I Will Never Forgive Vox for this One Abortion Article

Photo by Maria Oswalt on Unsplash

Let me set the scene. It's Apr 3, 2019, three years, two months, and twenty-one days before the federal right to abortion enshrined in Roe v. Wade is overturned by the Supreme Court ruling Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (or Dobbs for short). Some, especially in the abortion space, see this grim reality unfolding on the horizon. Others believe it's impossible.

The media company Vox has commissioned 15 writers for their "Hindsight 2070" series, all answering the question, "What do we do now that will be considered unthinkable in 50 years?" No methodology is posted for how these writers were selected, so it seems to be just a list of the most click-worthy topics about the future they thought would gain traction. In between condemnations of eating meat and kids playing tackle football, they produce one claiming that the right to an abortion will be unthinkable in 50 years, and it still makes me furious.

We are going to talk about this article, but more to the point, we will treat this text for the relic it is —the belief in a time that Roe could never end.

A brief look at liberal, anti-Roe articles

This abortion article was written by Karen Swallow Prior, who I would classify as a more "center-leaning" conservative. She may be pro-forced-birth and pro-religious "liberties," but she did have a scandal a couple of years ago where she was removed as a fellow from the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission for effectively supporting same-sex relations. She has also been pretty transparent about abusive dynamics in this space. As Rick Pidcock writes in Baptist News of her perspective:

“One might wonder, based on her speaking truth to power through the years, if she is secretly a progressive Christian. But Prior remains committed to conservative theology and pro-life politics, despite the conservative men who have hurt her.”

She is a commentator adjacent to more liberal circles, even if she does not fully embrace them. Consequently, Karen Swallow Prior takes an interesting rhetorical stance on abortion. She doesn't provide a different argument for why abortion should be illegal. She, like many others, claims that fetuses should have a right to life and that right should not be infringed by the autonomy of the mother. I have talked about why this logic is dehumanizing before (see When It Comes To Abortion, Humanity Is Stripped Away Until Only A Womb Is Left), but what makes her unique is that she links the forced birther movement to the liberal condition, saying:

“As we enter late modernity and recognize the limits of the radical autonomy and individualism which have defined it, the pendulum will correct itself with a swing toward more communitarian and humane values that recognize the interdependency of all humans.”

Although this point is easily debunked by bringing up the counterpoint that such "humane values" rely on the subjugation of the mother to the fetus (and consequently the often conservative arbiters of said fetus' rights), it's an argument that has all the right talking points for the then-contemporary liberal audience to view it as clever. It is the sort of piece that "makes you think," despite itself being relatively short and doing nothing to summarize the existing literature in the field or thoroughly explain why this trend will happen other than just a vague appeal to humanism. As one "Go Blue" Twitter profile commented at the time:

“Vox did a fascinating series asking experts, “What do we do now that will be considered unthinkable in 50 years?” And the responses, on subjects ranging from sex work to abortion, were really, really interesting.”

The liberal consensus on debating Roe before its nullification was often one of amusement. Yes, the ruling was considered important, but it was also settled and safe to pick apart. It was not uncommon to see liberals and the "moderates" they loved to court in the name of fairness, to position their opposition to the ruling on purely academic lines, utterly detached from the real-world circumstances on the ground. "Let Roe go," went the title of an article Megan McArdle wrote in 2018 in the Washington Post, arguing that the decision was poorly reasoned and that if the ruling was nullified, we could somehow get something better, saying:

“Somewhat paradoxically, the way to make abortion less contentious is to throw the matter back to the states so that people can argue about it. Debating the difficult decisions regarding gestational age and circumstances would force people to confront the hard questions that abortion entails, which tends to have a moderating effect on extreme opinions.”

This reasoning (and McArdle was by no means unique in believing it) was a sort of topsy-turvy logic that pretended that Roe's would-be nullifiers were not conservative reactionaries intent on making it illegal across the entire country. Pro-forced-birth conservatives are not satisfied with constraining their activities to state lines. Although the right to abortion continues to be popular, that has not stopped conservatives from pushing through unpopular policies before (see also the partial repeal of the ACA, less taxes on the wealthy, etc.). Public opinion is wholly divorced from the passage and repeal of policy.

Despite there being mounting evidence that the ruling was in genuine danger and would be supplanted by a more reactionary status quo, the majority of the liberal establishment, including Democratic Party leadership, was not very motivated to preserve Roe. There were and continue to be a lot of forced birth Democrats (see Democrats For Life of America), and the Democratic Party has never been interested in enforcing a hardline on this issue. As recently as last year, the Democratic Party's House leadership endorsed the House's last forced-birth Democrat for the 2024 cycle.

Before Dobbs, there was largely indifference from all parts of the establishment to mobilize on this issue, and that's because many people thought it was impossible for the ruling to be overturned. "By the numbers, why Roe v. Wade will probably stand," Eric Zorn lectured to us in the Chicago Tribune in 2018, convinced that it would be "political suicide" for conservatives. "No, The Supreme Court Is Not About To Overrule Roe v. Wade," argued Evan Gerstmann in Forbes, literally commenting on the Dobbs case, one year, one month, and six days before it repealed Roe.

For some, it really did seem like the status quo would go on forever. It didn't matter if someone pushed for theoretical objections to abortion in liberal circles on legal or even moral grounds because Roe was a wall that could not be moved. That sense of invincibility probably caused all of these articles to get greenlit in the first place, including, I suspect, this Vox one.

Yet this invincibility was always a lie, one that then imploded, and like Roe v. Wade itself, the rest is history.

The path forward

Karen Swallow Prior was ecstatic when Roe was overturned. "Called it!" she posted, linking to her Vox article, the day Politico published a leaked draft of the Dobbs ruling. She has not been commissioned to write for Vox since this piece. I don't see any pro-forced-birth pieces when I comb through Vox's archives either. The air of how we talk about abortion is entirely different in a post-Roe world. The sense of invincibility that Roe gave some commentators was removed, forcing many to come to terms with the cold reality that their rights were not as solid as they once believed.

Yet some were screaming about this before it was repealed. Some people were not surprised by the Dobbs ruling because they could see it coming, forecasted for decades by the conservative movement's war on bodily autonomy. I remember reading Gabrielle Zevin's novel The Hole We're In (2010), which is about a family suffering from the fallout of the 2008 recession. In the final chapters, one of the main characters is trying to get an abortion for her daughter in 2020, and it's difficult because Roe has been overturned. Gabrielle Zevin was able to predict this fate over a decade ago, only off by about two years.

Activists were aware of this trend and tried to stop it for decades, but rather than listen to these valid concerns, many instead chose to publish (and greenlight) condescending think pieces. The reason I am still angry at this Vox article is because of the complacency of it all. The editorial staff at the time amused themselves imagining what the future could look like, oblivious that Roe was going to be dismantled much faster than I doubt they imagined. This article (and many like it) represents a dangerous amount of complacency, softening the American public during a time when they needed to be even more vigilant.

There is no shortage of things that need to be screamed about. Some are pointing even now at new lines conservatives, other reactionaries, and even liberals are trying to cross, and we (as a society) don't need to be caught unprepared next time. We can listen instead of sticking our heads in the sand and stop treating every warning as an overreaction simply because the forecasted problems are not immediate.

Now, on the precipice of so many wide-sweeping changes (not just with bodily autonomy but also the environment, the militarization of the police, and so much more), we cannot remain ignorant of such warnings and still be surprised when they come to pass.