I had a thought recently about abortion ideology that I wanted to explore. I used to think the only prime driver of anti-abortionism is literally just Christian patriarchy (predominately in the West at least; elsewhere it might be Islamic patriarchy). In other words, this is really just a desire to enforce sexist gender norms, lest failing to do so continually remind you that even your government has declared your religion false. Abortion has to be illegal—or else women can have all the sex they want without subordinating themselves to a man or enslaving themselves in servitude to his children. That’s why anti-abortionists are also against anything that actually reduces abortion—like free IUDs; or any kind of birth control; or even mere training in how to use it. Condoms are evil not because they kill babies—to the contrary, prohibiting condoms has killed a huge number of people, including babies—but instead because they actually allow women to claim equality with men, sexual and otherwise. It fucks up patriarchy.

There is also, I suspect, a component of envy (like women who do not like other women claiming a hedonistic freedom they are themselves prohibited from enjoying; the “if I can’t have nice things, neither can anyone else” mentality; which may even reflect a sexual strategy) and a desire to control (like men who simply want to control women’s choices to keep them subordinated). But the prime mover, the thing without which there wouldn’t be a very strong movement to outlaw abortion, is this insistence on maintaining patriarchy and the subordinate status of women. It’s really about conservative Christian gender norms; the same thing that drives anti-trans activism: if we legalize that, just like if we legalize abortion, we are essentially declaring the Christian’s worldview false, because everything they believe about “man and woman” and their roles is inexorably linked to their entire Biblical worldview (Christ’s atonement, and thus mechanism of salvation, makes no sense without the story of Adam and Eve being taken in some sense literally).

Even worse: legalizing abortion means the government is thereby declaring their beliefs false. Right in their face. The cognitive dissonance is terrifyingly unbearable. It therefore must be crushed at all costs. The government must not repudiate their faith! The same motivation underlay the insistence on teaching creationism in schools: allowing the government to teach evolution is literally too emotionally painful to bear. It is a constant, official reminder that their worldview is bogus. It is an admission that they are losing the culture war. Their entire patriarchal culture—their entire religion—is just an archaic dying fad, factually unsustainable, and therefore unworthy of state endorsement. The horror!

This was clear enough in the long history of intense Christian opposition to gay rights. And there is a reason all these virulent beliefs are so comorbid: anti-evolution-in-school, anti-abortionism, anti-birth-control, anti-sex-education, anti-gay-sex, anti-gay-marriage, anti-trans-rights; these all orbit the exact same nexus of denying the conservative Christian’s sexist patriarchal gender norms. Yes, even evolution. Because, you know. Yeah, that. Which is why even when those few atheists side with Christians on these things, and oppose trans rights or abortion, just converse with them long enough and eventually they will reveal their own version of the same patriarchal delusion, maybe calling it Evolutionary Psychology, but ultimately just another bogus sexist belief in the same gender hierarchy that cannot abide challenges to its gender norms. Allowing the government to endorse factual reality against these deeply held beliefs is not just offensive, but literally, physically painful; and thus a cause of rage—and thence, action.

Consider a recent example. Atheists often scratched their head at why Christians were so enragedly obsessed with preventing the legalization of gay marriage. Why do they care what non-Christians do? It literally doesn’t affect them. Even when they insist it does (“I shouldn’t have to sell wedding cakes to homos!”), it really doesn’t (you literally are affected in no way whatever by who eats your cakes or where). Sure, maybe you can refuse to put words on your cake endorsing something you don’t believe in; that’s fine. But just cakes? Those aren’t words. And in any case, almost no one is a baker. So the once-nationally-pervasive anti-gay-marriage sentiment can’t be ascribed to angry bakers. This wasn’t a “won’t someone think of the bakers!” movement. Just as anti-trans activism isn’t really about bathrooms. So what was it really about?

