Machismo, Idolatry, and Sacrifice
When embryos and fetuses are elevated to idol, pregnant people’s health and wellbeing become unwilling sacrificial offerings.
Conservative and anti-abortion groups’ zealous and aggressive attacks against medically-necessary abortions for ER patients experiencing obstetric emergencies, has come as a shock to many Americans. So, too, has been the realization that the court system is willing to play along with these sadistic and dangerous attacks against pregnant patients’ lives and health. In January, The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled that Texas hospitals and doctors can deny stabilizing and life-saving, emergency abortions to ER patients, without having to face any recourse from the federal government. That same week, the United States Supreme Court allowed Idaho to prosecute emergency room physicians who perform abortions to save patients’ lives and health. In Moyle v. United States (the case out of Idaho) the U.S Supreme Court “has strongly hinted that it is ready to eliminate the limited statutory protection for patients who need emergency abortions under the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), which was enacted by Congress in 1986.” [1]
Completely abolishing abortion, without exception for the life and health of the pregnant person, has been the goal of the organized anti-abortion movement since the 1960s. El Salvador has been a vanguard of the movement; and as I noted in Part I of this series, the restrictions and policies that are lauded by the international movement against reproductive rights are on full display in this “pro-life paradise.”
Machismo
"[R]esearch has connected ambivalent sexism to anti-abortion attitudes,” which percolates the anti-abortion movement worldwide. [2] Rather than experiencing [either] benevolence or hostility toward women, ambivalent sexism" describes the phenomenon where "people who hold sexist beliefs feel both, hence their ambivalence, depending on the degree to which" a female person "conforms or violates conventional norms of" traditionalist female gender roles or ideas of femininity. [3] “Benevolent sexism reveres and offers protection to gender- conforming women who have restricted societal status and power (e.g., homemakers and mothers).” [4] “Benevolent sexism places the right kind of woman on a pedestal, encouraging women to hold less power and embrace limitation by rewarding this behaviour with social acceptance.” [5] “‘[R]everence and protection’ is reserved for women who fulfill traditional gender roles, like sacrificial mother. This mother is expected to be altruistic about difficulties of birth that could take her life, or to weather the mental and physical impacts of a pregnancy stemming from sexual assault. Women who turn away from this gender role are thus seen as “shunning the very roles and responsibilities that give rise to men’s adoration.” [6] Thus, hostile sexism - “antipathy towards women who violate traditional gender roles and contest men’s societal status and power” [7] - then motivates punishment towards non-comforming women, leading to the criminalization of pregnancy, pregnancy outcomes, and pregnant people themselves. [8]
“As Rosalind Petchesky has documented, ‘the primacy and necessity of woman as Mother has been a continuous ideological thread in antiabortion pronouncements since the nineteenth century.’” [9] The “conception of a pregnant woman as a mother included the expectation that she would even choose to die to save her ‘child’ as proof of her ‘absolute dedication.’ Thus, it is not surprising that legislatures are returning to banning abortions with virtually no exceptions as the antiabortion movement has gained increased strength in the twenty-first century. These states conceptualize any exceptions to the antiabortion principle as situations in which a ‘mother’ is killing her ‘child.’” [10] This is perhaps best illustrated in the words of German Catholic theologian Bernard Häring (1912-1998), in The Law Of Christ: Moral Theology For Priests And Laity 209 (Edward G. Kaiser Trans., 1966):
“If it were to become an accepted principle of moral teaching on motherhood to permit a mother whose life was endangered simply to ‘sacrifice’ the life of her child in order to save her own, motherhood would no longer mean absolute dedication to each and every child.” [11]
