It’s Not As Simple As They Hate Women
Trigger Warnings: References to abuse and sexual violence.
The conservative supreme court has leaked their draft opinion which will end with the legal right to abortion no longer being protected in the USA.
The reigning liberal explanation for when conservatives do things that will hurt people is “cruelty is the point”, but this is a lazy analysis. While some people people do act out of sadistic tendencies, the more complex answer is that people who are going to act out and hurt people are going to do so regardless, they are just looking for a socially acceptable scapegoat target to pour their aggression into.
Abusers don’t abuse just because they want to see you hurt. They abuse because they get some personal validation or gain for themselves, and don’t think they will be held accountable for their actions.
This is why people with developmental disabilities, the elderly, children, and the unhoused are often targets of violence at a higher rate. Unfortunately, people with intellectual disabilities are sexually assaulted at a rate of 7 times higher than those without disabilities.
The perfect victim is one who won’t report you or talk back, and abusers know this. They know how to toe the line and most of them are socially aware enough to only go after the people in the corners and not the popular social butterfly at the middle of the room. This is often why violent people will start with hurting animals, because they are a more socially acceptable target than humans.
If you’ve ever been in an abusive relationship, you’re aware it’s not really about your abuser trying to hurt you all the time. It’s more about them controlling you and turning you into a shadow of yourself, that has to rely on them and their scraps of approval to feel okay. Then, they can use you as a receptacle for all their bad feelings without worry of you leaving. This is why the cycle of abuse includes a Honeymoon phase, to keep the victim coming back under the wing of control. It’s not an accident that happens once or twice. It’s a well crafted plan to keep someone from leaving and to get them to accept more and more abuse.
In the context of abuse, banning abortion makes more sense as a control move than as a cruelty move. Yes, those people don’t care that many people are going to die in unsafe abortions (5–13% of maternal deaths per year died of unsafe abortion a year according to WHO), but it’s not actually about trying to kill us by slow attrition — they need us. It’s about control.
And here’s where i want to interject about gender. The fact that they are framing this as a “Women’s issue” is already a problem. For one thing, this is not a Women’s issue. It’s a human rights issue. Even in the case of a completely cisgender situation, a woman getting pregnant does not just affect her, it affects her whole family. If you are a child and your mother gets pregnant, she may be taken from you simply for getting a routine medical procedure now. If your wife has a miscarriage from your sperm, she can be jailed for that.
In the age where there is not a single state where you can afford rent on a full time minimum wage salary, your wife and mother of your child being jailed is going to affect the whole family. The entire family will be cast into poverty immediately if you force them down to a single wage earner by throwing one of them in jail.
Even if the woman in this scenario is capable of giving birth and delivering, which no one should ever have to do unless they want, she will still lose income from maternity leave, the costs of giving birth, and of course, the cost of diapering and clothing the new child. EVEN in the ideal scenario the uterine fascists have cooked up, where the parents don’t have to pay to raise the child, the cost of delivery is still is around 10K with insurance. It’s about double that if you don’t have insurance.
The yearly minimum wage is $15,080 a year. There is no possible way for a person to pay down 10k medical debt from having a child on minimum wage by themselves. This is not a individual “Woman’s issue” because the cost of those procedures is going to fall to their families and support networks.
Furthermore, conservatives are currently trying to deem trans people subhuman by denying us basic rights. By allowing them to frame this as solely a Women’s reproductive issue, you are re-enforcing conservative idealistic gender boundaries that don’t exist in real life.
I am a trans nonbinary person. I am not a woman, and my legal documentation even agrees with this. However, I can get pregnant, and my right to abortion should be protected. The same can be said for my trans brothers. Please use the correct wording and call it a Human’s Rights issue.
Speaking of trans people and convenient abuse victims — trans people are 4 times more like than cisgender people to be victims of violent crimes. Whenever a group is demeaned and treated as lesser, that’s a sign to the abusers of the world that we’re fair game. This is why all fights for equality have to be intersectional, because otherwise you’re just leaving some people for the fascists to punch.
This isn’t just about words. They’re trying to define us out of existence. Once we cease to be humans on paper, they can treat as subhuman in real life, too.
So, it’s not just they ideologically hate women. They’re trying to control and punish us for limiting our reproductive abilities. But why?
These attempts to justify abortion through appeals to broader right to autonomy and to define one’s “concept of existence” prove too much. Casey, 505 U. S., at 851. Those criteria, at a high level of generality, could license fundamental rights to illicit drug use, prostitution, and the like.(p32)
You see, the right to autonomy, because it is your private body that you own, could set dangerous precedents.
