The Anti-Abortion Movement Will Sacrifice Anything to Control Women

The shocking ruling outlawing Mifepristone shows just how far they're willing to go.

The first thing to know about the radical and unprecedented decision by a Texas judge to ban Mifepristone nationwide is that abortion pills are still available across the country, and medication abortion remains legal in states where abortion is legal. A court in Washington State has held that the FDA must not ban Mifepristone, which means that the FDA is looking at two conflicting authorities; the FDA may also use its own enforcement discretion and communicate that it will essentially look the other way if anyone or any entity violates the Texas ruling. In any event: You can still get abortion pills. Anywhere abortion is legal, an abortion using Mifepristone remains legal. Even where abortion is not legal, abortion pills are available. Conservative groups want to sow chaos and cause confusion about abortion’s legality and availability, so it’s worth emphasizing: Mifepristone remains legal; abortion pills remain legal anywhere abortion is legal; and people who need them have options for obtaining abortion pills even where abortion is criminalized.

The second thing to know about the radical and unprecedented decision to ban Mifepristone is that it is entirely, 100% ideological, completely untethered from any legal norm, perhaps the most explicit case I have ever seen in my life of a judge simply deciding that his personal beliefs should be the law of the land. It’s an overreach so stunning it’s almost impossible to believe it’s happening. It’s embarrassing; it’s a shocking act of lawlessness from a judge brazenly abusing his power.

This ruling is so absurd that, were other courts to follow it, the FDA would be rendered impotent. A national drug regulation scheme becomes impossible if even decades-old regulatory decisions can be overturned by single ideologues. Even if you oppose abortion rights, this decision should shock and appall you.

But the big takeaway from the radical and unprecedented decision to ban Mifepristone is this: The anti-abortion movement has always been an anti-democratic and authoritarian movement, and that authoritarianism has taken over the Republican Party and the far-right judiciary. This decision was not about life or women’s health or drug regulation or even the law (it really, really wasn’t about the law). It was a simple assertion of dominance, a clear statement that the right will stop at absolutely nothing – including the outer bounds of American law – to force women into compliance.

It is entirely about control.

And this is just a preview of what’s to come.

Feminists have long made the point that anti-abortion laws are about controlling women’s bodies and, more broadly, controlling women’s lives – constraining our futures, enforcing a social scheme of female dependence and male dominance. If the “pro-life” movement cared about women and babies or even wanted to prevent abortions, feminists have argued, there are a great many tried-and-true ways to decrease the abortion rate and improve infant and maternal health: wide access to effective contraception; comprehensive sexual health education; generous support for pregnant women and new moms; investment in health care and nutrition; paid leave for parents; high-quality childcare. The “pro-life” movement has done none of this; instead, the policies that have been proven to improve outcomes for moms and babies basically make up the feminist movement’s to-do list, while the anti-abortion movement has opposed these same policies, choosing instead to push dangerous, draconian, and punitive abortion bans.

And that’s telling enough. What’s truly stunning about this latest decision, though, is it shows just how outside of the normal rules of play the anti-abortion movement is willing to go to impose its will. It will essentially toss out an entire necessary regulatory agency if it means that more women will be forced into motherhood and out of the realms of political, economic, social, and even personal decision-making.

The anti-abortion movement has never played by the rules. Their members have bombed clinics and murdered doctors, while the top players and their friends in the GOP brushed the violence off or even tacitly encouraged it. They have made all sorts of absurd legal arguments. They flat-out lie, and have gone to court defending their right to pretend to be medical clinics and lie to women about abortion, all to bully them into continuing pregnancies. It really is something when you’re finding yourself arguing, with a straight face, that your religious “crisis pregnancy center” must legally be permitted to lie to women.

This Texas ruling on Mifepristone, though, goes much further.

While the anti-abortion movement has long overreached, they’ve often been slapped back. Roe v. Wade was the biggest obstacle to ridiculous anti-abortion legislation, and so when that fell last summer, the barriers to radical anti-abortion overreach largely came down with it. But Roe wasn’t the only obstacle. The United States remains, for the most part, a nation of laws. Our justice system is far from perfect, but part of what makes our country functional is that our judiciary emphasizes predictability and stability as much as fairness. Courts place heavy weight on the language of the law itself, as well as on precedent – on how laws have been interpreted and understood by previous and higher courts. One goal is continuity, with the idea being that people should be reasonably able to predict outcomes and act accordingly. If different courts all over the country are deciding cases simply based on what individual judges prefer, or even what individual judges believe the law says, chaos ensues.

Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of Amarillo, Texas decided the Mifepristone case based simply on his personal political preference. Chaos has ensued.

