“Let’s Make the Womb Safe Again”: Ethnographic Explorations of White Evangelical Women’s Language of Reproductive Injustice

Abstract

Like broader conservative movements, the pro-life movement in the United States has a fraught history regarding its alignment with White supremacy. Yet, the whiteness of the pro-life movement is often hidden behind the discourses of colorblind racism through the U.S. cultural moment. To uncover and deconstruct this supposed “anti-racist” discourse, I study Evangelical women and their roles in the pro-life/anti-choice movement to explore their consequences on the narratives of abortion and reproductive health care from the 1970s to present. I conduct interviews and participant observation with self-described Evangelical pro-life women through ethnographic opportunities and events. In this study, I explore the intersectional issues of reproductive injustices through fieldwork and interviews with anti-choice women. These interviews and ethnographic data focus on a particular group of anti-choice organizers who prepare and oversee the logistics of this movement: pro-life women. How does it come to be that conservative women control the narratives of reproductive health care? How can ethnographic methods be utilized to unveil new information and knowledge surrounding the barriers to reproductive health care by the pro-life movement? I analyze this qualitative data to understand how the rhetoric of the pro-life/anti-choice movement invades the language of reproductive health in the United States and how a reproductive justice framework can begin to deconstruct this problematic flow.

“God hates the shedding of innocent blood and we should too. The womb should be one of the safest places in earth. Let’s make the womb safe again.”

A 4-year-old named Anissa Fraser’s full body covered a billboard on the side of highways in New York and Florida in March 2011. Her mother was driving near her home in New Jersey and saw her daughter’s picture with the words “The Most Dangerous Place for an African American is in the womb” plastered above her head. Anissa looked scared and sad in the picture, as if she was the one in danger herself. Her mother, who did not consent to her daughter’s picture being used for a pro-life organization, sued the company who made the billboards called “Life Always.” Fraser’s lawyer Andrew Celli said, in regard to the lawsuit, that “the issue isn’t their position on abortion. It’s the statement that children of color are at risk because African American women are exercising their right. That’s the racist part, that African American women are dangerous to their children” (Kumeh, 2011). The framing of Black women as at war with their own wombs is integral to racial scripts in the United States, where Black women are pitted against their own children and bodies (Life Always, 2011). These statements are made and framed most often by White, pro-life women.

How do pro-life women talk about their own history of the movement, particularly regarding the intersections of gender, race, and reproductive injustice? I describe the ideological bases behind the roles of White women in the pro-life movement using ethnographic data from interviews with women at March for Life 2021 as well as through pro-life paraphernalia and prose. I argue that the racist scripts of the pro-life movement are tied to an investment in the purity of the nation, particularly through a White Christian nationalism in the United States. In this way, the pro-life movement, rather than helping Black women and championing for rights to their bodies and reproductive capacities, is inextricably linked to White supremacy and reproductive injustice.

To argue for this particular reading of my ethnographic project, I outline an historical narrative of the racial scripts that contribute to reproductive injustice for Black women in particular. Next, I describe my ethnographic methods that deal with collecting and recording interviews with self-proclaimed pro-life, White Evangelical women in the movement. Using examples from interviews that describe the purity of the nation, shame as tied to abortion care, as well as supposed “anti-racist” advocacy within the pro-life movement, the modern pro-life movement describes itself as an activist, justice-oriented project, using Black women and birthing people’s bodies as a battle ground for racist scripts that attend to and maintain injustices on reproductive bodies. These scripts are used to hide the racism of Christian nationalism that inherently polices particular people’s bodies, that is, people of color and poor people, in the United States through a rhetoric of public shaming that sustains reproductive injustice. To dismantle this “pro-life” language and subsequent injustices, we must turn to reproductive justice scholars and their telling of Black women’s reproductive histories in the United States.

Postracial Evangelicals

Omi and Winant (2015) describe race as a social and historical process and understand race-making through “racial projects.” Racial formation is the process of race-making; a concept that signifies and symbolizes social conflicts by referring to the labeling of different types of human bodies in regard to race. I emphasize these racial projects that label racialized bodies in specific ways through processes that deal with structural issues versus representations. Omi and Winant (2015) argue that a shift from racial domination to racial hegemony has taken place in the Post-WWII period, where “colorblindness” has become connected to neoliberalism. Colorblindness has formed the dominant racial script in America and was a large part of racialization processes in the late 20th century to today, as Bonilla-Silva (2010) demonstrates by asking “how is it possible to have this tremendous degree of racial inequality in a country where most Whites claim that race is no longer relevant?” (Bonilla-Silva, 2010, p. 2).

