Now’s the time for Kansans to wade out of the water of meaningless anti-abortion rhetoric

The Kansas Reflector welcomes opinion pieces from writers who share our goal of widening the conversation about how public policies affect the day-to-day lives of people throughout our state. David Norlin is a retired Cloud County Community College teacher, where he was department chairman of communications/English, specializing in media.

There’s that old adage about fish not knowing what water was — until they were taken out of it. It was just what they’d swum in, so who’d notice?

We’ve been immersed in abortion rhetoric now for years. To stretch the water metaphor, our immersion has been a mile wide and an inch deep. That mind-stopping, go-to word traditionally ends intelligent conversation. Too-easy condemnation of “baby killers” and glorification of baby-savers has led to a paralysis of imagination about women’s ongoing condition.

Driving long stretches of rural America, highway signs dot the landscape, proclaiming concern for “life.” These seem intended to highlight our caring and virtuosity. What’s unexamined is that acts of kindness and caring, without awareness, turn into acts of cruelty and meanness. That cruelty and meanness arises from ingrained ignorance — and fear of examining our history to discover another, equal or perhaps more important, truth.

Aug. 2, many Kansans climbed out of the swamp to more solid ground, moving toward that truth.

It dawned on them that a madly theocratic and illegitimate U.S. Supreme Court has just laid a foundation to undermine our unenumerated Constitutional rights.

Among them is a woman’s right to control her own body. To not be an incubator. To make her own decisions about how her life should proceed. To be something other than vessel or vassal. To not be what a bunch of predominantly older white male legislators — or priests, preachers or bishops — insist she become. 

What has been blithely passed over in this doxology of orthodoxy is our long history of turning women into providers of cheap labor. The extreme right insists on forced birth, but drops such heartening concerns once there’s an actual human in place. Ultimately, they want new workers available, and cheap.

Our state Legislature, for example, has for years been tone-deaf even to starvation and health care, repeatedly refusing to expand Medicaid and cutting benefits to insure food security, thus increasing real damage to child (and family) welfare. 

“Get a job,” is their response.

One result is that Kansas foster care and the lack of it has long been another source of shame. The recently released 50-state Kids Count report showed Kansas ranking “23rd in a batch of community measurements, and 24th in both health and education status of children. … The rate of child and teen deaths has worsened in Kansas, the 2020 report said, with 233 of 100,000 youth dying prematurely.” Low birth weight babies and obesity among 10- to 17-year-olds has increased. Uninsured children number more than 38,000.

As Dorothy Roberts, law professor at Penn University, points out, this interest in child production — and disinterest in their welfare — tracks back to slavery. Male “masters” freely used Black women slaves for pleasure and profit, without fear of reprisal.

“An essential aspect of enslavement was the regulation of Black women’s childbearing and the exploitation of Black women’s reproductive labor,” she said. “The denial of freedom over personal and family decisions was at the heart of the atrocities inflicted by slavery and the denial of Black people’s humanity.”

She notes that the U.S. Supreme Court perpetuated the stereotype that women’s first duty should be to the home, to have and raise children, thus “denying women opportunities in the market and political spheres, to travel freely, and to live their lives (as they wish). The regulation of pregnancy gives the state a lot of power to manage … (anyone) who can get pregnant and give birth.”

The high court’s Dobbs decision employs selective history to condemn to death or debt any pregnant person, but particularly those too poor to travel or use connections to skirt law enforcement.

This is of a piece with hidden, but long prevalent, attitudes toward women.

“Between World War I and World War II, Kansas authorities sent more than 5,000 women to a prison in Lansing under a law called Chapter 205 for no other ‘crime’ than having syphilis or gonorrhea,” wrote Nikki Perry for the Kansas Reflector.

“People saw women, especially Black and poor women, as being more like children than adults. They believed these women needed the state to make decisions about their health care and their sexual lives,” she added.

Due process and self-determination were “optional.”

No, we are not cruel and mean. But it’s time we stop swimming in anti-abortion rhetoric and move to higher ground. “Pro-life” legislators’ self-serving votes have preserved their position — and an arbitrary state that cares less about the welfare and more about the control of women’s lives.

Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.