As Amanda Marcotte brilliantly put it, after analyzing what anti-gay-marriage activists really said was their motivating reason, “To accept same-sex marriage is to accept this modern idea that marriage is about love and partnership, instead of about dutiful procreation and female submission.” In other words, merely allowing the government to recognize same-sex marriages means admitting that they have lost the culture war: marriage really is just about love and partnership, and now the government has outright said so. You should read her entire astute analysis in “The Real Reason Why Conservatives Like Ross Douthat Oppose The Gay Marriage Ruling” at Talking Points Memo. But in short, she’s right: while indeed Christians lost this culture war a century ago, they nevertheless complained about this constantly, still declaring their position “the silent majority” that an overpowered minority of decadent liberals were trying to undermine, rather than admitting their position was actually that of a declining minority who had already quite completely lost the argument—and hence, control of our national culture. What they still had, what could bolster their calm and assuage their cognitive dissonance, was that the government still endorsed their position (or appeared to at any rate). The prospect of losing even that was therefore nightmarish—terrifyingly unbearable, to be crushed at all costs. The government must not repudiate their faith! That is why Christians were so against allowing state-endorsed marriage contracts for gay people. It amounted to admitting even the government had declared their sexist, patriarchal understanding of the purpose of marriage bogus. So they fought it tooth and nail.

Our culture had long before already widely embraced a definition and understanding of marriage as something you do for love and not as a mere vehicle for gender-subordinating baby-production. It was only Christian conservative pockets who raged in terror at such a blasphemous shift in what marriage was even for. But that rage and fear sustained a massive political movement to oppose the government’s finally putting its official stamp of approval on what our culture had already broadly embraced. I think opposition to abortion is driven by exactly the same need, exactly the same impulse, exactly the same terror. All the “arguments against abortion” are just flailing around for some means to that end, rationalizations to get what they want, and not always the actual reasons they want it. The real driver is fear that their sexist patriarchy has not only lost and is in decline, but even the very government itself is saying so, the most intolerable of intolerables.

I am not here going to go into the arguments for and against legalized abortion, as that is not my subject today. You can check out my take on that elsewhere. Today I am only exploring a secondary question: why, when there are no even remotely credible arguments against legalizing abortion, people are still obsessively, even (literally) murderously against it? Why is this such an issue? And the patriarchy thing is definitely a major part of that answer. It unifies a lot of explanations, because it explains all the other crazy political fury coming from exactly the same people—against gay rights, trans rights, sex ed and evolutionary biology in schools. So it tracks well as a good explanation. And it predicts a lot of things.

But I’ve also come to suspect there is a second, reinforcing driver of anti-abortionism, one that might even be able to sustain its intensity without its abhorrently sexist patriarchal foundation: fear of death.

Atheists have long noted a major driver of religious belief itself is mortalism: people don’t want to cope with the fact that they are mortal—that inevitably, they’ll die, and thus not be around anymore—and their fear of this fate drives them by motivated reasoning to latch onto any “culturally normed” delusional belief-system that can let them go on thinking they will live forever. So, they can’t delusionally believe they are vampires (too easy to disprove; and there’s no widespread cultural support for it); but they can delusionally believe ancient blood magic will secure them eternal life. Because unlike vampirism, exposing yourself to daylight, or anything else, won’t immediately disprove that. Any disproof takes steps of reasoning; and steps of reasoning are easy to avoid if you are adequately motivated. And there is widespread cultural support to tap into—there are churches on practically every corner, literally hundreds of people who will eagerly validate your delusion, because doing so validates their own.

Hell, Christian evangelists literally use this as a persuader: atheism is bad because—shock!—those godless pinkos actually think we are mortal and Oh My God Isn’t That Terrible? Life would have no meaning! If it all just ends, that’s the worst thing ever! So surely we are immortal! We cannot abide thinking otherwise. “And hey, we have a special magic that makes you live forever; just some obedience to our social demands required. You know. Tiny little thing.” So there is no doubt fear of death is one of the prime factors driving religious belief; maybe not as potent a driver for every believer, but it drives a hell of a lot of them, particularly conservatives. If this is true of religion generally, then the same motivator could drive anti-abortionism specifically. All it would require is some inexorable cognitive link between “allowing abortion” and “admitting we’re all gonna die.” If that link exists, then abortion must be banned, because otherwise we are allowing the government itself to tell us we aren’t immortal. The cognitive dissonance would be terrifyingly unbearable. It therefore must be crushed at all costs. The government must not repudiate the faith!