The colorblind racism as a backlash to the Civil Rights Movement spurred many discourses that emphasized what White supremacists claimed as the cultural issues within non-White communities rather than seeing the structural and historical racist systems still at play. One of the racial scripts that came out of postracial, colorblind racist America was the term and ideological system of “Black on Black crime.” The racist and “colorblind” article written by Palley and Robinson in 1988 “proves” this phenomenon in regard to homicide rates by stating that “The leading cause of death among black males aged fourteen to twenty-four in the United States is homicide committed by other blacks (p. 60).” The article goes on to say that some accompanying underlying dynamics of this death rate are poverty, a lack of stable hetero-nuclear family structure, as well as so called “crime culture” (Palley & Robinson, 1988). This article exists within a long line of sociological studies that frame Black people as the cause of their own death, quite literally. The Moynihan report argued similar statistics and results two decades earlier in 1965 without the specific language of “Black on Black crime” (Moynihan Report, 1965). The rhetorical creation and execution of this phrase is important to a postracial society as it explains away inequality without having to center or even recognize the existence of White supremacy. I argue with Molina (2014) in that racial scripts do not just stay within a particular context but travel across time and space. Therefore, it is no coincidence that the popularity of the term “Black on Black crime” that came into being for White politicians and pundits is used as a guise for the political power of the Evangelical pro-life movement (D. Wilson, 2005).

In the case of the modern conservative movement’s racist rhetoric, the consequences of Trumpism on colorblind racism and the palatability of White supremacy must be explored. We need to account critically for the more recent history of race and colorblindness in American politics and culture. Not only have overt forms of White supremacy/White supremacist violence become more mainstream and lodged in the politics of the major conservative political party, but many White liberals who believed in the so-called Obama effect have let go of the fantasy of a postracial U.S. culture, especially after reckonings with police brutality (Carolan, 2020; Odell Korgen & Brunsma, 2012). With the election of Trump in 2016, came an authoritarian populist movement within conservative groups and communities, that also brought out overt and violent forms of racism in the United States (Perry et al., 2019, 2022; C. A. Wilson, 2021). This conservative populist movement uses the rhetoric of “post-truth” to argue that anything falling outside of a conservative perspective, which is ever-shifting, can be considered fake or not factual (Ho & Cavanaugh, 2019). I highlight this current treatment of the contemporary climate of race in the United States and, relatedly, how pro-life women’s arguments land in this context of race and reproductive injustice.

However, examples of everyday reminders of the continued postracial sentiments that accompany violent White supremacist claims still have salience in this moment in the United States, especially for conservative White Evangelicals (Gilpin Faust, 2022). Even though Trumpism brought in a more obvious racist regime and opening for White supremacists to speak out, there is still an underlying sentiment from mainstream conservatives that there is racial equality in the United States, just not necessarily harmony. However, although not as prevalent in liberal circles today, the way postracial rhetoric gets taken up and wielded by conservative men and women is particularly through unsettling consequences on people’s bodies. Rhetorician Eric King Watts describes postracialism as a way for White citizens to deal with Blackness as a bio-threat (Watts, 2017). Although race does not exist without the concept of racism, a postracial fantasy sees race as able to disconnect from racist rhetoric. Therefore, postracialism becomes an ideology used to argue for a view of race as not tied to racism—standing on its own in the name of diversity in a falsely honorific sense. Watts compares this postracial, and postfeminist, rhetoric to the way White people fantasize about threats to their homeostasis in the world and in their minds as he describes the “development of modern racism as a function of the emergence of technologies of biopower, racial formation as blackening (and whitening), and the production of a segment of a population as a bio-threat” (Watts, 2017, p. 319). Watts argues that the rhetoric of colorblindness obscures the actual racism perpetrated by White supremacists and even White liberals who often unconsciously perpetuate violent stereotypes regarding Black women’s bodies, in particular.

