then the big bad godless British people wanted to stake their claim on the new land. But God would not stand for such evil in his new country, so he declared war through his chosen one, George Washington. God supernaturally blessed his troops to defeat the British. Yeah, some people died, and a lot of the British were sort of Christian, too, but it was the price of freedom. And the greatest country the world would ever know was born: the United States of America. 

Okay, so maybe some bad people in the southern part of the country refused to stop owning people and tried to repeat what Americans had just done to the British, but they failed! Because God was on the side of the holiest president of all, Republican Abraham Lincoln, who signed the Emancipation Proclamation and ended racism forever. 

Over the next 150 years, America spread this gospel message of hope and freedom all over the world. God blessed our country in every war we ever fought. The Axis Powers of World War I? We beat ’em. Nazis? Really beat them. Vietnam? Uh… not sure but I think we probably won. The Cold War? Tear down that wall. The War on Terror? Mission accomplished. All these victories occurred because America was founded as a Christian nation, and as long as it stayed the most Christian nation on earth, it would continue to be supernaturally blessed. Hallelujah, the Great I Am and Uncle Sam were quite the team! 

This—almost exactly this—is what I wholeheartedly believed about American history for most of my life. I was taught that I was on the side of good, and everything I did was done with the goal of keeping that goodness going for generations to come. 

No one told me about the true, brutal history of Native American displacement and genocide. I vaguely knew about slavery, Jim Crow, and the KKK—whose members were largely Christians—and the fuzzy morality of using nuclear bombs. None of that fit the narrative I was taught. The message I received was very simple: America is the best. Period. 

I know now this belief is literally the definition of “nationalism,” which Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines as “loyalty and devotion to a nation,” especially with “a sense of national consciousness exalting one nation above all others and placing primary emphasis on promotion of its culture and interests as opposed to those of other nations.” 

So… pretty much exactly what I grew up believing. 

Of course, we never used the term “Nationalist.” It was simply called patriotism, and it ranked just below holiness. This is the first tenet of Christian Nationalism: The belief that America has been specially selected by God, and that it has a special place in God’s plan for redemption...

Ajoy, April. Star-Spangled Jesus: Leaving Christian Nationalism and Finding A True Faith (pp. 3-5). (Function). Kindle Edition.

One impressive young woman. Great sense of wry humor.

 

SURVEILLANCE TECHNOLOGIES

First, a bit of current Jacob Ward. (He is da bomb)

 

Anyone remember "Total Information Awareness?" 

 

Then, Michele Goodwin brings up the issue of forced drug testing of pregnant women of lesser means (disproportionately minorities. Hmmm... See my 297 pg 1998 grad thesis (pdf) on coerced drug testing policies (which was primarily focused on workplace surveillance).

 

Another link to a prior post. "Let Me Be Franks With You."

Lots of reproductive rights insights in her work. Plus this:

BAD FAITH 

I still remember the day I was saved. 

I was 8 years old. I was sitting, as I had sat nearly every Sunday morning of my childhood, in a hard oak pew with my mother and brothers, all of us dressed as respectably as our poverty would allow. As he did every Sunday at the close of services, our preacher stood in front of the altar, flanked by a Christian flag on one side and an American flag on the other, asking who among us was ready to come forward and accept Jesus into their heart. Some Sundays three or four sinners would stumble down the aisle toward salvation; sometimes no one left the pews. When those seeking salvation got to the front, they would huddle down with our pastor, and their voices would drop too low to be heard by those of us remaining in our seats. Very often they would weep. The end was always the same: Our pastor would lift his head and hands up and say the person’s name out loud, and the congregation would join him in rejoicing that one more soul had escaped eternal damnation and joined the fellowship of the church. 

By the day I decided to be saved, I had watched all this happen hundreds of times. I had heard how the streets of heaven were paved with gold and how no death and no suffering would ever be found there. I had heard the thunderous warnings about the burning fires of hell, where the sinners who had been too proud to repent would spend all of their days in torment and isolation. I had heard that all one had to do to obtain immortal life, avoid damnation, and be welcomed into the fold of the faithful was to accept Jesus as my Lord and Savior. 

It sounded so easy. I had come very close to stepping out into the aisle several times before, but I had shrunk back at the thought of all the eyes in the pews and of the preacher’s booming voice so close to my ear. I was seized with the fear that if I did step out in the aisle, the deacons would shake their heads forbiddingly and send me back, explaining that the offer of salvation was not meant for people like me. 