In El Salvador, “[e]ntrenched discriminatory and harmful stereotypes around women’s sexuality and their roles and responsibilities in the family, including as mothers and child bearers, permeate all levels of society.” [12] “The UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women has characterized the problem of gender inequality in El Salvador as being deeply rooted in patriarchal attitudes.” [13] In a report, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) noted, “the Committee is strongly concerned at the pervasiveness of patriarchal attitudes and deep-rooted stereotypes regarding the roles and responsibilities of women and men in the family, in the workplace and in society, which constitute serious obstacles to women’s enjoyment of their human rights.” [14] Under Salvadoran law, “when women transgress their traditional role as mothers and child-bearers— either by choosing to end a pregnancy or involuntarily in cases of miscarriage or stillbirth— the state penalizes this breach by labeling women as criminals and subjecting them to harsh penal sentences for their pregnancy outcomes.” [15]
Idolatry
“The prevailing discourse on the issue of abortion in El Salvador continues to centre on religious beliefs and entrenched discriminatory stereotypes of what constitutes appropriate behaviour for women.” [16] In his piece, Idolizing The Fetus: In Roman Catholic Theology, Mothers Take Second Place, Rev. Dr. John M. Swomley stated that “Fetal idolatry denies a woman’s right to control her body, her life, her destiny, all of which must be sacrificed to an embryo or fetus once she is pregnant.” [17] The anti-choice movement, Swomley wrote, has “attributed to fetal life a sacredness that is actually idolatry. The idol in Old Testament terms was inanimate, made of metal or stone. As such it was possible to attribute to it a tribe’s cultural or group interests and to worship it instead of God. Idolatry is therefore the absolutizing of a cultural or belief system as if it is sacred or of divine origin and therefore more important than human personality; it is something to which sacrifice must be offered,” (emphasis mine). [18] One Catholic writer even compared the fetuses to religious relics — the sacred bodies and body parts “of the holy martyrs and of the other saints” that “should be venerated by the faithful” — that Catholics believe heal the sick. [19] She wrote that “the real catastrophe of abortion” is that fetuses are deprived of becoming “the future saints of the Church, whose miraculous relics could have been…healing the sick,” which makes all Catholics alike “the sad victims of their fate.” [20] The acclaimed anthropologist Ernest Becker “writes that humans cause evil by wanting to triumph over evil… [that] we commit the greatest evil by trying to escape from evil by trying to create a paradise on earth” (emphasis mine). [21] Such is the case of the idolatry-driven international movement against reproductive rights, as we can see in El Salvador.
Sacrifice
Idols demand sacrifice. When embryos and fetuses are elevated to idol, pregnant people’s health and wellbeing become unwilling sacrificial offerings. We will explore this further in the next newsletter. For now, here’s a glimpse of the sacrifices demanded by El Salvador’s “culture of life.”
🟢 “A poor young woman who was ten weeks pregnant and had severe kidney disease was admitted to a public hospital. There, the nephrologist explained to her and her family that the pregnancy put her life at risk. Two months later, the seventeen-year-old girl arrived at the hospital in even worse condition. The family asked the doctor to terminate the pregnancy, but he told them that he would not do so for fear of going to jail. The next day, a pulmonary embolism caused the young woman's lungs to fail. The patient was taken to the intensive care unit, but ultimately both the young woman and the 20-week-old fetus she was carrying died. The father wept and blamed the state’s absolute abortion ban.” [22]
🟢 “A 20-week-pregnant mother of three was admitted to a national hospital. The woman had a serious cardiac condition, which her pregnancy exacerbated, dramatically increasing her risk of death. Upon learning of her heart failure, the mother asked her medical team to induce early labor; she did not want to die and leave her three children orphaned. But the hospital refused to induce her because they did not want to violate the total abortion ban. The woman only made it 26 weeks into her pregnancy before her heart could no longer bear the extra exertion that her pregnancy required. Both the woman and her baby died, and her three children were left without a mother.” [23]
