Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? is Wrong on Abortion

I agree with Frank Rich of The New York Times when he says that Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas is, “the year’s most prescient political book.” By and large, Frank is right on the money in his analysis of the radical right’s use of so-called values to turn Middle America Republican. But he’s got it wrong when it comes to the material goals of the anti-choice movement.

On page 96 of his book, he writes:

The pro-life origins of the Kansas conservative movement present us with a striking historical irony. Historians often attribute the withering and disappearance of the nineteenth-century Populist movement to its failure to achieve material, real-world goals. It never managed to nationalize the railroads, or set up an agricultural price-support system, or remonetize silver, the argument goes, and eventually voters just got sick of its endless calls to take a stand against the “money power.” Yet with the pro-life movement, the material goal of stopping abortion is, almost by definition, beyond achieving.

Thus far, Frank is still completely right in both in his comparison of Populism to the anti-choice movement, and in his claim that abortion is impossible to stop. But his next few sentences are a complete departure from reality:

Ask even the hardest-core activists, and they will admit that there is little that can be done to halt the practice without a fundamental shift on the Supreme Court. [emphasis added] Their movement, however, just seems to grow and grow. The material goal doesn’t seem to matter.

Two things are wrong here. First, Frank is off-base to assume that a fundamental shift on the Supreme Court will curtail abortion in America. Anyone who remembers the days before Roe v. Wade knows that a shift on the Supreme Court will only curtail safe and legal abortion. If abortion were illegal, then coathangers and other risky, often fatal measures would again become matters of course for women without the resources to find a safe abortion in another state or country.

Second, and more importanly, Frank is wrong to assume that anti-choice activists believe that banning abortion will protect unborn lives. I’m not talking about the foot soldiers of the movement here. Frank is correct when he writes that they are, “a grassroots movement of the most genuine kind, born in protest, convinced of its righteousness, telling and retelling its stories of persecution at the hands of the cops, the judges, the state, and the comfortable classes” (p. 95).

No, I’m talking about the hard-core anti-choice leaders - and really anyone in the anti-choice movement with any critical thinking skills whatsoever. They know that abortion won’t stop when it’s illegal. They know that women will again die en masse from procedures performed by quacks on card tables set up in filthy alleys. They just don’t care.

Frank is correct when he says that the purported material goal of the anti-choice movement is, “almost by definition, beyond achieving.” But his mistake is in taking them at face value. He assumes that their material goal is to end abortion by making it illegal through any means neccesary. But at its core, the anti-choice movement cares more about punishing women for our sexual decisions than it does about protecting lives. If anti-choicers were truly “pro-life” as they claim to be, they would know that access to safe, legal abortion coupled with unfettered access to birth control is the only meaningful way to protect the sanctity of life.

This is evident in the exemption that many anti-choice activists make when it comes to the abortion of pregnancies concieved through rape or incest. In those cases, the woman in question didn’t have a choice about whether to have sex. She was forced into it - so she’s still technically pure and free from the stain of sexual desire. In those cases, they can overlook the sanctity of the unborn child in her womb because what they’re really concerned with is whether or not she wanted sex.

At its heart, the anti-choice movement is no better than the Sharia courts of Nigeria and Saudi Arabia that condemn women to death by stoning if they have sex out of wedlock. They just take a more sophisticated and devious approach.

Anti-abortion ads via Protect Choice.org. Image of Geri Santoro - a woman who died from an illegal abortion - via Feminist Majority Foundation.