So, here we have pro-lifers taking away women’s reproductive rights and shitting on women.
Most of the pro-lifer’s I’ve seen come from Christian sites or people that I know are of the xtian faith. So…just wondering when America starts to become more like Gilead. It’s no surprise that Christians don’t support “freedom of religion” either unless it’s shoving a bible down your throat.
So just a thought from what “aunt lydia” is saying. How far are we from this happening?
women’s rights are increasingly at risk in the UK and Europe, too. Last year, while doing research for my book Six Conversations We’re Scared to Have, I discovered that from 1861 to November 2022 only three women had ever been prosecuted for terminating a pregnancy in the UK. But in the past two years alone, at least six women have appeared in court and dozens more have been investigated.
It is a criminal offence to have an abortion after 24 weeks in the UK or without approval from two doctors, carrying a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. While it is true that the abortion drugs mifepristone and misoprostol became available to use at home for women before 10 weeks of pregnancy during the pandemic, this change in procedure does not sufficiently explain such a radical increase in prosecutions.
Dr Jonathan Lord, a co-chair of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) abortion taskforce, has warned that when an unexplained pregnancy loss is suspected of being an illegal abortion, police in some areas are seizing women’s phones to search for period tracking apps and their internet history. There have also been reports that police are drug-testing distressed women who have suffered late-stage pregnancy loss and subjecting them to lengthy and distressing investigations.
Between 2008 and 2017, about $50m of funding flowed into Europe from 12 of the most influential Christian rightwing foundations in the US, according to research by OpenDemocracy in 2019. Neil Datta, the executive director of the European Parliamentary Forum for Sexual and Reproductive Rights, told me there has been a creeping expansion of anti-abortion Christian nationalist groups in the UK since 2013. When same-sex marriage was legalised in the UK and France, these groups went into overdrive and were triggered to hire lawyers and political scientists to learn how to draft laws and bills to fight progressive movements.
I know it’s common, but think pro-life a poor descriptive of most of the folks calling themselves this.
Currently, women are dying in some places because of the laws these people have pushed through. And once one of those lives comes to term and is born, many of the these same people have pushed for and enacted laws to dismantle safety net protections to ensure food and housing for a baby in need.
In particular, I get angry when I hear that abortion is okay only in the case of rape and incest.
The problem with answering that question, and many like it, is that many trends involve multiple inputs with complex interactions, and also involve sudden tipping points where it seems like nothing at all is happening until there’s suddenly a total collapse.
The economy is like this. China and Europe are both selling US Treasuries and Europe has lit a fire under its initiative to have its own credit card clearing system, two events that are pretty consequential and worrying but here on the ground so far there seems to be zero impact or at least no impact that the vast majority of people (who aren’t paying attention to boring issues like this) are going to notice.
The descent into authoritarianism is like this as well. There are always, ALWAYS people telling you that you’re hysterical for warning about anything dire who will maintain that right up until it happens and then, shocked, ask, “who could have possibly known this unthinkable thing could occur”? I think the odds of a Handmaid’s Tale style theocracy are about 50/50 at this point but I have no idea if it’s 3 months, 3 years, or 30 years away. Only that unless we take a hard and sustained turn away from it, it is coming. (There’s a third way here too – oligarchs could simply decide at some point that the Christers are no longer useful fools for their agenda, and cast them aside, and what will result will be less religious but no less hell on earth).
Even when a thing happens and has dire consequences, there’s usually structural denial going on. Covid is an excellent example. It ended up producing a whole new class of usually long-term disability in a significant percentage of patients, particularly those infected multiple times, and even where there was not overt post-viral syndrome style symptoms, study after study after study have shown that everyone who catches covid even once shows all the biological markers of an aging brain and often have lingering subclinical mental acuity issues under the general rubric of “brain fog”. So we have children not doing well in school and tend to blame it solely on the botched study-from-home period (and/or more recently on general societal stressors) because that’s easier to accept than that many of our children have been cognitively impaired by Covid. It also means we don’t have to wear the hated masks. (I still mask in public gatherings that are fairly dense and relatively small rooms (and aircraft); along with like, optimistically, 3% of the rest of the crowd).
It all boils down to people not wanting so see things that are hard to see and/or are easy to misattribute in part or in whole to less concerning factors. People are biased toward “normalcy” and past experience and lack of self-awareness and so on.
I have always found that those who rabidly harbor a pro-life agenda are the one most likely to support capital punishment. Irony is.
As George Carlin once said, “Pro-life conservatives are obsessed with the fetus from conception to nine months. After that, they don’t want to know about you. No neonatal care, no day care, no Head Start, no school lunch, no food stamps, no welfare. If you’re pre-born, you’re fine. If you’re preschool, you’re fucked.”
