Can abortion opponents turn the tide against Massachusetts-style radicalism?
Massachusetts’s Gov. Maura Healey on August 10 signed a new law giving doctors the prerogative to perform late-term abortions based on their own medical judgment in the Bay State, where previously abortion had been limited to the 24th week of pregnancy barring medical exceptions explicit in the statute. The usual suspects (shirts) hailed this measure as a blow for freedom, health, human empowerment, The Cause of Women, and all that jazz. The usual suspects (skins) denounced it as an assault on the dignity of the person, an attack on society’s most vulnerable, and so on.
It’s a little difficult to take any of this terribly seriously. Of course I believe that human life begins at conception, that irrespective of quickening date, abortion should be treated as homicide, and so on. In short, abortion is murder. But these are merely intellectual commitments. I continue to use public transit and utilities, to pay my taxes, to obey the law. As do most anti-abortion true-believers in the United States of America in the year of grace 2026. Yet here is a contradiction.
The abnegation of Roe v. Wade handed abortion legislation back to the states, which is where, constitutionally, it ought to reside, and where incremental improvement within the established order of things was supposed to be possible; the anti-abortion stance, which has eschewed the radical anti-government tack that could be easily intellectually justified by the scale and gravity of the abortion regime, is indeed predicated on the idea that such incremental improvements can be achieved by ordinary political means.
But at the state level, the people have spoken decisively in favor of the barbaric slaughter of defenseless infants, and not just in deep blue states—wretched referendum results in Ohio and elsewhere have upheld relatively expansive abortion regimes. One struggles to say that the latest law out of Boston contradicts the common sentiment of the people of the state. The techniques of populism do not seem to have been effective in advancing the cause of life. The single political vehicle for anti-abortion policies, the Republican Party, has collectively decided that with overturning Roe its work is done, and the Democrats are dedicated to reestablishing the Roe system by hook or by crook. This is grim stuff. If the anti-abortion crowd is right—and I believe they are—all American politics as currently configured is an argument about how to arrange picnic chairs on the lawn outside Auschwitz.
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The American people—and perhaps we are not unique in this regard—have always been willing to countenance horror in the name of expediency, so long as the horror is distant and sanitized, so long as you don’t have to see it. Consider the American way of war. The founding legend of the American empire is the indiscriminate bombing campaign against Germany and Japan, which, despite being vastly costly and far less effective than more targeted strategies, has been enshrined as the great necessary evil for defeating fascism. This attitude can be maintained without discomfort only because the scale and horror of the destruction—the vast clouds of flies proliferating over the rubble in Hamburg, stinking pools of human lard, refugee mothers refusing to part with the carbonized bodies of their children—was not visible to the Western public, in part because of strict wartime controls on the press. And, in the last instance, even when confronted by such details in a now distant time, many will say the German and Japanese peoples are themselves to be blamed for the vistas of horror in Dresden and Tokyo because they did not overthrow their wicked governments. (Not a comfortable thought for those devotees of the American right-wing configuration of unquestioning militarism and notional pro-life commitments.)
It is difficult not to connect this cultivated, semi-voluntary blindness to human misery abroad with the willingness to countenance the dismemberment and disposal by vacuum of viable human infants, so long as it occurs in clean offices, with the benefit of anesthesia, under the expiatory oversight of an expert with a medical degree. When the eye slips—when pictures of My Lai or Gaza or Minab make it into the public consciousness—the enthusiasm for war begins to ebb. Perhaps the pro-lifers, who for my entire adult life have embraced a chirpy, sanitized, “positive” tone and pastel color schemes, were on to something with the banner-sized photographs of dead, bloodied babies in the ’90s.
Yet the standard response is aporia. What can we do? And are our lives in the shadow of industrial slaughter so very bad? For pro-lifers on the right, is the anti-abortion cause worth jettisoning the goods of deregulation and lower marginal tax rates? For the (many fewer) pro-lifers on the left, is it worth throwing over a generous welfare state and robust personal rights? You change what you can, and it’s easy to assuage your conscience about what you can’t. A vast carelessness overhangs the American character; I suggest that the aporia itself is a corollary of this carelessness. Pro-lifers—and I include myself in this condemnation—simply do not act as if the abortion issue is as epochally important as their intellectual commitments suggest. (Nor are many of them willing to reconsider their cozy relationship with the political lovers of war, who are so casual about life and death in faraway lands.) Will the advance of radical abortion laws like the new statute in Massachusetts pierce the fog of indifference? Or is the indifference those laws’ precondition?