Why Do White Supremacists Hate Abortion So Much?

Protesters outside Justice Brett Kavanaugh's house this week

Smarter, more informed commentators than me have spilled copious ink in the week since the leaked draft SCOTUS opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson. I won’t waste your time rehashing what better-credentialed pundits have said. I’m more interested in the realization that this opinion is deeply White supremacist. And not just in the sense that poor, non-White women have less access to family planning, and fewer resources to enact any plans.

Historian Kathleen Belew writes that the White Power movement has anchored its public relations strategy heavily on language of motherhood, particularly White motherhood. They realize that, even in America, a nation where racism remains painfully widespread, openly proclaiming for bigotry won’t sell. Even Lee Atwater, the Republican strategist behind much of our generation’s noxious racist American drum-beating, acknowledged that you can’t say that overtly anymore.

Instead, the White Power movement, which arose from nationalist propaganda during and shortly after America’s Vietnam entanglement, co-opted the “wives and mothers back home” language common in military recruitment videos. It pitched a mythology of a world in constant jeopardy from violence, starvation, and dictatorship. Anything we do, the military myth proclaims, is perforce justified, because the alternative is leaving our poor, defenseless women open to depredation and death.

Nor is this exclusively a Vietnam-era claim. Anyone old enough to remember the news coverage surrounding atrocities in places like Abu Ghraib will remember that government salespeople, and the pundits who repeat their fables unquestioningly, accepted this violence as necessary. We must kill these moral monstrosities on their home turf, the legend went, or they’ll come over here. And when they arrive, they’ll target our wives and mothers first.

Any violence, any indignity, is justified by protecting women. Womanhood, a state that is implicitly both White and maternal, is surrounded by constant threats, beset by ravages of injustice prepared to break brutally over America’s women. Thus women need defenders willing to suspend all moral standards and stoop to any violence that will protect our defenseless lady-folk against exploitation. This justifies purging any implied national impurities, which are helpfully color-coded.

Please note, this defense of womanhood isn’t value-neutral. It positions women as weak and defenseless without male intervention. For readers familiar with America’s racial history, this means women are White. As historian Ibram X. Kendi writes, American mythology positions White women as weak and vulnerable, and therefore good. It counterposes Black women as strong and self-reliant, and therefore bad. The source of this binary is murky, but no less real.

Therefore, American mythology has always coded White women as vulnerable to violence, which is defined as rape. White supremacist mythology, like D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation and Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, repeatedly present White women as constantly one misstep away from rape. Any violence, no matter how disproportionate, no matter how antithetical to supposed Christian values, is justified by protecting White women.

Now I acknowledge, in a worldview where the worst possible injustice a White woman can suffer is rape, the contradiction that abortion should be restricted or banned. But in this mythology, motherhood is sacrosanct; a White woman’s foremost responsibility, to retain her standing as defenseless and therefore pure, is to give birth. Even if that birth contravenes White Supremacist beliefs about racial purity and the evils of miscegenation, that concern comes second.

That’s why, prior to the Dobbs leak, so many state-level abortion restrictions involved appeals to supposed maternal instinct. Forcing women to listen to a fetal heartbeat (although embryologists know that isn’t, by any definition, a heart) or view transvaginal ultrasounds, are unnecessary hurdles designed to tweak the supposedly muted maternal drive. See the babe, this reasoning goes, and women will melt into puddles of maternal goo.

Perhaps this explains why White supremacist groups also abhor transgendered people. American White supremacy has a rigidly defined gender script, and anybody who doesn’t conform with that script is considered dangerous. LGBTQIA+ people are, to White supremacists, even worse than self-fulfilled women. Because they can’t become, in the conventional sense, parents, they’ve abnegated the one role every person is meant to fulfill. Therefore they are unclean and need removed.

The simple fact that countless women don’t want this protection, that many women don’t consider defenselessness a state they aspire to, doesn’t faze these defenders. Women who make their own choices about motherhood violate the script, and need punished. Hard-right lawmakers may claim they’re defending fetal lives when they outlaw IUDs and investigate miscarriages. But fundamentally, it’s about preserving nationalist myths of White motherhood.