The ‘Pro-Life’ Pipeline to Prison

Protest following decision overturning Roe v Wade. Photo via Guardian

Sitting in church following the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson, a vision came to me as the priest read a statement from the Jesuits about it.

In this vision, I saw a group of self-righteous white people with smug facial expressions in a hospital holding picket signs proclaiming the need to save the unborn. They were surrounding a young Black woman on a gurney who was writhing in the pains of labor and tearfully shouting out, “Why are you making me do this?”

Upon delivering the baby boy, a police officer stepped in for the obstetrician, took the infant, handcuffed him, and told him he had the right to remain silent and that anything he said would be used against him.

As the officer read the baby its Miranda rights, the white people with the signs were not bothered in the least. It was only the unborn Black lives that mattered to them.

Before I became a law student, I was tried and convicted by white folks who looked strikingly like the ones surrounding the Black woman in my mind’s eye.

Looking back on how I was sentenced to life without parole at the age of 14, I now wonder how many Black and brown children whose lives are a consequence of the Supreme Court’s decision will share my destiny.

Undoubtedly, there will be more colored folks being processed through the criminal legal system than there otherwise would have been.

Having escaped the abortionist, their rewards are to be born into poverty, raised in ghettos and housing projects, and injected into a school-to-prison pipeline designed to send them to penitentiaries.

But post-birth complications caused by economic inequality don’t trouble the conscience of these conservatives.

‘A Safe Place’

Mat Staver, the Founder and Chairman of the religious liberties organization Liberty Counsel, gave insight into this sort of benign neglect when he declared in 2019, “We must continue to fight to protect every precious life and make the womb a safe place again in America.”

Make the womb a safe place—not the home, not the neighborhood, not the school, just the womb.

Pro-Lifers have killed abortion doctors and blown up their clinics. But these assassins and terrorists never considered targeting the people and places that make the lives of black and brown babies miserable.

There will be no human chains to prevent them from being taken from hospitals to places that no American with any sense would want to raise their children.

Recall how Kanye West was criticized for declaring during a fundraiser for victims of Hurricane Katrina, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”

But Kanye was on to something.

Political scientist Alan Abramowitz makes this truth easier to swallow, highlighting,

Whites who score high on measures of racial resentment and racial grievance are far more likely to support strict limits on abortion than whites who score low on these measures. This is part of a larger picture in which racial attitudes are increasingly linked with opinions on a wide range of disparate issues including social welfare issues, gun control, immigration and even climate change.

Who Will Support Unborn Black and Brown Children?

Just consider some of the policies opposed by many conservatives who are celebrating their Supreme Court victory.

President Joe Biden proposed spending billions of dollars for paid family leave, subsidized childcare, and universal preschool to help support these former embryos. Not surprisingly, Republican lawmakers rejected it, then awaited a Supreme Court decision that would make more women raise children in poverty.

That should come as no surprise.

“That’s what the Republicans do all the time,” observed Sen. Mazie Hirono, a Democrat from Hawaii.

Similarly, consider the environment these babies are raised in.

According to researchers from Yale University, “The greater the concentration of Hispanics, Asians, African Americans or poor residents in an area, the more likely that potentially dangerous compounds such as vanadium, nitrates and zinc are in the mix of fine particles they breathe.”

Jonathan H. Adler of the Cato Institute notes, “Most of the major environmental statutes have not been reauthorized in decades, and new environmental measures are rarely considered. Democratic officeholders tend to endorse and advocate for more expansive federal environmental regulation, while GOP officeholders resist.”

Meanwhile, the first breath of air for black and brown babies is linked to cancer, asthma, and cardiovascular diseases.

But there is one area they are willing to assist communities where babies are struggling. Every year, billions of dollars of aid are delivered by police and prosecutors—one serving warrants and the other indictments.

Abortion and Crime Rates

And there could be plenty more aid coming because of the Supreme Court’s decision.

Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner theorized in their book Freakonomics that there is a link between legalized abortion and crime rates.

They detail how, a generation after the decision in Roe v. Wade,  the sudden drop in the crime rate that began in the early 1990s was unrelated to criminal justice policies, innovative policing strategies, capital punishment, a booming economy, an aging population, the bursting of the crack bubble, and other often-cited reasons.

They concluded, “[T]he very factors that drove millions of American women to have an abortion also seemed to predict that their children, had they been born, would have led unhappy and possibly criminal lives.”

Reason: Growing up poor and “in a single-parent home roughly doubles a child’s propensity to commit crime. So does having a teenage mother.”

If this study is accurate, the conservatives who advocated for unborn criminal lives to come into being will undoubtedly blame them for everything.

Conservative radio talk show host Dennis Prager knows the script, insisting, “People (of any income level) who rob, rape and murder do so because they lack a functioning conscience and moral self-control. It is not material poverty that causes violent crime, but poor character.”

Assuming this were true, there will be more people with poor characters who are running in the streets robbing, raping, and murdering.

Luckily, there was no need to kill these future criminals before they drew their first breath of polluted air, that would have been immoral.

But it is perfectly appropriate to lock them up to preclude them from procreating and allowing that bad seed to spread. Ironically, the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, was a proponent of eugenics.

It took over 50 years for the organization to repudiate the woman who used to speak at Ku Klux Klan rallies and experiment on Puerto Rican women without their informed consent.

Still, she can rest easy. Mass incarceration has realized her dream by providing a means for achieving eugenics on the back end.

Reflecting upon Sanger’s legacy, Alexis McGill Johnson, president and chief executive of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America stated, “[W]e must fully take responsibility for the harm that Sanger caused to generations of people with disabilities and Black, Latino, Asian-American, and Indigenous people.”

Jeremiah Bourgeois

It will probably take another 50 years for the anti-abortionists to take responsibility for harming the next generation of people with disabilities and Black, Latino, Asian-American, and Indigenous people.

As for the Supreme Court, it has inoculated itself against “political considerations” and “public opinion” and babies forsaken and ending up in prison because, in the words of Justice Alito, “[T]he court cannot allow its decisions to be affected by such extraneous concerns.”

Jeremiah “J.J.” Bourgeois is a criminal legal system consultant at Jeremiah Bourgeois Consulting LLC and the Director of Beyond the Blindfold of Justice, the legal advocacy arm of the nonprofit Freedom Project based in Washington State. He is also the author of The Extraordinary Ordinary Prisoner: Essays from Inside America’s Carceral State.