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Christian Nationalism by Diane Petryk August 4, 2024
Pregnant for the fourth time, Afiya panicked.
Her three previous pregnancies ended in three dead fetuses and one Cesarean section she almost did not survive. She did not want to risk pregnancy again.
Her neighbor in Ngcobo, South Africa, told her about a mixture she could take: crushed steel wool and brandy. Others have ingested ground glass and bleach, among other things. These potions are difficult to survive. Consuming sharp objects damages the throat, stomach, and bowel as they move through the body. Uninformed women die.
Afiya died. Her death is tragic and ironic. There was a public health system for Afiya (not her real name) that would have helped her obtain a free, safe, legal abortion. She just wasn't informed.
Here's where Christian Nationalism comes in with its world wide effort to anoint “Life begins at Conception” as a a rule that applies to everyone. And they don't want you to have information on abortion or contraception, if lack of that knowledge kills you.
According to the National Institutes of Health, 30 percent of South African women surveyed in multiple regions of the country do not know they can have a safe, legal abortion for any reason up to 13 weeks; after that, up to 20 weeks if the pregnancy would significantly affect their social or economic circumstances, would risk injury to their physical or mental health, there is a substantial risk that the fetus would suffer from a severe physical or mental abnormality, or the pregnancy resulted from rape or incest. After 20 weeks abortion is still available if the fetus' is not likely to survive or there is a likelihood of serious birth defects.
American pro-choice advocates would probably be satisfied with South Africa's abortion rules. We have recently seen how women in Texas and Idaho have suffered when faced with dire pregnancy complications and under those states' laws no doctor dared approach them, even when their reproductive organs and very lives were at risk.
Christian Nationalists approve of putting even a fetus with a fatal anomaly above the mother's life. That's why they so love the international gag orders imposed by every Republican administration since Reagan's second. This does not just mean that the United States will not give out abortion information. It means that any country hoping for American aid must zip its own lips or lose out on major funding for things it needs.
That's how Christian Nationalism kills women.
The American gag orders are reliably lifted during every Democratic administration, but Christian Nationalists don't go away when Democrats are in the White House. One of them is Valerie Huber, who is the president and founder of The Institute for Women's Health (IWH). It's based in Washington D.C., where she can wine and dine senators and congressmen.
Last year, touting their Life Begins at Conception mantra, the IWH feted Senator Steve Daines (R-Montana), Senator James Lankford (R-Oklahoma), Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Mississippi), Senator Marco Rubio (R-Florida), Congressman Jim Banks (R-Indiana), Congressman Robert Aderholt (R-Alabama), and Congressman Chris Smith (R-New Jersey), together with the ambassadors of Guatemala and Hungary.
Many of these Republican “friends” go around the world with Huber agitating to make it more difficult for women to access contraception, abortion and post-abortion care.
I can respect an honestly held belief that abortion is wrong and will do so if I ever hear one. Lankford said: “We believe in the value of every single person. We don’t believe some children are disposable; we believe that every one of those children is valuable and should be given opportunity.” To that I would ask him why his party would let children die without medical care, as they would if they had succeeded in repealing the Affordable Care Act; go hungry by ripping away free school lunch or food stamps. Is not a child who dies without medical care being treated as disposable? Is one left without proper nutrition being given “opportunity”?
Afiya died before President Biden lifted the gag order, as democratic presidents have reliably done. Before that, President Donald Trump not only reinstated the policy after the Obama Administration, but expanded it. By May 2017, a ban covering roughly $600 million in family planning money suddenly applied to nearly $9 billion of money doled out by the US among all global health organizations, including the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the Department of State, Office of the US Global Aids Coordinator, Center for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institutes of Health, and the Department of Defense.
At the same time we know that reducing access to information about modern contraception and family planning and sexually transmitted disease is linked to higher maternal and infant mortality as well as higher incidence of HIV. Also a greater number of accidental pregnancies and desperate women like Afiya.
Trump and Christian Nationalism are a lethal partnership.
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