Anti-abortion Muslims and the Christian Right in America under Trump

Relatively minor in the grand scheme of things, but the thing that vexes me about this emerging Muslim right wing partnership with Never-Trump Catholics on abortion is not so much that Muslims are allying with people who hate them. Actually many Catholics respect Islam for both what it has that Catholicism has, and also what is has that they feel Catholics have lost (Jeremy McLellan made a career out of it). No, what I dislike about such efforts to overturn Roe v. Wade are their quixotic nature.

I understand and respect those who feel abortion is wrong. But Roe v. Wade wasn't about mandating abortion, and the point of making abortion legal wasn't to criminalize unborn babies, but to reduce suffering in the world by giving the mother final and absolute say in ending her pregnancy. This is not the place to get into all the ethical complexities of the why of that decision. It is a guaranteed right, according to the Supreme Court. With respect to the priorities of Muslim Americans, unlike abortion, alcohol is explicitly haram in the Quran. Why doesn't one see Muslim Americans joining a prohibition bandwagon, or creating one? Why are some Muslim Americans jumping on the ethical bandwagon of extreme Catholics?

Those few Muslim Americans salivating about overturning Roe v. Wade havn’t paid attention to the larger history of how abortion was established as a right in the first place in America, and who accomplished it. Abortion wasn’t legalized through the fiat of a corrupt ruler. The last seventy years have seen popular movements completely transform the legal and social landscape with regard to gender, sexuality and civil rights. These transformations were painful, they came from below and they were an extension of the Black civil rights insurgency of the 1960s. Now a small group of right wing Muslims comes along and wants to ally with arch-Catholics to roll back these protections. Both groups don’t seem to realize that many of those they are allying with don’t want to stop with abortion or LGBT, but will continue onto the 14th Amendment, the Voting Rights Act, labor laws etc. Jumping on the anti-abortion bandwagon in the current political climate is the height of foolish naiveté.