Was the culture ready for the end of Roe v Wade?
The claim that ‘the culture wasn’t ready for the overturn of Roe v Wade’ has now started doing the rounds on social media.
There’s just one problem: this idea suffers from several glaringly fatal flaws.
Firstly, this claim rests on the faulty belief that the law has very little, or no impact at all, on shaping cultural norms and practices.
In one sense, laws are downstream from culture, in that politicians are the products of the culture they have been formed in, and will make laws in conformity to that culture. At the same time, however, culture is also downstream from law, in that laws are a powerful force when it comes to shaping cultural norms and practices.
This means that, if a culture isn’t actually ready for a ruling like this, it is precisely because of the previous laws which created structures, institutions, beliefs and norms which all worked against, or outright prevented cultural change from happening.
Secondly, the idea that the perfect time to make a law change is only after the culture has first changed is faulty and based on a utopian vision of social change.
Social change is a very messy and imperfect thing which almost always unfolds over long periods of time in a piecemeal kind of fashion.
A good example of this is seen in the abolition of slavery in the the US and England. It took decades, and multiple steps to bring slavery to an end. And, in the US, they were so culturally unprepared for the legislative change that a bloody civil war was fought over it.
Then, even after the abolition of slavery in the US, it would take almost another 100 years before the passing of civil rights legislation there.
Lastly, I think that the critics who make this claim that the culture wasn’t ready for the overturning of Roe v Wade place a completely unrealistic and unfair demand on the pro-life movement.
Pro-lifers have done more to care for pregnant women in crisis than any other group, but they have done this with extremely limited funds, as a minority group, and often in the face of extreme opposition from the establishment.
This ‘the culture isn’t ready’ criticism seems to imply (and sometimes it is even outright stated) that pro-lifers haven’t done enough to change the culture - as if they were the wielders of insane levels of influence and control, but they were just too lazy, irresponsible or immoral to exercise that power properly.
As someone who has now dedicated 18 years of blood, sweat and tears to this cause, I can say with absolute certainty that this is completely untrue (and that such criticisms almost always come from those seated comfortably on the sidelines, watching as we take the rucking on the field).
Here’s something to consider though: right now, there are more than three times as many pro-life pregnancy centres (2,300) as there are abortion clinics (808) in the US. That’s not a bad effort for a grassroots movement which is regularly accused of not doing enough to care for women in crisis pregnancy by pro-abortion opponents and those ignorant of the truth.
I think a lot of this is also fuelled by false beliefs that some people hold about abortion rates and political policies. Like the factually incorrect idea that abortion rates go down under Democrat social policies, and increase under Republican regimes. They don’t - Snopes has fact-checked this claim as false.
The New Zealand figures also pour cold water on this mistaken belief.
The annual abortion rate climbed to its highest rate ever in our country five years into the policies of the Helen Clark Labour government.
It only began a noticeable decline two years into the policies of the John Key National government, and by the time Key had left office our abortion rate was almost half that of what it had been at the peak of Clark’s Labour government policies.
In other words; the reasons for the increase or decline in abortion rates is actually a lot more complex than some are trying to make it out to be. As the son of two very poor parents, who were encouraged, but refused to abort two of my younger brothers, I can also say that it is a simplistic lie to claim that poverty makes you want abortion more.
In a nutshell: the claim that ‘the culture wasn’t ready for the overturning of Roe v Wade’ creates a false dichotomy between law and culture - one which seems to want us to turn a blind eye to gravely unjust laws.
The reversal of Roe was a good thing, and its advent will now allow for the very cultural change, which critics are claiming is absent, to actually begin happening. The demise of Roe was the essential catalyst to bring about the next imperfect step in the process of changing things for the better for unborn children and their often vulnerable mothers.
