[ad_1]
On September 1, Texas implemented Senate Bill 8 (SB8) Abortion is prohibited After six weeks of pregnancy, including rape and incest.
Given that most women don’t even know they are pregnant at six weeks, SB8 almost completely prohibits abortion. This is the most restrictive law of this kind in the entire United States. The landmark Roe v. Wade ruling of the Supreme Court in 1973 ostensibly provided constitutional protection for the right to abortion.
Except for what constitutes a crime, Texas law is totally unreasonable.First of all, its execution is not entrusted to state agents, but entrusted to Individual citizen They win prizes of $10,000 or more by filing lawsuits against doctors, abortion clinic staff, Uber drivers, and any other knowing or unknowing accomplices.
The plaintiff does not have to be from Texas, nor does it have to have any relationship with the defendant. It is speculated that SB8 will not only encourage ordinary American religious fanatics to further release their inner police, but also inspire other demographic data to use efforts to eliminate the appearance of women’s rights acquired under patriarchal capitalism.
As NPR points out, the Texas Right to Life organization has “established a so-called’whistleblower’ website where people can submit anonymous reports about anyone they believe is violating the law.”
Although the Department of Justice has sued Texas for SB8’s alleged unconstitutionality, the U.S. Supreme Court has Refuse to block law. Reuters reported that “In an unsigned interpretation, the court majority stated that the unusual structure of Texas law-leaving enforcement to the individual who filed the lawsuit-limits its ability to act. “.
The moral of this story seems to be that it does not matter whether the law is legal, as long as it is enforced by ordinary citizens and not by those who should enforce the law.
Among other ironies in Texas, September 1 also contributed to the birth of a state law that allowed Carry a hidden pistol Without permission.
The “right to life” ends here.
According to right-wing Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott, SB8 “ensures that the life of every unborn baby with a heartbeat will be protected from abortion.”
However, the state’s attention rarely extends to the beating heart outside the womb, where mankind has been ravaged by the deadly neoliberal system to “save lives.”
It is also worth emphasizing that criminalizing abortion does not prevent women from seeking to terminate pregnancies that they do not want or cannot afford; it simply forces them to seek less safe and often life-threatening options.
To be sure, the harmful effects of SB8 will have a disproportionate impact on the bodies of poor women—especially black and Latino women—this is the race of the country where Abbott was named the “best governor in the country” in 2020 The reality of social and economic oppression, according to his official website.
Indigenous women are also facing increasing difficulties. NBC News wrote that not only are Native American women “more than twice as likely to die from diseases caused or exacerbated by pregnancy as white women,” the Department of Justice statistics show that one-third of them are “raped or become rapes.” Victims of attempts”. “.
In a chapter entitled “Racism, Birth Control, and Reproductive Rights” published in 1981, the iconic scholar and activist Angela Davis reflected contemporary views on Native Americans, Chicanas, Puerto Ricans and The proportion of black women undergoing forced surgical sterilization is disproportionately high—not to mention their poor white women. Through a program funded by the U.S. federal government.
Trivia like this shows that American abortion policy has never been about a potential heartbeat. Rather, it is about controlling the female body.
In the same chapter, Davis observed that black and Latino women’s support for abortion rights has little to do with “they want to be free from pregnancy”, but more with “tragic social conditions preventing them from taking a new life.” Into the world”.
Davis emphasized that black women “have been having abortions since the early days of slavery.”
On the other hand, the official “life supporters” are basically not affected by considerations involving historical background, socio-economic reality, and general rationality.
For me, some of them are very uncomfortable very close to home. When I was reading a recent Washington Post article on SB8, I saw a paragraph about an anti-abortion demonstration outside a clinic in Austin, Texas, which contained a bell-ring name: “Cilly · Harden kneels in the mud with the rosary in his hand and prays,” and said enthusiastically, “It is great that ordinary citizens now have the ability to sue clinics and others who help illegal abortions.”
A brief Google survey confirmed that the problematic Harden was indeed the mother of my former classmate at an almost all white Catholic elementary school in the capital of Texas, where I spent a part of my youth studying an important life. Course My dog will not go to heaven. Using colored lip balm is the first step towards the decline of premarital sex.
At the same time, some critics of SB8 also lost the plot. For example, a opinion column in USA Today warned that “the right to guns may be lost in the future.”
In the “Chicago Sun Times”, the former US presidential candidate Reverend Jesse Jackson slammed the “Republican Texas Taliban”-the “Texas Taliban” rallying slogan was also used by actress and activist Allie Alyssa Milano and Rosana Arquette.
Of course, anyone is guessing why the fanaticism of a country based on genocide and slavery requires Orientalist comparisons to compare with the brown foreigners in the distance. These foreigners came to power first, in part because of the United States. warlike.
Call it the bloody ravages of imperialism-please note that this is not just a Republican matter.
In response to the clamor of the “Texas Taliban”, the feminist filmmaker Mara Ahmed marveled on the “Left-wing haphazard Islamophobia” on Facebook. She defined the Texas abortion ban as “typically American” and urged critics to “put it within the scope of American evil.”
As the United States continues to be its typical self, it is time to discontinue SB8-and we are still doing more.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
[ad_2]
Source link