Abort The Patriarchy In November
If women attempt a coup in D.C. at the Capitol, we can blame it on their economic frustration. Abortion bans will cause immeasurable economic frustration and loss of freedom.
There’s a trifecta of callousness in the right-wing circus tent, and when Roe v. Wade is banned the three main ideological groups of the GOP will get to show off their sanctimonious thirst for power over women and indifference to suffering children.
The Christian fundamentalists can say, “Whores have sex so they deserve to carry their fetuses to term, and must birth babies they don’t want or can’t afford regardless of human agency or personal medical circumstances, and its God’s will! As interpreted by me, the guy who knows exactly what God wants.”
When the baby takes its first breath of air the laissez-faire conservatives step in to cross their arms at any governmental subsidies and welfare programs that might help mom support the baby because “If we help you it would be communism.”
Then libertarians interject with, “You deserve your poverty you boostrapless parasite on society!”
And in between these exclamations of casual indifference all three groups remind us daily of the continuing degradation of the American Family™, and lament the number of divorces, single mothers, runaway fathers, and children with unstable home lives. But look at political maps of almost any problem and see the glaring pro-life inequalities. The epicenter of infant mortality, child poverty, under-education, hunger, and lack of preventative healthcare is the Bible Belt. Red states banning the family planning that abortion makes possible, among many other misguided socio-economic prescriptions, are not leading to a conservative utopia of strong, healthy nuclear families. It’s actually making their citizens’ lives objectively worse in economic ways that tear families apart.
But ever notice how Republicans never recite their pro-life mantra for literally any other governmental policy? Single-issue voters with abortion ought to be similarly clamoring for universal healthcare, any number of Care Economy initiatives to equalize opportunity and support for all children. But they don’t politically lift a finger for unwanted kids after they’re born. American mothers don’t get paid maternity leave to give their babies’ earliest formative weeks the security of being with them all day because it’s “bad for business,” just like Jesus would have thought. If anything about supporting women or babies costs money, the GOP throws away all its pro-life talking points.
To acknowledge the pandemic in the room, America just passed the million-dead-Americans mark of COVID after two years of our self-lionized culture victims militantly calling for mass death herd immunity routes back to global health and economic stability in a plague that has killed millions of people worldwide, including thousands of pregnant women at worryingly disproportionate levels. The Covidiots who shamelessly appropriated pro-choice political rationales and slogans like “my body, my choice” to express their anti-government outrage against wearing a mask for 20 minutes in the grocery store are absurdly insisting that the government threaten women with imprisonment to carry a baby for 9 months, maybe die, and raise it for the next 18 years.
The goon math on their conception of freedom and autonomy is deranged, though the inconsistency is ironically appropriate for the Bible.
In Deuteronomy 28:53, God promises to cause a terrible war that will make everyone eat their own children, and throughout the Old Testament also kills millions of people and kids. In Exodus 21:23, it’s specified that if a pregnant woman is hurt in a fight and has a miscarriage, the assailant has to pay merely whatever the husband demands within reason as determined by a judge. But if the woman is killed, a life for a life is required. And for all the places where the Bible mentions God “knowing us in the womb” there are scripture lines suggesting life only starts at birth because as little medical and biological knowledge is expressed in Republicans’ state abortion bans across the country, the writers of the Bible knew much less.
The self-aggrandizement of Christian Values™ Republicans waving around their archaic, mythological Bible in political arguments is anachronistic for a professional, modern government. Roe v. Wade’s dismantling should officially squash the taboo against calling out the backward delusions Christian fundamentalists are increasingly forcing upon everyone else with their bullshit, stolen Supreme Court majority filled with judges appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote. Our Constitutional freedom to be in control of our own lives is being infringed upon by puritanical narcissists who believe God is telling them what to do. Not professional, not modern.
Conservatives have one right idea that life is spectacular and precious, but reproductive health, embryology, and pregnancy are incredibly complicated. Human experience, too, is complicated. Rape, incest, fetal developmental abnormalities, any number of pregnancy complications, and the possible end of life for both the fetus and the mother mean that the subject of abortion is very grey area, personal, and private. Human reproduction can be fraught with risk, and there’s too much variability and complexity for our Constitutional rights to be respected by a state government forcing a one-size-fits-all ban on every scenario.
If a fetus is found to have a rare defect and its brain won’t develop, the fetus will die immediately after birth. But if the mother lives in a fundamentalist state with no abortion exceptions, she will be forced to carry her dead child for another several months and then risk her own health and life in a needless birth, or go to jail for decades. What if the mother already has four kids? To punish the mother for a “god’s mysterious ways” miscarriage of one kid you’ll wreck the other kids’ lives? That’s not pro-family or pro-kids, it’s mindless power over women like legal assault.
If a pregnancy is ectopic the fetus will never develop, and die killing the mother. But if the fundamentalist state government won’t let her abort it in this dangerous circumstance, she’ll have to choose between dying and prison. She has four kids already. That’s not pro-family or pro-kids. It’s governmental voyeurism of dying women.
These are SO many more biological and medical scenarios necessitating even more complex, difficult decisions. Read every woman writer you can on this subject. Hear what they think about this. They hate it. It’s unConstitutional, and maximalist government intervention into people’s private lives. Get the fuck out.
The government should not be participating in these decisions with the GOP’s medically medieval abortion bans written by Christian Values™ virtue-signalers cosplaying as fundamentalist prophets. We have to push back against the false prophets of freedom and reproductive health.
Maybe take a page out of the MAGA book. Maybe women should turn extremist and attempt a coup against the patriarchy a la January 6th at the Capitol. We could justify it the same way and blame it on women’s economic frustration. The end of abortion rights will add immeasurable economic frustrations and loss of real freedom. Or women could just vote in record-breaking numbers this midterm election and take back their freedom. Unambiguous elections are the best antidotes for fundamentalist creep crusades against women.
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Thanks for your eyeball attention!
-Dash MacIntyre
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Love the title. Yes we need to abort patriarchy, and that means aborting a lot of religions, all of which should be taxed anyway.