Pharoah Did it First

To Be Black and Christian in the Aftermath of the Dobbs Decision

It’s the states’ right to decide.
This sounds familiar.
There’s no guarantee of ‘liberty’.
I think we’ve heard this already.
The constitution doesn’t grant you that right.
I’m pretty sure we’ve heard this before.
It must be deeply rooted in this nation’s history.

All of these lines, summarized from the majority opinion in the Supreme Court ruling on Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, are familiar. They echo sentiments shouted to maintain unjust systems and to stall progress. They were among the arguments against abolition, against civil rights, against equal rights, against … justice. It should not, then, have come as a shock to hear them repeated in the Supreme Court’s decision to deny a right to bodily autonomy. We should not have been surprised that the “constitutional purists” would look backward to a time when only a few – landed, white, and male – had any voice, any choice, any rights at all. We should not have been surprised to hear those same sentiments repeated, again, in threats to overturn every decision for progress the Supreme Court has rendered. We heard it all before.

 So many people, though, were shocked at the ruling. So many people were surprised that the highest court in the land would rule that the prevailing interests of the state prevents the individual from choosing to have an abortion. They should read their Bibles more.

In the first chapter of Exodus, we find a frustrated Pharoah. He looks around and notices that the population has changed. The foreigner outnumbers the “native.” He begins to fear that those who had fled to Egypt because of famine in their own land were replacing the Egyptians. He begins to oppress the people, casting them into slavery. When that doesn’t destroy them, Pharoah makes the labor harder. When they still thrive, Pharoah turns his attention to reproduction. He declares it the right of the state to determine who will and will not have children. Pharoah commands which children should live and which shall die. He commences a reign of terror against the bodies of birthing women and toddlers. The people, he declares, are property of the state and it is the state’s right to decide their fate.

Pharoah did it first.

 The Dobbs decision followed a wave of protests for the sanctity of Black lives. It came at the heels of a wave of awareness that Black and Brown bodies are overpoliced and highly murdered. Even in the midst of disease, young people (and some of the rest of us) piled into the streets to declare they’d had enough. Equity and inclusion became more than mere buzz words. Companies took notice and changed centuries’ old practices. Black and Brown people were hired for positions in companies where they’d been previously barred. The face of America began to change.

And the backlash was swift. From mass shootings seeking to “even the odds” and prevent “white replacement” to threats of bombs at HBCUs and Black worship spaces, the response to the call for Black lives to matter and the inclusion of Black faces in advertisements and movies was waves of violence.

Like Pharoah, white supremacists looked around and saw themselves being replaced. For hope, they looked backward. For hope, they remembered a time when white meant “I’m right” and they had the power to determine other folks’ humanity. Like Pharoah, they looked for ways to limit the growth of All Others. They looked for population control. They found sympathizers in judicial garb.

Abortion.

It’s polarizing for Christians. It’s full of conflicting emotions for Black Christians. We heard the theologies that remove us from the image of God. We heard the preaching and teaching and medical practices that attempted to convince us that we are less than human. We believe that we are fearfully and wonderfully made, stitched together by God in the wombs of our mothers. We believe that God knows us and calls us before we were born. And we are acutely aware of what it means to be considered property of the state, bred like livestock against our wills, and forced to carry what we never desired. We are acutely aware of what it means to be unable to follow our own minds, our own consciousness, and have the paths that we would choose blocked to us by the state or racist agents. And we are far too aware of the little value placed on our lives – by pro-life and pro-choice activists alike – and how quickly we are slaughtered in the name of peace. We have seen our innocent blood flow through streets in every state. As Black and Christian in America, we have spent generations in Pharoah’s crosshair and know that both pro-life and pro-choice leaders tend to pull the trigger. It can seem like none of this has anything to do with us at all. But Pharoah knows that the state interfering in reproductive decisions maintains the Pharoah’s power.

When Pharoah decided for the Hebrew women how and when their children would live, God intervened. The midwives Shiphrah and Puah disobeyed Pharoah’s command, saving the children Pharoah commanded to die, and were rewarded by God. There is a tendency to say, “well, this is the opposite of reproductive justice. The children lived.” But the principles of Reproductive Justice are the right to have children, the right to not have children, and the right to raise the children we have in safe and healthy environments. When those rights were violated by Pharoah’s commands, God showed up. When Pharoah decided that the women could not have children, God showed up. When Pharoah decided that the children would be raised under oppression and enslaved, God showed up. With Dobbs, the Supreme Court has declared that individuals do not have the right to determine to not have children while ignoring the unhealthy and unsafe living environments the children we do have.

For Black women, these state-forced pregnancies can be deadly. Because of implicit bias in health care, Black women still receive prenatal care at lower rates and are still more likely to die during and after childbirth than every other race. The Dobbs decision ignores the possibility of harm. It ignores the impact of Black maternal mortality on the future of the Black community. It ignores the lack of access to adequate health care and the possibility that Black mothers who choose to opt out of dangerous hospital births risk losing their children to the foster care system. Like Pharoah, the Supreme Court’s decision willfully disregards the suffering of the least of these for the sake of preserving the power of the state, for the sake of preserving white Christian nationalism.

The Dobbs decision has opened the door for legislated oppression, for individual states to begin to rollback human rights progress, and for increased suffering and harm for the very least of these. The Bible says, after Pharoah’s decrees grew increasingly morbid, that God looked upon the Israelites and was concerned about them (Exodus 2:25). May we, too, look upon our communities and be concerned enough to stand up for Reproductive Justice.