Abortion: Make America Great, Make America Like Ireland

 In 1973 the Supreme Court issued the Roe v. Wade decision as a practical necessity to save the lives and health of women who felt the need to risk death to eliminate an unwanted pregnancy.  Abortion was generally illegal, and had been so for many years, but the quest for an illegal and medically unsupervised abortion continued unabated.  The nation—and many religious figures—were ready to end the bloodshed with a compromise that should have satisfied both the proabortion and antiabortion factions.  The latter group would continue to organize politically and promote an absolute prohibition of the procedure.  After fifty years, Roe v. Wade was overturned by the current Supreme Court, meaning all fifty states would now be required to establish their own laws regarding the legality of abortion in their domain.  This is being viewed as a victory by some, but it is really a return to an earlier stage where the issue must be reargued and codified into law.  In effect, Roe v. Wade in 1973 was an answer to the demands of the general population.  Afterward, the contention over abortion passed into the political domain.  Now, the battle has returned to an arena in which the general population can express itself.  This antiabortion victory may be a prelude to an even greater defeat.  It has been suggested that Ireland provides the example of where our nation is headed.

An article provided by The Economist, Around the world, bans do not make abortion much rarer,  discusses the evidence that banning abortion does not limit the number of abortions; it merely makes pregnancy more dangerous.  This chart was included.

From this data the need for an abortion begins to look like a fundamental constant.  No matter what legislation is in place to ban it, its rate of occurrence is unchanged.  The article continues on to discuss the complexity of a woman’s health issues during a pregnancy and the difficulty of enforcing a ban that takes into account risk to the health of a pregnant woman.  That concern was elaborated upon by Fintan O’Toole in an article in the New York Review of Books: The Irish Lesson. 

O’Toole attributes much of the intellectual fervor behind the antiabortion movement to Charles E. Rice. 

“As a professor of constitutional law, he established Notre Dame University in Indiana as a redoubt of the conservative Catholic legal thinking whose influence most fully blossomed when Donald Trump appointed Rice’s colleague and associate Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court.”

“But back in 1973 Rice despaired of the possibility that even a Republican-dominated Supreme Court would overturn Roe. He hoped instead for a constitutional amendment that would be ‘unequivocal’ in outlawing both abortion and all forms of contraception that could be deemed to be ‘abortifacient’: ‘In order to prevent the licensing and legal distribution of abortifacients, the constitutional amendment on abortion must prohibit abortion at every stage beginning with the moment of conception’.”

There was no possibility of such a constitutional amendment in the US, but the advocates felt that Ireland, a country already under the thumb of a cruel and tyrannical Catholic Church, could set an example that might ultimately lead to success in the US.

“Divorce was outlawed, not just by statute but in the text of the Irish constitution. The importation and sale of contraceptives was banned. The laws against ‘gross indecency’ under which Oscar Wilde had been persecuted in England in 1895 were still in force in Ireland. Having or performing an abortion was punishable by life imprisonment.” 

Irish women, like women everywhere, obtained abortions when they needed them in spite of the legal constraints.  They merely had to take a short trip to England.

Antiabortion “missionaries” were sent to Ireland to encourage the citizenry to take the repression a step further.

“…the…aim was to make abortion into something it had never yet been in Ireland: a political issue. It was already outlawed by Victorian legislation that remained in force from the nineteenth century, when Ireland was still part of the United Kingdom. No significant political party was in favor of repealing these laws. A small number of radicals argued for abortion rights, but most feminists and liberals were far more concerned with contraception, divorce, and other forms of legalized discrimination against women. What mattered for the Americans, however, was not this indigenous Irish reality but the possibility that Ireland could provide a vicarious triumph to boost their own morale and give them hope for the future.”

“Abortion was being transformed, as it would be in America, from a physical reality into a marker of identity. Majority identity in Ireland at the time was still defined by loyalty to orthodox Catholicism. The actual experiences of women who had abortions—their lives, their situations, their concrete choices—were successfully occluded. Life as it was really lived in Ireland would not weigh very heavily in the scales against ‘Life’ as a concept that one could be ‘pro.’ The satisfaction of declaring to the world that the unholy writ of Roe v. Wade would never be followed on our side of the Atlantic gave Catholic Ireland an inflated sense of its own importance.”

A referendum on a constitutional amendment banning abortion at all times and without an exception for rape or incest was held and passed, but it included a concession which would soon become a fatal flaw.  It would “guarantee the right to life of the unborn, but with due regard to the right to life of the mother.” 

O’Toole identifies three serious problems that abortion bans encounter.

