The “right to life”

May 15, 2019

On a daily basis, the news has us all cycling between alternate feelings of rage and dread.  Around the country, puritanical zealots are locked in a competition to brand every woman in America like Hester Prynne.  Not content with punishing women for daring to assert sexual agency, the Alabama legislature passed a bill yesterday that would make all women the powerless victims of depraved and criminal men.  The Alabama bill, which contained no exception for rape or incest, was stunning in its cruelty (Source:  “Alabama Lawmakers Vote to Effectively Ban Abortion in the State,” by Timothy Williams and Alan Blinder, The New York Times, 5/14/19).  With this spate of legislation, anti-abortion extremists seem closer than ever to their long sought goal, to tee up a challenge that would give the newly ultra-conservative Supreme Court the chance to overturn Roe v. Wade. Although women have always known that this was the endgame, the abject ignorance of actual biology and naked contempt for women displayed by these anti-abortion militants still feels like a punch to the gut.

The truth, as Lili Loofbourow explains in chilling detail in Slate, is that this outcome is far from accidental.  It is the result of a meticulously planned strategy employed by Republicans at the state and local level, to attack the democratic process through boring bureaucratic means.  Through the interlocking strategies of gerrymandering, voter suppression, and hijacking legislative procedure, a revanchist minority is asserting its determination to have complete dominion and control over the lives of women and people of color.  In their eyes, we are all expendable. For white women, it means that they will have neither the ability to pursue their ambition on an equal footing with men, nor bodily autonomy.  For women of color, it means all of that, plus the risk that our children will be taken from us or that we will be murdered with impunity.

Consider the murder on Monday night of Pamela Turner. Turner, a 44 year old Black mother of two was shot and killed by a Texas police officer just outside of her own apartment building.  She was murdered, despite telling the officer she was pregnant.  So much for a reverence for the “unborn.”  The officer claimed that Turner had outstanding warrants for “criminal mischief” as a purported justification for her arrest, but Turner’s sister said that Pamela struggled with mental health issues and had asserted that the officer had a history of harassing her, (Source:  “A Texas Cop Shot and Killed a Black Woman Outside of Her Apartment Complex,” by Hannah Gold, TheCut.com, 5/15/19).

Consider the footage, just released three years after her death, from Sandra Bland’s own cell phone.  The newly released footage makes it crystal clear that she posed absolutely no threat and that the officer needlessly escalated an encounter for a minor traffic infraction.  The lack of consequences for the officer whose actions led to Sandra Bland’s death should fill us with rage, (Source:  “Sandra Bland Recorded Video of Her Traffic Stop.  It Just Became Public Three Years After Her Death,” by Molly Olmstead, Slate.com, 5/7/19).   As we see with depressing regularity, in everything from police brutality to Black maternal death rates, Black women’s lives are cheap.  With the rash of increasingly harsh abortion bans, we can see that white women’s lives are.  We can only hope that they see it too.