In all of those hundreds of Sunday mornings, I had never seen anyone who looked like me get saved. We were the only Asian members of our tiny, all-white Southern Baptist church. We were also one of only a handful of Asian families in the entire town of Pine Bluff, Arkansas, a city whose population was almost evenly divided between white and black. We were a minority even within that minority, as my brothers and I were the biracial children of a Taiwanese mother and a white father. Our father had died when we were young, and my mother was raising the three of us by herself, and I was convinced that our poverty was the first thing people saw when they looked at us, like the mark on Cain’s forehead. 

Church was in many ways a refuge. No one was likely to call me a “chink,” or shout gibberish at me as they pulled their eyelids back into slants, or mock my mismatched, secondhand clothes. Church meant gospel songs, grape juice and tiny tasteless wafers for communion, and a gift-wrapped present with my name on it at Christmastime. But I could never shake the feeling that even in church, we were at best pitied and tolerated rather than warmly embraced. 

I wondered if salvation would change that. 

That day, as our elderly church pianist hammered out the final hymn of the Sunday service, the fear of eternal damnation and the desire to belong to a community won out over my other anxieties. I made my way down the aisle, and, to my immense relief, I wasn’t turned back. That Sunday, I was the one kneeling down before the altar with our preacher, I was the one tearfully accepting Jesus into my heart, and I was the one being presented to the congregation as the newest member of an eternal fellowship, forever and ever amen…

Franks, Mary Anne. The Cult of the Constitution: Our Deadly Devotion to Guns and Free Speech (Function). Kindle Edition.

UPDATE

A quick topical search, 3/25/26 

Google Gemini search: “Surveilling pregnant women”

Surveillance of pregnant women is increasing in the United States and globally, spanning from public health tracking to monitor maternal health outcomes to digital and physical monitoring aimed at policing pregnancy and abortion access. The landscape of surveillance has intensified following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, with digital data, medical records, and location tracking increasingly used to monitor or criminalize pregnancy outcomes. 

Center for American Progress +4

Digital Surveillance and Abortion Tracking

• Search History & Data: Internet search histories, location data, and search and browsing histories regarding abortion can be used to infer intent to end a pregnancy. Law enforcement has utilized these tools to track individuals.
• Period-Tracking Apps: These apps store sensitive data on menstrual cycles, sexual activity, and fertility. Much of this data is not protected by HIPAA and is vulnerable to being used by third parties or law enforcement.
• Digital Footprints: Police may use geofence warrants to identify everyone near an abortion clinic, or purchase data from commercial data brokers to track people suspected of seeking abortions.
• Surveillance Technology: In areas where abortion is restricted, technologies like automated license plate readers (FLOCK cameras) have been used to track people traveling for care. 

Center for American Progress +3

Legal and Medical Surveillance

• Criminalization: In some regions, law enforcement is increasingly scrutinizing pregnancy outcomes, such as miscarriages or stillbirths, leading to the investigation of women who self-manage abortions.
• Medical Surveillance: Some hospitals and state agencies have been accused of unlawfully drug-testing and monitoring pregnant patients without their consent.
• State-Mandated Tracking: Certain states have passed laws requiring hotlines or tracking systems that critics fear can be used to identify and track individuals seeking abortions. 

Brookings +3

Public Health Surveillance

• SET-NET: The CDC’s Surveillance for Emerging Threats to Mothers and Babies Network (SET-NET) tracks the effects of health threats (such as Zika, COVID-19, and syphilis) on pregnant people and their infants.
• Mortality Data: The CDC's Pregnancy Mortality Surveillance System (PMSS) reviews vital records to understand the causes of pregnancy-related deaths.
• Global Health Surveillance: In low- and middle-income countries, Health and Demographic Surveillance Systems (HDSS) often track pregnancies through regular, intensive community health worker visits. 

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention | CDC (.gov) +2

Impact of Surveillance

• Chilling Effect: The fear of being monitored has led to a "chilling effect," where pregnant people, particularly those in marginalized communities (Black, brown, and low-income), may avoid seeking prenatal care, fear discussing their health with doctors, or fear searching for information online.
• Targeted Communities: Surveillance disproportionately affects marginalized communities, including immigrants and people of color, raising concerns about deportation, family separation, and increased criminal justice involvement.

In some of my more irascible, cynical moments, I've mused "hell, why stop there, Fundies? Why not panoptically/digitally gumshoe ALL women possessing functional ova, lest they indulge in behaviors that might one day 'prove' harmful to a fertilized ovum 'person' inside them?"

Don't think for a second that such would never be proposed.

 

More to come... 

"Please step out of the vehicle."

"You are under arrest for attempting to evade motherhood."