It’s hard to overstate just how bad, sloppy, and far-reaching the anti-Mifepristone case was. Written by a hodgepodge of far-right abortion opponents, the case was one of hundreds of efforts nationwide to throw a bunch of radical ideas out there and hope one sticks. I suspect that if you took the smartest person from the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, the far-right organization that filed the case, out for a long night of drinking, they would eventually admit that yeah, their case was full of shit – that it’s a total joke, a ridiculous claim that could only win in front of a judge who is extremely ideological and at least a little bit stupid. Which is exactly why the group that filed the case incorporated this past August in Amarillo, where the Trump-appointed Kacsmaryk is the only federal judge. Kacsmaryk is so extreme that even Republican Sen. Susan Collins opposed his nomination; he has spent his career focused on far-right Christian causes, including at a group where his boss called transgender children part of “Satan’s plan;” has been clear he has no use for Supreme Court or other precedent; and has a long history of overt hostility to LGBT people and women. It was venue shopping at its most obvious.

If the principle of this decision holds, there are remarkably few medications in the country that could survive a court challenge. The anti-abortion movement simply made up a lie that the FDA fast-tracked Mifepristone and has refused to account for its safety. That would be convenient for their aims, but it’s just not true – what the FDA has done with Mifepristone is a matter of fact and public record. And the fact is that the FDA process for approving Mifepristone was far more onerous and drawn-out than the FDA’s typical drug-approval process, exactly because the anti-abortion movement has so thoroughly politicized abortion-inducing drugs. Even after approval, Mifepristone has been subjected to a much stricter regulation scheme than the vast majority of drugs that receive FDA approval, despite Mifepristone’s pretty incredible safety record. There have been more than 100 studies on the safety of abortion-inducing medications, and all of the legitimate ones have found that these drugs have very good safety records. Even some of the studies cited by the anti-abortion plaintiffs in this case still find that abortion pills are safe, but abortion opponents have twisted them and lied about their findings — arguing, for example, that bleeding is a “serious side effect,” when abortion pills by definition induce a miscarriage, which means significant bleeding.

Nearly 10 times as many people in the US died from taking Viagra in the first eight months after that drug’s approval than have died from abortion pills in 23 years. And of course the opposite of abortion is not “nothing” but continued pregnancy and childbirth, which is nearly five times as dangerous as ending a pregnancy with abortion pills.

You can feel however you want about abortion, but there are also basic facts at hand. The fact is that Mifepristone is far safer than many of the drugs Americans take every day, from penicillin to Viagra. And it is far, far safer than childbirth.

That may be inconvenient for the anti-abortion movement, but it doesn’t make it false. Instead of just addressing their problem with Mifepristone, though – and the problem isn’t that it’s unsafe for women and girls, the problem is that it’s part of a very safe and every effective protocol for inducing an abortion – the anti-abortion movement pretends to care about safety and women’s health. This opens a pretty big can of worms. Because if Mifepristone is unsafe, and if the FDA’s own decisions on its regulation are substandard, then what drug could survive this kind of judicial scrutiny? And if individual judges can exert their own authority over the FDA and say that a drug the agency has approved should actually not be allowed on the market, what authority does the FDA really have?

I don’t like the outcome of this case, obviously. But it’s not just the outcome that’s a problem here – abortion pills remain available, and even if Mifepristone were outlawed, misoprostol, which can induce an abortion even when used alone, would remain on the market, at least for now. The how matters. It matters that we have judges who rule according to the law itself, and not according to their specific ideological preferences. It matters that our judiciary follows the rules, and that judges don’t abuse their power. And yes of course we have a Supreme Court majority who do something like this, but at least a few of them do seem to have limits – they have a legal philosophy that is absolutely bonkers, but there is at least some effort to dress their decisions up in the language of originalism and the rule of law.

Here, it’s just one man imposing his will. And it’s an entire conservative movement either applauding or staying mum.

I try not to be a Chicken Little about fascism in America. I do think America’s institutions are strong; I do think our slow-moving legal and political systems are bulwarks against radicalism, which is frustrating when I want to see progress come faster, but comforting when it means we don’t rapidly descend into repression and tyranny. The thing is, though, that we need people who believe in those systems and adhere to their rules for those systems to work; we need people from across the political spectrum to understand that the project of a stable and cohesive nation with predictable laws and fair, transparent, and coherent processes is more important than any one powerful individual getting exactly what they want exactly when they want it.

The anti-abortion movement rejected the concepts of liberal democracy and individual rights long ago, and have made clear they are willing to do whatever necessary to get exactly what they want exactly when they want it. Our courts and political systems have kept those authoritarian impulses at bay. But now, the Republican Party has been near-fully taken over by people who outright reject democratic norms and processes, and who unapologetically want to impose a patriarchal conservative Christian nation-state on the rest of us. We’re seeing this in the takeovers of state legislatures by radicals. We saw it in Tennessee this week, when the Republican Party kicked out two young Black lawmakers – representatives of their districts duly elected into office – in a transparent move to tighten their grip on power and shut down any opposition. We’re seeing it in laws that ban books and art and performance and gender presentation that is outside of a traditional norm.