So, is there such a link? I think there is. Atheists will often note that anti-abortionism makes no actual logical sense without a soul. “Anything with DNA is human, all humans are persons, therefore fetuses are persons” is illogical. Try it on a cadaver and you’ll see what I mean. Likewise anyone alive but braindead. “DNA” simply isn’t what “person” means. This is like trying to argue that because latches on ship’s doors are called dogs, that all ships must therefore be full of animals. Nonsense. Likewise “fetuses have heartbeats and fingernails, therefore they are persons” or any other likewise illogical rationalization. Other arguments are simply fabricated, like “abortion will kill you” (in fact maternal mortality is far higher; you are literally more likely to be killed by a pregnancy than an abortion). Clearly no one really believes that either. Except insofar as they need to believe it, to get the result they want, which is to get the government to stop declaring their most heartfelt religious beliefs false.

No. When you dig, push, get them to admit those arguments are all bogus, what you end up with underneath it all is this belief that fetuses have souls. One might question whether even having souls is sufficient to warrant outlawing abortion, but that doesn’t matter to the present point; by far most anti-abortionists are conservative theists (Christians, in the U.S.), and conservative theists are obsessed with the idea that people (and thus fetuses) have souls, and that it is this that makes killing immoral. After all, they can’t say murder is wrong because it ends life; they believe everyone is immortal. Right? And they can’t even say it’s wrong because it “might” send someone to hell, because it actually might not (Jesus saves!). You don’t see Christians saying it’s totally okay to kill Christians because doing so doesn’t really kill them—it simply relocates them, and to a far better place, in a far better body, where they can even reunite with lost loved ones and pets! No. They need this soul thing. Killing a body with a soul in it just has to be “wrong” somehow. They can’t actually articulate a logical reason for thinking that. But religion isn’t logical. What matters is that they believe it. Not whether they rationally should.

Once you recognize the absolute necessity of believing (1) fetuses have souls and (2) killing anything with a soul is wrong, in order to sustain any logical opposition to legalized abortion, it becomes obvious why allowing the government to legalize abortion threatens every delusional Christian’s belief in their own immortality. If it’s okay to kill a fetus, then the presence of a soul isn’t what makes a person; if the presence of a soul isn’t what makes a person, then only a particular physical structure and activity of the brain makes a person; and if only a particular physical structure and activity of the brain makes a person, then the dissolution of the brain is the dissolution of the person. The government is thus endorsing and admitting this when it legalizes abortion. It is outright telling Christians: there are no souls. Not in so many words, of course. All the government is doing is admitting there are no facts admissible in court that a person even exists in a fetus. But that is tantamount to admitting there is no soul in a fetus warranting outlawing the killing of one. And if fetuses don’t have souls, the same evidence entails neither do babies, children, or adults. The state is thus declaring personal life is a particular physical brain-state. Which entails death is death. No more immortality … unless you jump on the techno-immortalism bandwagon, which is itself a repudiation of Christianity. Jesus doesn’t save; hypothetical future nanobots do.

Legalizing abortion is thus intolerable to a conservative Christian for the same reason legalizing gay marriage is: it amounts to letting the government tell them their most cherished beliefs about how the world works are false. The resulting cognitive dissonance is terrifyingly unbearable. It therefore must be crushed at all costs. The government must not repudiate their faith! “How dare you have the law say people don’t have souls and thus are not immortal!” Fear of death thus, in part I suspect, drives anti-abortionism, because accepting abortion entails accepting its implicit mind-brain physicalism, which entails repudiating the Christian’s cherished delusion in their own immortality. Indeed, worst of all, it recruits their own precious government in effecting that repudiation. They would feel less threatened if the government endorsed their belief in souls, because that would validate their belief in their own immortality, and thus not trigger their fear of conclusive death.

