The United States of Gilead
It took me a while to write this.
Not because it was difficult, but because early drafts were just a string of curse words and exclamation points. As a woman writer, it’s universally accepted that if you don’t present yourself in a cool, rational way, laying each point of argument out like systematically placed cookie dough on parchment, you’ll be accused of being hysterical. Or shrill. Or a thousand other tired tropes we throw at women when we don’t want to hear what they have to say.
And so I edited and stepped away. I balled up my raw cookie dough arguments and repositioned them.
I failed.
I failed mostly because I’m really over this shit. Like really, really fucking over it!!!
(Whenever I slip up and curse in anger in front of my younger son, he tells me it gives him a pleasant tingle in his belly. Perhaps hearing his mother swear lends a bit of legitimacy to his own anger. And who knows, maybe with a few well-placed curse words and !!!, I can give voice to someone else’s anger. That’s enough for me.)
We are slouching toward Gilead, the (quasi) fictional land of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, in which women are nothing more than walking, hobbled, red-draped incubators.
With the signing of so called “heartbeat” bills in several states and a (now DOA) Texas bill which would make obtaining an abortion a capital crime eligible for the death penalty, we’re even closer. But make no mistake. Banning abortion has never been about the “sanctity of life”. The fact we’d seemingly overlook the mass frying of a few thousand women in the electric chair should make the hypocrisy of supporting “life” pretty damn clear.
No, controlling access to abortion has always been about controlling — and shaming — women.
You see, the only way the current evangelical narrative about abortion can survive is by perpetuating the notion that women who dare to have sex deserve to be punished. The only way it works is if we accept — at face value — that women who choose abortion are nothing more than sluts who rock up to drive-through abortionists with the casual air of ordering a burger at In N Out. They’re whores. They’re irresponsible, deserving of everything they face. Can’t finish school? Your own fault. Can’t get a job, feed your other kids, escape a domestic violence situation, advance your career? Your own fault, you filthy slut.
You should have kept your legs shut.
And yet personal responsibility for sex and conception only starts post ejaculation. How do I know this? Because there is not a single bill being put forth holding men responsible for pregnancy, though sperm indeed, is responsible for 100% of pregnancies. There are no bills mandating jail time for fathers who don’t materially and financially support a child. There are no bills making it mandatory for equal parenting or punishing men finacially for a roll in the hay. Not a one. Even men convicted of rape or sexual assault often don’t get jail time. But sure, tossing the victim of rape into a jail cell for choosing a legal medical procedure makes perfect, fucking sense.
In Gilead.
The increasingly frenetic anti-abortion narrative only works if we keep propping up the myth that only wanton whores have abortions. Only over-sexed succubi who can’t keep their legs shut have abortions. And those women? Well, by God, those women should bear the consequences!
Even if the consequence is death.
And death? It’ll come a knocking. There will be a long road meandering through history littered with dead women. Bodies discarded, buried with a marker that reads:
“She got what was coming to her.”
And here’s the kicker, ladies: Nothing would make those fuckers happier than being able to step over a dead woman and tell her bled out corpse she got exactly what she derserved.
Let’s take a deep dive into statistics, shall we?
More than half of all US women who choose abortion are practicing birth control. Go ahead, do the math.
I’ll wait.
Forget it, I’ll do some math for you. In the US, about 11 million women are on the pill at any given time. Even a 1% failure rate means 110K unplanned/unwanted pregnancies a year, and that’s under perfect circumstances, which don’t exist. The actual effectiveness of the pill hovers around 91%. That puts the number of unplanned pregnancies while on the pill, around 990K.
990K.
Even factoring in a miscarriage rate of 1/3, we’re still looking at over half a million unplanned pregnancies a year. Not of whores who use abortion like ketchup on their sex lives, but women who are being “responsible”. And that’s just the pill.
Women — not sluts, not whores, not succubi — chose abortion for a thousand different reasons. Yet literally no one pushing the Gilead narrative is interested in those reasons.
Those brogelicals? They’re not interested in fixing the underlying reasons why women terminate pregnancies. They are far more interested in controlling what women do or do not do with their bodies than they are about making it easier for women to carry pregnancies to term.
The truth about abortion has always been more complex. Outlawing abortion, won’t stop it. Women have always — and will always — seek ways to end pregnancies. Making it unsafe or difficult just means that more women will die doing it. And if you’re ok with that, in the name of Jesus, God, Allah, or Jehovah, you need to take a real close look at that religion you’re practicing. Overlooking dead and dying women, poor women, broken women, trapped women, in order to shove your own religious beliefs down their throat is about as far from the tenets of religion as you can get. If you’re ok with killing a living, breathing woman as punishment for a legal medical procedure, you are a sanctimonious hypocrite.
And if you don’t see that? You should drop kick your own sorry ass out of the temple.
I’m going for the tingle in the belly now.
If abortion as a health care choice is offensive to you, the choice is clear: don’t have one. If you’re a man and find the notion offensive? Don’t have sex, that way you don’t have to worry about your role in an unwanted pregnancy. Get a vasectomy. Practice abstinence.
Keep it in your pants, brogelicals.
The only trope more powerful than the whorish woman who uses abortion as birth control? The myth of the benevolent mother. The idea that any woman, once presented with an infant, will love and care for and nurture that child is simply that: a myth. The truth is, many women should never be tasked with the care of another human being. Forcing birth on them is the answer?
And don’t spout adoption at me. Women chose abortion because they can’t afford to be pregnant — economically, psychologically, physically. They choose abortion because they can’t take time off from work they need to support a family. Because medically a pregnancy is dangerous, far more dangerous than abortion. Because psychologically a pregnancy might kill them. Because physically it may. Because their birth control failed and they are not ready, for whatever reason, to carry a pregnancy. Because they’re already living close to the financial edge, or under it and a pregnancy is going to drown them. How does adoption solve any of those issues? How does a woman who can’t continue to work to feed her kids benefit from adoption? How does a woman in a domestic violence situation benefit from adoption? Are you seriously ok with telling a woman who is repeatedly raped by a violent partner that she should just suck it up and risk her life?
Pro-life my ass. How are you helping a woman’s life?
I’ll wait.
Women are human beings. We live and breathe and bleed. We have lives, rich, complex and robust actual lives which are continuously ignored, side-lined, and conveniently forgotten about in the zealous push to sanctify the cell-cluster of potential we have the capacity to carry.
For all it’s star-spangled Jesus hoopla, the United States of America is not a Christian nation. If you’re a 2nd Amendment nut and believe in the foresight of the founding fathers, you should also believe that the foundation of a nation free of a state religion was purposeful and designed.
You do not get to shove your religion down my throat or into my uterus. You do not get to insert your religion into my body with greedy fingers or trans-vaginal ultrasounds or laws. You do not get to speak about your fears of Sharia Law while enacting Evangelical Law in the US.
You do not. You do not. You do not.
If dead women is your goal, congratulations. Keep going. Keep shoving your fundamental extremes down the throat of a nation while turning away from the corpses. But know this: in whatever afterlife you imagine for yourself, in whatever golden hued paradise you envision, you will have blood on your hands.
And know this as well. Women will come after you. Repeatedly and hard. With curse words and exclamations points. With boycotts and lawsuits and protests and eventually, with voting your sorry asses out of office where you will no longer be able to do us any harm. So come at us assholes. We dare you.
We will not go gently into that good night of the United States of Gilead.