Samuel Alito's Dobbs Love Child turns two

June 24th, 2022 ... Dobbs

   

Moreover, let's be perfectly clear about the intentions of the Alito camp allies.

 

 

The 900+ page Project 2025 "Action Plan Playbook" (pdf) negatively cites the word "abortion" 198 times (repeatedly conflating it with other hated "liberal" policies), and is utterly clear regarding its reactionary "Christian conservative" goal of establishing constitutionally-protected, vigilantly-enforced "Personhood at Conception."

 

JOHN OLIVER ON PROJECT 2025

 

134 days to the November 5th 2024 U.S. elections.

 

RELENTLESS WHITE CHRISTIAN NATIONALIST THEOCRATS

 

I have no problem with any of these reactionary people and groups advocating for their fatuous causes (look up the two doozy books depicted above). Where they cross over from advocacy to (more and more overt) coercion is where my red line resides.

 

Below, just ran across these two beauts on TwitterX:

 

JUNE 25 UPDATE

"Trump 2024 examines the presidency of Donald Trump through the eyes of 25 Evangelical Leaders. These leaders include:

Dennis Prager, Franklin Graham, Mike Huckabee, Tony Perkins, Irvin Baxter, Jerry Boykin, Damon Friedman, Brigitte Gabriel, Jack Graham, Harry Jackson, Jack Hibbs, Dr. Robert Jeffress, Alveda King, Mike Lindell, Bob McEwen, Eric Metaxas, Star Parker, Tony Perkins, Sammy Rodriguez, Dave Robbins, Don Stewart, Stephen Strange, Randall Terry, Paula White, Jeff Wickwire."

Quite the crew.

 

BRIAN KLAAS

Five Reasons Trump 2.0 Would Be Worse
There's a widespread misconception that a second Trump term would be just like the first. That's a catastrophic misreading of American politics—and the unprecedented risks if he wins. 

Brian rocks.

AND, RECALL SPIRITUAL WARRIORS 2024?

 

More to come...

_________

   

Personhood

apropos of the prior post. Today I ran across this article in The Atlantic.

 

The Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade more than a year ago, but in the time since, the number of abortions performed nationwide seems to have gone up, not down. And not just in blue states—even in red states where abortion has been banned, some sizable percentage of people can and do travel out of state or get abortion pills in the mail.

The anti-abortion movement is—no surprise—committed to stopping this flow of patients and abortion pills across state lines. One strategy that has recently emerged is an effort to revive and reinterpret the Comstock Act, a 19th-century anti-vice law that the movement claims makes sending or receiving any abortion drug or device in the mail a federal crime. Other approaches are proliferating. In Alabama, the attorney general has vowed to use existing state conspiracy law to prosecute residents for helping others seek abortions out of state. And in Texas, several counties passed an ordinance allowing anyone to sue a person driving on local highways who is bringing a patient to get an abortion, whether illegally in Texas or legally elsewhere…

The more that off-the-wall anti-abortion tactics proliferate, the easier it is to dismiss them as scare tactics. But that might not be the case at all. Any law can be enforced if enough people take part in rustling up offenders. Of course, the Supreme Court could be hostile to the anti-abortion activists’ new enforcement strategies, striking down laws limiting travel or rejecting conservatives’ interpretation of the Comstock Act. But this Court may not. The majority’s conservative leanings are clear, and many of the legal areas at issue are undeveloped enough to leave room for a sympathetic justice to side with abortion opponents. If that comes to pass, then the laws’ “unenforceability” can’t be counted on to protect anyone.

Mary Ziegler is the Martin Luther King Professor of Law at UC Davis.

Which led me here.

Stay tuned. Hip deep in this one at the moment, perhaps 50% through it. A nice complement to Kathleen's book. (Couldn't resist Photoshopping the Bourne movie poster graphic.)

Scholars have traced how an ascendant form of Christian nationalism—the belief that the United States was and always should be a Christian nation—was needed for Trump to edge out Hillary Clinton in 2016. But the influence of the anti-abortion movement went much further, and it had everything to do with money in U.S. politics.

Political scientists and historians of the religious right have told part of the story of the fascinating partnership between abortion foes and Republican leaders. Their studies often suggest that while pro-lifers became dependent on the GOP, the Republican Party did not fundamentally change its priorities. Some assert that the GOP co-opted the religious right, gaining its votes while offering little but speeches in return.

By focusing on the pro-life movement and its complex relationship with the broader religious right, this book shows that partnership with the movement had consequences for the GOP that went well beyond abortion. Anti-abortion operatives helped make control of the Supreme Court a deciding issue for conservative voters who had no legal background. And to gain control of the Supreme Court, abortion foes joined and ultimately helped to lead a growing fight against campaign finance laws, persuading many social conservatives and GOP leaders to oppose them as well.

