Living in Gilead
Shortly before my 18th birthday, the Supreme Court of the United States issued Roe v. Wade, a landmark decision granting the right to abortion and reproductive health care to women.
“Roe v. Wade, legal case in which the U.S. Supreme Court on January 22, 1973, ruled (7–2) that unduly restrictive state regulation of abortion is unconstitutional.”
Shortly after my 66th birthday, the Supreme Court of the United States of America overturned Roe v. Wade with the Dobbs decision, restricting abortion rights to be granted on a state by state basis.
I was at the age where it would affect me personally when the decision was issued, and it had an equally enormous impact on my generation of women.
For it freed us from the tyranny of state-imposed bodily autonomy, increased our ability to have reproductive health care and to decide on our own fertility and life choices.
I (along with many millions of other women) never dreamed that this would ever change in my lifetime. From being able to decide for one’s self if one should have or want a child to being barred and forbidden from having any right to do so at all in at 14 states and partial bans in 7.
That means for millions of child bearing age women, their ability to make conscious and life-altering decisions about their fertility is gone.
For also in those states that ban abortions, even the exceptions for the ban are not enforced.
This case happened just the other week-a woman with an ectopic pregnancy was denied an abortion because the doctors didn’t believe she was in danger and that the fetus would be viable.
“The 25-year-old college senior was told she likely had an ectopic pregnancy, a highly dangerous condition where the embryo implants outside of the uterus. Without immediate treatment, the fallopian tube can rupture — and the patient can die.”
In other cases, women have been refused an therapeutic abortion when the fetus has been diagnosed with a terminal condition and the mother would be in danger of dying as well.
“A pregnant Louisiana woman says she will be traveling out of state next week to get abortion care after she was denied an abortion for a fetus with a fatal abnormality because it still has cardiac activity. By the time she gets the abortion, Davis will have had to carry her pregnancy for 6 weeks after she made the decision to terminate the pregnancy.”
This is NOT an isolated case, either. Dozens of cases through out the country have come forth from this disastrous and inhumane Dobbs decision:
“CNN has told the stories of several women – including one from Houston, one from central Texas and one from Cleveland – and what they had to do to obtain medically necessary abortions. “
This recent decision, from the Alabama Supreme court, has ruled that embryos are considered children. One more step to slavery and stripping women of their body.
So what’s my point?
Gilead is here.
The book “The Handmaids’ Tale” was supposed to be fiction.
“The novel explores themes of powerless women in a patriarchal society, loss of female agency and individuality, suppression of women’s reproductive rights, and the various means by which women resist and try to gain individuality and independence.”
Margaret Atwood, the author, said she believed it would or could become reality because she had read of instances of it occurring.
“Atwood argues that all of the scenarios offered in The Handmaid’s Tale have actually occurred in real life—in an interview she gave regarding her later novel Oryx and Crake, Atwood maintains that “As with The Handmaid’s Tale, I didn’t put in anything that we haven’t already done, we’re not already doing, we’re seriously trying to do, coupled with trends that are already in progress… So all of those things are real, and therefore the amount of pure invention is close to nil.”[15] Atwood was known to carry around newspaper clippings to her various interviews to support her fiction’s basis in reality.[16] Atwood has explained that The Handmaid’s Tale is a response to those who say the oppressive, totalitarian, and religious governments that have taken hold in other countries throughout the years “can’t happen here”—but in this work, she has tried to show how such a takeover might play out.[17]
Now she has seen the destruction of women’s right to bodily autonomy. just as her novel played out:
“No one is forcing women to have abortions. No one either should force them to undergo childbirth. Enforce childbirth if you wish but at least call that enforcing by what it is. It is slavery: the claim to own and control another’s body, and to profit by that claim.”
How badly naive we all were in being complacent, in the face of religious zealotry and male chauvinism.
The Patriarchy is scared of women-this is how they act when we don’t stop them.
It’s time to fight back-this November, remember Roe, Dobbs and all those women who are now helpless to dictate their own lives.
Vote Blue, no matter who.
It’s time we stood up and fought back, just like we did 48 and more years ago!
The Patriarchy cannot win.
fmhilton 