“The first of these is bodily reality. Prohibition is as successful in this arena of human life as it has been for alcohol and drugs. It doesn’t diminish the number of pregnancies that women cannot or do not want to bring to term…If the purpose of abortion bans is to actually reduce the rate at which women terminate pregnancies, the Irish experience shows how utterly ineffectual they are. Some poor, vulnerable, or very young women and girls can be forced to carry babies they do not want, but a policy that depends for its success on female impoverishment and powerlessness is not easy to sustain in an open society.” 

If you take the extreme position that the moment an egg is fertilized it becomes a human being with the same rights to life as any other human being, including the prospective mother, you set up an unending series of conflicts of interest between the unborn and their mothers: which one should a medical caregiver choose to murder in a given situation. 

“It turned out that the constitutional amendment, intended to ban all abortion forever, had in fact established a right to abortion in some very limited circumstances. The conservatives were left to rail at the effects of their own handiwork, but they could never find a textual formulation that would satisfactorily obliterate in law the right to life of the mother.”

Ireland was beset with cases that aroused sympathy for the mother whose health or life was threatened by the intended absolute ban.  Similar cases are already showing up across the US.

“Revulsion…forced the Irish government to put forward further constitutional amendments, including one guaranteeing access to information on abortion services abroad and another assuring women of their right to travel out of the country to have an abortion. The conservatives felt unable to oppose these amendments. To do so they would have had to argue for pregnancy tests for women leaving Ireland and for the banning of magazines or newspapers that carried information about abortion. Yet by failing to insist on precisely these measures, they lost the integrity of their argument. If abortion is murder, such radical measures would be fully justified. If they are not justified, it is not murder…If conservatives shy away from the fiercely repressive measures necessary to enforce their ideological positions, they begin to seem cynical and hypocritical. If they do not balk at outright autocracy, they seem merely mad.”

Finally, it is inevitable that cases of outrage over the murder of a mother by overzealous antiabortion laws will turn the general population against what was once deemed reasonable.

“The third great problem that became evident in the Irish experience is that, while poor and marginalized girls and women are the primary sacrificial victims, some middle-class, well-educated women will also end up being killed for the cause of antiabortion righteousness. By their nature, antiabortion laws cannot be clear. They bury innately complex physical, social, and psychological realities in abstract phrases that can never be adequate to the multiplicity of circumstances in which pregnant women find themselves. In Ireland the once-and-for-all constitutional amendment of 1983 spawned five more constitutional referendums and half a dozen major cases in local and European courts. Buried within this thicket of argument were women’s bodies.”

“In 2012 a young dentist, Savita Halappanavar, died of sepsis in Galway University Hospital. She was seventeen weeks pregnant and, even though she was having a miscarriage, medical staff were afraid to intervene until they were sure that the fetus had no heartbeat, lest they be accused of having carried out an abortion.” 

That case received international attention and aroused the conscience of the Irish nation.  In 2018 voters would decide to eliminate the antiabortion amendment from their constitution.  And in so doing, they would succeed in freeing themselves from the smothering domination of the Catholic Church.

“Attempts to ban abortion did not preserve holy Catholic Ireland as an island of sanctity in the deluge of immorality. They ultimately served, rather, to force the Irish to reject the ideological system that created so many cruel hypocrisies. Arguably, the great victory of Irish and American conservatives in 1983 actually hastened the demise of Catholic Ireland by making Catholicism seem heartless, fanatical, absurd, and misogynistic. Abortion is now legal in Ireland—the beacon of morality that was meant to shine back across the Atlantic at benighted America has been turned off.”

May the religious extremists who enabled the overturn of Roe v. Wade be recognized for the “heartless, fanatical, absurd, and misogynistic” beings that they are.

O’Toole provides this summation.

“But even if Ireland no longer matters much to the history of American religious conservativism, it shows them their future. For what happened to the vicarious victory of the antiabortion fanatics in Ireland in 1983 will happen to their indigenous triumph in the US Supreme Court in 2022. They will cause girls and women to suffer. They will reduce female personhood to the same level as that of a zygote. They will spread shame and silence. They will kill some women by terrifying and confusing the doctors who should be treating them. But they will not change the necessity of abortion in women’s lives. They will not be able to enforce the coercive laws that their zealotry demands. And they will not find that the fulfillment of their long-held desire puts an end to the social change they so despise.”

