Time Flowing Backwards...
Time in reverse is not something unique to science fiction. We just saw it happen in the state of Texas. After nearly half a century of women having the right to control their own bodies, Texas has passed the most restrictive anti-abortion law on record. Using not law officers to enforce it, but civilians encouraged to file lawsuits against anyone who performs or "aids and abets" an abortion.
Now, that's one for science fiction. Where but in some dystopian future world would one see citizens encouraged...financially rewarded, in fact...to employ lawyers as hired guns to enforce a repressive law?
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This reversal in time...this temporal regression towards the days of back-alley abortions is one fraught with contradictions and hypocrisy. Texas is a state that refuses sex education or contraception to its young people. A land of chastity pledges and fire-and-brimstone piety. It is also the state with one of the highest rates of teen pregnancy and abortion in the union.
Why do anti-abortion elements in this country continue to wage war on a woman's right to control her own body? Certainly not out of compassion for the unborn. Conservatives won't stand for "welfare states" or "big government" picking their pockets to care for the children of unwed teenaged mothers. If babies starve or die of disease, they couldn't care less. Just as they don't care if children die in detention on our southern border. They're all for war and capital punishment. They'd slaughter whole populations if they could...They'd "make the sands glow in the dark" if they could. They'd execute illegal aliens, LGBT people...and, probably African Americans en masse if they could. (Look what was done to the native American.)
No, it's not the word of Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace that motivates them, that's for sure. What they want is to dominate women. That, they will not let go. Patriarchal culture in its most primitive form...the macho cowboy culture that shaped the great American west...that goes to the soul of the anti-abortion movement.
And, that movement employs an almost science-fictional approach to equating abortion with murder... something that was never done, biblically or otherwise, in all the centuries before Roe v. Wade. Abortion was legal under English law for a hundred years after the American Revolution. It was outlawed in the 1800's for 2 reasons:
1) The procedure was dangerous and life-threatening in those days, so the doctors didn't want to perform it.
2) Women had no individual rights to speak of in those days and, in the eyes of the church, their primary role in society was to produce children.
A century later, neither of those reasons applied anymore, so the forces wanting to maintain men's control over women had to invent a whole new reason why abortion was wrong. Even while dropping napalm on children on the other side of the globe, they told scientific and medical half-truths, implying that abortion was the moral equivalent of infanticide.
So, here we are, half a century later...perhaps on the verge of waking up in the past. Coat hangers, knitting needles...garage mechanics performing surgery in back alleys. Illegal abortion drugs sold on the black market. Women and girls dead by the hundreds.
But, perhaps we're waking up into a dark future, as well. A nightmare world of state-sanctioned vigilante goon squads herding women into detention camps in the desert where they're force-fed and maybe even cut open like livestock to safeguard their unborn babies. Could it happen? If a woman can be forced to carry a pregnancy to term against her will...if that's not considered a violation of her most basic human rights...then, why not?
The clock is ticking backward...how long before we wake up?
