Modesty and Abortion

With the US Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, leaving the question of abortion up to individual states, many American Mormons are celebrating the chance they have to live in a state that bans all (or nearly all) abortions. The Church’s official position allows for abortion under some circumstances, which makes it not consistent with such blanket bans. So why the inconsistency? Why, when the official position allows for some exceptions, are so many Church members excited to have all abortions banned?

A few years ago, I wrote a post where I asked this question and suggested an answer based on reviewing a bunch of Church rhetoric around abortion. I concluded that while GAs wrote the exceptions, their rhetoric constantly minimizes their occurrence, making them seem so rare as to be negligible.

Today I want to consider another line of explanation in addition: Church rhetoric on other issues—I’m taking modesty as an example—is based on a deeply patriarchal worldview that is straightforward to apply to abortion too. Note, just to be clear, that I’m not arguing that the Church’s stance on modesty causes its (or its members’) stance on abortion. I’m just saying that they’re both driven by the same underlying stance on women, so when GAs talk about one issue, it’s easy for members to understand the worldview and generalize it to another issue.

Image credit: National Photo Company, retrieved from Library of Congress PPOC

Here are some points of similarity I’m thinking of:

Men’s responsibility is ignored.

In Church modesty rhetoric, there is lots of discussion of women (and girls) needing to dress a particular way to avoid giving men (and boys) sexual thoughts or ideas about their sexual availability. There is no discussion of the need for men to stop themselves from objectifying women, regardless of how they’re dressed. (This is in contrast, of course, to Jesus’s famous admonition that “if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out . . .”)

It’s easy to see how this line of thinking lines up with abortion too. Nearly all pregnancies result from an act of sexual intercourse between a man and a woman, but anti-abortion rhetoric focuses pretty much completely on women. Sex is something that just happens, and so is pregnancy. Men’s participation is ignored. It’s assumed that if women don’t want to be pregnant, it’s on them to prevent it from happening. The whole topic of abortion isn’t even brought up until there’s a pregnancy.

The same line of thinking plays out in the Church too. Men are never reminded not to pressure their partners into unwanted sex or into unwanted pregnancy. In fact, given that couples are told to work out their childbearing decisions between themselves and God, but husbands are also told they’re to preside over their families, it seems likely that the effect in many families is that husbands dictate to wives how many children they will be bearing. Also, needless to say given that even these topics aren’t discussed, men are certainly never told explicitly not to commit rape.

Women’s (dangerous) sexuality needs regulation by men.

In the Church, modesty rhetoric comes mostly from male leaders. For example, the For the Strength of Youth pamphlet, a frequently referred-to resource on modesty, has a message from the First Presidency at the beginning, and is clearly intended to be understood as coming from them. Even when women leaders are the deliverers of the modesty message, it’s clearly one that ultimately comes from men. The message is almost entirely focused on women, with men’s modesty mentioned as an afterthought, if at all. (For example, FTSoY explicitly mentions several particular clothing choices young women should avoid, but then for young men, only has the bland comment that “Young men should also maintain modesty in their appearance.”) The implication is clear that women’s bodies are troublesome tempters of men, but men’s bodies do not pose a similar threat to women.

Along similar lines, abortion laws in the US are by and large passed by male-dominated legislative bodies, and are targeted pretty much exclusively at women. Prior to the overturn of Roe, many states passed laws that communicated the clear message that women were too irresponsible with their sexuality and needed a (male) government hand to control them. For example, I’m thinking of the laws that required a pregnant person to read anti-abortion literature, or to get a trans-vaginal ultrasound, or to return on a different day, before being permitted to get an abortion. No state legislature that I’m aware of passed a law that aimed to reduce abortion by punishing men for irresponsible ejaculation when a woman they had impregnated got an abortion. Because men just aren’t seen as needing to be regulated in that way, even when we are the ultimate causes of abortion.

Rape is women’s responsibility.

Although such rhetoric is several decades old, GAs have talked about rape in ways that make clear that they think a victim can be responsible. Spencer W. Kimball, in The Miracle of Forgiveness, infamously said,

Even in a forced contact such as rape or incest, the injured one is greatly outraged. If she has not cooperated and contributed to the foul deed, she is of course in a more favorable position. There is no condemnation where there is no voluntary participation.

The line “if she has not cooperated or contributed” suggests that it’s possible she might have cooperated or contributed. Speaking of abuse more generally, Richard G. Scott said in a 1992 conference talk,

At some point in time, however, the Lord may prompt a victim to recognize a degree of responsibility for abuse.