 These shifts to a focus on judicial nominations and money in politics helped the GOP score electoral victories it might not otherwise have managed. But in the long term, the changes in campaign finance rules that the anti-abortion movement helped to achieve came at a terrible price for the Republican establishment—and had important consequences for the functioning of American democracy.

Of course, other factors helped to gut the establishment as well. To begin with, the GOP had long courted the kind of voters whose loyalty Trump later captured. For decades, Republicans had fueled whites’ anxieties about immigration and demographic change. Christian nationalism—and some evangelical Protestants’ investment in a masculine populism—did not begin with Trump. In the past, however, Republican politicians had effectively managed these forces. GOP voters had fallen in love with populists before, but the establishment had found a way to sideline them.

Gradually, however, the Republican establishment grew less able to marginalize insurgents. Americans increasingly disliked those in the opposing political party, and this negative partisanship triggered a surge in partisan loyalty. Whomever their own party nominated, polarized voters did not cross party lines because they viewed the opposing party’s candidate as unacceptable. Some of these changes affected both parties; negative partisanship became common among Democrats, and politicians on the left became more ideologically homogenous (and more progressive) than they once were. Democrats have relied on independent expenditures, dark money, and super PACs (political action committees) to fund their campaigns, and at times have outraised and outspent the opposition. And Democrats on occasion played a part in pushing more money into politics, passing laws like the 2014 Continuing Appropriations Act, which significantly raised the contribution limits that applied to political party committees. But partisan polarization has been asymmetric. The GOP veered sharply to the right on issues from climate change to immigration, and the party has proven more willing to play constitutional hardball than the opposition, holding up Supreme Court nominations and routinely forcing government shutdowns...

Ziegler, Mary. Dollars for Life (pp. 6-8). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.

Whereas Policing Pregnant Bodies spans millenia back to the ancient Greeks (with a lot of focus on sociological / cultural factors shaping our current views on reproductive policy), Dollars For Life dwells principally on the increasingly partisan right-to-life / choice politics comprising the U.S. period encompassing my own nearly 78 years. I'm finding it in large measure a well-written exercise in "recall" providing a heightened awareness of the bigger picture as it exists today.

I also recommend two other relevant, excellent books already in my stash:

Quite worthy reads. Anti-choice advocates have every right to their (minority) opinions. That is not the same, however, as moral & legal license to dictate what other women must do.

A HEADS-UP: 

THE GOP / HERITAGE FOUNDATION "PROJECT 2025"

Should Donald Trump manage to win the 2024 Presidential election, this hard-right group intends to hit the ground running full-speed on day one to eradicate every aspect of "liberalism" they can. Their Manifesto (pdf) runs about 900 pages. I'm down several hundred pages into it thus far. A few relevant teasers:

The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensi- tive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists…

In Africa, Skinner writes, the U.S. “should focus on core security, economic, and human rights” rather than impose radical abortion and pro-LGBT initiatives. Divisive symbols such as the rainbow flag or the Black Lives Matter flag have no place next to the Stars and Stripes at our embassies…

Max Primorac asserts that the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) must be reformed, writing, “The Biden Administration has deformed the agency by treating it as a global platform to pursue overseas a divisive political and cultural agenda that promotes abortion, climate extremism, gender radicalism, and interventions against perceived systematic racism.”…

Reverse policies that allow transgender individuals to serve in the military. Gender dysphoria is incompatible with the demands of military service, and the use of public monies for transgender surgeries or to facilitate abortion for servicemembers should be ended…

Focus on core diplomatic activities, and stop promoting policies birthed in the American culture wars. African nations are particularly (and reasonably) non-receptive to the U.S. social policies such as abortion and pro-LGBT initiatives being imposed on them…

Finally, conservatives should gratefully celebrate the greatest pro-family win in a generation: overturning Roe v. Wade, a decision that for five decades made a mockery of our Constitution and facilitated the deaths of tens of millions of unborn children. But the Dobbs decision is just the beginning. Conservatives in the states and in Washington, including in the next conservative Administration, should push as hard as possible to protect the unborn in every jurisdiction in America. In particular, the next conservative President should work with Congress to enact the most robust protections for the unborn that Congress will support while deploying existing federal powers to protect innocent life and vigorously complying with statutory bans on the federal funding of abortion. Conservatives should ardently pursue these pro-life and pro-family policies while recognizing the many women who find themselves in immensely difficult and often tragic situations and the heroism of every choice to become a mother. Alternative options to abortion, especially adoption, should receive federal and state support.

