Shame On You, Governor Ricketts

Wednesday Pete Ricketts, the Republican governor of Nebraska, tweeted this piece of absolute bilge:

Nebraska is a #prolife state, and we support the brave pro-life champions and their work in Alabama and Georgia.https://t.co/WCUGYqZliM

— Gov. Pete Ricketts (@GovRicketts) May 15, 2019

Without doubt, my response to Governor Ricketts’ worthless message is colored by my beliefs. I’ve described myself as a Pro-Choice Christian, because my faith requires me to refrain from imposing myself on others’ most harrowing medical choices. Ricketts, by contrast, throws his weight behind one of America’s most authoritarian mandatory birth laws, implying he’ll push something similar in Nebraska soon.

Let’s make something clear: Nebraska’s current political climate, while deeply opposed to abortion, is anything but pro-life. Nebraska has one of America’s highest maternal mortality rates, especially in poor and rural areas—and remember, most of Nebraska is rural. Nebraska’s investment in early childhood education is dismal. While other conservative states impose an abstinence-only sex-ed curriculum on schools, Nebraska has no statewide standards whatsoever.

That’s saying nothing about what many opponents call a clearly pro-life issue: Governor Ricketts has actively campaigned to reinstate, and expand, the death penalty. After Nebraska’s legislature repealed capital punishment, Ricketts, who was born rich, used his personal money to fund a referendum drive to get it restored. He then executed Nebraska’s first criminal in twenty-one years, despite having to illegally import drugs from India to do it.

So if this is Governor Ricketts’ idea of “a #prolife state”, God help us if he ever decides to become pro-death.

Governor Ricketts opposes the Affordable Care Act, and continues actively slow-walking a Medicaid Expansion bill approved by a majority of Nebraska voters, on putatively libertarian grounds. He doesn’t want federal or state government getting involved in economic issues. Yet both the Alabama abortion law, and Nebraska’s continued support for capital punishment, are massively authoritarian. You cannot kill people, or regulate uteruses, without circumscribing other people’s freedoms.

There’s an important distinction, though. Governor Ricketts, like many current right-wing mavens, quietly elides the economic impacts of his policies. The ACA would pinch insurance providers, who are overwhelmingly rich: insurance is one of America’s most lucrative private industries. Women who seek abortion, by contrast, are generally poor—and overwhelmingly likely to be even poorer after being denied safe, legal abortion.

Governor Pete Ricketts
(official portrait)

Based on the evidence, it appears Ricketts (who, again, was born rich) sides with money. His talk of having anti-abortion ethics is strictly a rhetorical condom; he will support whatever positions further enrich the wealthy, and further impoverish the poor. Any attempt to recreate the Alabama abortion law in Nebraska, without improvements to WIC, Head Start, public schools, and other instruments of collective betterment, will clearly make the poor even poorer.

One only need read summaries of these new, aggressive anti-abortion laws to understand this. The leading issue, for me, is the stipulation requiring police to investigate every miscarriage as potential homicide. Much coverage of this stipulation has focused on the fundamental lack of knowledge about reproduction this implies. I’d go further: when societies provide prenatal medical care below the standards available, miscarriage is an economic issue.

That is to say, poor women are more likely to miscarry, because they have less access to appropriate medicine. Therefore, under these laws, they’re more likely to be considered criminals, and have to defend themselves against serious accusations, than better-off women. So they’ll have to spend money they don’t have on criminal defense, going into debt to cover the expenses, locking themselves into further intractable debt.

Therefore the law that Alabama Governor Kay Ivey just ratified, and which Governor Ricketts implies he’d like to replicate, isn’t a passive defense of life. It’s an active effort to legally and morally punish poor women for being poor, and for being women. It isn’t a benevolent act designed to protect children, no matter what rhetorical spin advocates place upon it; if it were, it would include basic schooling and medical care.

So, let me address Governor Ricketts directly: Sir. If you continue this path, you’ll first lose all libertarian credibility forever. You cannot champion libertarianism for rich people, while increasing authoritarian intrusion in poor people’s wombs, without people noticing. Many voters may applaud this high-handed action on moral grounds, so whatever. But libertarians will forever notice your authoritarianism, and they generally have long memories.

But that’s only your first loss, sir. More seriously, you’ll lose the support of Nebraskans who will see you increasing police presence in conservative rural areas—which are your base. They’ll see your representatives interrogating women in hospital beds. They’ll see you actively criminalizing poverty. And sir, they will notice, and they won’t let you forget this shame.