Like I said, these are a few decades old. The problem is that the Church’s policy of never refuting bad ideas it wants to move away from means that they’re still out there, available to be applied by more patriarchal leaders. Not to mention that there’s just not much ever said about rape in the Church, leaving anyone who goes looking to find only harsh comments like these ones. I also think it’s an open question just how much the current Q15 would even want to refute statements like this. Given how modesty rhetoric places the blame for men’s arousal at women’s feet, it seems like a small leap to also blaming women for what men do with their arousal too. And again, as I noted above, men are never taught at Church not to commit rape, so the balance of the rhetoric clearly suggests that rape is thought of as a women’s issue.

Again, the connection to abortion is straightforward. Where Church rhetoric suggests that women may be to blame when they’re raped, anti-abortion laws that make no exception for rape don’t just rhetorically blame women, but actually place punishment for rape on an impregnated woman. It is also important to note that, given that the harsh treatment that the American legal system so often gives to victims of rape, many women choose not to even report it when they’re raped, so rape exception for abortion does little good. In the first place, it’s unlikely that a rape victim will be able to have their attacker convicted and therefore have the option to get a legal abortion. Second, and perhaps even worse, the existence of such an exception will almost certainly mean that women who report being raped will be viewed with even more suspicion than before, as they’ll be seen as crying rape only to get access to an abortion that they couldn’t otherwise legally have.

Women’s experience is irrelevant.

Church rhetoric on women’s clothing choices is pretty much entirely focused on modesty, on how what women wears affects men. There’s no concern whatsoever for women’s own experience of wearing particular clothes. Does a particular article of clothing make a woman feel powerful, or objectified, or frumpy, or beautiful, or unsafe? These questions are never discussed. What matters is what men think or feel when they see women wearing such clothes. This can be seen perhaps most clearly in rules commonly applied at young women’s summer camps, where girls are often required to wear not only one-piece swimsuits, but also clothes (including pants in some cases) over those swimsuits. These rules are often justified by appealing to the need for visiting priesthood leaders to remain untempted. It’s clear that it’s more important to enforce a norm of a high level of skin coverage than to have any concern for whether the girls might even be safe doing things like swimming while wearing clothes that can easily become waterlogged.

Along the same lines, anti-abortion discussion has little to no concern for pregnant women’s experience. People are happy to argue that it’s no big deal for a woman to carry a pregnancy to term, ignoring that even the most ordinary of pregnancy experiences can be physically taxing. And this is to say nothing of the emotional trauma of being forced to carry a pregnancy after being raped, or situations where pregnant people risk their health or even life. And of course, even in situations where a pregnancy cannot possibly end with a viable birth, no-exceptions laws will happily let a woman die.

To conclude, again I’m not saying that the Church’s rhetoric about modesty is intended to cause, or even does directly cause, its members to oppose legal abortion. It’s more just that this rhetoric communicates a strongly patriarchal worldview, in which it makes sense that women need to be controlled with unforgiving abortion laws.

22 comments

  1. This is so depressing. I hate the patriarchy. It’s such a cruel and arrogant worldview. I doubly hate it when the patriarchs get all sweet and condescending as they insist that they know best and women just need to be more humble about everything.

  2. Amen to Bro. Jones and Janey’s comments.

    I hate that men are never held accountable when it comes to their contributions to modesty/purity culture and causing unplanned pregnancies. It’s why the young men are allowed to run around shirtless at camp and play skins vs. shirts basketball games while the young women have to wear shorts and shirts over their one-piece swimsuits. It’s why girls and women always have their hemlines measured, are told to “cover up” when wearing certain shirts (that oftentimes aren’t even revealing at all), and why their dress codes are several pages long when the ones for the boys and men are a mere sentence. It’s why women and girls are blamed when they’re sexually abused. It’s why a man who gets a woman pregnant is allowed to leave her and not have any responsibility for what he’s done.

    Of course, everyone knows that one way to reduce abortions is to hold men accountable for getting women pregnant in the first place, but no one ever wants to do that.

  3. I think the stories that are told and those that are not told in talks have significant cultural impact. There was a recent talk by Elder Cook (the other Quentin) in which he valorizes a woman who chose to continue with a high risk pregnancy, literally one of the situations the church would allow for an abortion. How many talks/articles are there about women who made the other choice in such circumstances? I’m going to speculate and say it’s zero. The implication of such a talk is that even if you’re in a situation where an abortion would be considered an acceptable choice, your choice is considered inferior.

    This happens on other questions as well. I can think of several general conference talks about individuals who heroically chose not to compete in an important sporting event on Sunday, but we’ve got more than one Seventy now who played in the NFL and NBA, and I sure haven’t heard any of them give talks (yet) about their decisions to play on Sunday.