Pro-life organizations follow these racist, colorblind scripts by spreading egregious and false statistics; such as Black women are killing their “babies” by only allowing 60% of Black births in New York City to come to term (Life Always, 2011). The predominately White women behind these statements make judgments about Black women’s bodies that follow the postracial scripts of colorblindness that perpetuate moral arguments about certain groups of people. In Killing the Black Body, Dorothy Roberts (1997) argues that “regulating Black women’s reproductive decisions has been a central aspect of racial oppression in America” (p. 6). I argue that the popularity of this colorblind, victim-blaming ideology in America, along with the later creation of Trumpism, and its simultaneous beginnings with the start of the self-proclaimed pro-life movement is no coincidence. The way White women frame the pro-life movement as postracial, or even anti-racist at times, comes directly from the campaigns they run, the strategies they devise, and even the words they use regarding their involvement—while maintaining the racist, gendered, and classist rhetoric and actions that contribute to and sustain reproductive injustice.

Women in the Christian Pro-Life Movement

Many scholars in religious studies and communication studies have examined the rhetoric and media representation of men in religious movements. ¹ The roles of women in Evangelical Christian circles are perhaps harder to trace and observe. In her book How the Republican Party Became Pro-Life, Phyllis Schlafly writes that by 2012, “America is Becoming Pro-Life” and “Gone are the days when Republicans remained silent after an obviously wrong, unconstitutional and immoral decision by supremacist judges [Roe v. Wade]” (Schlafly, 2016, p. 48). The little Schlafly said directly about race and Blackness during her decades of conservative activism unveils the respectability politics and civility in terms such as “family values” that often mask White supremacist beliefs and actions—making these beliefs palatable to the general public. Similarly, yet more forthright about her views on race in America, Abby Johnson, a former abortion clinic director turned pro-life, Christian activist, writes in her book The Walls are Talking about what she and others who “changed sides” saw happening behind the walls of clinics that provide abortion care (Johnson & Detrow, 2016). She describes Black women as particularly susceptible to abortions. She also exclaimed in a recent Republican National Convention speech that it would be “smart” for police to racially profile her adopted biracial “brown son,” while arguing that Black men are more likely to commit crimes (therefore, her son most likely will) because of the lack of strong father figures in Black communities (Sherman, 2020). Focusing on “family values” and Black men and women as stereotypes are both rhetorical moves used often by women in the pro-life movement to de-center White supremacist beliefs and actions and have dangerous consequences now and historically for Black reproductive health.

Historically, physicians have been most concerned with White women’s reproduction and bodily capacities for the protection and proliferation of the White population. Black women’s reproduction, however, was critical in the creation of America as a nation because of slavery, and especially after the formal end of the slave trade. According to historian Dierdre Cooper Owens, the professionalization of physicians in the late nineteenth century influenced and increased the status of obstetric and gynecologists who studied the “conditions” of women and took over the profession from midwives and nurses who took a more grounded and wholistic approach to the practices of pregnancy and birth (Ehrenreich & English, 2010; Thompson, 2018; Cooper Owens, 2017). This greatly affected Black women in particular and contributed to disparities and violence toward them in health care and reproduction, including experimentation on their bodies and systematic genocide in many cases (Cooper Owens, 2017; Weinbaum, 2019). Shortly after the Civil War, the American Medical Association (AMA) announced its commitment, when referring to abortion, to

protest against the unwarrantable destruction of human life, as they were also organizing an enormous shift in law and culture surrounding medicine—putting it into the hands of Christian faith-based, doctors who were white and experimented upon women of color. (Morone, 2003, p. 251)

Overall, in these various forms, anti-Black violence and rhetoric defines morality and “purity” through unfounded fears of outsiders and their “unruly” bodies, in particular Black women and queer people, attacking “traditional” White Protestant families as well as through their capacity or incapacity for Christian faith through the capacity for economic prosperity (Strings, 2019). Through this process, the tropes of “Welfare Queen” and other falsely theorized sexual deviancy of Black women in particular leads to violent reproductive injustices.

While the focus on Black women’s bodies in the discourses of the pro-life movement might seem to center race, these discourses are used by White women to perpetuate a colorblind racial script dominating the rhetorical landscape of race in America in the 21st century. Before the modern movement (1990s to today), anti-racism was not used by the White pro-life movement much as a way to garner support, and even before Evangelicals got involved, Catholic and Baptist groups were waging a eugenic-based war on people of color and poor people in the U.S (Haugeberg, 2017, p. 141). Pro-life women use the example of Dr. Mildred Jefferson, a Black woman who in the 1970s created the National Right to Life Committee, to argue for a seemingly anti-racist foundation of the movement (p. 15). However, the history of Black women being involved in the pro-life movement in the United States is complex and rooted in understandable responses to the racist history of gynecology. However, through my methods and analyses, I choose to center the White women who are not affected by this history and, instead, choose to continuously commit violence through their lived religion in the Evangelical pro-life movement.