🟢 “There’s also the case of a woman who arrived in the ICU at 23 weeks pregnant with a damaged reproductive system. Understanding that there was no way to save the fetus, her family pleaded with the medical team to terminate the pregnancy. The doctors responded that they could not do the procedure as a ‘matter of law.’ The woman died, as did the fetus she was carrying. Her devastated husband asked the doctor, ‘How am I going to raise these 8 kids alone?’” [24]
“El Salvador’s total abortion ban is a human rights travesty; countries considering more strict abortion bans should study El Salvador. El Salvador’s abortion ban persecutes women who suffer miscarriages, pushes child rape victims to suicide, forces doctors to let patients die preventable deaths and disproportionately impacts low income families. The ban fails to reduce abortions and makes pregnancy a terrifying ordeal.” [25]
Citations
[1] Michael J. Dell, opinion contributor. (2024, February 2). Do women still have a right to stabilizing abortion care under federal law?. The Hill. https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/4444695-do-women-still-have-a-right-to-stabilizing-abortion-care-under-federal-law/
[2] Dyer, R. L., Checkalski, O. R., & Gervais, S. J. (2023). Abortion Decisions as Humanizing Acts: The Application of Ambivalent Sexism and Objectification to Women-Centered Anti-Abortion Rhetoric. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/03616843231173673
[3] Ibid. 2
[4] Osborne, D., Huang, Y., Overall, N. C., Sutton, R. M., Petterson, A., Douglas, K. M., Davies, P. G., & Sibley, C. G. (2022, March 8). Abortion attitudes: An overview of demographic and ideological ... Wiley Online Library. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/pops.12803
[5] Choudhury, N. (2022, June 24). “benevolent sexism” behind support for restrictive abortion legislation. Open Access Government. https://www.openaccessgovernment.org/benevolent-sexism-behind-support-for-restrictive-abortion-legislation-roe-v-wade-us-law/134831/
[6] Ibid. 5
[7] Osborne, D., Huang, Y., Overall, N. C., Sutton, R. M., Petterson, A., Douglas, K. M., Davies, P. G., & Sibley, C. G. (2022, March 8). Abortion attitudes: An overview of demographic and ideological ... Wiley Online Library. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/pops.12803
[8] Davies, C. (2009, March 66). Stereotyping and the new women-protective antiabortion movement. Bora Laskin Law Library. https://library.law.utoronto.ca/sites/default/files/featured/davies_paper.pdf
[9] Colker, R. (2021, May 12). Uninformed Consent. SSRN. https://www.bu.edu/bulawreview/files/2021/04/COLKER.pdf
[10] Ibid. 9
[11] Ibid. 9
[12] El Salvador: On the brink of death: Violence against women and the abortion ban in El Salvador: Executive summary. Amnesty International. (2021, August 10). https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/amr29/004/2014/en/
[13] Ibid. 12
[14] Ibid. 12
[15] Zureick, A., Chen, A., & Reyes, A. (2018, July 10). Physicians’ challenges under El Salvador’s criminal abortion prohibition. International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynocology. https://obgyn.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ijgo.14013
[16] El Salvador: On the brink of death: Violence against women and the abortion ban in El Salvador: Executive summary. Amnesty International. (2021, August 10). https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/amr29/004/2014/en/
[17] Swomley, J. M. (n.d.). Idolizing The Fetus: In Roman Catholic Theology, Mothers Take Second Place. Idolizing the fetus: In Roman Catholic theology, mothers take second place. by John M. Swomley. https://www.population-security.org/swom-98-06.htm
[18] Ibid. 17
[19] Hazard, A. (2015, August 8). What do fetal parts and relics have in common?. Catholic Stand. https://catholicstand.com/what-do-fetal-parts-and-relics-have-in-common/
[20] Ibid. 19
[21] Crime, H. T. (2021, March 26). Hidden: A true crime podcast: Beyond the veil: When Lori met Chad and the dream of Immortal love part ii on Apple Podcasts
[22] Reifenberg, N., & Viterna, J. (2023, March 7). The Other Beatrices. The other beatrices. https://elfaro.net/en/202303/opinion/26755/The-Other-Beatrices.htm
[23] Ibid. 22
[24] Ibid. 22
[25] Teter, C. (2020, March 1). When a miscarriage is a crime: El Salvador’s Humanitarian Crisis - Berkeley Political Review. Berkeley Political Review - UC Berkeley’s only nonpartisan political magazine. https://bpr.berkeley.edu/2020/01/19/when-a-miscarriage-is-a-crime-el-salvadors-humanitarian-crisis/