In summary, the next President has a moral responsibility to lead the nation in restoring a culture of life in America again...

I fixed some of their Art for them.

While this stuff might seem nominally scary, it would not surprise me one whit for this to end up being largely one more grift Op, perhaps just a tad up the socioeconomic-cognitive distribution above the Trump Rally MAGA Marks.

 

UPDATE

Project 2025: A Heightened Threat of Christian Nationalism and Authoritarianism

And, How About Those VERMIN?

 

OK, QUICK DIVERSIONARY ERRATUM

 

Yeah, we are drowning in grotesque, often barbaric exigencies of late. Makes it difficult to even stay on one topical thread. Humor me...

 

I'm late to the party, but, yikes, the Apple TV+ series "The Morning Show." I'm now on S1:E4.

 

This series is simply brilliant. Aaron Sorkin was not the screenwriter, but the script is every bit as good. The topical relevance to this post is spot-on.

UPDATE

I finished Mary Ziegler's "Dollars for Life." Very illuminating. Combined with "Policing Pregnant Bodies," you get a complete picture of the acrimonious reproductive rights issue.

 

Also, below, I read Jonathan Ksrl's new book. Quite sobering. I am SO beyond sick of Donald Trump.

More shortly...

__________

 

Womens' (lesser?) rights back in the headlines.

"Rethinking reproductive harm."

   

Got my latest issue of Science Magazine. 

 

 

As per custom, I scan the Table of Contents, and head straight for the book reviews. Found this (among others).

In her new book, Policing Pregnant Bodies: From Ancient Greece to Post-Roe America, Crowther explains that “although our current biomedical understanding of pregnancy and fetal development is relatively new…many of our most cherished ideas about reproduction trace their origins back thousands of years.” Crowther believes that we must examine the long history of ideas about pregnant people, fetuses, pregnancy, and abortion to understand where we are now. She does not trace a direct line of influence from the ancient world to today—an impossible task— but she effectively shows how the same misogynistic ideas crop up repeatedly throughout history, pitting pregnant people against fetuses in a dangerous zero-sum game…

In Policing Pregnant Bodies, Crowther combines three decades of experience as a medical historian with a rare ability to communicate clearly and engagingly with a general audience. She also brings her personal experience of living in Oklahoma— “one of the reddest states in the country”—to bear. In 2021, Oklahoma passed House Bill 2441, banning abortion after 6 weeks of pregnancy. When women in the state miscarry and seek medical attention, they can be arrested for manslaughter. But Oklahoma also has some of the worst infant and maternal mortality rates in the country. Fifty-four of its 77 counties contain food deserts. Active fracking sites in the state pollute the water supply, substantially increasing the risk of miscarriage. Policies such as House Bill 2441, Crowther writes, “treat pregnant people themselves as the greatest threat to fetal life,” while doing nothing to address factors that play a far greater role in infant and maternal mortality, including lack of access to healthy food, clean water, safe housing, and medical care.

THE REVIEWS

Timely and important.This book is a wake-up call for those who care about and for women and children.
— Library Journal (starred review)

Historian Kathleen Crowther sees a connection between Ancient Greek philosophers studying embryos and modern day abortion restrictions....In her new book, Policing Pregnant Bodies...Crowther examines ancient metaphors that are still being used, describes the process through which early physicians came to understand fetal development, and explores the pernicious notion that a pregnant woman is the primary threat to the health of her fetus.
— NPR

[Crowther] effectively shows how the same misogynistic ideas crop up repeatedly throughout history, pitting pregnant people against fetuses in a dangerous zero-sum game....In Policing Pregnant Bodies, Crowther combines three decades of experience as a medical historian with a rare ability to communicate clearly and engagingly with a general audience.
— Science

This book is a masterpiece. Though the medical and legal surveillance of pregnant women's bodies is relatively recent, Crowther demonstrates how wombs have historically been considered dangerous places and how the policing of pregnant bodies today is an insidious extension of that train of thought. The explicit links that she draws between the present and the past are the brilliant foundation of this perceptive historical analysis.
— Elizabeth Reis, Macaulay Honors College, City University of New York, author of Bodies in Doubt: An American History of Intersex

There's a long history of showing the fetus as independent, with the body of the person carrying it as passive, or even hostile. This lively and readable introduction shows how historical metaphors of pregnancy can help us understand modern preoccupations with saving babies rather than supporting women.
— Helen King, The Open University, author of Hippocrates' Woman: Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece

