As an article of faith, and thus perhaps as a hope for reconciliation, I believe that an affirmation of life in all its forms – man and woman, beasts wild and domestic, birds, forest, flower – was both the necessary element and logical principle keyed as a counterbalance to our species’ avarice and brutality and thus aligned to our survival as a species. This reasoning led me to being pro-life. There are other parts to this belief as well, but this was the touchstone.
However, as soon as anti-abortion activists and lawmakers chose enforcement rather than persuasion as the means by which an affirmation of life could be realized, they and we were headed to this moment – a time when cruelty has been unleashed upon women and children.
Red State after Red State seem to be competing with themselves to see who can enact the harshest laws against abortion. The general trend is to create surveillance territories where internet searches on abortion and abortion clinics and morning after pills could be used in legal cases against women seeking an abortion or their friends who might help them. Laws are being proposed that limit out of state travel for women who may seek abortions away from their state of residence, that demand criminal investigations of miscarriages, that set loose civilian bounty hunters on those women, that force rape and incest victims and women whose health is threatened by their pregnancies to give birth or face jail time. Less than a month after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, a 10-year-old rape victim had to be spirited out of Ohio into Indiana so she could safely abort. Her doctor’s life has been threatened. State officials have lied about the case from the beginning. In Louisiana a law has been proposed to bring murder charges against women who undergo an abortion.
Pro-choice advocates have been right all along: the drive to overturn Roe v Wade has always been about controlling the bodies and thus the lives of women and therefore about forcing them into physical and psychological places where the iron control of the State can securely bind them. Tyranny and cruelty and misogyny, translated into statutes, are the logical end results of the Dobbs’ decision.
