Saving Innocence

In this essay I explore salvation narratives in abortion and adoption dialogues, including the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, to highlight the complex ways such stories function to divert attention from state regulation of families in support of a white supremacist, patriarchal agenda for the nation. I argue that these stories emphasizing salvation function as a way of hiding intersections of racism, misogyny, and homophobia driving this conservative social vision. Drawing on interdisciplinary narrative analysis, I consider laws and policies as stories about how society should function. In a “color-blind” legal system race cannot be an explicit consideration, yet exploring family laws in relation to each other, in a larger context of sociopolitical meaning, helps us see the ways in which all these social narratives function together as what Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham calls the “metalanguage of race.”