  4. I can’t help but wonder what our country would be like if all elected leaders were women. As a man, I would welcome the experiment. I suspect we would all be far better off.

  5. Thanks for your comments.

    Bro. Jones and Janey, amen. Patriarchs who know best are awful.

    JC, exactly! Both the church and the political rhetoric is clearly so male-driven because it’s so female-focused. Abortions are bad so we need to stop these troublesome women from getting them. Never a word about stopping these troublesome men from contributing to the pregnancies. Because regulating the men is anathema. Actually, it’s probably even worse. It’s just not a think male lawmakers and male GAs can even imagine.

    Quentin, spot on! I’m sure you’re right that we get story after story of women who valiantly refused an abortion even when their life was on the line, and of course came through and everything was fine. We get zero stories of women who died after doing this, or whose children died, or whose families were driven into poverty. And of course we never get stories of women who chose abortion, even under one of the “approved” circumstances. The message is pretty clear. The GAs want to offer these exceptions, but they still see it as wicked if anyone has an abortion for any reason.

    Tom, yes! I would find that arrangement so much more reasonable in so many ways. Even setting aside domestic issues like abortion, aren’t women politicians less prone to go to war than men politicians?

  6. RE: Quentin (not Cook)’s observation that anecdotes in our rhetoric are all about those who took the risk to keep the baby and everything came up roses. I’m pretty sure it was FMH a few years ago that put out the definitive work on that (can’t find that blogpost right now), but this was their conclusion, too. I think my concern is that the question of abortion has much greater moral significance than how much of human bodies gets covered/displayed. Our rhetoric, because it exclusively presents the “success” stories does not really help an LDS woman (or a couple, when the father is involved) truly wrestle with the decision when they are faced with it. How do you really weigh the risks to the mother and/or child as you try to decide what to do when the only choice you’ve been presented is “if there is any chance of the child being born alive, then keep the pregnancy?” IMO, one of the starting places to really improve our rhetoric around abortion is to really talk about that decision and when a woman might choose to continue the pregnancy and when she might choose to abort.

  7. Re: Quentin (not Cook)’s comment-
    The church speaks loudest through intimation and code, winks and nods. Church members have been trained to read between the lines, and ignore or deprioritize official positions, especially political ones. Implicit rhetoric=for the faithful, explicit rhetoric= for our worldly enemies. Church members read strict pro-life from our pulpits,
    despite what the handbook says.

    There’s a podcast (I think) on Mormon Matters about correlation, where the history of our wink and nod speech is flushed-out. Essentially, being persecuted, maligned and misunderstood by outsiders- we developed internal and external communication styles. This wink/nod communication hit a zenith during the end of polygamy.
    The manifesto is a prime example of the church walking a tightrope between doctrine/belief and political necessity and its public face. We did end polygamy, but not overnight, and during that transition time- this masked rhetoric further evolved.

    Here’s another example. For years the church has advocated for mothers to stay at home, while also bolding exemptions for working mothers. But, 99% of the time they model/honor the SAHM and tell stories of women who chose to stay home *despite* qualifying for those exemptions. (Sound familiar???) Similarly, motherhood has always been held on a pedestal and gushed over for countless hours, while the exceptions are listed under a cough. I just love how a talk on motherhood can make non-mothers feel horrible for 99% of the time, but everything is supposed to be ok because one sentence excusing only certain circumstances was uttered. I’m not saying they haven’t done better recently, or that they have been entirely silent in support of non-mothers or working mothers, but this has been the overwhelming historical pattern. They strategically lend time and volume to their (sadly) impractical cultural norms and implicit curriculum. (Remember Julie B Beck’s “Mothers who know” talk? Prime example. ) Knowing about this implicit/internal communication style I winced seeing Elder Oaks’ Deseret-Book-headlining daughter stumping for 45 during the last election by using her last name, sacred hymns and pictures of the SL Temple. Technically, she skirted the policy her dad couldn’t- and sadly many members “read” into this. Elder Oaks was constrained by politics to speak, but the wink, wink, message still got out for the faithful who were listening. (And we wonder why too many saints fell so hard for Q. It’s in our DNA. )

    We have essentially 200 years practice of following subtext. This is the *real* message we’ve been enculturated to flow. So, the subtext of patriarchy and a need to control women’s evil sexuality that you’ve highlighted really well in this post, resonates *more* with the masses than the litany of circumstance or policy. That’s the juice, the flow we’ve been taught to follow. I think many members don’t even consciously know what is happening, they are seeking layers of meaning in religion, and succumb to this tactic. (I think it causes a lot of our endemic depression too—- and is sometimes talked about as Mormon guilt.) Corporate leaders know how to use this implicit/explicit rhetoric to walk the tightrope between productivity/mission and regulation. Our leaders wield this tool with utmost skill and intention. You can’t convince me otherwise. (I’m always impressed with the women who have little or no corporate practice with this technique who do it *as well as* the men who have decades of professional practice. There’s more to
    climbing up the GA ladder than simply emulating GA voice, hair or clothing; there are the communication techniques to master as well.)

