Why Did the Abortion Ban in the United States Cause a Violent Struggle Between Conservatives and Liberals?

By 5-4 votes, on June 24, 2022, the US Supreme Court overturned a 1973 ruling giving women the right to have an abortion, setting the United States back nearly 50 years and allowing many states to restrict abortion rights.

Former US President Donald Trump welcomed the ruling, saying: “It was God's decision,” while current President Joe Biden criticized it and promised it as religious extremism.

Research circles believe that the abortion ban is deepening the already aggravated division between Republicans and Democrats in the United States, and brings the country closer to an identity crisis, which may pave the way for the country's partition or civil war.

 

Dangerous Decision

The five judges who agreed with the decision explained that it meant that the majority of the court withdrew the choice of abortion decision from women and gave it to the states, Politico reported on June 26, 2022.

The decision would result in twenty-two of the 50 US states having an immediate ban on abortion because they have outdated laws that prohibit it but were bound by the 1973 Supreme Court decision.

The abortion ban came after a series of moves by Anglican lobbyists demanding the right to life, and since the eighties, it has penetrated the Republican Party, so the Christian conservative movement and the Republican Party considered it a victory for them.

However, the Republican Party fears that the decision will affect the mid-term congressional elections in November 2022, and liberals, angry at its cancellation, are voting for the Democratic Party, while other Republicans expect the support of abortion supporters to support them.

Christian right-wing organizations, such as Moral Majority, the Christian Alliance, the Council for National Policy, figures of right-wing Christian extremism, and preaching pulpits in Protestant churches, have praised the abortion ban as an issue of religion.

Politico asserted that the Supreme Court ruling represented a victory for the Christian conservative movement that has sought for years to push US courts to the right, with the help of legal and political activists.

“Leaders and founders of right-leaning groups such as the Federal Assembly, and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, had significant influence over Supreme Court appointments by Republican presidents, especially Donald Trump,” it added.

A study conducted by the American National Medical Journal on July 31, 2019, had expected that between 94,000 and 144,000 American women would be denied the right to abortion, in the event that the Supreme Court finally rejected the Roe decision that was passed in 1973.

 

Identity Crisis

The battles and demonstrations before and after the court ruling to cancel the decision to legalize abortion showed that the struggle is religious and liberal, between religious conservatives who demand the prohibition of abortion, homosexuality, and sexual relations outside marriage, and the liberal who supported abortion, who demonstrated against the court’s decision in various ways, criticizing the religious significance of the Supreme Court’s ruling, which they likened to an authoritarian state called Gilead in the novel The Handmaid's Tale.

The story of Gilead's Daughters who refuse to have an abortion is based on the novel The Handmaid's Tale by Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, which tells about a state called Gilead, with an authoritarian Christian religious nature in which women wear red robes and white bonnets.

The novel, which dates back to 1985, revolves around a fictitious coup in the United States following the decline in women's fertility rates, as the putschists, Christian religious hardliners, establish a political regime called ‘Gilead’.

This male-ruled regime, with a fist of iron and fire, protects a patriarchal religious hierarchy, in which women who still maintain their fertility are kidnapped and enslaved to the service of men as maidservants tasked with childbirth.

Therefore, the American women who opposed the abortion ban wore the same clothes as a symbolic protest expressing what happened, and an indication that the court's decision brings back to the fore the authoritarian Christian religious state of Gilead that came in that novel.

The author of the novel, Margaret Atwood, wrote an article for the Atlantic on May 13, 2022, predicting the court's ruling, saying: “I invented Gilead, and the Supreme Court is making it true.”

She said that her fantasy novel envisioned a future scenario in which the United States would separate, and part of it would turn into a theocratic dictatorship based on Puritan beliefs and jurisprudence.

 

Religion Guides Politics

The American Christian nationalist wing witnessed its golden era during the Trump era, and it penetrated politics and succeeded in bringing three conservative judges belonging to this wing, who were the ones who favored the abortion ban.

So Trump, backed by these evangelical Christian groups, called the decision to ban abortion in the United States God's decision, he told Fox News on June 24.

In turn, Politico confirmed on June 26 that the credit for laying the groundwork for the court's decision to repeal protections for abortion rights goes mainly to Trump.

On the other hand, US President Joe Biden described the ruling as a tragic mistake stemming from an extremist ideology, in reference to the evangelicals' support for the court's decision, and considered it a sad day for the court and the state.

Biden pledged to use all the powers of his administration to stand against the Supreme Court's decision, asserting that the court literally set the United States back 150 years.

Biden also acknowledged Trump's decisive role in banning abortion, and said: “Three judges appointed by one president, Trump, were the basis of today's decision to overturn the balance of justice and uproot a fundamental right of women in this country.”

Strangely enough, Biden is a Catholic Christian who goes to church, while Trump is an evangelist who only went to church during his candidacy for the presidency and later sought the help of evangelical missionaries to support him.

 

Civil War

The Christian Right in the United States has previously warned of a civil war because of the religious struggle over the issue of abortion.

The Observer newspaper reported on May 25, 2019, that prominent figures belonging to the Christian right in the United States are warning that the battle over abortion rights could lead to a new civil war.

“Republican lawmakers such as Candice Keller of Ohio and Matt Shea of Washington state have publicly speculated that the division over abortion rights in the United States could lead to civil war,” it reported.

The anti-abortion Christian movement in the 1980s and 1990s moved from picketing in front of clinics to bombing clinics and killing abortion providers.

The Intercept website pointed out on May 12, 2022, that evangelicals in the United States have turned themselves into an anti-abortion machine.

“The books and lectures of priest Francis Schaeffer played a key role in politicizing Protestant evangelicals and turning them against Roe v. Wade and dealing violently with the matter,” it added.

A poll conducted by the Pew Research Center had previously shown that 68 percent of American Christians want the Bible to have an impact on their country's laws, and the percentage among white evangelical Protestants rose to 89 percent.

Pew polls also showed that 55 percent of the American people pray regularly, compared to 10 percent in France and 6 percent in the United Kingdom.

Evangelicals have a great influence on American politics. They reject the modern way of life, glorify the nation, weapons, and Christian traditions, and reject abortion, premarital sex, and homosexuality.

In the United States, the word “Evangelical” means all Protestant Christian denominations that have been distinguished from traditional Protestants by a number of beliefs, most notably, its belief in the concept of the second birth or the birth of the soul, and believed that they make up about a quarter of the population of the United States.

Followers of this religious thought say that their rush towards American politics and elections came in the wake of the Supreme Court's decision in the historical case Roe vs. Wade in 1973, which gave American women an absolute right to abortion in the first trimester of pregnancy, but allowed restrictions in the second trimester, and imposed a ban in the third trimester.

Hence, this ruling became the document that guarantees the constitutionality of the right to abortion in the United States, until it is rescinded by a decision of the same court on June 24, 2022.