The new attacks on Roe v. Wade are about protecting men, not women
Part of President Trump’s new immigration proposal is something called “patriotic assimilation.” It’s a euphemism for an immigrant entry exam that evokes the Jim Crow literacy tests used to disenfranchise black voters. One administration official told the Washington Post that green-card applicants would be required to pass an exam based on such everyday American household dinner topics as Thomas Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptist Association.
That is a perplexing choice for the administration, given the timing. That letter, dated January 1, 1802, is the foundation of many understandings of the First Amendment when it comes to the separation of church and state. That is anything but what we saw this week, as their Republican allies in statehouses throughout the Midwest and South pushed through unconstitutional, misogynist and pseudoscientific restrictions on abortion.
In my native Ohio, a child who is raped might not even know she is pregnant before she runs out of time to abort her rapist’s fetus. Missouri sent its eight-week restriction to its eager Republican governor for signature on Friday. And Alabama’s law, arguably the most barbaric of them all, criminalizes the procedure from the moment of conception and carries a prison sentence for doctors of up to 99 years. That is a much longer bid than the maximum any rapist in the state could get, all while his victim is forced to bear his child. Each law, in its own way, subjugates women and girls — and since white women statistically have greater access to the procedure, signals a specific attack on women of color. This is a particular issue in Georgia, where noted vote suppressor Brian Kemp is governor. Under the law scheduled to go into effect on January 1st, women who self-terminate their pregnancies can be imprisoned for life or executed, thereby accomplishing two goals: subduing them for their gender, and taking away their ballot. (Men who impregnated them, per the law, suffer no consequence.)
It has been plain for a while now that the anti-abortion cause has nothing to do with actual deities or morality. If it did, it wouldn’t put the lives of doctors, patients and clinic employees in jeopardy to make its argument. States would be more concerned with their terrible infant mortality rates than they would about saving fetuses. Ending reproductive rights in America has never been about anything holy. Anti-abortionists like to remind us of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger’s statements about eugenics or claim they’re trying to stop a “black genocide,” but their movement was born to keep white patriarchy alive. And it is white men who are the primary beneficiaries of such policies.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/white-patriarchy-abortion-ban-law-837026/
Just have to say as a 61 year old white male, I find it strange that anyone would feel threatened by women having the choice of whether to have a child or not.
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