I should preface this by saying that I don’t expect great results from mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. From fundamentally damaging taxation policies to (fittingly) conviction-free theories about how to police the Big Apple, the bar is buried in the ground for the active democratic socialist who will soon have tremendous control over America’s most populous city.
Yet, as so often happens, it’s a significantly less headline-grabbing moment that demonstrates Mamdani’s true character: his take on pregnancy centers. Or, more specifically, how he wants to destroy them. Mamdani, who’s never made a great secret of his ardently pro-abortion worldview, vowed during the campaign to “protect New Yorkers” from . . . the deadly danger of crisis pregnancy centers. This is not an offhand characterization. It’s in an official campaign memo — the Mamdani administration believes that pregnancy centers are a “deadly danger.”
Bias against pregnancy centers is nothing new in American public life. From my vantage point as someone combating political bias at the biggest, most influential companies on earth, it’s literally baked into corporate policies. Perhaps the most prominent example, Microsoft, has only recently made progress in removing software-driven bias against religious organizations and specifically pregnancy centers. In the eyes of many organizations, such centers are other-ed, discriminated against, and barred from receiving philanthropic support — for no other reason than the crime of offering an alternative to abortion. Not to mention, these pregnancy centers (especially in non-red states) often operate with shoestring budgets. They normally run on donations, goodwill, and the passion of staffers who show up every day because of their love for families and children, both born and unborn.
Let’s mince no words about our intentions: Pregnancy centers are institutions that deserve our full support. We must be willing to move society, law, and culture to clear the hurdles standing between pregnancy centers and the communities they exist to serve, or else we should second-guess how well we’re waging this whole “culture war” business.
These institutions, run by some of the most selfless people you will ever meet, are the ones that pernicious politburo planners of the Mamdani variety have decided that society must be protected from. Because, without the “empowering benevolence“ of democratic socialism, women might hear that there are better options for their lives than abortion. And that’s the crux of the issue. That is the cultural, communal argument that the Mamdani worldview has for the women and children of New York. You must be protected from coming in contact with anyone who would even suggest a worldview other than abortion — that’s what the state is for.
It’s supremely ironic that many democratic socialist types – some of whom will lambast you with monologues about community health centers the minute you suggest that the police might be useful folks to have around – have zero tolerance for community institutions like pregnancy centers. It’s the age-old devilish paradox of tolerance: We cannot tolerate the intolerant, who conveniently happen to be our political enemies.
In a “democratic” socialist world, it’s imperative that leaders outsource the functions of the state to the community — except for those parts of the community that teach values. Those, of course, must be thoroughly policed, controlled, and kept under bureaucratic lock and key by state-sanctioned ideologues. Garden-variety statists are all for empowering the community, until the community starts making noises, having ideas, and daring to serve other people in accordance with their values. Unacceptable.
In the memo from Mamdani’s campaign, he decries the “lies about abortion safety and medications” spread by pregnancy centers, conveniently without mentioning any of the “lies” by name. Maybe the lie where abortive drugs are widely considered safe, a claim that’s once again been called into question as new research surfaces, and as scrutiny grows on the brands that distribute them. Or maybe it’s that other lie about abortion — the one where it doesn’t kill a developing human being. Yet, somehow I doubt those truths are what’s being described as “lies.”
Some people might consider the war on pregnancy centers and the values they hold to be an element of a strange new world. In a way, maybe it is. But in another way, these are the elements of a routine old world, one where politicos want to have their cake and eat it too. They’re more than happy to get the cocktail party applause of doing things for the community, so long as the community spits out their exact values to the letter. That is, after all, the dangerous thing about community — the word itself comes from the Latin communitas, or fellowship — it’s made up of people who occasionally have ideas that are better than what secular statists can dream up.
For the sake of the countless children yet to be born in New York City, let’s pray that their actual community is strong. Strong enough to withstand politicians twisting the language of living in community to take away their actual right to live.
