Recognizing that the law is not confined to its technical or historical aspects, Ius & Iustitium is pleased to present this essay by S.R.T., exploring one of the more infamous political cartoons published in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision. S.R.T. studies law and literature.
Four minutes after the decision was published in Dobbs v. Jackson Whole Women’s Health Organization, a cartoonist posted an image of a statue of a pope holding a gun to the head of a pregnant Lady Liberty. As a piece of propaganda, this cartoon is impressively misbegotten, which has not prevented it from doing moderate numbers on Twitter. But detach it from the artist’s propagandistic intent, and the cartoon becomes a fascinating artifact. Among other things, through its very failure as propaganda, the cartoon accidentally reveals much about the poverty of the liberal imagination. It is worth spending a few minutes to see how.
To begin with, the image of a pregnant woman in danger is an obvious attempt to play on our sympathies. We cannot help but recognize pregnant women as uniquely vulnerable and uniquely deserving of protection. But the image of a pregnant woman carries such a powerful emotional charge precisely because we sense that the child’s life is also in danger. An image of a pregnant woman just is an image of her unborn child, in the same way that an image of an egg, to one with poetic insight, just is an image of the bird that will hatch from it. The pregnant mother’s enormous belly cries out to all who see it: I carry new life within me, and even if it is hidden from full view, you still owe it important moral obligations.
So the cartoon reminds us of exactly what its author wants us to forget, that to do violence to a pregnant mother just is to do violence to her child. Now, it might seem that the cartoonist simply made an error of judgment: his pro-abortion argument would have been better served by making the mother’s belly not as big as possible, but as small as possible, to convince the viewer that it’s no one’s business but her own. And indeed other cartoonists have taken this approach. For example, this popular depiction of a barely-pregnant warrior-woman holding a dagger to her own throat while arguing with God about whether she should have to give birth. But it turns out that this move, too, backfires. The image of a barely-pregnant woman ineluctably summons the idea of her pregnancy progressing. Her belly is small, but it will get bigger. As the caption suggests, the life within her is destined for greatness: it will grow until it bursts out of the womb that nurtures it and becomes visible as a human person. In the face of this greatness selfish complaints about frustrated preferences are hardly deserving of a response. Pregnant pauses in conversations with the divine usually indicate a momentary failure of comprehension on the part of the human participant.
So should the pro-abortion cartoonist instead depict a woman who is not visibly pregnant at all? But if the image does not depict a pregnancy, the idea of woman’s special authority over pregnancy is entirely lost, and she becomes merely a man with slight variations in physique. The cartoonist might as well draw a shapeless “person who can get pregnant,” subordinating his desire to defend abortion to his fealty to the alphabet-soup ideology. So many cartoonists have done, with results as rhetorically impotent as they are artistically formless. It has certainly been remarkable, in the past few days, to see how quickly progressive circles are distracted from outrage over Dobbs to outrage that some of those outraged are not using the up-to-date terminology. The vapid style of these cartoons is this dynamic’s visual correlative.
But suppose the cartoonist wants to do more than signal loyalty to the woke cause: he wants his cartoon to communicate that the meaning of a pregnancy varies depending on whether it is wanted or unwanted. If images made meaning by mechanical combination, this task would not be impossible. The author of this cartoon has conceived of his work’s meaning as a simple rebus: Dobbs attacked a putative civil liberty having to do with pregnancy, which adds up to a gun to a pregnant Lady Liberty’s head. But in fact images make meaning organically, and in ways their authors cannot fully control. The artistic project of the pro-abortion cartoonist simply cannot succeed, because it seeks to attach to the image of pregnancy not a meaning but an anti-meaning. The ultimate form of any pro-abortion cartoon would be a picture of a woman with child, with a caption reading “this is not a child.” Conversely, to reject the pro-abortion propaganda cartoon is to affirm what we all know: that pregnancy does mean something, and what it means is not the paradoxical impossibility of knowing what it means, but something profoundly simple. A new life is coming into the world, and we must honor and protect it.
It is because pregnancy means something, and we know it, that we can ask what if anything this cartoon means. The image poses two related puzzles. First, Lady Liberty is pregnant. What fruit does liberty bear? Second, she is not merely under threat, but under threat of a shot to the back of the head, what the movies call “execution-style.” Why is she being threatened with capital punishment? The answer to both questions is given by the biblical reference on her tablet. Genesis 38:24: “And behold after three months they told Juda, saying: Thamar, thy daughter in law hath played the harlot, and she appeareth to have a big belly. And Juda said: Bring her out that she may be burnt.” The cartoonist seems to have chosen this verse to support with his theme of religious authorities wrongly controlling women’s bodies. Again the mechanical approach to meaning-making lets him down. The story does concern a pregnancy unwanted by the father, and Juda’s response here is indeed a poor one—but not because Thamar ought to get an abortion. Rather, because Juda ought both to let Thamar live to give birth, and to acknowledge himself to be the father.
