One of the many chilling ironies of the war on abortion is that the states most insistent on women having babies, no matter what, are also the ones with the least to offer those babies once they’ve had the bad luck to be born there.
And it’s important to understand that these states are getting increasingly insistent on women having babies, no matter what.
Goaded and guided by abortion abolitionists in legislatures, law firms, and courtrooms, Republican governments are, one way or another, actively blocking off any avenue that doesn’t lead to a woman of any age getting pregnant, giving birth, then getting pregnant again. Rinse and repeat. If the woman dies in the process, she’s easily replaced.
The idea seems to be that women are a sort of production line, whose purpose is to generate usable babies. The way they get pregnant is irrelevant to the discussion. If they were impregnated by, say, an uncle, or a rapist, or a clergyman, the laws of these states care not at all who the father is. The fetus is more valuable than its mother. And it has more rights. It only starts to lose those rights when it’s born.
Red-state governments are systematically closing off any access to abortion, and there are now bounties on anyone who seeks one, or helps someone else seek one. Such laws have the effect of legitimizing and indeed monetizing citizen-on-citizen informing, a glaring red flag for any student of totalitarianism.
Much of this is going under the radar. Outrage fatigue is affecting us all, and there’s only so much bandwidth we can devote to being mortified. But since the election, the struggle for reproductive rights has gotten little or no discussion in the media, for whom women’s issues are secondary at best. As a result of this neglect, most of us have no idea how vicious, or how effective, the abolitionists have become.
Fortunately, we have Jessica Valenti to watch their every move, and explain it to us. I’ve written of her several times, and I rely on her for information and context on all matters reproductive. I tend to read her on her blog, but she has a lively video presence as well. People need to know she is out there, keeping track of these horrors.
Valenti shows us vividly how cruelty is the abolitionists’ whole point, and how the subjugation of women is now a matter of policy in a depressing number of states.
And she has no illusions about the direction federal policy will ultimately take. With champions at the highest level — JD Vance is their current point man, though you’d never know it from the media — the abolitionists are working tirelessly to make The Handmaid’s Tale into a reality show.
While there are many threads Valenti follows regularly, her take on the state of reproductive rights at this moment is, more-or-less, as follows:
…These mostly-male lawmakers say they’re saving babies even as their states’ infant mortality rates spike; and they claim their states are safe, even as doctors flee. Because they can’t prove abortion is dangerous, they fabricate statistics. They mock feminist warnings about the threat to birth control as they restrict access to IUDs and emergency contraception. And they call themselves the party of family values as they force women to carry dead and dying fetuses, decimate maternal healthcare in rural communities, torture patients, and kill women.
If anything, she understates the situation, and I invite you to follow the links in that paragraph to get a fuller picture. Open to any page on her blog, and you’ll find something you didn’t know, something being done to terrorize and marginalize women.
She can tell you, better than I, how red states have lately taken to criminalizing miscarriages, how one Texas woman was held in custody five months for “abuse of a corpse,” while the circumstances surrounding the dead fetus were investigated. And even though the charges were ultimately dropped — after five months in jail — it must now be assumed that in Texas, every miscarriage is a possible crime scene.
She can tell you about the astroturfed issues, such as the one about fetal remains contaminating the water supply. RFK Jr. has apparently bought into this bit of bullshit, and is promising action on it — if he can spare time from his evisceration of our healthcare system.
She can tell you how they bend the language in ways that change the narrative. How a minimum national standard is code for a federal abortion ban. How post-birth abortion, which does not exist on any planet, was insidiously elevated to an “issue” in the last election.
Or how a simple word like intention can be twisted to drive a wedge between abortion and healthcare. After all, if a woman has an abortion intentionally — because, say, she wants one — then it can’t be for a legitimate medical reason:
They’re inventing new ‘medical’ terms—words and phrases that have no basis in science or reality. And if they can’t get doctors to use them, they’ll repeat them so often that everyday Americans will pick them up. That strategy works; just look at what happened with ‘partial birth abortion’!
She can also introduce you to the abolitionists themselves, as foul a crowd of smarmy doctors, dishonest lawyers, and religious nutjobs as only a red state could produce.
Take, for example, Christina Francis, president of the American Association of Pro-Life OBGYNs (AAPLOG), an organization whose very name is an affront to medical ethics. Francis believes that any woman who is pregnant, regardless of age, must bring home a baby, dead or alive. The health of the mother is immaterial. No life is worth saving if abortion is the only way to save it. And Francis is a doctor.
Valenti can also tell you how red state prosecutors are taking legal action in blue states, both to halt the flow of abortion medication and to intimidate abortion providers.
Or about officials tampering with vital statistics, so as to understate the appalling rise of infant and maternal deaths — Texas is up 95 percent among white women — and to hide the undeniable truth, that anti-abortion policies are deadly.
Or about the rapidly growing obstetrical “deserts” — the result of too many doctors leaving their benighted states for saner pastures — where a woman might have to travel hundreds of miles to find pregnancy care.
Or, indeed, she can tell you about the subtle ways these same abolitionists are chipping away at birth control:
Republicans are pushing bills that look like they support contraception while quietly redefining what birth control is—and codifying those false definitions into law.
I’ll let her give you the details, and trust me, she can. She approaches the whole subject with a thoroughness that only comes from real passion, and she doesn’t sugar-coat anything. She’s enraged and she doesn’t care who knows it.
One of the few rays of light I can detect in her writing — and she treats it as a true ray of light — is that at least three-quarters of our population detests everything these assholes stand for.
The abolitionists are, or course, fully aware of this. They know what they’re up against, and they’re content to move slowly, in small increments, toward the dark society they crave. They will continue to mislead, misinform, and lie flagrantly about everything they’re doing.
And they will continue to think they’re putting one over on us, which is certainly their goal. Good thing Jessica Valenti is on to them.
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