One reason that authors of dystopian fiction pen such stories is because they hope these dark futures will not come to pass.
Lately, though, dystopian novels are more like Nostradamus-level predictions, and no author’s work more so than Margaret Atwood.
Atwood’s “Handmaid’s Tale” posited a bleak world where a theocratic government suppressed women’s rights and, among other nefarious activities, put abortion providers to death. Regardless of how far-fetched this scenario may have been in 1985, here we are in 2019, facing Ohio’s latest attempt to circumvent Roe v. Wade with a bill that would ban all abortions in Ohio and levy murder charges against doctors who perform them.
USA Today notes the bill has not been formally introduced, although it does have the support of 21 Republicans in the state House. The proposed legislation would likely trigger a lawsuit if passed.
It’s been a clear strategy of abortion foes to introduce more and more audacious and draconian measures in the hopes of gnawing their way to the Supreme Court, where await justices who may be more kindly disposed toward nixing Roe v. Wade than any in a generation.
Ohio Right to Life organizers feel the best chance of curtailing women’s rights — although they don’t couch it in quite that same language — will come from legal challenges to various “heartbeat bills” like the one Gov. Mike DeWine signed into law in April. Last week’s more brazen attempt is the product of an extreme faction of abortion foes, one who will stop at nothing to stop a practice it believes is tantamount to murder.
Of course, these agitators apparently see no disparity between their beliefs about the sanctity of fetal life vs. the possible execution of medical professionals involved in providing access to a procedure that has been legal in this country for 46 years.
For too many conservatives, and especially those at the far right of the continuum, concern about life begins and ends at the womb. Once fetuses are born and become actual, honest-to-goodness children, they — and their parents — must fend for themselves in a world where many of the same people that fought for their right to live now seek to deny them adequate healthcare, equal educational opportunities and living wages.
They can drink polluted water and breathe filthy air, courtesy of repealed environmental laws. They can grow up poor, be swept away by the school-to-prison pipeline, and find their right to vote suppressed. They can be discriminated against because of the people they choose to love, denied rehabilitative services for any addictions, and find their options for food curtailed by a government that doesn’t believe they are working hard enough.
And all this is fine, as long as they had an inviolable right to come out of the womb after nine months. Think of it as pulling themselves up by their bootstraps before they even have bootstraps.
With so many other problems to deal with, it is telling that conservatives so often return to the abortion issue. If they would work as diligently and fervently to address life’s other inequalities, especially economic, they might find that the demand for abortions will drop precipitously, without the need for further laws.
But that’s not really the point, is it?
No, the point for too many of abortion’s foes has more to do with addressing what they perceive as society’s (re: women’s) failure to adhere to so-called Christian morality. For their temerity to have sex outside of marriage and for their insistence that they have autonomy over their own bodies, they must be punished by carrying fetuses to term, and we aren’t too concerned with what happens to them after that.
What we need are more people who are both pro-choice and anti-abortion. Create a culture where people of all income levels and colors are loved and protected from birth to death, where all women have free and unfettered access to all forms of birth control so they can decide when the time is right to have a child, and where doctors and patients have the privacy and autonomy to discuss sensitive medical issues without interference by mostly old, mostly white politicians — and where, it should go without saying (but can’t because of insanity), medical providers don’t have to fear for their lives when they provide options.
When we do that, we take a huge step away from dystopia and toward something sane, sustainable and life affirming.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
No comments:
Post a Comment