Methods

Setting out to understand more fully the consequences of reproductive injustice instigated by the pro-life movement, not just in documentation from media, news outlets, archives, or even from pro-choice activists, I sought out interviews with White, Evangelical women in the movement themselves. In January 2020, I planned on attending the March for Life in D.C. to speak with pro-life women in-person and to document my experiences. Instead, due to COVID-19, I was able to talk with over 50 women over video and audio chat the day of the March who were attending online that year, with many of them going in-person over the years since the start of the March in 1973. After conducting fieldwork while being online for the entire day and talking with these women, I was able to fully record and transcribe 40 interviews with self-proclaimed Evangelical, White, pro-life women. ² Through these interviews I do not argue for a grouping together of all White, Christian women; however, I explore the discourses and the contradictions that make them into one powerful, political voting block and activist group in America. The words White Evangelical women speak out loud to someone whom with they disagree are important sites of inquiry as building blocks of Christian nationalism as well as the dog whistles that underlie the eugenicist notions of the pro-life movement and contribute to reproductive injustice in the United States.

Often there is a particular and siloed method that must be articulated in a research project, whether it be historical, rhetorical, or ethnographic. Alternatively, religious studies scholars often see lived religion as a broad negotiation of these methods. Lived Religion is a term coined by religious studies scholar Robert Orsi (2018) that aims to loosen categorization of people’s experience with their particular religion. Religious studies scholar Meredith McGuire writes about lived religion as a way to think about religion as an “ever-changing, multi-faceted, often messy—even contradictory—amalgam of beliefs and practices that are not necessarily those religious institutions consider important (McGuire, 2008, p. 4).” The women of the pro-life movement may not be the most visible, but their lived out religious experiences and activisms are central to the messy and contradictory political workings of the Christian church and American politics.

As a critical scholar, I reject the idea that we must describe everything these women do as part of their lived daily religious routines as a valid mode of existence without criticism of interlocutors in some form, based on what should be a universal human right to bodily autonomy. These women and their stories do not fit neatly into a religious ethnography about faith and daily life alone—although that is an important facet. Therefore, I take a critical, feminist ethnographic approach to these interviews and analyses akin to scholars such as Patricia Zavella (2020) and Dána-Ain Davis (2019). Critical feminist ethnographers, anthropologists, and rhetoricians center a feminist heuristic and methodology in regard to power, agency, and identity (Campbell, 2005; Royster, 2000). A focus on how assemblages of power that facilitate identification for Evangelical women can be implemented within feminist work through a genealogical methodology, looking at how the histories of power influence the present through a Foucaultian understanding of power structures as traveling through language specifically (Foucault, 1972). Donna Haraway (1988) states that we simultaneously need an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects and a commitment to faithful accounts of the real world that can account for projects of freedom and liberation (p. 575). These interviews, field work accounts, and conversations convey the power and persuasion of the pro-life movement’s rhetoric working through a perfect historical combination of White women and the normalization of reproductive injustices.

Postracial Christianity and Reproductive Rights

For science to use depopulation measures of any kind in any country is wrong. We serve a God who made the Heavens and the Earth and all structures and inhabitants. To think he can’t make more room for his people is not believing or trusting. Genocide happens when there is no trust and fear.

Although reproductive justice scholars such as Loretta Ross (2017) and Dorothy Roberts (1997) have debunked and spoken out against it, there is a predominantly supposed “anti-racist” sentiment floating around the pro-life movement of the 21^st century. I argue that the anti-eugenics arguments of the modern pro-life movement are simply ways to capitalize on the colorblind racism of this century. The women I interviewed seemed to be deeply invested in rhetorics that countered depopulation and genocide, while still endorsing a fear of certain reproductive bodies and peoples with negative consequences on reproductive choice and justice.

