Mike Doughney

As any significant reform, much less overhaul, of America’s healthcare system looks more and more unlikely, I thought I’d repost this: a brief article that Sabina and I wrote almost 12 years ago, and had published in a small, long-defunct, obscure journal. In recent times it has been clear to me that the anti-abortion movement was just a precursor, a demonstration of how fictional hoaxes could be used to derail access to healthcare. The same tactics are playing out today at the national level. We were right to point out that abortion may be a mere footnote in the context of then-future efforts to eliminate what many had often taken for granted, such as the availability and affordability of healthcare for even a majority of Americans. Abortion was the means to move their people, overcoming inertia to create a broad campaign to broadly marginalize and demonize science, medicine and healthcare.

By Mike Doughney and Lauren Sabina Kneisly

as published in the Body Politic, January/February 1998

Access to abortion services is going to continue disappearing in the next 5 years. While providers are aging, few newcomers are learning the technique. Harassment and vigilante action, along with new restrictions, also contribute to the growing unavailability of the procedure. Even new technologies remain unavailable or difficult to obtain under these conditions.

While it is important to have an understanding of why we got here, we should be talking about what must be done now to stop a very broad
movement that is openly fighting a war across many fronts. The Biblical America movement, which has seldom been taken seriously for the past 25 years, continues to gain real power. While each group threatened by this movement independently works in their own field, opposition is fragmented and ineffective in countering progress toward the goals of BA. Sole focus on abortion, without acknowledging the interconnections to other issues exploited by the Biblical America movement, is a grave strategic mistake.

We fail to notice that they are teaching a whole new generation a set of values alien to us. For instance, they’ve succeded in gaining access to public schools, through so-called “chastity programs,” to teach that abortion is to be avoided at all costs. Not only their own children, but our entire culture, is slowly absorbing and accepting the concept of abortion prohibition.

It’s through 25 years of neglect, of accepting Roe as an end and not one point of a process of legitimizing abortion, that we’ve arrived here.

It’s basically pointless to discuss the particulars of abortion “rights” when we are about to be overrun by an antidemocratic, fascist, theocratic movement that will do away with much of what we take for granted; the loss of abortion will be a minor historical footnote.