Resetting the Arc

In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, the Roe v. Wade decision protecting the right to abortion has been completely overturned by justices who, when asked about Roe in their confirmation hearings, professed deep respect for the principle of stare decisis (stand by things decided). Unlike prior reversals of Court precedent, this one eliminates individual rights rather than expanding them.¹

The result is a catastrophe for women, for anyone who might seek the medical care abortion provides. It fetters them. It will upend their lives, make them deeply unfree. They will be bound against their will into enacting the state’s conception of an individual life. Thus, many will be forced into radically different lives from the lives they wanted to live. Because abortion, as a medical procedure conducted by professionals, saves lives, many people will die. Some will be murdered (because men will kill partners carrying their offspring). And children will be born against their parents’ will.

I was not born against my mother’s will. (I do not know, and may never know, what was my father’s will.) I can’t speculate what my mother’s will was in relinquishing me to a Catholic adoption agency. I do know that she lacked the resources and support necessary to raise me. In consequence of an event for which she cannot be held to blame—she was impregnated; she did not impregnate herself²—she handed away to that agency her first and only child, whom she never for a single day failed to think of, whom she searched for with no success, who found her and learned her story and that of thousands of others who relinquished their children because they had no other choice, enduring a lifelong anguish that religious conservatives in the United States are, right now, jubilant about seeing inflicted, again, nearly fifty years after the United States Supreme Court said this is not consistent with our ideals and it is not consistent with our grounding law.

To realize God’s Heaven on Earth we must force births. To realize God’s Heaven we must think of the millions of childless couples who will have a chance to call their own the babies so forced into existence. And to realize God’s Heaven we must mount “a massive national marketing campaign to elevate the sacrificial love and benefit for heroic women and girls who choose adoption.”

That is the advice in an article appearing in the Christian Post, which calls itself “the nation's most comprehensive Christian news website.” A glorious moment is at hand:

“Millions of pro-Life advocates and organizations have now joined the ranks of America’s Martin Luther King, India’s Gandhi, and Great Britain’s Wilberforce to re-set the arc of nations.”

It is time to “reset and revive the adoption alternative:”

Let us take the dynamic footholds of victory into new levels of choice, the choice for adoption rather than abortion.  With today’s landmark decision, the ship of our nation is turning back to its constitutional harbor.

Martin Luther King, Jr., famously said of the shape of moral progress in human history, the “arc of the moral universe,” that it is “long, but it bends toward justice.” Religious conservatives love this image, evoked in the clumsy phrasing of “re-setting the arc of nations.” Richard D. Land, executive editor of the Christian Post, former head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, appropriates Dr. King for his own communicative ends—ironically enough, since it was Dr. Land’s comments about the Obama administration’s and civil rights leaders’ use of the shooting of Trayvon Martin to “gin up the black vote” in 2012 that led to his departure from that commission.³

How do we do the Lord’s work of “resetting the arc?”

• SATURATE our culture, first, with a massive national marketing campaign to elevate the sacrificial love and benefit for heroic women and girls who choose adoption. Engage famous adoptive parents or famous pro-life individuals in sports and film to make expert, engaging commercials, and advertising to draw positive attention to the adoption option. Adoption marketing must consistently run like a product or political advertising campaign.

Market our product.

• PRODUCE a sequel to the film "Unplanned,"telling the story of a woman who makes the sacrificial decision to choose the adoption option and fill the empty arms of a childless couple. With "Unplanned's" outstanding scriptwriters, producers, and actors, they can shape a story from both perspectives, and full of drama, conflict, and joy.

Unplanned, released in 2019 and featuring a cameo by My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell, an executive producer, is based on a memoir by Abby Johnson, anti-abortion activist and former Planned Parenthood clinic director. The factual details in both the film and the memoir have been challenged.

• DESIGNATE a national task force of attorneys who specializes in adoption to craft ways to navigate the differing state policies governing adoptions. The task force could also consider pro bono services to prospective parents who lack the finances.

Provide financial assistance to those who wish to take a child someone else, for lack of a better option, will relinquish.

• BUILD more Safe Havens, an excellent alternative for desperate women and girls who abandon their infants. Every state has Safe Haven laws. The “Baby Moses” laws are detailed at www.NationalSafeHavenAlliance.org.  Ask construction companies to donate or build Safe Havens in all fire stations and hospitals. Launch denominational efforts in churches to add Safe Havens as part of their domestic missions budget.

Respond to a crisis of desperate parents prepared to abandon their children by creating climate-controlled boxes in which they may carry it out.

What is the product we are marketing in our campaign to reset the arc? The aim is to entice people carrying forced pregnancies into relinquishing their infants to strangers. So the target market is these people. Certainly not hopeful adoptive parents, who, as is well known, are legion. What is to be marketed to these people? “Sacrificial love and benefit for heroic women and girls who choose adoption.”

This is not an easy sales pitch. One study estimates that of women who sought abortions but were denied owing to gestational limits, only 9% elected to relinquish their children.⁴ Indeed, it is difficult, on its face, to understand relinquishment—abandonment by another name—as a purely heroic, selfless act. Relinquishment is borne of desperation. To market it otherwise is to put lipstick on the proverbial pig. “The best thing you can do, in your circumstances, is to give your child away”—you can’t put rainbows and hearts and emotional truth around that.

The reference to Safe Haven laws only heightens the confusion. These laws were designed to accommodate the most desperate people who, lacking any alternative, might kill their newborns. There is little evidence that people coerced into giving birth, will, in general, resort to baby boxes.⁵ Techniques of persuasion are likely to have little effect on people in crisis.

The truth is that this campaign to Reset the Arc of Nations is based in what is at best a deep misunderstanding of, and more likely a profoundly callous disregard for, those forced by the unavailability of abortion into the terrible predicament of choosing among only traumatizing and disempowering options. As for Unplanned, it is hardly surprising that a proposed sequel to a film full of lies about abortion would aim to tell lies about relinquishment.

The incoherence at the root of this propaganda project gives me some small degree of comfort. Ideas of womanly virtue and family shame that passed for conventional wisdom in white, middle-class America 70 years ago look patently silly today. But then, the “girls who went away” always knew better.⁶ They knew they made their sacrifice from a position of subjection—through raw, ugly force. People overwhelmingly want to keep their children. Even those denied the abortion care they desperately seek.

As for me, the adoptee—I never for a moment imagined that the Resetting of the Arc had anything to do with the welfare of the child. As usual in discussions about adoption, favorable or critical, we rate as little more than chattel. And while it is essential that adoptees keep reminding the public of the losses we sustain, the rights we are denied, we can also, as Roe dies, bear witness to our birthparents’ unfreedom, their disempowerment, of which ours is a legacy and bitter fruit.

1. Compare Brown v. Board of Education overturning Plessy v. Ferguson on segregation; Lawrence v. Texas overturning Bowers v. Hardwick on anti-sodomy laws, and Obergefell v. Hodges overturning Baker v. Nelson on gay marriage.

2. See Gabrielle Blair’s wonderful Twitter thread on the percentage of unwanted pregnancies caused by irresponsible ejaculations: 100% of them.

3. Evidently the real sin was that he had plagiarized his remarks from another source, an op-ed column in the Washington Times.

4. This study is cited in footnote 17 of Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan’s dissent in Dobbs v. Jackson.

5. See footnote 16 of the Dobbs dissent.

6. This is a good moment to read, or revisit, Ann Fessler’s searing work of oral history and testimony, The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade.