The Heartbreak of Alabama's New Abortion Bill
By Alex Morris
The first time I pledged my virginity to Jesus, I was 13 years old, sitting cross-legged on the finished basement floor of the sort of stately home that passes for “middle class” only in the movies. I had not yet gotten braces. I still wore bright ribbons in my hair. I had surreptitiously kissed Ross Morgan on the lips in the backseat of my family’s minivan, but neither of us had opened our mouths — I’m not sure we knew we were supposed to. As I now remember it, I sat there, surrounded by dozens of other seventh grade girls who attended my same junior high (where we learned about states’ rights but not evolution), and was told that every time I let a boy put his hands on me, it was as if I’d taken the white, heart-shaped piece of paper proffered to each of us by the Bible study leader and I’d ripped it; rip it enough times and I’d only have a shredded heart to give the man I would eventually marry. Wide-eyed, pondering that chilling prospect, we were then told that our hearts and souls should be pledged instead to Jesus. It was all about saving our hearts and our souls that day; as far as I can remember, our bodies were never explicitly mentioned.
As it turned out, our bodies had something else that could save them: money. At the time, I attended Mountain Brook Junior High School, in Mountain Brook, Alabama, a suburb of Birmingham whose school district had blatantly invented itself to sidestep desegregation. Here is a place where golf courses spread, where monogrammed thank you notes are endlessly sent, where this Bible study was considered compulsory for the daughters of “good” families, and where my wealthy public middle school had roughly 1,000 students, exactly zero of whom were African American. Even being Jewish was viewed as slightly exotic. My best friend, Mary, whom I passed notes to in math class and who had been adopted from the Philippines as an infant, was sometimes complimented on her perfect English.
And six years later, by the time my class of about 300 kids was graduating, not one of us had ever had so much as a pregnancy scare — at least not publicly. (One girl a few years ahead of us left school for a while and then returned with a new “baby sister.” Another girl a few years behind had a small bump that one day magically disappeared.) Meanwhile, I don’t know of a single friend who was on birth control; we would have been too terrified to tell our parents we needed it. Either our paper hearts remained unsullied, our male cohorts were fastidious about their condom usage, or something else was going on, something related to our parents’ ability to pay our problems away (most likely some combination of the three).
This week, the Alabama legislature passed what is being touted as the most restrictive abortion legislation in the land, and I’m sure that many hearts in Mountain Brook are rejoicing. Once passed in the state Senate (which it will be) and signed by the governor (which it will be), the Alabama Human Life Protection Act will criminalize any abortion performed after conception occurs, meaning the very nanosecond sperms meets egg. The bill has no exemptions for rape or incest and also neglects to give the mother parental rights in the event of rape, meaning that a mother might be forced to share custody with her rapist. When it comes to repressive legislation, leave it to Bama to go whole hog.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/alabama-new-abortion-bill-restrictive-830846/
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