 

The US Economy Requires Many Immigrants: Demographics and the Future

 A recent article from The Economist provides a perfect example of the adage “watch what you wish for.”  In A shortfall in immigration has become an economic problem for America, Trump’s and the Republican Party’s goal of limiting immigration at our southern border has had unintended consequences for the US economy.  Like most wealthy countries, the US has a resident population with a birth rate that does not support its current population.  In order for population growth to occur, and to some extent economic growth as well, immigrants must come and assume jobs that the growing economy will produce.  Taking from the article in The Economist:

“New immigrants accounted for nearly 70% of the growth in the American labour force in the 2010s. Over the next two decades, immigrants are likely to be the only source of growth.”

These immigrants have been contributing to the economy at both the upper and lower wage levels.  With Trumpian policies and the arrival of the COVID virus, this steady flow of new workers was significantly diminished.

“Net international migration—that is, accounting for both arrivals, whether authorised or not, and departures—added 247,000 to America’s population between July 2020 and July 2021. That was the smallest increase in the past three decades, and less than a third of the annual average during that time. The covid pandemic explained much of the drop, as America barred international visitors from dozens of countries, closed consulates around the world and froze many applications.”

“But the decline began before covid. Net immigration has trended down since 2017, Donald Trump’s first year in office. High-profile restrictions on travel from several predominately Muslim countries set the tone for his administration.”

“Giovanni Peri and Reem Zaiour of the University of California, Davis, estimate that by February America was missing roughly 1.8m working-age foreign migrants relative to its post-2010 trend…”

Interestingly, emigration has also been significant.  Migrants who come, legally or not, often return home eventually.

“Emigration has been another factor. The number of Mexicans living in America peaked 15 years ago. Many older migrants have returned home. Indeed, for all the furore about the southern border, the estimated population of unauthorised immigrants in the United States has declined during that same period, from 12.2m in 2007 to perhaps 10m in 2020.”

The net result is that jobs are going unfilled.

“Employers in the restaurant and accommodation sector, which draws a quarter of its employees from the foreign-born population, could not fill about 15% of job openings last year. In professional and business services, where the foreign-born make up a fifth of workers, doing everything from architectural sketches to tax preparation, roughly 10% of jobs went unfilled last year. That, in turn, may be contributing to higher wages, with pay rising especially quickly for low-income earners.” 

The resulting job market, where there are jobs available and rising wages, prompted another economic response: The Great Resignation.  Workers, sensing the opportunity to better themselves, have been quitting their current jobs and looking for better opportunities.  The New York Times addressed this phenomenon in the article All of Those Quitters? They’re at Work. 

“Many of last year’s job quitters are actually job swappers, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the census, which shows a nearly one-to-one correlation between the rate of quitting and swapping. Those job switchers have tended to be in leisure, hospitality and retail. In leisure and hospitality, the rate of workers quitting rose to nearly 6 percent from 4 since the pandemic began; in retail it jumped to nearly 5 percent from 3.5. White collar employers still struggled to hire, but they saw far fewer resignations. The quitting rate in finance, for example, declined at the start of the pandemic and is now just below 2 percent, and in media and technology it stayed roughly consistent, also below 2 percent.”

Critical industries like agriculture and food processing depend on a supply of workers who will accept hard work and low wages.  Established citizens of the US have demonstrated that they will not perform those tasks at any wage.  The seeming success of The Great Resignation suggests that other low-wage occupations— leisure, hospitality and retail, for example—are being nudged in the direction of “work immigrants do.”  This can only further increase the need for more immigration if our economy is to perform like it has in the past.

The US is in the position of most wealthy countries in that its birthrate seems destined to be less than its death rate for the foreseeable future.  Population will continue to decline unless it is bolstered with immigration.  It is this unavoidable fact that has contributed to the rise of nativist parties in Europe and the US.  But these politicians complain about the situation without proposing how they would provide a vibrant economy with an ever-declining population and no immigration.  Most who try to go this route work on trying to increase the fertility rate. The Republican Party’s hero, Victor Orban of Hungary, has been trying this for years with little progress.  That country’s population has been declining for 40 years.

An obvious first step in dealing with a declining population might be to tune the economy so that the low-wage, unpleasant jobs disappear.  That will be expensive, but it would be beneficial in creating a more classless society, and it would limit the economic necessity for low-wage work and thus the need for immigrants.  In the past, the US faced immigration based on economic need.  Participants knew they were being taken advantage of yet were still benefiting from the system.  Those conditions have changed.  Those coming to the southern border are seeking refugee status claiming they can no longer exist in their previous home region.  To the extent that is true, people should be subject to humanitarian considerations, not profit and loss considerations

Unfortunately, any economic adaptations are likely to by overcome by events as climate change forces more and more people to leave their home regions to find relief.  Someone should be planning accordingly.