Hey, look! More depressing news coming out of my home state!

Less than three months after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a ban on a controversial late-term abortion procedure, a Cincinnati Republican has reintroduced legislation to outlaw all abortions in Ohio. Rep. Tom Brinkman Jr. hopes his bill will become the vehicle for overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, which legalized abortion.

I didn’t know much about this guy prior to these events, as he’s not my representative– he covers the eastern segments of Cincinnati, such as Hyde Park, Mt. Lookout, and Mt. Washington. However, a quick skim of his campaign website makes a strong case in my mind for him being an asshole.

This is, of course, not the first time he’s tried this; in 2005, another bill banning all abortion in Ohio was introduced by the same legislator. Luckily, it didn’t pass; unfortunately, another anti-abortion bill introduced around the same time did, and was signed into law by the outgoing Republican governor only a few weeks before our current Democratic governor, Ted Strickland, took office. As a result, “it is the public policy of the state of Ohio to prefer childbirth over abortion to the extent that is constitutionally permissible”, and “None of the funds appropriated to administer [health assistance for poor Ohioans] shall be used to counsel or refer for abortion, except in the case of a medical emergency” (HB 239, as sent to the governor and signed into law). In effect, there’s discrimination against allowing poor women in Ohio to have access to a full range of reproductive choices, including abortion, since the procedure is often expensive and can’t be subsidized by any governmental funds below the federal level in Ohio.

Reading the comments on a Cincinnati Enquirer blog post on the subject made me feel vaguely sick. Relatively safe in Oregon, which just passed laws granting domestic partnerships and subsidizes reproductive health care for patients under a certain income level, it’s always a shock when I take a quick glance at what average people in Ohio are saying. There’s so much work to be done in educating people that abortion rights are deeply necessary to offering women free choice in their reproductive health, and with more and more of the people in my generation fleeing the midwest, how are we ever going to manage it?

Time to go write to my state representatives. You should write to yours, too.

My excellent friend Friar Yid has a terrific skewering of Pat Boone’s latest sexist and moronic column on WorldNetDaily. (I won’t link directly to either of those since I don’t want to be seen raising idiots’ Google rankings—if you care, you can find links and lengthy excerpts on the Friar’s blog.) In a nutshell, the erstwhile rock singer Boone claims that strong women only exist by contrast with men who are weaker than usual:

Consider the women, in our day, who have become the heads of state in India, Pakistan, Israel and Great Britain. Question: Is it likely that these very accomplished and brilliant women would have attained these positions if there had been men in evidence who seemed equally or perhaps even better qualified? … Don’t get all defensive, ladies; hear me out. I’m praising and complimenting you here. Thank God for you!

It wouldn’t be worth commenting on this (except with great humor and brilliance, as is Friar Yid’s wont) except for the fact that lots of people take crap like this seriously and those of us with an ounce of sense are left to flail our arms wildly and wonder: What the hell?

Commence wild arm-flailing on the count of three. Ready? One…

The Quiverfull movement is a small Christian sect which believes in having as many children as possible– that is, using no birth control or methods of family planning. They’ve been covered recently by many excellent blogs, all of whom commented on the disturbing nature of the group’s beliefs and practices.

What I find particularly interesting– and evocative of some of the movement’s disconcerting intentions– are the close similarities between Quiverfull’s stated goals and those of the Augustan marriage legislation of 18 and 17 B.C.E. (the Leges Juliae). While Augustus’ marriage laws are perhaps most famous for his attempt to outlaw adultery (a resounding failure that later forced him to exile his adulterous daughter Julia), they also included the Ius Trium Liberorum, a law that provided special rights and privileges for the parents of more than three children and penalized those who could procreate but were not doing so.

Augustus’ rationale for supporting this legislation, so far as we know, was to increase the falling birth rate in Rome and separate the intermingling social classes by restricting intermarriage. The similarities to Quiverfull are clear– their movement seeks to provide “weapons for the culture wars” in the form of numerous children raised strictly within their ideology, just as Augustus hoped to encourage “traditional values” in Rome by reducing the mixing of social classes. As Amanda at Pandagon aptly points out, Quiverfull carries a strong undertone of race consciousness; Augustus likewise hoped to bolster the native Roman population in the face of a swelling population of foreign freedmen.

The implications for the status of women are, in both cases, also quite worrying. The Quiverfull movement believes in the full submission of women to their fathers until marriage and their husbands afterwards, a regression to social practice common both in the Roman world and earlier. We also know that gaining the ius trium liberorum in Rome didn’t always increase the status of the “honored” woman. Instead, since married women or widows with fewer than three children were punished by the law, having three or more children simply became the expected norm in Augustan and post-Augustan Rome. While Quiverfull adherents are careful to claim that there is no “competition” among themselves to see who can have the largest family, it isn’t difficult to imagine the social problems that might arise for a Quiverfull woman or couple struggling with infertility.

Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that there is such a correspondence between these two cultures, but there’s some comfort in the fact that the Quiverfull people would likely be disconcerted by the similarities between their movement and Roman legislation. After all, it’s telling that a movement supposedly predicated on the ideals and history of Christianity isn’t substantially different from an ancient movement predicated on the religion and history of pagan Rome. What holds each of these cultures together, modern and ancient, is their attitude towards women as little more than bearers of children, not the sincerity of their different faiths.