  8. I’m really struck by the point about what’s not said, about the stories that aren’t told. I’m thinking of a similar observation that you hear faith-promoting stories about how a family had an impression that they needed to have just one more child, even if that didn’t seem terribly realistic. I don’t think there has ever been a cautionary tale about a family who had too many children and then the mother had a nervous breakdown.

    I also like Mortimer’s point about communicating between the lines. I feel like I’ve encountered this with the statement issued every election year about political neutrality; some people definitely hear it as, in order to placate the government we will say this thing, but you know how we really want you to vote, wink wink.

    What’s wild about the current situation, I feel like, is that the church’s official position is now to the left of a big chunk of the anti-abortion movement, given that so many bans no longer have exemptions for anything except the life of the mother being endangered (and even that’s a problematic one, because it’s so vaguely defined that health care workers don’t know at what point they’re allowed to give lifesaving care, leading to horrific consequences). I’d love to see some LDS leader denounce those extreme right-wing positions as contrary to church policy, but I’m not holding my breath.

  9. Regarding stories that aren’t told (but should be), I think about this one a lot:

    https://bycommonconsent.com/2020/10/28/reflections-on-heartbreak-and-choice/

    I wonder how many women I’ve attended church with over the years – Nursery leaders, Primary teachers/counselors/secretaries/teachers, YW presidents/counselors/secretaries/advisors, Relief Society presidents/counselors/secretaries/teachers – have made this heartbreaking decision themselves, but have kept it quiet due to the stigma and risk of church discipline. I suspect the number is much higher than anyone thinks.

    On that note, I wonder how many faithful LDS women continued carrying a pregnancy with genetic defects and/or a life-limiting diagnosis not out of choice, but out of obligation, pressure, fear of how their church leaders and fellow congregants would react, knowing what the church’s stance on abortion is, and not wanting to be forced out of their faith community. It’s hard not to wonder if those women feel any resentment towards their heavenly parents, the church, and church leaders about being saddled with such a pregnancy and what comes after.

  10. MrShorty, that’s an excellent point that Church rhetoric provides no real guidance on making real-world decisions around abortion. It would be a great step forward if it did, assuming the guidance could manage to actually follow the Church’s policy rather than, as you point out, effectively saying “The baby-to-be is everything; nothing else matters.”

    Also, no worries on mixing my post up with FMH! I’m honored to be mixed up with such a fine blog. And mostly I’m just glad you remembered the post! It’s one of the ones I’m most proud of my work on, even if it was a really depressing one.

    Mortimer, yes! Thanks for adding that broader context. I don’t know if you’ve read Joanna Brooks’s book Mormonism and White Supremacy, but I think in there she calls this phenomenon “undergrounding.” As you point out so well, it’s a much broader thing than abortion. It happens with so many topics where we as Church members clearly learn that some things said by GAs are said for public (non-Church) consumption, and shouldn’t be taken entirely at face value.

    I also think your comparison to women working for pay is spot on. Church rhetoric that allows for mayyyybe some possible exceptions to the general rule of it being wicked if there are small children at home is really shown to be not serious by all the stories of righteous women only being SAHMs.

    Lynnette, that’s a great point about the Church now being to the left of lots of laws, as well as the evangelical Christians who are running the show. I wonder if they’d consider spending a little money on pushing for liberalization of the super-harsh no-exceptions laws in some states, but like you said, I’m not holding my breath.

    JC, I agree. I suspect there are far more women in the Church who have had to face this issue personally than we would ever guess. They can clearly read the writing on the wall, though, and they know that it would only get them branded as evil to ever bring it up in the face of the rah-rah pro-life rhetoric that’s so common at church.

  11. A thought I had is that suggesting adoption as an alternative or solution to abortion reflects a very male-centric view of the issue. Abortion and adoption both have the exact same costs and results for man: he will no longer have parental obligations. There’s that problem solved, right?

    However adoption and abortion are nowhere NEAR equivalent for the person who will be pregnant. Pretending they are the same completely ignores the costs of pregnancy (financial, emotional, and physical) even assuming everything goes perfectly and there’s no complications.

    I thought this is a tidy example of the patriarchal worldview you describe.

