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Today I’ll be talking about abortion, and I want to make a few things clear right at the outset so there’s no confusion. First of all, my position is that anyone who can bear children (whom I’ll be referring to in this essay as the fertile) has, as with all people, an inviolable and sovereign dominion over their own body. This means that I am in favor of what has been framed in recent debates as “reproductive rights,” but I’d argue that this is something more fundamental than those things which we typically call “rights.” What this means in practice is that, according to my position, anyone who can become pregnant has a right to end that pregnancy at any time and for any reason or for no reason, whether or not that termination results in the death of the fetus, and that the termination may be induced by any means necessary or desirable, so long as such means do not cause harm to anyone beyond the fetus and so long as any harms to the fetus itself—such as pain and other suffering—are minimized. My position is that a fetus is a living organism but not a person until it can and does survive on its own outside the womb. I realize that this position puts even infants in a grey area regarding personhood, but I have my reasons for it and I hold to it.
However, this will not be the focus of my argument. Rather, I’ll be arguing that the current opposition to the basic rights of the fertile is not fundamentally about the rights of the alleged fetus people but rather a significant component of a broader campaign, fundamentally patriarchal and ongoing since the Neolithic Revolution, to enslave and exploit human labor, and that the desired status quo of those opposed to these rights itself constitutes the enslavement of the fertile so as to control the reproduction of labor.
The public image of the debate over reproductive rights is that there are two sides—pro-life and pro-choice—and that this has always been the case, at least since the dawn of Christendom. But this picture is far from accurate. In fact, positions on abortion and positions on who should have access to them have shifted markedly over the course of history. What is it that has caused those shifts?
To answer this question, let’s begin with consideration of the fact that abortion is not a new phenomenon but rather has been part of humanity going back as far as we can tell. One consistent, objective factor over the course of this history is that new humans require substantial resources in terms of food, water, social attention, and security. At some point, humans acquired knowledge of which actions would cause, or herbs induce, an abortion; prior to this, unwanted children were simply killed or left to die, a practice which remained widespread and which was considered entirely normal throughout almost all of human history (Brewis, 1992). Once we figured out that certain herbs or certain actions could induce an abortion, we started doing that as well, but the period from conception to the end of infancy can last anywhere from two to three years, depending on how you count, and a lot can change during that time, so the practice of infanticide continued even after we figured out how to abort pregnancies. Maybe a mother thought that she would be able to raise a child but then crops failed and so she left it in the field to die or gave it to the priests for a sacrifice.
Starting in ancient Greece, we start to see the first documented opposition to abortion. In Book 7 of the Politics, Aristotle recommended that the line between lawful and unlawful abortion be drawn based on quickening, the time at which movements of the fetus can be perceived by the mother. Later writers and legislators on the subject used this demarcation to delineate between “formed” and “unformed” fetuses, forbidding abortion for the former but permitting it for the latter. Hippocrates, one of the fathers of medicine, included in his Hippocratic Oath, which remains a major inspiration for medical ethics to this day, that a physician was not to “give a woman a pessary to cause an abortion.” A pessary is an ancient (and still-used) medical device inserted into the vagina for various therapeutic purposes, and it is possible to use one to induce an abortion. Abortion rights opponents have long mentioned Hippocrates’ oath as evidence that opposition to abortion is ancient, forgetting that, in his Oath, Hippocrates does not denounce abortions wholesale but rather only a specific means of inducing them, perhaps on the basis that he saw this use of the pessary as being medically unsound compared to, for example, medical methods for inducing abortion.
In general, though, abortion up until quickening was tolerated in ancient Greece and Rome. At least for some, and this is a key point that I’ll be returning to. For the Romans, abortion was exclusively something chosen by the father. It concerned his right to dispose of his children or not, as he saw fit (Röskamp, 2005). Those who procured an abortion without their husband’s permission could be punished. A concern raised by early Christians, including Augustine, was that adulterous women might become pregnant and then use abortion to help keep the secret (Dombrowsky, 1988). Roman slaves, of course, were the property of their domini, their masters. They could be freely raped and impregnated by the dominus, or by other slaves at the command of their domini, or commanded or forced to abort any pregnancies resulting from the rapes. In this way, the dominus could, over the long term, produce more slaves if he could afford to keep them, or limit their population if he didn’t want more slaves than he could feed and control.