A timely, important intervention that reveals the long histories of many of our modern ideas about reproduction. In our time of reproductive health crisis in the United States, this book illuminates the ways in which ideas about women as threats to fetuses or about inherent conflict between fetuses and women are neither natural nor inevitable.
— Julie Hardwick, University of Texas at Austin

While fetal monitors and ultrasounds seem to define pregnancy today, Crowther reveals that our ideas about the relationship between fetus and pregnant person are profoundly shaped by very old ideas about procreation. Incisive and elegant, this critical commentary is urgent reading in our current moment.
— Mary Fissell, Johns Hopkins University

From Aristotle to 21st-century statehouses, Crowther excavates the embryologic origins of symbolics of the fetus and the pregnant body that now dominate medical, political, and popular discourse around abortion and pregnancy in the U.S. Essential reading for anyone interested in how a range of policies harm the well-being of babies and birthing people.
— Carolyn Sufrin, author of Jailcare: Finding the Safety Net for Women Behind Bars

In this compelling, accessible history of embryology, pregnancy, and its interruption, Crowther reveals the development of ideas that have led to pregnant persons' rights to bodily autonomy being diminished, denied, even condemned. With nuance, Crowther puts past and present into dialogue to expose a history of insidious ideas that continue to shape our present.
— John Christopoulos, author of Abortion in Early Modern Italy

Yep. Based on what I’ve read this far, those plaudits are entirely warranted.

As a male, I am always troubled by the feeling that I have no right to even an opinion on issues of womens' reproductive decisions. An individual woman's prerogative to reproductive autonomy is properly inviolate.

 

Nonetheless, I share a relevant story from one of my other blogs. It's not an abstraction for this male.

The year is 1969, the place, suburban Seattle. A young couple chafes within the throes of an ill-advised (and ultimately doomed) marriage. They have an infant girl, on whom the young father joyfully dotes. The one unequivocally bright spot. Parenthood, at least, suits him, so it seems. 

The young wife announces one day that she is again pregnant. But, while the husband is thrilled at the news, she exudes an inexplicable anxious and distant air. In the subsequent weeks, her smoldering anxiety morphs into a controlled state of cornered panic, and the devastating truth must finally be aired one night; she had had a recent transient sexual dalliance, and this unwanted pregnancy is almost certainly the upshot. To make matters even more complex, the cuckolding paramour is a black man (this couple is white). 

Thermonuclear agonies ensue, regarding which, words utterly fail.

The young woman is beyond frantic to obtain an abortion (circumstances being exacerbated by the fact that her own father is an overt racist), but, this being an era prior to Rove vs Wade, abortions are proscribed by law in Washington state. Her subsequent attempts to procure one illegally fail, and she realizes she will have to carry this fetus to term. 

She is then advised by state social services agencies that she may indeed relinquish the newborn sight-unseen for adoption, and wishes to opt for that alternative to end this nightmare, however imperfectly. This, though, requires the husband's written assent, which, for reasons not entirely clear to him, he declines to provide. In part, one can safely assume, hoping against hope that this is all a cruel, horrific dream, and the child will in fact prove to be biologically his. 

An uneventful delivery obtains in the hospital in Renton in July of 1970, a 7 lb. 6 oz. healthy baby girl. The young man hesitantly approaches the glass partition of the nursery unit. The moment of truth in a glance: 'Nope, well, this is definitely not your child.' A fleeting, wracked feeling of being dropped down an open elevator shaft gives way within seconds to a subsequent flustered internal flurry: 'Now what? Whatever will become of this child? None of this shit is her fault...'

He turns and heads down the hall to the office, whereupon he signs the requisite parental paperwork. He will be her "father." Not even legally her "adoptive father," simply her father, DNA be damned. His bigoted father-in-law be damned. Subsequent hushed gossip and furtive glances within his social cohort be damned. 

Fast forward four years to a Clark County, Washington courtroom. The young man is granted an uncontested divorce, along with sole custody of his two girls. The henceforth ex-wife does not attend the hearing. 

Fast forward yet again. Knoxville, Tennessee a decade later, a dining room discussion ensues during which the younger daughter learns for the first time the full story."Thanks, Dad, you saved my life." 

They laugh. It is good.

The foregoing is no mere illustrative fictional anecdote conjured up for emotional impact. I am that father.

 

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Nonetheless, it is not my place to dictate to women what they must do should they become pregnant.