By making Lady Liberty pregnant, this cartoon strongly implies (despite its author’s conscious intent) that she must be allowed to give birth. Even in the days when capital punishment was much more common than it is today, a pregnant woman would never be executed until after the child was born. Not because she had to be given a chance to define for herself the mystery of life, but because the child she bore could be recognized by all as a distinct human life, and there are few injustices greater than executing the innocent along with the guilty. An allegorical abortion would only be warranted only if we could know beforehand that because this liberty was mere license, its fruits were necessarily corrupt. The image of a woman with child tends to undercut this inference; even Milton’s Sin is not often depicted pregnant with Death, but rather having already given birth to the monster. While we might suspect that America is a licentious experiment that must be terminated with prejudice (this cartoon says), it should be allowed to endure for a while, despite its sins, because it harbors a seed of new life which must be given a chance to take root. After this last week, such optimism at least feels a bit more palatable.
The other figure in the cartoon is, of course, a pope. He does not look much like Francis, but perhaps resembles a young John Paul II, popularizer of the phrase “culture of life,” or even the reactionary orphan Pius XIII of the TV series The Young Pope. Once again the propagandist’s intent is easily identified: looking around for someone to blame for the Dobbs decision, he naturally turns to the Church that has stood consistently against abortion for two thousand years. This is a compliment, no doubt. And we must admit that, while there is an argument that clerics should not bear arms, the pistol-wielding pope radiates cool. That this cool pope is an archetype of the Integralist, newly willing to wield secular power in the service of spiritual ends, is obvious enough. I want to suggest two further layers of meaning which are perhaps less obvious.
First, the cartoon draws some rhetorical strength from how it riffs on one of the more popular meme templates of the last few years. One astronaut looks down at the earth and asks in surprise, “What, it’s all [blank filled in by memer]?” The other puts a gun to the first’s head and responds: “Always has been.” The relationship between the astronauts is ambiguous, as is our intended attitude towards them: are we to sympathize with the astronaut caught off guard, or the one about to shoot him? But the rhetorical effect is clear enough: the meme conveys in humorous fashion the violence of revelation. Discovering the truth about reality might make your brain explode, but the change will not be in reality, it will be in you. The person you were will be dead; you will be reborn. In this light, the cartoon seems no longer an either/or. Lady Liberty will both be executed for conflating liberty with license, and give birth to a new regime which understands the difference. This latent meaning is sufficiently obvious that it is hard to understand how the cartoonist imagined his work to be anti- rather than pro-Dobbs.
Second, the posture of the Cool Pope toward Lady Liberty carries within it a latent ambiguity. Men (another thing we all know, even if we sometimes don’t admit it) are typically taller than women. But this pope appears either half a head shorter, or, more plausibly to my eye, closer to the plane of the picture. Yet the pope is also turned towards us rather than away toward her, making it difficult to understand how his gun could be pointed at her head. The entire perspective seems off, unless we instead see the gun as pointed past her ear, toward some unseen menace off to the left. A quick edit of the cartoon, translating the pope to the left while leaving his vertical position undisturbed, will show what I mean. This interpretation of the image, too, is not inappropriate, since there is much reason to protect liberty and its fruits, when these are rightly understood.
I am sure more could be said about the meaning of this cartoon. But apart from its particular meaning, there is something to be learned from the mere fact that the cartoon means anything at all beyond what the cartoonist intended. There is an analogy—though, I stress, only an analogy—between the interpretation of an image and the interpretation of a legal text. The originalist, which is to say, the liberal proceduralist, would insist that the cartoon means only what the propagandist intended for it to mean, insofar as the viewer can identify that meaning from the cartoon itself. A mechanical translation: liberty plus pregnancy plus danger plus religious authority equals theocrats attacking reproductive freedom. But while this is certainly the meaning the cartoonist wanted, it is not the cartoon’s ultimate meaning. Not because meaning is infinitely malleable or in the eye of the beholder, but because the image has a meaning, and it is not that. We can see the proof of the cartoon’s true meaning in how Catholic twitter has already begun to meme it. There is much to be salvaged from even the worst artistic abortion, just as there is much to be salvaged from even the most licentious legal regime, if you know how to look.
S.R.T.