The loss of abortion rights in the United States is the news of the day -- the US Supreme Court has overturned Roe V Wade, redefining women's rights and allowing states to stop women from getting abortions.
After deciding 40 years ago to make abortion into a divisive partisan issue, Republicans have finally caught the car.
Republican state legislatures and governors spent years pandering to their pro-life voters by passing rigid, cruel but meaningless laws criminalizing abortion -- they thought draconian laws didn't really matter because Roe V Wade would never be overturned anyway so they would never have to try to enforce them.
Meanwhile, the American Pro-Life Taliban were entranced by their hazy water-coloured memories of how marvelous America used to be, back in the good ol' days before Roe V Wade -- back when men were men and women were women and "decent" women were ashamed to get pregnant "out of wedlock" and the bad girls give birth secretly in maternity homes thus ensuring a "domestic supply of infants" for adoption while the girls crept home in shame.
Yeah, good times....
So here we are -- today, all of a sudden, Roe V Wade is overturned.
And all those awful laws criminalizing abortion are now in effect. So criminalizing abortion has created a "War on Women" just as criminalizing marijuana created a "war on drugs" 70 years ago.
But society has changed -- women aren't ashamed of having sex any more, or of getting pregnant, and for 50 years abortion has been just another medical procedure that sometimes women needed. Society no longer views pregnancy as something embarrassing.
But by criminalizing abortion, these stupid awful laws have criminalized everyone associated with abortion - the teenagers and the young couples and the entropic pregnancies and the families, the doctors and nurses and pharmacists and social workers, even the taxi drivers. They're all supposed to be going to jail now.
That'll show 'em who's boss!
Folks, its just not going to work.
The New Yorker has a major article today on this:
Jia Tolentino writes:
... The future that we now inhabit will not resemble the past before Roe, when women sought out illegal abortions and not infrequently found death. The principal danger now lies elsewhere, and arguably reaches further. We have entered an era not of unsafe abortion but of widespread state surveillance and criminalization—of pregnant women, certainly, but also of doctors and pharmacists and clinic staffers and volunteers and friends and family members, of anyone who comes into meaningful contact with a pregnancy that does not end in a healthy birth.
Those who argue that this decision won’t actually change things much—an instinct you’ll find on both sides of the political divide—are blind to the ways in which state-level anti-abortion crusades have already turned pregnancy into punishment, and the ways in which the situation is poised to become much worse.
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