War on women
The foul Texas anti-abortion law has gone into effect, courtesy of the Supreme Court’s refusal to do an emergency review. Reporting on the subject is badly undermined by the near-total avoidance of That Word.
A near-total abortion ban in Texas empowers any private citizen to sue an abortion provider who violates the law, opening the floodgates to harassing and frivolous lawsuits from anti-abortion vigilantes that could eventually shutter most clinics in the state.
“Abortion access will be thrown into absolute chaos,” says Amanda Williams, executive director of the abortion support group the Lilith Fund, a plaintiff in the suit that challenged the law. “Unfortunately, many people who need access the most will slip through the cracks, as we have seen over the years with the relentless attacks here in our state.”
There it is already – “people” who will need access. But it’s not “people”; if it were the law wouldn’t exist. “People” don’t get pregnant, women do. This is all political, and we can’t talk intelligently about the politics if we can’t even name the class of people that is being deprived of rights. It’s women who get pregnant, and that’s not just a random attribute, it’s a core reason women are subordinated and dominated and deprived of rights. Women are all-important because of the power to make new people, and because of that fact, women are treated as bad suspect rebellious slaves. Women, not people.
“It is unbelievable that Texas politicians have gotten away with this devastating and cruel law that will harm so many.”
So many what?
In the days leading up to the law’s enactment, Texas clinics say they have been forced to turn away patients who need abortion care at the law’s cutoff point this week and into the near future.
Women. They’re not patients if they’re turned away, and it’s important to keep it front and center that this is a full-on attack on women.
“We are all going to comply with the law even though it is unethical, inhumane, and unjust,” Dr Ghazaleh Moayedi, a Texas abortion provider and OB-GYN, said. “It threatens my livelihood and I fully expect to be sued. But my biggest fear is making sure the most vulnerable in my community, the Black and Latinx patients I see, who are already most at risk from logistical and financial barriers, get the care they need.”
Latinx? They’re Latina.
The law will force most
patientsto travel out of state for care, increasing the driving distance to an abortion clinic twentyfold – from an average of 12 miles to 248 miles one-way, nearly 500 miles round-trip, the Guttmacher Institute found. And that is only ifpatientshave the resources to do so, including time off work, ability to pay for the procedure, and in some cases childcare.
Women. It’s women this is being done to.
Many abortion-seeking women are expected to be delayed until later in pregnancy and others will be forced to carry pregnancy to term or try to end their pregnancies without medical oversight, abortion providers caution. As with most abortion restrictions, low-income women and women of color will bear the greatest burden under SB8.
There we go. Finally. But do that all through.
At the first “people” I thought you might have been overreacting a little bit in this instance…. But then….yeah. I thought bollocks.
Yet what is the mantra of the anti-masking, anti-vaccine, pro-horse de-wormer crowd?
MY BODY, MY CHOICE!
Gee, I wonder where they might have heard that one before? How is it that when the cohort of covidiots chant it, Red State governors and legislators nod sagely at the wisdom of the masses, responding by banning mask mandates, and downplaying (if not actually banning) public safety measures that actually save lives? Why is it different when women say it in the context of abortion rights? Why is it suddenly okay then for the state to step in and interfere in the rights of individuals to make health care decisions for themselves? Because women are not actually individuals with rights, but any fertilized eggs they may be carrying are.
How many women know they are pregnant within 6 weeks anyway? Having a late period doesn’t usually call for an immediate pregnancy test, and that’s not much time to get results and arrange for a procedure. The abortion seeking women who are able will probably travel to a state with more lenient abortion laws. Also no rape or incest exceptions makes it extremely restrictive. Damn near impossible I’d say.
This instance is indeed far from the worst. The word “women” appears 6 times, which is 6 more than zero.
But. But it’s just so wrong to veil it at all. It’s crucial to lean hard on the fact that this is done to the people who are the source of people, the people who are punished and dominated because they are the source of people.
“Latinx” is what really pissed me off. Both because “Latinx” is a really stupid word, so un-Spanish, and because all the people relevant to this pieces are Latinas, as Ophelia noted. Everything else was theoretically justifiable, since women are indeed people, and the word “people” wasn’t invented (originally) in order to avoid saying “women”, whereas the word “Latinxs” was specifically invented in order to erase women.
latsot,
Indeed, the first “people” strikes initially as appropriate, in what might well be a recognition that women are people too, dammit. But the conspicuous lack of the W-word throughout the piece — except for a few occasions, including a sop at the very end, which will still no doubt trigger great distress amongst the TRAs because it said that women were the most vulnerable group for this particular issue — turns it into an Orwellian nightmare. As though “women” were a double-plus ungood word.
And yes, Latinx is one of the most baffling Twitter phenomena. It seems designed to piss off (and piss on) an entire language and several subcultures and dialects within it, for no real reason at all.
This law is so ironic to me. When I got pregnant, I was 14 weeks along when I learned. Oklahoma didn’t permit abortion past 12 weeks, so I had to travel. Where did I go? Texas.