In the first few centuries of Christianity, abortion was mostly condemned outright as murder at any stage of the pregnancy. But then a strange shift occurred around the time of the fall of the Roman Empire: Christian theologians returned to a sort of hybrid view that, while post-quickening abortion was still murder, pre-quickening abortion was, at worst, a sin but not equivalent to murder (Bakke, 2005). Comparing this to the historical situation of Christianity, we notice an interesting parallel: as an emerging religion, Christianity would have benefitted from birth-based induction into its ranks. In other words, the growth of Christianity in its first few centuries may be explained, in part, by Christians having many children who were then raised as Christians. In his book The Triumph of Christianity, Bible scholar Bart Ehrman disputes this, saying, “Christians were born and died at about the rate of others, despite elite Christian authors claiming that Christians never practiced abortion or infanticide. These claims have been shown to be propagandistic and cannot be accepted naïvely as factual” (appendix, 2018). But even if Ehrman is entirely correct here, we can still at least say that the incentive was there to condemn abortion in order to bolster population, whether or not that actually succeeded in practice. But by the end of the Western Roman Empire, Christianity had become the religion of the elite, and with population growth being less of a concern, the Christian hegemony would have benefitted from a more nuanced view on abortion which allowed them to permit it for some and condemn it for others, and that’s exactly what we see.
Now, that might seem a bit spurious, and taken on its own, it is. But what we’ll see going forward is a clear pattern of correlation between attitudes towards abortion among different groups and the labor and population needs of those groups, as well as evidence that this relationship is a causal one, that labor and population needs drive changes in attitudes towards abortion.
In America, during the 18th and early 19th centuries when the agricultural economy was driven by slave labor, attitudes towards abortion were much the same as they were in ancient Rome: legal, available, and permissible for the white elite slaveowners who wanted to maintain a concentration of wealth and power; forbidden for Black slaves who could only be allowed to reproduce with their master’s permission, and more typically were forced to reproduce, or not, at their master’s command. Data suggest that the white elite made copious use of their abortion privileges, with various contemporaneous studies indicating that anywhere from a sixth to a full quarter of white pregnancies ended in abortion (Luker, 2009). But the 1807 Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves meant that, after the act was passed, new slaves could only be procured by breeding them, and this was done systematically, with female slaves described as “breeders” or “breeding slaves” and selected for their ability to bear large numbers of children (Smith, 1991, p. 104).
After the abolition of slavery—which occurred, contrary to popular belief, somewhat gradually over the course of the next century (Knowing Better, 2022)—we see a shift in attitudes towards abortion which, again, parallels shifts in labor and population demands. What I’m saying is that whether a group approves of abortion for themselves or for any other group depends on whether it serves their interests for the population of those groups to increase or decrease. If your own group has concentrated wealth and power and doesn’t want to spread it around too much, then, as we have seen historically, you will approve of abortion for your group. But if there’s another population whose growth you want to control—say, if you have dominion over a slave population and want to breed them to create more slaves, or if you have a plentiful source of cheap labor and want to keep it that way—then you might disapprove of abortion for them.
This also serves to explain why the same group that most vehemently opposes reproductive rights, the American evangelical Right, also opposes many measures aimed at helping new mothers and their infants (taking as one of many possible examples the recent GOP vote against measures to make baby formula more available during a major shortage, Scott & Sonmez, 2022). Those raised in a favorable environment during early childhood are more likely to climb the social ladder (Conner & Storper, 2020), and this is exactly the demographic that the elite wants to limit so that they can keep the wealth concentrated. Conversely, those raised in unfavorable environments are more likely to end up poorly-educated and desperate, and that desperation is exactly the objective, because desperate people are easy to control and to exploit for their labor on the cheap.
If my hypothesis is correct, we would expect to see those agencies with the greatest demand for cheap labor investing substantially in organizations opposed to reproductive rights. And what do the data show? That some of the largest contributors to anti-abortion groups include Amazon, Wal-Mart, and Coca-Cola (Duffy, 2022). A recently-leaked internal memo from Amazon states that the company is expected to “deplete the available labor supply in the US network by 2024” (Del Rey, 2022), so the motive is certainly there. Notably, Amazon also has a policy of providing a $4,000 benefit to those in need of an abortion who live in states where it has been or will be outlawed (Kramer, 2022). This would seem to conflict with my hypothesis, but remember that this is a benefit offered specifically to people who are already working for the company and who would have to take time off from work if they bore live children. Thus, over the long term, Amazon ensures a steady supply of desperate and therefore cheap labor by restricting access to abortion, while in the short term, they can mitigate childbirth-induced downtime and garner public support by supporting abortions at the individual level.