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DR. CROWTHER

INTRODUCTION
In popular pregnancy guides, cutting-edge medical research, and pro-life propaganda, fetuses are treated as separate and distinct from the people whose bodies they inhabit. Fetal development has been mapped in exquisite detail from fertilization to birth. Pregnant people, on the other hand, are little more than incubators, and faulty ones at that, requiring constant supervision to prevent them from harming the fetuses they carry. To this day, many aspects of pregnancy are poorly understood, and many obstetricians are not trained to recognize and treat serious complications like preeclampsia and infection, especially when they occur after the birth. The combination of fervent concern for the well-being of fetuses and hostility to pregnant people has been disastrous for both.

Although our current biomedical understanding of pregnancy and fetal development is relatively new, dating back to the mid-twentieth century, many of our most cherished ideas about reproduction trace their origins back thousands of years. A great deal of what we know or think we know about procreation owes more to ancient religion and philosophy than it does to modern science…

We describe pregnancy as passive, not active, something that happens to women, not something that women do. This mindset has consequences. An artist needs social, emotional, and financial support to create works of art. Your oven does not need social, emotional, and financial support to bake bread. “A bun in the oven” might seem like a perfectly innocent expression, just a quaint and old-fashioned euphemism for pregnancy, but it is part of a broader pattern of thinking about reproduction that we have inherited from the ancient world, and one that continues to shape the ways we treat pregnant people. Nowhere is the influence of ancient ideas about reproduction more apparent that in our contemporary debate about abortion.

On January 22, 1973, the US Supreme Court handed down its decision in Roe v. Wade, declaring a Texas law prohibiting abortion, and similar laws in other states, to be unconstitutional. Chief Justice Harry Blackmun (1908–1999), writing for the majority, argued that the “right to privacy” guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment was “broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.” This right was not absolute. States had an “important and legitimate interest in protecting the potentiality of human life.” However, the state’s interest in potential life—in the fetus—could not override a woman’s right to an abortion until viability, the point in pregnancy when the fetus was capable of “meaningful life outside the mother’s womb.”…

Not quite fifty years later, on June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court overturned the Roe decision. In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the court declared: “The Constitution does not confer a right to abortion.” Justice Samuel Alito (b. 1950), writing for the majority, asserted that “the viability line [established by the Roe decision] makes no sense.” There was no reason that a state’s interest in the protection of “potential life” could not begin well before viability. Each state should be able to determine for itself if and when abortion was legal. In anticipation of the court’s decision, thirteen states had already passed “trigger laws” banning abortion that automatically went into effect. Most of these laws ban abortion any time after fertilization. Politicians in some states have signaled their intent to introduce legislation banning or restricting abortion. Leaders in other states have affirmed their commitment to maintaining legal abortions…

As our awareness of and concern for fetuses have increased in the years between Roe and Dobbs, so too have our suspicions about and surveillance of pregnant people. In recent years, states have prosecuted women for using illegal drugs while pregnant, even if their babies were born healthy. Doctors and midwives have violated patient confidentiality to inform police of illegal drug use by pregnant patients. Hospitals have tested newborns for drugs and reported findings to the police. Doctors have obtained court orders forcing women to undergo Caesarean sections and other invasive medical interventions, on grounds that such interventions were in the best interests of the fetus. In such cases, laboring women have been denied the right to make their own medical decisions. Perhaps most cruelly, states have prosecuted women who miscarried or gave birth to stillborn babies, even when these women had no intention of ending their pregnancies. All of these trends reflect the insidious idea that the fetus requires special protection from the mother. In the interests of “protecting” the fetus, the mother’s rights to privacy and bodily autonomy can be abrogated…

Since Roe, the maternal mortality rate in the United States has risen, and it is now among the highest in the industrialized world. The infant mortality rate has also risen disastrously. Concern for “potential life” could, in principle, lead to better conditions for pregnant or potentially pregnant people. We could, as a society, make it a priority that all pregnant people and all who could become pregnant have access to healthy food, clean water, safe housing, and medical care. We could guarantee these things to all fetuses when they are born. But we do not. Instead, we treat pregnant people themselves as the greatest threat to fetal life. To protect fetuses, we ban abortions, regulate the behavior of pregnant people, and punish them for miscarriages and stillbirths. Our beliefs, attitudes, and policies surrounding reproduction are not saving babies, and they are harming women…

Crowther, Kathleen M. Policing Pregnant Bodies. Johns Hopkins University Press. Kindle Edition [loc 51-165].

I'm deep into it. Had not been on my on-deck list. Compelling. No man could write this.

See some of my prior blog rants related to Dobbs.

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Yeah. And we must not forget the "Man-Dog Marriage" guy. He's back in the news.

[Nov 8th, 2023] Former Senator Rick Santorum complained that the major election losses Republicans suffered are actually a sign of how “pure democracies” are a bad form of government.