While individuals are certainly free to think and to say what they wish about “existence,” “meaning,” the “universe,” and “the mystery of human life,” they are not always free to act in accordance with those thoughts. License to act on the basis of such beliefs may correspond to one of the many understandings of “liberty,” but it is certainly not “ordered liberty.” (p30)
You’re allowed to think and wish about freedom, but you’re not actually free.
Ordered liberty sets limits and defines the boundary between competing interests. Roe and Casey each struck a particular balance between the interests of a woman who wants an abortion and the interest of what they termed a “potential life.”
(p31)
That’s right, they just admitted that your right to bodily autonomy is going to be destroyed because of what is stated as literally a “potential” life. Not even an actually viable fetus, a Potential. If you have a uterus, your rights have been placed underneath that of a person that might never even exist.
Some have argued that a fetus should not be entitled to legal protection until it acquires the characteristics that they regard as defining what it means to be a “person.” Among the characteristics that have been offered as essential attributes of “personhood” are sentience, self-awareness, the ability to reason, or some combination thereof.” By this logic, it would be an open question whether even born individuals, including young children or those afflicted with certain developmental or medical conditions, merit protections as “persons.” But even if one takes the view that “personhood” begins when a certain attribute or combination of attributes is acquired, it is very hard to see why viability should mark the point where “personhood” begins. (p47)
So they’re making the argument that the line for person-hood in fetuses is difficult to determine, because disabled people are people. Let’s see what a disabled vegan feminist has to say about person-hood:
When neurotypical and able-bodied human capacities are used as the measure of a being’s value, both nonhuman animals and disabled human beings lose out. The characteristics that humans have used to measure cognitive capacity are no doubt signs of a certain kind of complex cognition, but they are not necessarily the only way to measure intelligence, let alone value or worth.
So Taylor agrees that personhood shouldn’t be determined by able-body human standards. How anti-ableist of the supreme court! But what does Taylor think of the ability to choose when you want to give birth?
As socialist feminists like Federici have shown, capitalism developed by encouraging, and coercing, women to accept their role as selfless nurturers as natural, inevitable, and eternal. Over the centuries people rose up and demanded a different set of possibilities and expectations for those designated as female — something more than a lifetime of dishes, diapers, and intercourse on demand. Women have insisted on having control of how and if we choose to engage in sex, pregnancy, abortion, birth, and lactation. Yet capitalism has persuaded us to lower the expectations we have for our fellow creatures. A socialist feminist perspective urges us to ask how it is that we have come to see the violent mechanization and profit-driven control of other animals’ uteruses, breasts, and reproductive capacities — and the vast inequity and devastation it enables — as par for the course.
In fact most vegans are pro-abortion, recognizing that animals too should have bodily autonomy. From a vegan perspective, what happens to animals is generally the model for what humans are capable of doing to other humans they deem subhuman, as animals are quite literally, nonhuman. In this case, humans are capable of putting millions of barely pubescent cows in cages and inserting an arm into her vagina and injecting her with harvested sperm so they can harvest both her, her milk, and the child later.
Back to the right to abortion, the briefing doesn’t offer any more tangible explanations for why they’re doing this, falling back on the excuse that determining a viability cutoff line is difficult. Even though before 24 weeks,
survival is rare and most of them are either fetal deaths or live births followed by a neonatal death.
Let’s dig a little deeper into the why of it:
If this labor shortage continues, there will be rising wages, inflation, and supply chain issues in the short term. In the long term, it could halt GDP growth, induce a recession, and cripple the future expansion of sectors dominated by blue-collar and manual workers.
They just say it! They need more workers. Since congress has no interest in raising wages or protecting worker’s rights, that leaves one option for attracting workers: simply create more, and punish the ones that try to resist that.
But it’s not just that. Workers also include soldiers, and you need soldiers to expand your imperialist empire. I couldn’t find exact numbers, but the military is struggling with recruitment so bad that they’re offering large bonuses on recruitment now.
The civilian workforce has also become more favorable to employees, with companies having to battle for talent as workers have become more empowered to demand higher salaries, more robust benefits and a greater work-life balance since the pandemic amid low unemployment.
They don’t even try to hide that poverty is the biggest reason people sign up to dangerous jobs like the military.
They already try to force us to work by making sure social benefits like food stamps and social security don’t cover cost of living. They already cut all the worker protections they could and are ignoring the ones we’re supposed to have.
It’s not enough that they’re mining us for every facet of existence and stealing our wages, they’re going to punish us if we don’t make more workers for them to exploit. We are their living stock, and they will take more from us every time they are hungry.
It’s not just that they may hate us and want to hurt us. To the politicians and financial powerhouses, we are nothing but something to harvest. They need more of us, and that’s all that matters.
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