Despite the evidence I’ve presented, one might reasonably think my theory simply too cynical to be believed. However, there is a well-established precedent in the history of American chattel slavery and the racist ideas that supported that institution. In his book Stamped from the Beginning (2016), historian and activist Ibram X. Kendi dispels the myth that slavery and other institutions of racial oppression and discrimination arose from the racist ideas of ignorant and hateful people. To the contrary, he argues, the chain of causality operates in the opposite direction: racist ideas were promulgated in order to support those institutions, which were established due to labor needs. So we see that, for the hegemony, with regards to the matter of labor, nothing is beyond the pale.
This forceful, exploitative, and oppressive use of labor traces back to the Neolithic Revolution about 12,000 years ago, when humans began transitioning from bands of gatherer-hunters to villages organized around agriculture. Prior to this, it was not possible for a given band to gain a substantial advantage over others; nor was there any real need to. However, after the Neolithic Revolution, one could gain power from the land and use it to subjugate others in order to gain more power. If one happened to control a stretch of land with more favorable growing conditions, one could use those conditions to create a surplus, use that surplus to build an army, and use that army to gain control of more land along with people to cultivate and harvest the crops. The surplus grows, the army grows, the control of land grows, and over many thousands of years, villages grow into empires. Central to this process is the reproduction of labor: humans grow old and die and their labor in this system must be replaced, and so the means of reproduction—the bodies of the fertile—must be tightly controlled, and the exact form of that control is necessarily going to change as the labor needs of the elite change.
At the moment, the motives of the Christian hegemony with regards to other demographics is: make more cheap labor. And its motive with regards to its own demographic is as follows: make more Christians. This means that, in the immortal words of the alien Kodos (who was at the time impersonating presidential candidate Bob Dole), their present position is “no abortions for anyone.”
As for the second point, that the Christian hegemony wants Christians to make more Christians, consider the Quiverfull movement, which started in the early 20th century and which adheres strongly to Psalm 127:3-5:
Lo, children are an heritage of the LORD:
KJV
and the fruit of the womb is his reward.
As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man;
so are children of the youth.
Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them:
they shall not be ashamed,
but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate.
Quiverfull adherents are known for their large families, with the number of children sometimes reaching into the double digits, as depicted in reality shows such as 17 Kids and Counting… which later became 18 Kids and Counting… which later became 19 Kids and Counting… which later became… actually they cancelled the show at that point when it came out that the eldest son was molesting some of his sisters. The underlying motive here is entirely explicit: more Christians means a bigger Christian army and more power and control. Remember—and this is something I’ve covered in several other episodes, such as “On Lies”—a central aspect of the current evangelical metanarrative is that American Christians are an embattled minority at war with secular culture and with outside forces such as Islam and so-called “cultural Marxism.” In order to fight a war, you need soldiers, and the most reliable way to ensure a long-term influx of soldiers is, as with slaves, to breed them. This was the case as well for Christians in the first few centuries of the religion: the religion needed to grow, and this goal would have been effected by the promotion of large Christian families and general Christian fecundity.
When did we see the shift from “abortions for some” to “no abortions for anyone”? Exactly when we would expect, given my hypothesis: at the exact time that the American sexual revolution was heating up and the Christian hegemony began to see their dominance and way of life as being under threat. According to the excellent book Jesus and John Wayne by Kristin Kobes du Mez (2020), the Southern Baptist Convention approved of expanding access to abortion until at least 1971. In 1973, former Southern Baptist Convention president W.A. Criswell stated, “I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person, and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed” (in Rumberger, 2022). At the time, Christian leaders still felt at least somewhat secure in the household dominance of the father and thus believed that abortion decisions would primarily be made by men, but as the feminist movement gained traction and women continued to fight for their emancipation, the patriarchs felt their power threatened and sought to take the choice off the table entirely.
There’s a direct involvement with this issue in the evolving Christofascist state. Abortion, as a political issue, is often described as being a wedge issue; in other words, it’s an issue that splits the voter base and pushes those on one side to vote a certain way. I’ve spoken to numerous conservative voters who abhor Donald Trump but who voted for him because of their perception of him as a pro-life candidate. These are people who acknowledged his buffoonery, his racism, his sexism and misogyny, his stupidity… everything about him that made him not only an abominable political leader but an abominable human being all around was ignored because they believed—correctly, as it turns out—that he would succeed in regressing reproductive rights.
