Some prolife Christians I went to high school with are posting agreement and support for a recent John Kass essay which goes on a rant about pro-choice people being ritually loyal to a death cult. Written by Kass and posted on his self-published digital platform johnkassnews dot com. I don't want to link it here because of its harmful content. His essay is tapped in to the energy of recent viral outrage over an image of a full term pregnant woman, Amanda Herring, who painted "Not Yet A Human" on her pregnant belly as a protest message.
Kass is a Greek Orthodox Christian who resides in St. John IN. Christians who share his attitudes and support the rhetorical choices in Kass's article need to reflect a bit more on what he is really doing with his words.
He links to a news article with info about the protesting pregnant woman who painted her belly: she is also the mother of a year-old child and likely has given birth again very recently, as she was protesting 24 hours before her due date. According to the news article Kass hyperlinks to his essay, she is also a Jewish educator, and she is quoted explaining that her statement makes sense if seen as part of Jewish religious ideas about when human life status and soul is conferred upon people: at first breath after birth.
John Kass missed the church history lesson so many of us missed about the loooong Christian tradition of blood libels against Jewish people. We go on and on with ideals of US is meant to be a JudeoChristian nation, but have a shameful European history of portraying the people who are permanently part of a special tree of Abrahamic faith (to which believing Christians are precariously grafted) as having uncivilized beliefs and rituals that endanger innocent children who need to be protected by Christians. 80% of US Jewish people support for pro-choice policies, so it is very alarming to see Kass’s argument that pro-choice proponents are part of a blood sacrifice death cult. This wouldn’t be a new move for fervent Christians, this projection of violent traits outward on other people, which ironically and predictably leads to Christians enacting murderous violence against their Jewish neighbors.
He repeated uses the word hysteria to describe pro-choice people, a word invented to diagnose a mental disorder or demonic possession only afflicting people who have a hystera, or uterus. Women who did not want to get married, for example, were diagnosed with hysteria and institutionalized or tortured.
The byline photo (per usual in Prolife propaganda) is a detached floating unwrapped fetus, floating in celestial gasses, with no visible amniotic sac enclosure or adjacent placenta and uterine wall, purposefully ignoring any flesh existing beyond the umbilical cord. The woman and her uterus is not part of the image, influencing us to individuate the gestating life as its own detached yet alive person. Prolife activists always use unwrapped or unconnected fetusimages and even give out rubber unattached-to-uterus fidget toys to students at prolife training sessions. The fantasy is "if only a fetus were truly free from its uterus, that potential death chamber trapping someone stuck inside a potentially unloving or malicious mother."
And in true Chicago fashion, Kass makes sure to include the racist trope against single mothers by linking fatherless homes and urban communities to an outcome of gang children who slaughter other children. Single mothers who choose to give birth and raise children in harrowing circumstances are just as evil, in Kass's eyes, as this gloriously pregnant mother is in eyes: raising murderous thugs by neglecting kids while at work, or raising social leeches by being caregivers and receiving welfare assistance. This sweeping disdain and disgust for women, esp. Black, brown and Jewish women with leadership roles in their own households, churches, schools, and civic governments, is something to flee, and Christians need to be condemning rather than applauding this kind of essay.
There are many ways for Christians to help their communities acheive higher rates of fullterm pregnancies and healthy live deliveries in US if they are truly concerned about morbidity and mortality losses endured during pregnancy and labor. This ain’t it. Kass is mocking reasonable philosophical outlooks held by a variety of citizens who have equal rights as he does to their conclusions on complex philosophical topics. Our fellow citizens include secular humanists, as well as people subscribing to different faith traditions. A variety of reasonable answers to "when does human personhood begin?" are excellent attempts to balance the ethics and risks of existing as a mortal living being while our blood and oxygenation systems are intertwined with one or more developing mortal living beings. He is diminishing his unquestionably alive neighbors who are women, single moms, and Black and brown Congresswomen by saying they are hysterical, frothing at the mouth killers and mothers of killers. What signals does he show that he’d treat any of these women’s future offspring with respect and love at the developmental stages he would actually encounter them? He will never have access to encounter them while they are in utero, but only when they become living, breathing, opinionated, active, and activist humans like their mothers currently are.
