Uvalde, Abortion, and You

Robb Elementary School has been shuttered and is scheduled for demolition.

One year ago today, on May 24th, 2022, a gunman armed with a high-yield assault rifle and seven spare ammunition clips entered Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. Nobody stopped the gunman (who shall remain nameless here) for 74 minutes, despite the eventual presence of nearly 400 federal, state, and local law enforcement officers on-scene. The shooter killed twenty-one people and injured eighteen, the third-deadliest school shooting, and ninth-deadliest civilian mass shooting, in American history.

This past Monday, May 22nd, 2023, Nebraska Governor Jim Pillen signed LB574, a controversial bill that both establishes a 12-week abortion ban statewide, and bans all gender-affirming medical care for minors. By mashing together two popular conservative bugbears—Nebraska’s legislature is nominally nonpartisan, but dominated by Republicans—this new law gives the state sweeping omnibus authority in how Nebraskans express their sex and sexuality. The “small government party” is literally regulating private citizens’ genital activity.

The correspondence between these two events couldn’t be more jarring. In the year since the Uvalde shooting, state legislatures and Congress have done nothing about America’s overwhelming concentration of private firearms, which now outnumber U.S. citizens and legal residents. These changes, we’re told, take time. Yet at this writing, nineteen states have banned or severely restricted abortion in the eleven months since the Dobbs decision, proving that lawmakers can, indeed, work quickly when they try.

We’re already hearing horror stories emerging about abortion bans’ unanticipated consequences. One high-profile story out of Florida featured a woman forced to carry her fetus to term, knowing it had no kidneys, underdeveloped lungs, and other deadly fetal abnormalities. The baby lived for 94 minutes. A South Carolina Republican legislator publicly regretted the abortion ban he co-sponsored when it almost immediately nearly killed a 19-year-old woman. These are just the stories getting national media traction.

Personally, I formerly opposed abortion, until about 25 years ago. A woman I knew suffered an incomplete miscarriage that created complications which very nearly killed her. Because the treatment for her condition was technically an abortion (although her fetus was already dead), several hospitals bounced her case before one accepted her. That’s when I realized the nuance and complexity of abortion. Last week, I decried LB574 on social media, saying: “this will get people killed.”

A friend responded: “People die by abortion every day.” I don’t know whether my friend means adult women suffer complications daily, or if she counts aborted fetuses as dead humans. Either way, she’s wrong. Pew Research disagrees that complications are common. And even if we believe unborn fetuses are fully human, which I don’t, the underdeveloped fetus cannot have more value than the mother, and her ability to survive and care for her existing children.

Furthermore, our inability to protect elementary school children from Uvalde-style massacres proves that we don’t care about the living. Our legislatures can’t pass even rudimentary precautions like red-flag laws, background checks, and safe storage standards. With no way to prevent weapons hoarding, mass shootings are now literally a daily event. Mass shooters routinely target locations where children congregate, including schools, malls, churches, and concerts. We’ve known this for years, and we’ve done nothing about it.

Claims that we pass anti-abortion legislation to protect children are abject and demonstrable bullshit. The states most likely to pass onerous abortion restrictions are also least likely to have affordable prenatal care. Texas has restrictive abortion laws, and a permitless carry law similar to one recently signed by Nebraska governor Jim Pillen. It also has a high and growing mass shooting rate. Conditions are worse in Texas now than they were before the Uvalde shooting.

Stopping mass shootings don’t require mass roundups of civilian firearms, which no serious lawmaker is proposing anyway. Evidence suggests most mass shooters have a prior history of domestic violence; the Uvalde shooter shot his grandmother in the face before moving onto the school. (She survived.) Taking guns away from convicted domestic abusers would protect not only the abusers’ families, but anyone else who may suffer knock-on effects. That suggestion seems both low-friction and supremely modest.

Yet we continue doing nothing. We love every human life while it remains an abstract platonic ideal swimming in the amniotic goo. But the minute it needs a doctor, or a square meal, or protection from an AR-15, our sympathy evaporates. Indeed, we don’t protect fetuses because they’re human; we protect them because they aren’t human, untainted by original sin or human avarice. The minute it becomes human, we’re ready to kill the damn thing.