Abortion is a particularly convenient wedge issue. Fetuses are ideal objects for moral concern because their personhood, such as it is believed to exist in the first place, is abstract and uncomplicated. A famous quote by Methodist pastor David Barnhart compares fetuses to several other categories of personal moral concern, such as the homeless. Caring for unhoused people is generally thought of as a moral good, but one can also excuse oneself from concrete action on this matter by citing the high potential for unhoused people to be addicted to drugs. One might say, “Sure I support the homeless, but I don’t want to subsidize their drug addiction.” No such problem exists with fetuses; they seem to possess all potential human goodness and no potential human vice. “You can love the unborn and advocate for them,” Barnhart says, “without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone.”
Let’s consider the general role of the state in all this. There are many approaches we can take to theorizing the nature and role of the state, and for purposes of this essay, I’ll be looking at the state from the most conservative and autocratic form which can still be described as a legitimate political entity. Fascist and Stalinist totalitarianism, to take a couple examples, are illegitimate because they do not even aim at the service of the body politic but rather the empowerment of the state itself. This is largely true of traditional monarchy as well, but it is at least possible to theorize a justification for this hierarchy of authority as being good for society in general, and this was exactly the perspective taken by the 17th-century English political theorist Thomas Hobbes in his book Leviathan (1998, originally published in 1651).
Hobbes wrote Leviathan during the English Civil War as a justification for the powers of the monarchy. According to his argument, the life of humans in their natural state was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” a “war of all against all.” Hobbes was, of course, entirely wrong about the conditions of the state of nature. Human life prior to the Neolithic Revolution certainly must have been very difficult, but the human and proto-human population nevertheless persisted over several million years, which would seem unlikely were Hobbes correct in his assessment. But let’s put that aside for a moment.
According to Hobbes, in order to escape the brutish state of nature, people entered into a social contract in which their individual freedoms were given up to a monarch who would enforce order, security, and justice. According to Hobbes’ reasoning, the monarch was justified in any use of their power whatsoever because even the worst tyrant was still better than the state of nature. However, in chapter 20, Hobbes states that slaves, uniquely among all people, were justified in all resistance to their masters, including lethal resistance. Even the most notorious authoritarian in the history of political philosophy found slavery just cause for violent rebellion against the throne, and what is dominion over another’s body if not slavery?
Again, Hobbes is one of the most conservative and authoritarian political theorists in history, and even he would see the government of the United States as illegitimate as a result of its present course of action. Pick any legitimate political theory you want, anything short of state totalitarianism, and you’ll find yourself with the same position with regards to the United States government: it has (once again) enslaved a portion of its population and therefore delegitimated itself as a political institution. Let me be clear about this: I am not, in the context of this podcast, advocating for any violent or illegal action towards the state or its representatives. In this podcast, I am only making the purely descriptive claim that every legitimate political theorist in history would have advocated for such action under these circumstances. Do with that information what you will.
This brings us to the Satanic Temple, the Satanist religious organization founded by Lucien Greaves and Malcolm Jarry in 2013 and presently the largest and most popular Satanist organization in the world. The Satanic Temple has gained particular notoriety in recent months for their public opposition to the draconian restrictions on reproductive rights that have been imposed by certain states following the dismantling of the federal Roe v Wade protections. The Temple describes itself as being “the leading beacon of light in the battle for abortion access” (The Satanic Temple, 2022) and has filed several lawsuits to challenge the restrictions, as well as having created a religious “abortion ritual” designed to circumvent those restrictions, about which more presently. I’ve noticed a significant uptick on my social media feeds in recent months of posts advocating for joining the Temple or otherwise supporting them financially to aid in their efforts. I suggest that this is not a wise strategy for fighting this fight. Long-time listeners to the show know that I have my disagreements with the Temple and I want to make it clear, as always, that none of those disagreements extend to individual members. However, the reality is that the Satanic Temple has neither a clear and coherent legal strategy nor the experience necessary for waging this war against legal restrictions on abortion and other reproductive rights.