My interlocutors spoke the basic and broad language of diversity. For people who use racial imagery in their pamphlets, promotional materials, and advertisements, they said little about race directly, even when prompted. Using phrases such as, “Human injustice is something we should all stand against” was a common refrain in interviews, without mentioning specific groups of people or structural, or even individual, modes of oppression. Colorblind racism often became a way to express that everyone mattered rather than focusing on the need for equitable conditions in a structurally racist system. One interlocutor, Rebecca, focused on a broad definition of human while also arguing for an “every life matters” approach to profane, sacred, and political life:

What it means to me to be pro-life is to understand that every life matters no matter their age, location, gender, race, socioeconomic status, health . . . Every life has value and should be protected and fought for. We are all humans that have souls and feelings; from the time we are in the womb to the time we are at the end of our lives.

Another common theme throughout the pro-life rhetoric of my interlocutors was a focus on the history of eugenics and gynecology in the United States. In the field, at pro-life events and outside of abortion clinics, I heard calls for reform of eugenicist practices, but ones that only understood abortion as a threat to women of color rather than a choice of reproductive freedom. For example, one older White woman, Nancy, stated to me that “Black women and children are targeted most by abortion sentiments” while another younger White pro-life activist Marie exclaimed, “Planned Parenthood has a Black Lives Matter banner—it is the biggest irony to me.”

This “All Lives Matter” logic comes out of an American backlash to reckoning with racial injustice and police brutality, specifically from White citizens who see the United States as having already dealt with racism through the abolishing of the institution of slavery. Black Lives Matter is a movement started online with the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter in 2013, after the acquittal of George Zimmerman who killed a Black teenager named Trayvon Martin (Ransby, 2018). This rallying cry has since become a world-wide and extremely successful movement in the fight for racial justice. However, the backlash to this movement, like most movements that deconstruct and combat predominant power structures, has been extremely violent and vitriolic. Sociologist Ashley Atkins argues that “Critical affirmations such as ‘Black Power’ and ‘Black Lives Matter’ have proved difficult for many interpreters to understand because of the way that they manifest resistance to white supremacy” (Atkins, 2019, p. 1). In the case of All Lives Matter, it is not only a manifesting of resistance to the concept of White supremacy, it has also caused extreme violence toward Black people in America through police brutality, anti-Black social programs, and anti-Black rhetoric—all contributing to reproductive injustice.

Along with these structures of violence in the infrastructures of America, the history of gynecology in the United States is one of contested eugenic rhetorical consequences that harmed, and in many instances continue to harm, women and birthing people of color, specifically Black women. Historians such as Dorothy Roberts and Deirdre Cooper Owen describe the detailed and complex history of medical bondage, slavery, experimentation, and gynecology in the United States (Cooper Owens, 2017; Roberts, 1997). And doctors who study health equity and social determinants of health know that the United States has one of the largest racial and ethnic disparities in pregnancy-related morbidity and mortality of industrialized nations with Black women and birthing people having up to a 4-times higher risk of maternal mortality compared with White women (Howell et al., 2016). However, White women’s concerns in the pro-life movement do not center abortion with obstetrical violence or maternal morbidity and mortality, even as they sometimes vaguely reference it. These histories are deeply connected that they are calls for an “all lives matter” colorblind racism that use Black women’s bodies as rhetorical tools for reproductive injustice to uphold hegemonic power in society.

About half of the women I spoke with were willing to say “Black lives matter,” unprompted, but they often couched that in an “all lives matter” nationalist rhetoric that immediately after negated their claim of being “anti-racist.” For example, Nancy exclaimed when I asked her about why she thought Black women and children were most at risk for abortion: “We respect LIFE because it’s where WE ALL started. LIFE IN ALL FORMS MATTER!” (she wanted me to write it down with the capitalizations for emphasis). But when I then asked if her views on human rights affected her vote or political party she simply stated, “I cannot vote for a party that supports abortion. All the people I know it is one of the main things for them.” Pro-life women use specific rhetorical tactics to orient the movement as what they often sincerely believe to be “anti-racist” on a political level, but on a personal level do not have to engage with their own views on race and racism in the United States. The women I spoke with used the concept of shame as an affective way to balance the concept of race in public and private life without having to actually commit to an anti-racist stance.

Weaponization of Shame

I decided to dedicate my life to fighting for the lives of innocent babies and also fighting to spare the mothers from the agony of living with the choice of ending their baby’s life.

