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Monday, March 4, 2024

Next Stop, the Warring 20s

There can be no doubt that Republicans are coming for women’s rights to reproductive self-determination. All signs are pointing in the same direction: to the 1920s.

We already know about Dobbs overturning Roe v Wade, which sent the abortion issue back to the states. We know that the Red States immediately began to see who could produce the most draconian laws to punish those who dared to make a choice with which The State did not agree. We’ve got total bans, 15-month bans, 6-month bans, travel bans, and lawsuits encouraged in which there is no recourse from having to pay for counsel, regardless of merit.

But that’s not good enough. Now the MAGA Bible-thumpers running the Republican Party are seeking a federal regulation that a legal human life begins at conception, now that the backward Alabama Supreme Court has so ruled.

While it doesn’t say so specifically, that put an end to In-Vitro Fertilization (IVF) in the state because there were no provisions for the disposal of extra fertilized cell clumps. Storing them in perpetuity was also a no-go.

Banning IVF was not the goal. The real idea was getting human life defined as the moment of fertilization because THAT’s how they’re going to start attacking contraception. IUDs? Gone. Day-After pill? Gone. Birth control pill? Gone.

Why the birth control pill? If I remember from my old health classes, taking The Pill prevents ovulation, so there is no egg to fertilize. BUT, it also thins the lining of the uterus so there is less chance of implantation (same as an IUD). The implantation of the fertilized egg is when medical science considers a pregnancy to be happening. But, now with the new legal definition of “life” beginning at the moment a little swimmer pierces the outer rim of an ovum, any interference with the implementation becomes murder.

It’s clear that all of these moral and philosophical hurdles are not meant to “save babies.” Republicans don’t give a shit about babies. This is about controlling women to promote patriarchy, just like we had in the Old Days.

Most Repubs won’t admit that now, but don’t follow their words, just watch their actions. Like in 2022, after the Dobbs decision, there was a bill in play to codify the right to contraception. 194 Republicans voted against it.


Voted against contraception, in this day and age. Sure, they’ll tell you that it was because they thought it was unnecessary, or they were protecting the rights of pharmacy workers to withhold treatment from you due to their own beliefs. It was amazing they could spew such nonsense after Roe had just been done in, with one justice openly stating that he wanted to go after Griswold next (which enshrined the right to privacy decision that ensures access to contraception). It’s funny how they talk out of one side of their mouth about how something “isn’t necessary,” while from the other side, back actions that make it VERY necessary.

The bill never saw any action in the Senate. But the next year, a nearly identical bill passed the House again, by almost the same margin. (All Dems and a smattering of Republicans who were retiring.) The bill was eventually squashed by Senate Republicans before it could be brought to a vote.

At this point, you can’t be fooled by any single, seemingly “reasonable” Republican. They have become a monolithic entity… you’re either with them or against them. Any digression from the expected dogma and they stick you straight into the “against them” pile. And right now, regardless of what they say, their actions are coming to ban abortion and several kinds of contraception. And no Sex Ed, either. They don’t even want kids to know the correct terminology for their own anatomy. All they have to offer are platitudes about the “sanctity of life,” even as they watch hundreds of thousands fall into poverty, despair, and even death, for lack of family planning and reproductive health options.

This isn’t about you obeying your own sense of morality, it’s about obeying theirs. They don’t give a shit what you think about when life begins.

This campaign against reproductive freedom and for the subjugation of women is the only reason one needs to vote straight Democratic in November. It’s that important.

 

2 comments:

  1. You write fine. But you're flat wrong here. A HUGE part of you should take your own advice and turn off YOUR channels of choice. The "patriarchy" thoughts in your head are such complete hogwash that it makes me sad when reading about any other concept you write so smugly and snarkily about. You must be incorrect across the board, sadly, if you don't expand your thinking beyond recent formulated anti-societal crap you've been trained to think.

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  2. DJ: This comment looks like something that you drop into any post that you don't like. It's quite free of specifics. I laid out exactly what Republicans are doing across the country and how those actions degrade the lives of women. Kindly explain exactly where I'm wrong. I don't think you can because the proof rolls out day after day.

    If requiring pregnancy due to the "sanctity of life" and then abandoning any aid for unwilling mothers isn't an attack on women, please "expand my thinking" by giving me a rational explanation.

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