Republicans faced devastating losses on Tuesday, as voters in Ohio overwhelmingly chose to legalize marijuana and enshrine abortion rights in the state Constitution. In Virginia, Democrats flipped the state House of Representatives, taking control of the entire legislature. While abortion was not explicitly on the ballot, the future of reproductive rights in Virginia hinged on which party controlled the government.

“You put very sexy things like abortion and marijuana on the ballot, and a lot of young people come out and vote. It was a secret sauce for disaster in Ohio,” Santorum whined Tuesday night on Newsmax…

The arrogance.

DR. CROWTHER

CONCLUSION
I began writing this book when Donald Trump was president. It was clear from the day of his surprise victory over Hillary Clinton that reproductive rights were in danger. A substantial portion of Trump’s base were (and are) evangelical Christians who expected him to abolish legal abortion. During his presidency, pro-life politicians and activists were emboldened to push for more restrictive abortion laws in many states. These included “heartbeat laws” that ban abortion after a fetal “heartbeat” is detected and “fetal personhood laws” that define a fertilized egg as a human being. These laws do not just ban abortion, they also justify the regulation of pregnant people and the criminalization of actions perceived as detrimental to the fetus. As Alison McCulloch writes, “Once you have a citizen, a person, living inside you, with all the rights and moral status that citizenship and personhood attract, then the authorities gain the right of entry, and a regulatory role in how that fetal citizen is treated.”1 In the interests of “protecting” the fetus, the mother’s rights to privacy and bodily autonomy can be abrogated. Trump’s appointment of two Catholic pro-life judges to the US Supreme Court put the final nails in the coffin of Roe v. Wade.

Like many Americans, I could see that I was witnessing a period of rapid historical change as the rights that I enjoyed throughout my reproductive years were stripped away from my children’s generation. But as a historian who has spent the past three decades studying and teaching the history of reproduction, I could also see that I was witnessing arguments and ideas that were very old indeed. Although heartbeat laws and fetal personhood laws are specific to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, I often experienced a sense of déjà vu when I read or heard support for these bills. [pp.203-204]

Below, I post this to my social media every Mother's Day.

UPDATE

Nov 9th. Very interesting.

THE NEW GOP HOUSE SPEAKER

Click for tweet link.

Yeah, women are simply broodmares. Moreover, Speaker Johnson would surely expediently agree with Aristotle that offspring are the property of the state, not the mother. Modern economic imperatives provide his modern rationale. Reverence for fetal personhood is just so much sanctimonious window-dressing.

UPDATE

 

I finished the book this afternoon. Totally 5 Stars, both in terms of engrossing relevant scholarly historical detail and elegant writing style. Again, no male could have written this book. ALL males (and women) should read it closely.

 

DR. CROWTHER CONCLUDES

I noted at the beginning of this book that it was not a comprehensive history of embryology. I chose to focus on aspects of that history that were relevant to contemporary issues, but also ones that display the continuities between the past and the present. Another value to studying history is that we encounter ways of thinking that are different from our own. Examining unfamiliar ideas about procreation can cast new light on our own assumptions. For example, based on her analysis of seventeenth-century English medical texts, historian Mary Fissell found that many English people in this period imagined the fetus “as a sort of guest within the mother’s body, and it was her job to provide appropriate hospitality to it, just as she would in her own home.” In this metaphor, “women’s bodies were naturally welcoming and generous.” This way of thinking about pregnancy is, as she points out, strange to modern readers. We are far more accustomed to metaphors that imply that pregnant women’s bodies are passive. And, as I have demonstrated in this book, we have deeply ingrained fears of the dangers posed to the fetus by the pregnant woman.

The implication of saying a woman has a “guest in her house” is very different than saying she has a “bun in the oven.” Taking care of a guest is work, but it is work that one undertakes willingly and (ideally) lovingly. If you are forced to take someone into your house and care for them, they are not a guest. Hospitality is also embedded in notions of community, reciprocity, and mutual obligations. By contrast, the metaphor of the bun in the oven implies that the womb is nothing more than a heat source. The real work of creating the fetus has already been done by the father. The point is not that one metaphor is more “accurate” than the other—both capture some aspects of pregnancy and ignore others. The point is that the “guest in the house” metaphor forms the basis for a more positive view of pregnancy, and of the pregnant woman, than does the “bun in the oven” metaphor. If we thought of women’s bodies as inherently nurturing, rather than inherently dangerous, we would be less likely to blame and to punish women for poor pregnancy outcomes. If we thought of pregnancy as creative work, rather than incubation, we would be more likely to support and nurture pregnant people.  Policing Pregnant Bodies [pp. 207-208]

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