Written Spring 2022 for REL 3203
TW: Mentions of rape and incest.
The Supreme Court’s landmark decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, legislation securing the right to an abortion for pregnant people in the United States, was made on Friday, June 24, 2022, and stirred chaos throughout the nation. It’s clear that the issue is divisive, but ascribing its divisiveness nature to a single influence is a misrepresentation of the situation. Like any opinion, there are countless things to take into account. In this article, I will analyze the mechanism by which this decision and the idea of abortion as a whole is divisive by the means of legitimation, authorization, and authenticity put forth in Craig Martin's A Critical Introduction to the Study of Religion. In writing this post, I am in no way attempting to declare or forward my opinion, I solely wish to analyze the social nature of the way it divides people.
Objectively, debate on this issue as it is done today is futile. Each side seems to be firmly set in their ways and unlikely to waver. Appealing to the other side is impossible, because there is no definitive “other side”, there is no essence, as Martin may say, because there are so many factors involved: religion, personal experience, policies, and science, among other things. However, each side will continue to offer their legitimations, which more often than not can be traced back to authority. This is because, as Martin writes, “… authority is not intrinsic, rather conferred by a community” (129). The reoccurring idea that we shape our environment as it shapes us back is evident here: we have manufactured our legitimacies, and offering these legitimations to others is futile in the face of subjectivity. Pro-life people legitimate their stance by appealing to authority, in the exact same way that pro-choice people legitimate their stance by appealing to authority; they may even appeal to the same authority. So, at the heart of these legitimations are authorizing institutions, roles, divine beings, and figures. These, on both sides and in between, seem to commonly be science, political figures, and religion. Each of these, even, can be divisive in the ways that they are employed and interpreted. In short, in the case of abortion, as with many highly debated issues, there are an overwhelming amount of authorities appealed to, and no single one that can be applied to a label such as “pro-life” or “pro-choice”. In his 8th chapter, Martin expands on this idea, by not attempting the impossible of defining a group by its authorizing personage or idea, but rather analyzing what the act of the appeal says about the appellants themselves. I, instead, look toward the authority figure and that which drives them to authorize what they do. It is, of course, the people that appeal to this power, but this, too, is a simplistic view. For instance, politicians are certainly assigned power by the people who voted for them, and may act accordingly, but they also enact this power to appease their own authority. A pro-choice congressman may suddenly vote in a contradicting way to forward his ratings or to appease funders. A commonly used example is Donald Trump: a man who is now strictly anti-abortion, though apparently was not prior to his consideration of a bid for presidency. Even in science, a seemingly objective practice, results and interpretations can be skewed to appease a higher authority, as in politics, those who provide the money in support of that certain project. There are a multitude of things that impact ones’ actions, yet both pro-life and pro-choice people legitimize placement of authority in certain figures or institutions, to forward, or legitimize claims, even when the target of this assignment is tainted by conflicting parties.
Clearly, it is evident that it is human nature to want to divide into even groups. We are democrats and republicans, cat people and dog people, and pro-life and pro-choice; however, as alluded to above, it is rarely, if ever, this simple. As Martin succinctly states, “[t]here is no authentic essence to be found, only the process of competing groups claiming authenticity” (Martin, 155). Because we each hail from different backgrounds, each second of our lives an opportunity to deviate from others’ experiences; thus, it is entirely improbable to think that any two people, even with more than 8 billion in the world, will think in the exact same way. I know many people who are “conditionally” pro-life (or pro-choice): some are always pro-life, some make exceptions in cases of rape or incest, some make exceptions for medical conditions that may affect the pregnant person or child. Society’s obsession with the drawing of boundaries and assessing authenticity is prevalent in this case. So, within groups of people who claim the same ideas, opinions differ and discourse arises from these discrepancies. If you got an abortion in the case of pregnancy as a result of a non-consensual encounter, are you really pro-life? If you think that abortions should be widely available, but some peoples’ access should be limited due to abuse of the privilege, are you really pro-choice? This policing of authenticity functions to further divide people is wholly evident on both sides of this debate and in others.
The divisiveness of society seems insuppressible. In the case of abortion discourse, society has effectively divided itself into two groups, though this is a gross simplification that is evident with even the slightest analysis. Martin’s thoughts surrounding the implausibility of any one essence to define a group are clear here, as is that legitimacy, authenticity, and authority are manufactured constructs that are contaminated, but implicative of those who participate. Pro-life and pro-choice people function in the exact same way: we all legitimize our beliefs by appealing to authority, however contaminated, and police our groups with demands of authenticity. We solely refuse to understand this on the basis that our interpretations and appeals are different; furthering the notion of us and them, of right and wrong, that disallows productive discussion.
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