Cognitive dissonance can only be resolved by abandoning the belief that is false (or unsustainable on any evidence), or denying the entire state of the evidence, which latter requires some mechanism of evasion or validation: avoiding (or making go away) people who don’t validate, and surrounding yourself with people who do validate, your delusion. But you can’t evade the government’s decisions. The law, the state’s decisions on what to manifest in society, is a constant and unavoidable reminder that your own cherished central authority (‘Merica!) won’t validate your delusion. And this is as true of their patriarchal delusion as their immortality delusion. The government is admitting fetuses don’t have souls and therefore neither do we. Which is effectively the same as admitting that the Christian isn’t immortal. Their deceased loved ones are gone forever. And soon they will be too. This cannot be abided. Whereas outlawing abortion creates the comforting impression that the government has endorsed everyone’s immortality, by recognizing the soul exists, and is the reason for outlawing any kind of killing at all. Their religion is thus validated.

This is true even for pseudo-Christians, those Christians who don’t really believe, or don’t much care whether what they believe “is true,” but who embrace the position of Plato and the modern neocon movement: if society will fall apart if people don’t believe they are immortal, then the government must endorse immortality by outlawing abortion. The neocon ideology is that most people (“the masses”) need to believe religion is true, even though it is false, because it is only this false belief in their immortality that motivates their being moral and obeying laws. Therefore, the neocon must themselves pretend to believe; otherwise they might contribute to the undermining of social order by inspiring the spread of unbelief, which if allowed will drown the nation in socialism, rape camps, fun-riots, and skeet-shooting kittens. The neocon belief is just as false and delusional as the sincere Christian’s. But it remains just as motivating. This is why those politicians who don’t seem likely to be real believers nevertheless think it remains important to outlaw abortion—so as to reassure the public they are immortal, and thus assuage them into conforming to the capitalist social structure. Opium of the masses.

Needless to say, there has to be some motive for being anti-abortion (as also anti-gay, anti-trans, anti-factual-education). Because it isn’t motivated by evidence. Indeed, even anti-abortionists recognize that it would be abhorrent of Jews to legislate a ban on pork and shrimp, or Hindus on beef, simply because of their personal religious beliefs. Everyone agrees they can simply freely not eat those things themselves; no one else, no one who lacks these beliefs, need heed such a directive. And so, if Christians believed in religious liberty, they’d agree they can refrain from abortions themselves if their religion declares them immoral; no one else, no one who lacks these beliefs, need heed such a directive. The government has no business outlawing abortion, then, than in outlawing pork, shrimp, or beef. But instead, when it’s abortion (or gay marriage, or switching gender, or teaching evolution or sex ed), they lash about for some rationalization to outlaw it, or at least impede it by law. Because admitting their real motives out loud would be damning, even to their own sense of identity. They can’t admit to being sexists defending patriarchy or that they are just afraid of death. They have to tell themselves a different story. But the stories they tell themselves are false. Their real motives, meanwhile, are real.

But the real motives exist as subtext everywhere. You can see this across the slew of “arguments” to outlaw abortion promulgated by the now-defrocked Frank Pavone, every one a specious rationalization, but underlying it is this latent fear that Christianity is false; we aren’t going to live forever. This is clearest in his argument that almost even mentions the fact:

I have talked with and listened to many providers of abortion and often they justify their actions by saying, “Well I don’t know when the child receives a soul.” My response to that is, “So what”? The law that protects you from someone else trying to take your life does not require that that person believe you have a soul. It doesn’t even require that they believe in souls at all. The pro-life effort is not about imposing religious beliefs upon anybody. We’re not asking that anyone belong to a particular religion by law. All we’re asking is that the same norms that protect born people be used to protect unborn people. Is that really too much to ask?