Reproductive injustice writ large is sustained by pro-life Evangelical White women through the rhetoric of purity through shame. I sat on a video call with a woman named Greta who told me her own abortion story. She is a brown-haired, blue-eyed White woman in the Midwest who became a born again Christian after growing up in the Catholic church. She, like most of the women I spoke with, had her own abortion story:

I showed up to the abortion clinic and was moved through the process with a dozen other girls. It was an assembly line of waiting in a room crying and hearing stories about how their friends heard their baby’s bones breaking during their abortions. I wish I had had the strength and sense to get up and walk out and never look back. But before I knew it I was being put under anesthesia and the next thing I remember was waking up feeling the sheer panic of making the worst decision of my life and wanting to rewind time and change the reality of what I had just done. I felt the loss of my baby like a deep hollow hole that would never be filled. I forever lost a piece of my soul that day.

Shame is racialized and class-based—connected to particular bodies and disconnected from others. Shame is an affect that is inherently devoid of meaning yet wielded in particularly meaningful and impactful ways. Theorizing the weaponization of shame, I wanted to understand how shame is being produced: who gets to be seen as “guilty” and who gets to do the guilting? In the case of pro-life women’s stories about their activism and beliefs, shame is produced by private beliefs that are forced and policed upon the public. I along with other reproductive health and feminist scholars such as Michelle Goodwin, David Cohen and Carole Joffe (2020), and Katie Watson (2018) define shame as the affect associated with the stigma tied to the health care procedure of abortion. For example, critical/cultural and feminist scholars, such as Michelle Goodwin (2022), describe the stigma surrounding reproductive health care as shame through the excising of women’s bodies from nationhood, branding people who need abortions as extraordinary, criminalizing motherhood and womanhood generally, and the creation of a complicated pathway to care (Fischer, 2019, p. 2). Scholars in the medical field document stigma and shame in gynecological care generally and with abortion care in particular through patient experiences of being pushed out of the conversations surrounding their care as well as the language used to describe their experiences being stigmatized and othering (Astbury-Ward et al., 2012; Cook & Dickens, 2014; Kumar et al., 2009). The language surrounding the practice of abortion drives it to the edges of conversations surrounding reproductive health care, allows public displays of individual shaming to occur on local and global scales for those who receive and practice the procedure, and creates a culture of discursive and physical war over where abortion should be in the public, personal, and political. This stigma extends to other forms of reproductive health care that in particular orient Black women as inherently immoral based on racist assumptions of sexuality and reproduction. Shame is cultural and gets tied to abortion care that is pro-natalist for White women in particular.

Therefore, I argue that the creation of shame around abortion procedures happens in the United States because of its Protestant-based Christian nationalism that guides the policing of mothers through security culture and White supremacy. Shame becomes embedded within the concept of choice, where “choice” is a sinful act when used “against” a fetus. Women in the pro-life movement use the concept of “choice” to their advantage to argue that there is only one correct choice—choosing life. Greta talked to me about what she called the “moving target definition of life”—the way “liberals will separate personhood from humanness. It is the self-interest in person decision-making.” She told me that the way to combat this is to “Save the baby, but save the mom too in the process of it. She needs to hear that she is just as loved as the baby inside of her so she doesn’t resort to terminating the life within her.” The choice is there for women to make, but there is only one choice that will be self-less and understandable in the eyes of pro-life women. There also only exist choices for certain people, White women mainly, as Black and brown women and birthing people are always positioned as at war with their own bodies and babies.

Private Redemption Through Public Shame

Because there is a moral equivalency with life, you should feel ashamed for the sake of redemption.

In this way, shame is a particularly Western notion because of its ties to a Christian set of morals and beliefs, and prioritizes whiteness. Shame surrounding abortion and certain medical procedures does not exist without a biblical view of sin, shame, and forgiveness. When I asked a woman named Emily about why she was pro-life, she stated:

when I became a Christian and learned that God doesn’t make mistakes and he can turn evil into good . . . if I were raped and got pregnant, I trust God enough to know he will make good out of the bad that happened. I would consider myself selfish and arrogant to play God in choosing to end a baby’s life.