I’m guessing most readers of this newsletter support abortion rights. But I want to emphasize that this goes so far beyond abortion itself. It gets to the fundamental questions of what rights humans should have, of what kind of nation we are, and what kind of nation we want to live in. Are we a nation of both individual rights and generally-applicable rules? Or are we a place where patriarchal Christianity dictates all of our roles, and individuals in power can assert their dominance at will?

The anti-abortion movement really is about control. First, there is the fundamental authoritarianism in believing that the government or men or anyone should have the ability to force a woman though nine months of pregnancy, then the unbelievable pain and inherent risk of childbearing, and then into motherhood. What kind of person, with what kind of worldview, believes it is their right to compel a person to see their body inhabited and expanded; to have their ability to move and work and even breathe constrained; to experience one of the most painful events a human being can go through; and to enter into perhaps the most sacred and complex lifelong relationship that can exist between two people?

I hesitate to get too graphic, but right-wing activists, judges, and politicians are legally forcing women to go through unbelievable and routinely unspoken pain and injury, the kind of physical burden that is imposed, at least in today’s America, in no other context and on no other category of person. Pregnancy and childbearing are processes that often result in women’s bodies tearing open; vaginas being filled with scar tissue; abdominal wall separating; teeth falling out; persistent vomiting; breasts becoming painfully infected; skin stretching; bodies being cut open, internal organs being removed, uteruses cut into, and then everything put back inside and sewn up; months or years of incontinence; months or years of painful sex; pelvises fracturing; permanent nerve damage; uterine prolapse; and one’s very cells permanently changed. And then one’s life is permanently altered: professional achievements possibly curtailed and future possibilities inevitably shifted, sure, but also the beginning of a permanent state of immense and incomparable vulnerability, of, as so many parents put it, having one’s heart walking around outside of one’s body (please excuse the cliché).

Pregnancy and childbearing are among the most beautiful and brutal things human beings do. How dare anyone be so arrogant as to believe it is their right to impose these undertakings by force.

I’ve often compared anti-abortion laws to rape, and I think the comparison remains apt. Sex can be incredible, beautiful, fun, and thrilling, among the most pleasurable and generative and connective acts human beings can do together. But when sex is forced, it’s among the ugliest, most violating experiences a person can have. And that’s entirely because of how powerful a force sex can be, and how fundamental it is to human existence. Being raped is not like being punched in the face; it is not simply an act of violence, it is a much more profound violation because it is so intimate – literally inside of the body – and because it is such a harsh inversion of something that can be (should be) so sweet.

Sex can also be uncomfortable and confusing and regret-inducing and disgusting, just like much of the rest of the human condition. But even bad sex is worlds away from violently forced sex. The decision to tamp down or muddle through or (hopefully) respond to discomfort and confusion and regret and disgust, and the (hopefully) resulting ability to integrate those less-than-ideal feelings into one’s experience and (hopefully) learn and grow, is part of how many (most?) people become more aware, responsive, and present sexual beings. It’s not that sex is always fireworks and rainbows. It’s that willingness matters.

Pregnancy, childbearing, and parenthood are the same. Deciding to welcome a child into the world is perhaps the most serious undertaking of a person’s life. What is more profound than creating a new human, and molding that person into an adult? And what asks more of women physically and emotionally than pregnancy, childbearing, and then motherhood? When this is a decision made willingly, it doesn’t mean that any of it becomes easy. But it does mean that the difficulties are undertaken freely, with the knowledge or perhaps just the instinct that the tremendous joy and meaning of parenthood will make them worth it.

There is so much power and strength in pregnancy and childbearing, which is part of what makes small people (and particularly small men) so terrified. It is, after all, almost God-like, this ability to use one’s body to create and gestate and birth more people — or to decide not to. Of course misogynists cannot leave that kind of power to mere women.

And so: Control. Control a woman’s reproductive life, and you control her whole life.

Right now, we’re seeing what happens when this impulse to control women’s bodies, and by extension our lives, supersedes all else. The anti-abortion movement and the Republican Party are clear that they will do away with the rule of law, with an independent judiciary, with the democratic process, with majority-rules elections, with representative democracy, and with agency oversight if it means that they can control more and more of people’s lives – if they can force all of us to live according to the narrow rules that even they don’t abide by. This is the whole game. A judge in Texas just showed the conservative movement’s whole hand.

It’s never been about life or babies, and it’s certainly not about the health or wellbeing of women and girls. It’s about control. And the anti-abortion movement and their representatives in the GOP will burn down the whole country if it means they get to rule over the ruins.

xx Jill