Let’s look first at the Satanic Temple’s “abortion ritual,” which they describe on their website’s Reproductive Rights Campaign page. The general idea is that an abortion can be performed as a Satanic religious ritual, circumventing legal restrictions on the basis of constitutional protections for religious liberty. The subpage describing the ritual uses as a header the false claim that “Satanic Abortions Are Protected By Religious Liberty Laws” (TST | Reproductive Rights Campaign, n.d.). To confirm that this claim is indeed false, one need not even scroll down: a disclaimer is prominently displayed beneath the header which reads,
While legal precedent dictates that we have the right to practice our Abortion Ritual, unimpeded by government restrictions, neither a violation of that right nor what the appropriate remedy is has yet to be recognized by the courts. Until the law is settled on this issue, any legal demand for a right to abortion services without government interference will likely result in litigation.
The problem here is that abortion is not, in fact, a religious rite or ritual. The Satanic Temple’s “abortion ritual” was invented ad hoc for the purpose of circumventing a law. There’s clear legal precedent that one cannot invent a religion or a component of a religion for the purposes of circumventing existing laws (cf. Cavanaugh v. Bartelt, 178 F. Supp. 3d 819), and that’s clearly exactly what the Satanic Temple has done. Furthermore, even sincere religious beliefs do not provide carte blanche for any conceivable activity (cf. Reynolds v. United States, 98 US 145). If the state can prove that it has a “compelling state interest” in preventing the activity regardless of its underlying religious motivation, it is free to do so, and given that many conservative states have already codified the nonsensical claim that “life begins at conception,” any defenses they mount against the Temple based on a compelling state interest to protect human life are likely to be slam dunks. This is not in any way to say that the states would be morally right or just to do so—tyranny is tyranny regardless of its legal status—but the unfortunate reality is that, under the American legal system, it’s not sufficient to be morally in the right, and the Temple’s incompetent and ineffectual strategy is redirecting resources from more competent and effective agencies and their campaigns.
The title of a recent article on Politifact sums up the situation quite effectively: “Satanic Temple’s fight over abortion rights, Roe v Wade so far is unsuccessful” (Cercone, 2022). The article mentions not only the Temple’s consistent failure to successfully litigate their claims, but also includes the opinions of legal experts who thoroughly deconstruct the viability of the Temple’s legal strategy.
Abortion is a right, full stop. Pretending that it’s a religious ritual when said ritual was coincidentally invented at exactly the same time that it became illegal trivializes that fact and threatens the protection of those rights. It makes it appear as though supporters of reproductive rights lack legitimate arguments for their case and so have to invent means to prevail through legal trickery. To say that abortion requires a religious liberty exemption from the law is to say that people do not have a natural right to abortion.
But as long as we’re talking about religious views on abortion, and being that this is A Satanist Reads the Bible, it’s worth looking at what exactly the Bible says about abortion, or, more accurately, what it doesn’t say about abortion. Remember, abortion was quite common in the ancient world, but despite the thoroughness of the Bible’s legal code, which prescribes even the kinds of fabrics that one can wear, abortion is not mentioned a single time in the entire text. Modern anti-rights activists equate abortion with murder, and one would think that, were they correct, such a morally-egregious act would be mentioned specifically, but it never is. An anti-rights activist might counter that the Bible doesn’t need to say anything about abortion because it already condemns murder in the Sixth Commandment (Exodus 20:13). However, even if we put aside the passages that conflict with this commandment (such as Numbers 31:14-18, in which Moses commands his people to kill all of their prisoners of war, children included, sparing only the virgin women, whom they take as sex slaves), it remains that the Bible is clear that fetuses do not have the status of full personhood. In Genesis 2:7, we see that it is breath which brings Adam to life and makes him a nefesh, a living being, which suggests that life begins not at conception but at birth. Additionally, Exodus 21:22 sets the punishment for accidentally causing a miscarriage as a fine, while verse 14 of the same chapter mandates the death penalty for not only premeditated murder but also for cursing at one’s parents.