Private shame turns into a public weaponization of that shame through a Christian world-view. While the Bible nor any other ancient Christian texts says anything explicitly about abortion, the Bible and the concept of God/Jesus are used as a way to argue, according to Greta, “If we are arguing about life, then we are arguing about God.” Therefore, feeling publicly shamed is part of a private healing process. The public shame also comes with physical symptoms from the choice to abort that are mandated by God until redemption can occur. Rachel, a young White woman in Students for Life told me that abortion,

Isn’t something I would wish on my worst enemy. It causes a lifetime of regret and wishing and wondering and emptiness. It causes women to feel shame, disgust, guilt, hopelessness, and agonizing self-hatred . . . increases women’s chances of having relationship problems, depression, anxiety, substance abuse, promiscuity, suicidal thoughts, and other self-destructive behaviors.

Greta, the woman with her own abortion story, even went so far as to tell me that God was punishing her for having an abortion by not allowing her to get pregnant ever again: “I went to get married and our first pregnancy ended in miscarriage. I thought for sure that was my punishment from God.” Therefore, individual shame equates to you (plural) “should” feel shame because of my (singular) personal experience with shame through my belief system.

However, shame works differently based on intersections of racialized and gendered bodies. When I asked about the impact of race on the subject of abortion, I was told that Black women often abandon their children in the womb and after, which is “not their fault” but a “product of their culture.” This racist script akin to “Black on Black crime” is used by pro-life women to blame Black mothers more than White mothers for their choices, no matter if they decide to have an abortion or not. I also received answers such as “You just don’t abandon your children. I believe from the moment of conception, it’s really a strong conviction for me,” or “Make your choice before you get pregnant. There is plenty of methods of birth control,” or “the thing that gets me is women who use abortion as birth control.” The redemption for Black women and children in particular seemed to be achieved through a separate route, if able to be achieved at all. Instead of receiving a “gift basket of diapers, wipes, crib sheets, receiving blankets, onesies, outfits, sleepers, etc.” from a crisis pregnancy center in a small Midwest town, women of color who choose to keep their pregnancy have to go through extensive point collection systems at one woman’s “inner-city crisis pregnancy center” she runs. Women receive a point for every prenatal visit they go to if they provide proof. Having to prove you are worthy of material gains is an experience that Black women and children go through structurally and individually on a daily basis, and is especially egregious when they are pregnant.

In the case of a colorblind, postracial society in the United States, structures that are put in place to further equity are being taken away by the same White women in the pro-life movement who believe that all women have the same resources to keep and care for their children. Because there exists a moral equivalency in the movement to having a child grow up in a Christian, heterosexual, two-parent household, the stereotypes used to describe Black parents are used against Black pregnant people. For example, the woman who runs her own Crisis Pregnancy Center, Susan, gave me examples of the kinds of work she does for women of color. She told me that her clinic is able to help women find loving homes for their babies. Instead of providing material resources and support, women like Susan assume that Black mothers and parents are not able to parent their own children. Most of the pamphlets I was shown or handed by women who protest outside of abortion clinics were about resources to give your child up for adoption to a family in the (predominantly White) church who could not have their own. The lack of acknowledgment of inequity and racism swirled with the negative moral judgments put on Black mothers proves that many of the women I spoke with believed in the racist scripts of inferiority when it comes to Black people in the United States.

Reproductive Injustice as Moral Surveillance

Many of the women I spoke with told me in a variety of ways that “Legislation is morality.” This is a particularly disturbing sentiment when it comes to the understanding that those who see morality through “traditional” White values have control over defining morality in our current society. One of the major misconceptions is that women in the pro-life movement are not in mainstream culture/society; however, they are sustainers of a White, Christian nationalism while also being sustained by this system itself. The major infrastructure of the United States financially, morally, and structurally, supports pro-life sentiments. White Evangelical women, through both voting and grassroots activist power, also control electoral politics to the detriment of Black, brown, LGBTQ, disabled citizens and their well-being.

