24-bbbbrrrraaaaiiinnssss

I was going to write about something completely different for this Tuesday Top of Mind. I had it written and everything but posted.

And then Arizona’s Supreme Court upheld an 1864 anti-abortion law, making it the law of Arizona.

A near-total abortion ban.

Okay. I see what you did there.

They resurrected a zombie law. A law that is technically still on the books but hasn’t been enforced in DECADES.

This completely dismisses more than half of their population. Because in 1864 women couldn’t 1) vote 2) hold office 3) hold property 4) hold a job 5) have a bank account. No women voted for it. Because they couldn’t. Women didn’t gain the right to vote in Arizona until 1912.

I am so incandescent with rage about this further degradation of women’s bodily autonomy and rights.

This zombie law has lurched back to life, aided by those who seek to control women and is now going to be fed the blood of those who it tortures. The women who request abortions and the often doomed children they are seeking to protect. Just like Texas. Just like Tennessee. Just like Florida. Just like any other state that has passed anti-abortion bills since the overturning of Roe v Wade and the Dobbs decision.

This is what Justices Alito and Thomas were signaling when they brought up the Comstock law against mailing indecent and lewd things in the mail during arguments about the legality of mailing mifepristone through the mail. You know, the abortion pill. The Comstock law hasn’t been enforced since the 1930s. I remember when it was bandied about when Larry Flynt was on trial for distributing lewd magazines in the 1970s and 1980s. That magazine was Hustler, among others. If I remember correctly, that is why magazines such as these started to be shipped in brown paper wrapping. To protect the eyes, you know.

Eye roll.

Cruelty and control are their endgame.

They don’t care about the potential child. They just want to control women and bring them to heel because we dare to think that we are people in our own right. With our own rights. With our own ideas. With our own bodily autonomy.

Cruelty is the point.

Control is the endgame.

Also endgame is to have the hard-won rights of women rolled back to when we could be controlled. If that ever was a thing.

This is what the attack on no-fault divorce is about.

This is what the attack on abortion rights is about.

This is what the attack on women’s bodily autonomy is about.

This is what the upcoming attack on birth control is about.

I’ve been writing and marching about it for years.

Increasing the birth rate of WHITE women by WHITE men is the ultimate goal.

This is and always has been about control and cruelty.

This is where being a Cassandra really sucks. No one believes us.

Gah!!!

Tuesday top of mind 2/20/24- Cassandra calling

We warned you.

We warned you about the threat to Roe, despite assurances that there was nothing to be concerned about with settled law. Look what happened to Roe v Wade with the Dobbs decision. You know, the decision that knocked down fundamental, important rights of being a woman: the right to bodily autonomy, the right to privacy with discussions with their own doctor about their own body. That decision.

We warned you that medication abortion was next.

Along came Kacsmaryk and his ruling that called into question the FDA safety processes around mifepristone. The same ruling that was based on shoddy research that has since been recalled by the publisher? Yeah, and the case is now in front of the Supreme Court which has already shown willful disregard of laws and precedents in order to advance their religion on the United States. That one.

We warned you.

We warned you that in vitro fertilization was next.

After all the logical path says that if all abortion is murder, then in vitro embryos must be treated as people. The Alabama Supreme Court yesterday ruled that the embryos that were destroyed by accident by someone who wasn’t even allowed to be in the room but “wandered in” opened the freezer, took out embryos, and dropped them because the very cold temperatures required to gave them freezer burn to their hand. This broke the frozen clumps of cells. Yeah, and that temperature is -320 degrees Fahrenheit. The Alabama Supreme Court ruled that the embryos were to be considered children.

This was a terrible thing to happen to those cells. Terrible for the clinic that housed these cells, terrible for the family whose potential children were destroyed by someone “wandering around”. There should be charges.

However.

Respectfully an embryo is not a child. Embryos are potential children.

This ruling will send shockwaves through reproductive health. Again.

On a side note, the Mayo Clinic 10-20% of known pregnancies end in a miscarriage for a variety of reasons. That is not even counting the ones that are not yet realized and the woman may think nothing of a 1-2 day delay in her period or not even have a delay in her period.

Shall we take bets on what the courts will say about that? Are women going to be punished for having a miscarriage, a phenomenon that often has no answer and no causative agent? For being a woman. Bet me and you’ll be proven wrong when this slippery slope gets steeper and faster and men can act out their revenge fantasies on women. Because control.

I am sick of being Cassandra for reproductive health. Reminder, Cassandra was the daughter of the last king of Troy. Apollo bestowed the gift of prophecy on her in exchange for her doing his bidding. When she refused him, he said that no one would ever believe her prophecies. Sound familiar? Are you icked out yet?

Control has been the cudgel of powerful men for millennia. Even in fiction.

For now, in Alabama, frozen cells are to be conferred personhood.

We should all be frightened.

Tuesday Top of Mind 1/23/24-light a candle for Roe

Yesterday marked 51 years since Roe versus Wade. The ruling protected a woman’s constitutional right to choose their own path, including the right to choose an abortion.

Well, thought men everywhere, we’ll see about that.

After all, if a woman as the right to her own body just think of what else she will decide to have the rights for.

She may decide that she has the right to end a terrible marriage. Not terrible because of abuse, or because of infidelity, but because they just don’t suit after all. There has been a rumbling, deep in the men’s groups, about the downfall of society was the no-fault divorce. This means that the woman (or man) can just decide that they don’t want to be married anymore.

Gasp, the audacity!

Yes, this is heavy on the sarcasm. The no-fault divorce will be the focus soon enough. And is what will be the focus of some groups next as I’ve heard the rumblings.

However, the Roe v Wade decision guaranteed a woman’s privacy in health care matters, including abortion.

Apparently we women don’t know our own mind.

But we do; and that scares people to death.

As I’ve written before, it is not about the child. If it was there would be affordable daycare, rent, healthcare. You know, the things that are required to raise the infant to adulthood. Where they can be a tax paying entity.

Money and power and control.

I’ve written about it many times because it is heavy on the mind. Especially 51 years after Roe v Wade was decided by the Supreme Court 7-2.

The Dobbs decision was June 24, 2022. Notwithstanding the outright lies to get three of the justices on the court during their confirmation hearings, this kicked back the decision to the states.

According to the Guttmacher Institute and their work on reproductive health, the state laws run the gamut of total ban, without exclusions for rape or incest or health of woman, to 6 weeks (the so-called heartbeat bills), 8 weeks after last menstrual period (essentially a 6 week ban), 12 weeks (end of first trimester, and also before the anatomy scans for sex of the baby are even done), 15 weeks after last menstrual period (essentially a 12 week ban), viability (which is nebulous and being pushed by medical science all the time), 24 weeks after last menstrual period, and one 3rd trimester. A couple of states don’t have any abortion ban laws at all. Confusing, right?

Raise a glass to the Roe v Wade decision, light a candle, not matter what you feel you have to do to mourn the rights that were stripped from ALL women in this country in June 2022.

Because some men said so. Okay, there was a woman too.

How dare they?

Taking away the power and the control and the patriarchical overtones, it is, and always has been, about cold hard cash. Taxes, I mean. The taxes that the baby could have paid as an adult. Or, in some states, as child laborers.

Not to mention to torturing of unborn babies who are incompatible with life, or the women who die because their state said no. Even though the pregnancy is killing them.

Mourn them too.

Then put the steel in your spine and fight to get our rights back.