Now that avenue would be closed to me. I ache for the Texas women who will suffer for this law.
@7 Also, for the lower income women to travel long distances to a more abortion lenient state, not to mention the added expense of an out of state abortion itself will be very prohibitive. It’s a bad deal all around.
Latinx as it’s normally used isn’t intended to erase women–quite the opposite. It’s meant to be a way of getting around the fact that in Spanish (much like other language with sex-based grammatical gender) if you’re taking about a group of people of any size, as long as there’s just one male in that group you use the masculine form.
I agree that it’s ugly, and goes against the phonotactics of Spanish. There’s a movement in Argentine to use forms like “Latines” as neuter nouns; at least that’s pronounceable in Spanish.
And yes, in the context of abortion, it’s wrong.
What’s wrong with “Latinos o Latinas”, or, for that matter, “Latinas o Latinos”? And obviously in the context of abortion just “Latinas”.
In English, what’s wrong with “Latin Americans”?
@GW,
Re “latinos o latinas”: aside from being unwieldy in itself, it doesn’t get around the fact that articles, plural pronouns, and adjectives are also inflected for gender in Spanish. It could get very messy very soon. “Los Latinos/las Latinas están preparados/preparadas.”
(I’ve also seen “Latin@s”, which works ok for written, but not for spoken, language.)
Athel: Even better!
We used to say “Hispanics”, but I think that became verboten because it excluded Portuguese-speaking Brazilians.
Texas is so huge that the distance from El Paso to Houston is about the same as from El Paso to Los Angeles. Where will women in East Texas travel? New Mexico may soon be the only state adjoining Texas that will be feasible. Consider Oklahoma to the north, Louisiana and Arkansas to the east. I am quite certain that all 3 of those states will adopt restrictive abortion laws once they see that Texas’ stands.
I think they already have them written, just waiting for the repeal of Roe v Wade.
WaM, 8, yeah, it was difficult for us, really at the edge of what was possible. We were both working in low-paying jobs, though higher than minimum wage. If we had a 24-hour waiting period and we hadn’t had friends to stay with, there would have been no possibility for us to travel. Even for middle-class women, it can be a daunting trip and a financial drain, so the working class and poor women will have no options.
My recollection is that this Texas statute may not be limited to abortions performed in-state, i.e. if a Texas resident travels out of state for an abortion, she and anyone who assisted (money, transportation, etc.) could be sued.
And of course you can expect all the neighboring states to follow suit with their own copycat laws now that SCOTUS has let this stand.
But hey, everyone who said Roe v. Wade was on the line in 2016 was just engaging in extortion, and what are women’s rights to control their body compared to optimal email management practices and avoiding having a woman you find “shrill” in charge?
I thought the legal strategic consensus was that they (the Court) wouldn’t go after Roe v. Wade because going after PP vs. Casey was pretty much a slam dunk and would have a nearly identical effect.
Blood Knight,
That depends on what you mean. Casey modified Roe, in that it adjusted Roe’s strict trimester formulation, allowing abortion restrictions in any trimester as long as they don’t impose an “undue burden.” Actually overruling Casey without explicitly overruling Roe would be a confusing state of affairs.
What a lot of people, including me, were concerned about was that the Court would simply work within the technical bounds of Casey by consistently declining to find any restriction the GOP comes up with to be an “undue burden.” That way Casey (and Roe) remain “on the books” but are effectively legal nullities, because you may have the “right” to an abortion, but only if you fill out forms in triplicate in unicorn blood by the light of a full moon while reciting Beowulf from memory without error.
This recent decision is still consistent with that. At least some of the conservative justices (Roberts in particular) don’t want to provoke the headlines “Court Overturns Roe v. Wade; Abortion Rights No Longer Protected.” That would hurt the reputation of the Court and possibly cause a backlash at the next elections against the GOP. But when they constantly whittle away at abortion rights instead, the media doesn’t know what to do with it, so it’s a page 3 story with equivocal headlines.
That does sound something like what I had heard
My wife calls herself Latin American. I’m sure I have never heard her use the horrible word Latinx, and I’m not sure that I’ve ever heard Latino or Latina from her, when speaking English, of course, but even in Spanish she normally says Latinoamericana rather than either of them. Many South Americans just call themselves Americanos: Inti Illimani have a song called Somos Americanos.
iknklast,
While I’d like to take credit for #8, that insight belongs to twiliter.
Athel,
My wife is Spanish (as in, from Spain). She is never quite sure if she’s Hispanic, Latina, both, neither. I think from the way I’ve seen those terms defined, she’s Hispanic but not Latina. But in any case, she probably has more in common culturally with her fellow Europeans than with Americanos.
What a Maroon, it appears I mis-nymed you…and twiliter! I do hope you’ll get the therapy you need before you do something drastic.
iknklast,
I’ll send you the bill to replace all the green mascara running down my cheeks.