They Just Hate Women
Republicans hate women, don’t respect us, or think we are worth less than men based on sex. All three, it seems.
Now it is in writing. Soon to become law.
Justice Samuel Alito wrote it down in a draft majority opinion draft leaked to Politico last week. Republicans are trying to make the leak the story and not the actual obliteration of a woman’s right to govern her own body.
Tucker Carlson’s (Fox “News” fame) take on the leak was, “people will get hurt.” Yes, Tucker, people will get hurt, but it won’t be the five justices taking away our rights.
Women will be hurt.
Women will no longer have the right to health care or autonomy over their lives.
Women will be harmed, in many ways, both psychologically and emotionally, but in the interest of time, let’s just talk about physically. Women will die. Because if history tells us anything, we, women, will continue to get abortions. Whether they are legal or not.
Wealthy women will fly to some blue state where abortion is still legal for themselves or their daughters. Once again, leaving abortion for the privileged few. If Republicans get what they want and succeed in a nationwide abortion ban, wealthy women will fly out of the country.
Before Roe became the law in 1973, women of means flew to Sweden to obtain safe and legal abortions. While less fortunate women were left to either have a child they did not want or risk their lives procuring an illegal abortion from quack doctors with crude tools. Doctors who didn’t care and most likely didn’t know what they were doing.
One woman described her pre-Roe abortion on NPR this morning, “the doctor rammed a hot rod up my vagina. He treated me as if I were livestock on his table, no anesthesia.” She was one of the lucky ones. She lived.
Another woman on NPR described how it wasn’t unusual across US college campuses to see a female being taken out of her dorm late at night, hemorging from a botched abortion.
Republicans pass laws and policies that make it harder for women to exist with human dignity simply based on gender alone.
Women who do not have the privilege to fly to another state or take a week or two off from work to drive to another state will die, be emotionally scarred and alone it will hurt them in all areas of their lives, or be forced to have a child they do not want or can’t afford to take care of. Back-alley abortions will be a thing again. Only those women who can keep a secret and have the fortitude to remain isolated from their support system during one of the most trying times in a woman’s life will survive. Secrecy adds shame. When we keep secrets, shame comes along for the ride.
Once Roe v. Wade is overturned when the official rule comes down —Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett have agreed to overturn the half-century-old precedent — in this atmosphere of criminalizing abortion, we won’t be able to share our stories with family for fear of retribution from someone who tells the wrong person, a person willing to rat us out.
Is this how we view women, as chattel, worth less than a set of cells that do not resemble a fetus, much less the cherub baby pro-lifers make a clump of cells out to be.
It would seem so.
Republican legislators in red states are not being quiet about their beliefs, and future plans, that put a fetus’ rights over the mother’s — prioritizing a clump of cells over a whole, actual, living being. A person with an entire life. Even in cases of rape, incest, and when the mother’s health is at risk.
We must give birth even when our health is at risk from doing so.
Not long ago, it used to be taboo to even mention forcing a woman to give birth in the case of rape or incest. Not anymore. Republican legislators, male and female, are not being shy about saying a fetus should have equal rights; they’re going so far as to say a fetus enjoys greater dignity and humanity than the woman bearing that “child.”
We are just the vessel.
Our dignity is being stripped away in broad daylight. And the highest court of the land is leading the charge.
Jessica is a writer, an online entrepreneur, and a recovering Type A personality. She lives in Los Angeles with her extrovert daughter, two dogs, and two cats.