Hyde Is What Happens When Left Fakes Right
Today, we mark 40 years of the Hyde Amendment. This law banning federal money from funding abortion has been renewed through administrations Democratic and Republican. Beyond hindering access to abortion, Hyde encapsulates what happens when Left fakes Right and unwittingly undermines its own aims.
Since before Roe v. Wade legalized abortion, the dominant note advocates sounded was one of “choice” and keeping “laws off our bodies.” From arguing this 1973 Supreme Court case on privacy (not equity) grounds to bumper stickers declaring “US out of my uterus,” they took the libertarian approach, hoping to hook folks from the right side of the spectrum.
Yet, in construing abortion as a “right,” proponents ignored the economic side of the equation, as Reproductive Justice proponents have argued for decades.
Most Democrats joined the “government out” chorus. Arguably, they won: forty years of renewing a Hyde Amendment made more restrictive under Bill Clinton in 1993.
This “government out” approach curried favor in a White House that also argued “It Takes a Village to Raise a Child.” Yet, these are contradictory notions. Staking our claim to a woman’s right to determine and control her reproduction (“my choice”) on the assumption that she (or both parents) must assume sole responsibility for childrearing (“my child”) has proven a shaky foundation for reproductive rights. Factor in what it suggests about childrearing, and it’s revealed as conceptual quicksand.
America’s last place in the industrialized world status on paid family leave, childcare supports, maternal health, child poverty and so on is well known. We’ve created an America where, by law, only the few adults actually related to a child need move a finger.
The literal language and underlying ethos of “choice” now appears across the political spectrum. Substitute in “parental choice” for “personal choice” in a “freedom from government intrusion” narrative and you have the favored argument for “reforming” (read: privatizing) public schools. Empowering parents to select what is best for their own children proved an ideal foundation for the charter school movement. This makes sense in a paradigm where kids are individually owned products to be perfected, not members of society to be reared and integrated.
British sociologists coined the term “parentocracy” for the notion that what befalls children, how well or ill they do, is entirely up to the parents. If certain kids ace all the tests while other are “left behind” or don’t “race to the top,” surely it’s the parents (and teachers) to blame. Never the structural features of society that ensure some kids endure poverty and violence as staples of childhood.
Parentocracy is also the through line between the Jew-Bu in Marin County who won’t vaccinate her daughter and the Evangelical in Appalachia homeschooling her son. My child, my choice — as the saying goes.
For wealthy Americans, the seldom voiced but all encompassing belief that offspring are the ultimate consumer good has brought us everything from Mommy Wars, to PTA battles over school lunch contents, to apps that filter other people’s babies out of your social media feeds. For the rest of us, these same ideals have led to the systematic dismantling of social supports for child development topped off with blaming all economic ills on family disintegration.
We’ve reached a point of dangerous fixation on the interactions between parents (read: mothers) and their kids. And it exists in seemingly opposing political paradigms. Dr. Spears, Dr. Spock and the Religious Right’s Dr. Dobson come to wildly different pronouncements on how to rear kids. But, they all take as their unspoken point of departure that parents — almost exclusively — ought to be working toward “producing” perfect offspring.
The debates about bottle versus breast and cry it out versus continuous comfort have taken such outsize importance that we failed to notice there’s a larger conversation we accepted never having: the role society ought to play in the complex and expensive task of raising the next generation. Hyde is the mere tip of this metaphorical iceberg.
Upon this anniversary, advocates are urging lawmakers to “be bold end Hyde.” Let’s bury with it the fiction of “my child, my choice.” If parents are forced to make reproductive decisions and raise children without social supports, we risk harming the kind of adults we need kids to become. The small people in any parent’s care are also everyone else’s future proctologists, police officers or politicians. Wouldn’t we like them to be competent or even happy, healthy and successful?