  12. Oh, that’s an excellent point, Starfoxy. I said in the post that the patriarchal worldview assumes that pregnancy just happens, by which I meant that it just starts kinda sorta on its own, and we shouldn’t concern ourselves with how it happens (to avoid bringing men’s responsibility into it). But your point is even better, that it’s easy for men to assume that all of pregnancy just kinda sorta happens, and since they (we) aren’t the ones experiencing it, the risks and costs aren’t that important.

  13. One major purpose of mortality is to gain your physical body. Church members should not be pushing worldly views. And yes there are exceptions for abortion life of the mother in danger incest or otherwise

  14. I know, right? Church members should totally not be pushing worldly views like total bans on abortion that so many states have! Thanks for pointing that out, Jonathan.

  15. Several years ago when I was in a YA ward one of the girls in our ward was raped while waiting for an early bus (5:30 a.m.) to take her to work as a janitor at a large corporation’s head office. Someone drove by just as the rapist was finishing and he stopped to try to stop the rapist, but when that proved futile he tried to help the girl and took her to the local police station where they both gave statements about the rapist. A police artist’s sketch was posted all over the community and county but the rapist was never caught.

    About 6 weeks later this girl discovered that she was pregnant. Because she was a bit intellectually challenged she didn’t realize at first what was going on. It was the terrible nausea that gave her condition away.

    Her parents who were staunchly anti-abortion and who were her legal guardians (although she was older than 18) and they insisted that she carry the pregnancy to full term and that she raise the child as “penance” for being raped. Our Relief Society was up in arms over this matter for many reasons as you may well imagine. Our bishop and stake president tried to explain to the parents that both the church and state law stated that abortion was appropriate for pregnancies as a result of rape and that no church action would be taken against their daughter should she go that route. I’m grateful that we had a sensitive and loving bishop who came to Relief Society many times during the next few months because we sisters were unsure how we could best help one of our own through what turned out to be a difficult pregnancy and a traumatic birth process. Frankly, most of us just wanted to kidnap her, take her to a safe place where her parents would never find her and where she could safely have her baby and then give it up for adoption. Unfortunately, kidnapping is against the law.

    We decided that if her parents (her guardians) were forcing her to keep the baby the Relief Society would do everything in its power to make sure that she and her baby felt our love and that neither of them would want for anything in terms of our love, baby clothes and supplies, babysitters and the services of a public health nurse who lived in our stake. Our bishop got permission from Salt Lake to have the baby blessed in our ward. That baby blessing was one of the greatest spiritual experiences most of us had ever had.

    A few months later I had to move away. Soon after I left this poor girl and her baby also left the ward. The word was that her parents were angry with our bishop and the ward for trying to love and serve our poor dear sister and her baby. They felt that she needed grim punishment for being raped (she asked for it!) and getting pregnant. I’ve often wondered what happened to both her and her poor baby. The thought of an intellectually challenged woman trying to raise a baby in the home of her hateful and punitive parents filled me with foreboding. I hope that there’s a special place in hell for her horrible parents who made a traumatic situation so much worse because there was no love in their hard hearts.

    The anti-abortion folks are so worried about unborn babies, but as soon as those babies are born into poverty, to single mothers, into homes and families who have anger issues, substance abuse problems and domestic violence situations and more the concern suddenly dries up and these now born babies and their mothers are left to get on as best they can. Most of the anti-abortion proponents proudly wear their Christian bona fides on their sleeves. Unfortunately, they have not only forgotten the two great commandments: to love God and to love others, but they have also forgotten that Jesus said that when we love, serve and uplift others we are doing likewise to Him. When we choose not to do so, we are choosing to forget or, worse, ignore Him. If these people really love Jesus how can they conveniently forget this integral teaching of His?

  16. Wow, Poor Wayfaring Stranger, what a horrifying story! I think your conclusion is spot on. Concern for “the unborn” seems pretty hollow when it turns into total lack of interest in the already-born.

  17. Ziff
    I must be old school because I think that the prophets and apostles are set here as guideposts to help us navigate mortality and return to Heavenly father. I think we should cleave unto to their words and not the world and I know on this blog this probably won’t be popular but that’s just what I think.

  18. That’s nice, Jonathan. You’re right. This probably isn’t the blog for you if your position is that we should uncritically accept everything that comes from the Q15. I do exhort you, though, to consider how you too are a cafeteria Mormon. If you’re celebrating total abortion bans, how does this square with the Church’s official stance that abortion is permissible under some circumstances? The answer is that it doesn’t, but you’re clearly picking and choosing among the prophets’ words, just like I’m sure you think heretics like I do.

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