I know this is long, but I feel it had to be said to you and all those who think compromise is an option.
Our home-grown theocrats have gone so far over the line that there is no compromise. There never was any compromising with them. It never was about “babies.” If it was, someone in the legislatures writing those “no exceptions” laws would have realized that a girl who was impregnated at age 9 (she only just turned 10) is still a baby herself. It was only ever about women and not allowing us to own our own bodies and shape our own futures.
I know you mean well, but what if there had been talk of “compromise” about chattel slavery? Really — those people’s lives could have been improved with better places to sleep and limits on whipping and raping. Maybe a mess-hall with abundant healthy food. It wouldn’t be so bad.
But when something is called slavery right up front, people with a conscience will recoil. And the human soul cries out for freedom and the rights to one’s own bodies and own thoughts and actions.
Because most women and girls in this country have a decent life in 2022, it is easy to forget how we got here. The keystone of it all — without which everything collapses — is contraception.
They, the Right Wing, started redefining the most reliable forms of birth control as abortifacients years ago.
That’s when I knew it was not just about abortion, but more deeply about every social advance women have made since we got the vote. Every social advance we’ve made since Margaret Sanger went to prison for telling women how they could avoid unwanted pregnancies. (By the way, since the dawn of time women have tried to control their fertility, and have done so. Alito is a damn fool if he thinks otherwise.)
Having a prospective employer say, “But you’ll just get pregnant,” or having your current employer say straight up the reason you as a married woman can’t get that promotion is because “You’ll just get pregnant” is something that will return in a heartbeat when contraceptives are once again unavailable. Because it will once again be true.
It goes further. My grandfather, born in the 1880s, told his 3 daughters that college for them was pointless because they were just going to get married and have babies. His 3 sons went to college.
American men are in for a very rude awakening if they somehow think this is “only a woman’s issue.”
When inflation & lagging wages for men really started to bite, women had already entered the workforce in large numbers. It was the wages of married women, long considered secondary in the family budget, that propped up the middle class as long as it did.
More than one or two children completely erodes family finances: childcare and diapers and formula are incredibly expensive.
One thing I never see factored in is the destruction of public schools, with the twofold push to homeschool and/or send the kids to private schools. Who homeschools? Mothers.
The pandemic shutdown put the religious right agenda on steroids: get the moms out of career jobs and back in the home where they belong, get the kids out of public schools and into a homeschooling setting where mom is the full time teacher, divert taxes away from K-12 public schools.
And if women once again cannot reliably control their fertility, it will fall to the man of the house to be the sole provider of an ever-expanding brood.
I hate the RW GOP so much there are hardly words for it. DON’T YIELD AN INCH.
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