Historian Linda Kerber (1976) explains Republican Motherhood as the duty of White mothers to create nationhood by raising patriotic sons and perform citizenship through domesticity. Republican motherhood fed upon a fear of state/federal control as White women felt control and education should come solely from the traditional family unit. Michelle M. Nickerson (2014) defines an antistatist perspective as the belief in small government and the role of the traditional family unit to decide what is best for their lives and well-being (p. 25). Religious historian Lisa McGirr (2015) adds to this definition by arguing that White mothers in the early 20th century saw the state as attacking the family unit, therefore dichotomizing the roles of the state and household. They legitimized this dichotomy through a reaffirming of what they believed to be patriotism and traditional, constitutional values of small government. Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz’s (2019) scholarship on homeland maternity in the early 21^st century traces the lineage back to Kerber’s work on republican motherhood in the early years of the founding of the US republic. She argues that the security of the nation is tied to White womanhood and, particularly, discourse surrounding White motherhood in the United States. The assumptions made about mothers, their reproductive choices, as well as their daily lives are controlled by a nationalist project of White supremacy. White women felt and feel as if it is their duty to police Black and brown mothers who do not follow these guiding principles and daily practices.

Evangelical White women believe the political sphere should be connected to their own sense of self and community—this is a Christian nationalism that is tied to White nationalism. The privatization of the spiritual is made public and policed on all bodies through structures of feeling/power, including science and technology, local politics, and grassroots organizing. For example, Greta explained to me that she had a friend who was recently pregnant and was told “that the ultrasound showed abnormalities possibly Trisomy 18. Baby was born the other day completely healthy what they had seen on an ultrasound was his gallbladder. Science isn’t God. God is God.” However, she also told me in the same hour that “science says life begins at conception.” While normally a woman like Greta would be quick to defend ultrasound technology as a way to peer into the womb accurately, she instead emphasizes this time the limits to science and technology. The messy and contradictory nature, as well as the disability politics, of these statements conveys the deep structural power White women, and White conservative women in particular, are able to harness to shape the narrative and consequences of whatever they choose to articulate as part of their belief system.

The women I spoke to, despite their individual economic circumstances, are all privileged as part of the Evangelical White mainstream in America. However, the concept of privilege does not exist in a postracial society. Instead, the women of the pro-life movement’s words are salient in a political and social climate that values equality over equity, and they often describe themselves as victims of a liberal society:

I think that less government funds and public donations should go to the abortion industry—an industry that profits from the services and treatments that they provide. Those funds and donations could do so much to support families that feel their only option is abortion because of their circumstances and lack of resources.

The contradictory nature of these statements shows the lack of understanding, or ignorance, of structural imbalances of power that make Black women and birthing people more susceptible to poverty. One woman I spoke to in her 40s described vaccines as inherently bad because they take away “God’s job to take people when it is their time.” When I asked if she considered that it is easier for certain groups of people to avoid disease over others, based on living and work conditions, she simply said, “the assumption behind all legislation is or should be the sacredness of human life.” The incongruity of these statements is striking when thinking about the education, planning, and indoctrination that goes into being a pro-life activist. Whatever her intent, the consequence of this colorblind language is one that perpetuates inequity and continues to frame Black women as inherently inferior instead of victims of structural discrimination from the state and Christian colonialism.

Conclusion

The day that the Dobbs v. Jackson decision was presented, I received a lot of text messages from friends commiserating the disheartening news (The Supreme Court of the United States, 2022). When a Facebook message alerted me, I assumed it would be more of the same. Instead, it was a woman, Heather, that I had spoken to a year and a half earlier asking me how I was doing on a day like today. Knowing that I do not agree with her, at the time I took it as a subtle snarky comment. However, I thought back to our first conversation, where after a 3-hr call she asked if she could pray with me. I reluctantly agreed, and she sat there thanking God for our time together and asked for the truth of abortion to be revealed to me. At the time, I know that I did not take it very seriously because I stopped recording our conversation. But I now understand what was so interesting, solemn, and scary about that moment—she believed what she was doing was for the good of all people and she would spend her entire life attempting to make abortion, and reproductive health care in general, inaccessible.

When asked about issues of race in reproductive politics, I received much of the same response: “If we can’t value life in the womb, we lose sight of all these other issues. Abortion is a First Principle Issue.” What pro-life women and Evangelical Christians call first principles they believe should guide all of the federal, state, and local laws in the United States, including faith in Jesus Christ, Biblically-based morals, and traditional “family values.” However, these principles also undergird the White Christian nationalism that structurally continues to oppress Black birthing people. If “The ultimate goal of the pro-life movement is to fight for those who do not have a voice and end abortion,” just like Anissa Fraser’s body on a billboard, the pro-life movement uses Black women, children, and birthing people as mouth pieces to maintain reproductive injustice—assuming that they do not already have a voice on abortion, their lives, or their bodies.