Alabama. A state with a dark history of hate and oppression. Odd that a state that has certainly never embraced a culture of brotherly love or Christian compassion should now violate a woman's constitutional right to control her own body in the name of defending the value of human life or of denying man the role of Almighty God.
This same week, Alabama was also in the news for having a prison system like something out of the dark ages. The mentally ill and the helpless are often left to die in their prisons, the most fundamental legal proscriptions against cruel and unusual punishment callously disregarded by those charged with upholding the law. No, Christian principles like compassion, redemption and forgiveness are certainly not at the heart of Alabama's attack on a woman's right to choose.
What is it, then? Why do conservatives in general, people who have no moral qualms about bombing cities to rubble, killing scores of women and children in the name of geopolitical strategy, who openly practice execution in the name of revenge (assuming the role of God) and who will let innocent children die of disease or malnutrition or thirst in cages or on deserts rather than pay higher taxes or open our precious borders, suddenly and conveniently find religion when it comes to a woman ending her pregnancy?
The answer, I suspect, lies in one of the defining pillars of their ideology: patriarchy. Women must in their minds be allowed to control nothing of their own lives. They can be domestic servants, nannies...and, of course, incubators. But never self-determining free beings. The irony is that a woman signed this bill into law. (A woman too old to bear children, but not to run for re-election.)
The right wing hope is that laws like this one in Alabama may be the wedge they need for a right-leaning Supreme Court to overturn Roe vs. Wade. It may well happen. And, what then?
Will there be choice states and handmaiden's tale-type states? Will the latter establish armed borders to prevent pregnant women from escaping to the former? Will underground railroads appear? Could interstate border clashes occur if one too many pregnant women attempt to escape? Will abortion pills be the next great prohibition nightmare? Might we come to see floating abortion clinics; vans on lonely country roads in the dead of night, and trigger-happy militias opening fire on them? Will murders of abortion doctors become the norm in states like Alabama, as lynchings once were?
The idle speculations of a science fiction writer? Or America's future? We'll see.
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