This argument is multiply specious. Just reword it as a Hindu justifying the outlawing of the entire beef industry and you’ll immediately see that his distinction between beliefs and behaviors is impertinent: outlawing beef is enforcing a belief on non-Hindus, a belief in the sacredness of cows. It enforces it through behavior: you can’t eat beef because I believe cows are sacred; thus disregarding the beliefs of everyone else, and simply forcing them to comply with the belief of the legislator. We all agree that’s wrong. And Pavone isn’t really responding to that here. He is just using verbal legerdemain to make it sound like he has. But notice what his statements further entail: he clearly believes the possessing of a soul is what makes killing wrong. He argues, “Well, just because you don’t believe there is a soul, still doesn’t make killing right,” because—your belief is false! There is a soul. So “disagreeing” over when a soul enters a body (he argues) doesn’t get you out of the fact that fetuses do have souls no matter what you believe; therefore you should comply with our belief that they do.

Notice he doesn’t argue that it doesn’t matter if souls exist, that murder is wrong for some other reason, that the unborn “are people” even if they don’t have a soul. No. He assumes the reverse. For him, this is merely a question of what one “believes.” Thus you can’t just “disbelieve” a soul exists and get away with murder—because, he is implying, belief is trumped by fact: fetuses have souls no matter whether you “believe” they do. He thus wants the state to validate not only his belief that people have souls, and that their having souls is the actual thing that makes murder wrong (neither of which is anything the state has ever or could ever actually declare), but that fetuses also have them—and so this excuse about “I don’t know when” souls go in simply has to be dismissed, because facts trump beliefs. Of course, there are no “facts” here. He is treating his belief as a fact, indeed the fact that gets to trump all other beliefs. Which is precisely what violates all principles of religious liberty.

This instance makes this obvious. But the same assumptions underlay all his arguments. “Abortion is the taking of a human life” is just code for “fetuses have souls; and killing things with souls should be illegal.” Likewise “abortion is an act of violence against a human being,” or abortion is “the destruction of children” or “child murder” or “baby killing” or “killing the child” or taking “innocent lives” or “the killing of babies,” or “the unborn [is] your brother” so we “cannot” claim we do not “know” when “life begins,” or “the child is already there, fully present,” or the unborn is a “human being” because he “bears the image of God,” or “the unborn child is a creature of God, loved and chosen by the Father” and therefore you cannot say “this child is not a person,” or we must respect “the need to protect our children,” or “if the destiny of the human person is to be on the very throne of Christ, how can followers of Christ tolerate human beings being thrown in the garbage?” Just as when he says we must “help those in need,” he is relying on the assumption that “those” are “people” who thus “have needs”; or when he says it’s “more tolerant and inclusive” to include fetuses as “persons” under the law.

At no point does he ever present any evidence for any of these assertions. Why are we to believe “the child” is “fully present” in a fetus? Not a clue. Yet Pavone bases nearly every single one of his arguments on this assertion; which is the same one, over and over again, only in different words. And it’s all just code for “fetuses have souls; souls are people; killing people is wrong.” Only six of his arguments (out of two dozen there) don’t employ this premise, but resort to the other tactic: false claims. Twice he declares abortion clinics aren’t physically safe for women; and once that they cause widespread psychological harm. Vast statistics refute him. He claims abortion clinics offer women “no other alternative” but abortion. Which is false. And he claims Sandra Bensing in Doe v. Bolton was forced to procure an abortion. Which is false. Likewise, he claims if we can outlaw killing the fertilized eggs of endangered sea turtles, then why can’t we outlaw killing human fertilized eggs? Apart from sea turtles being an endangered species (and humans anything but), there is no law against sea turtles killing their own eggs, so this analogy isn’t even logical. One does have to ask why he needs to make all these false claims to defend his position. Why is there no true statement he can make in defense of it? Well, we might have a clue in the remaining overwhelming number of times he repeats the same other argument instead: it’s “fetuses have souls,” all the way down.

Why is it so important for him to believe that? Why can’t he advance any intelligible reason killing is wrong but that? I suspect it’s because if he abandons either belief, he would be compelled to abandon belief in his own soul—and hence his own immortality. He might then have to admit he’s actually going to die. And he just can’t have that, can he?

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