Pro-choice advocates will often mention Numbers 5:11-31 as evidence that the Bible even describes and endorses an abortion, but that’s not exactly the case. This passage, known as the Ordeal of the Bitter Water, describes a sort of trial performed when a woman is suspected of adultery. The woman is made to drink a certain concoction which will, if she has indeed committed adultery, cause her “belly to swell” and her “thigh to rot” (Numbers 5:22). The Hebrew word for “thigh” is also used for “loins,” and in combination with the swelling of the belly and the context in which this is taking place, this suggests that the concoction induces an abortion. Indeed, some translations, such as the New International Version, assume that this is indeed the case and make that explicit in text. The verse in that version reads, “May this water that brings a curse enter your body so that your abdomen swells or your womb miscarries.” I agree that the text strongly implies that a forced abortion is taking place, but cannot state that with certainty and I think that the Committee on Bible Translation overreached in translating as they did. It’s worth noting, however, that that’s just my personal opinion, which can only be fairly considered in the context of the New International Version having been translated by a team of over one hundred scholars, and my broad familiarity with Hebrew is far from qualifying me as any sort of scholar in the language. In any case, we have either that the Bible makes absolutely no mention whatsoever of what would have been, at the time, a common practice, or that it mentions abortion exactly once by way of including it in a ritual.
And so, unsurprisingly, we find that the claim that opposition to reproductive rights is a biblical position unconvincing, and that, as usual, the Bible is not being used here as an authentic source of ethical guidance but rather as a cudgel to beat Christians into line and to fend of resistance to patriarchal oppression. And one might rightly ask, if I’m going to be so critical of TST’s campaign, what it is exactly that I suggest we do about it. In the short term, donating to reproductive advocacy groups like Planned Parenthood and getting out to vote for pro-choice candidates at all levels of government is of paramount importance. If the Republican Party wins control of Congress this November, my prediction is that they will seek to ban abortion at the federal level. I have to admit that my faith in the institutions of democracy are rapidly waning, but it remains that we must do what we can while we can.
I hope you’ve found this piece interesting and informative. If you’ve enjoyed it, I encourage you to look at some of my other essays, and if you find my approach to philosophy and religion at all valuable, I hope that you’ll stop in at my Patreon page, which features bonus content for patrons, and that you’ll stop back by to check on my new content.
Works Cited or Referenced
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Brewis, A. A. (1992). Anthropological Perspectives on Infanticide. 17.
Cercone, J. (2022, May 5). Satanic Temple’s fight over abortion rights, Roe v Wade so far is unsuccessful. @politifact. https://www.politifact.com/article/2022/may/05/satanic-temples-fight-over-abortion-rights-roe-v-w/
Connor, D. S., & Storper, M. (2020). The changing geography of social mobility in the United States. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(48), 30309–30317. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2010222117
Del Rey, J. (2022, June 17). Leaked Amazon memo warns the company is running out of people to hire. Vox. https://www.vox.com/recode/23170900/leaked-amazon-memo-warehouses-hiring-shortage
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Duffy, K. (2022). Amazon, Coca-Cola, Walmart, and 10 other companies have together donated $15.2 million in the last 6 years to political committees that oppose abortion, analysis finds. Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-cola-walmart-donate-anti-abortion-political-committee-roe-wade-2022-5
Du Mez, K. K. (2020). Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. Liveright.
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Kendi, I. X. (2016). Stamped from the beginning: The definitive history of racist ideas in America. Nation Books.
Knowing Better. (2022, April 4). The Part of History You’ve Always Skipped | Neoslavery. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4kI2h3iotA
Kramer, A. (2022, May 4). Amazon’s $4,000 abortion benefit is more important than you think. Protocol. https://www.protocol.com/workplace/amazon-abortion-benefit-roe-wade
Luker, K. (2009). Abortion and the politics of motherhood (Nachdr.). Univ. of California Press.
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Rumberger, A. (2022, July 1). The Making of the Evangelical Anti-Abortion Movement. Salvage. https://salvage.zone/the-making-of-the-evangelical-anti-abortion-movement/
The Satanic Temple [@satanic_temple_]. (2022, June 24). The Satanic Temple is the leading beacon of light in the battle for abortion access. With Roe v Wade overturned, a religious exemption will be the only available challenge to many restrictions to access. Learn More⤵️ https://bit.ly/3u0D8Fs https://t.co/SIjyRWdoZN [Tweet]. Twitter. https://mobile.twitter.com/satanic_temple_/status/1540381792049430530
Scott, E., & Sonmez, F. (2022). Nearly 200 Republicans vote against bill to ease baby formula shortage. Washington Post. Retrieved July 3, 2022, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/05/19/republicans-baby-formula/
Smith, J.F. (1991) Slavery and Rice Culture in Low Country Georgia, 1750-1860. University of Tennessee Press.
TST | Reproductive Rights Campaign. (n.d.). Retrieved July 24, 2022, from https://announcement.thesatanictemple.com/rrr-campaign41280784