“When the Supreme Court took away reproductive freedom from over 50 percent of the electorate with Dobbs, we were told that if we didn’t like it, we should go ahead and vote on it. Exit polls revealed that this is precisely what transpired.” Which unsurprisingly lead to shrieks of outrage online that women, particularly single women, shouldn’t vote (not a new thought on their part). Republican misogyny and forced-birth policies are massively unpopular but they’re not backing off:
“Some who voted in favor of the bill have since acknowledged they didn’t read it closely or understand how completely it tied the hands of doctors. Briggs, the bill’s co-sponsor, has advocated for changes and lost the endorsement of Tennessee Right to Life.” — Pro Publica looks at Tennessee’s malevolent abortion ban and how even women in need of life-saving abortions can’t get them. As LGM says, the piece shows Tennessee is, in general, a shitty place for motherhood.
Texas is lousy too, so I’m glad some women denied abortions are suing the state. Though with the current court system I doubt it’ll help.
“Women sent to prison after pregnancy loss are among the few Americans serving time for drug consumption; most laws criminalize drug possession and sales, not use. ” Because there’s always political support for punishing moms for not being perfect. Never mind the outcomes don’t benefit the fetus (“Doctors reported a sharp increase in the number of women avoiding prenatal care for fear of getting arrested, while the number of babies born in withdrawal from narcotics did not drop.”) While some antiabortion groups say they don’t support punishing the mother, I’m not aware of any of them doing more than lip service in this area.
I doubt we’ll see pushback against South Carolina’s new bill either, even though “under a standard reading of the proposed statute, the Prenatal Equal Protection Act would mean that terminating a pregnancy would give rise to a substantially similar scope of liability as would the killing of a person who has been born alive. Further, the bill’s title indicates that its purpose is to treat fertilized embryos on par with individuals born alive under the law.” And yes, that would apparently apply to the pregnant woman getting an abortion.
Meanwhile, in Arkansas ” HB 1174 says that it’s a crime to end a pregnancy by “wrongful act, neglect or default,” language so broad that women who have had miscarriages could be prosecuted for murder if the state decides that they somehow ‘caused’ it.”
In other news:
“I am certainly not an expert on sex ed, but I am an expert in having my boundaries violated,” — kidnap/rape victim turned activist Elizabeth Smart on the importance of teaching consent.
“In December of that year, as Korea’s fertility rate hovered at 1.2 births per woman (it has since slid to 0.78, the lowest in the world), the Korean government launched an online “National Birth Map” that showed the number of women of reproductive age in each municipality, illustrating just what it expected of its female citizens. ” — from an article about South Korea’s 4B feminist movement, which reminds me a lot of US feminism in the 1970s.
“I remember being scared because he kept wailing and sobbing, saying he was going to kill himself if she didn’t get an abortion.” — an account of how one conservative executive at a pro-life company allegedly impregnated an employee, then demanded she abort. Though as I’ve said before, while hypocrisy is contemptible, the issue is that forced-birth policies are bad, not the morals of those who support them.
Race-Ing Roe is a Harvard Law Review paper speculating pre-Dobbs that the Supreme Court’s forced-birth majority would invoke discrimination as an excuse to ban abortion (because mothers may opt for abortion based on race or disability). While that’s not how it played out, the article is a good history of the relationship between race, abortion, and eugenics. It shows for example that while some black male leaders worried abortion and birth control would reduce the black population, black women were a lot more pro-choice (go figure).
“Brad Pitt didn’t have to prove he was the right kind of man; that was already assumed. He existed to choose the right woman, and to prove her rightness with his approval.” — a look at the gender stereotypes in play in the Pitt/Jolie/Aniston triangle.
You can read more of my work about misogyny in Undead Sexist Cliches, available as a Amazon paperback, an ebook and from several other retailers. Cover by Kemp Ward.
Fraser Sherman's Blog 