Barbarism and Subjugation of Women Under the Guise of Religion?

Barbarism and Subjugation of Women Under the Guise of Religion?

Taliban – There… US – Getting There

I don’t believe that I have witnessed such a surge in hypocrisy in a political party in my lifetime. The party of the “right to life.” One of the main new planks of the GOP is a cry for the expansion and enforcement of the death penalty. They scream about reinforcing our southern border to repel rapists, murders, criminals, terrorists, and most of all drug smugglers, but completely ignore that American guns, from a mostly uncontrolled US gun market, smuggled south have empowered the cartels to corrupt control of so much of Mexico and Central America. All in support of servicing mostly American addicts and social drug users.

Just as they call for pardons for the well-video-recorded insurrectionists, convicted of serious felonies, attacking the Capitol on January 6, 2021 and defunding the DOJ/FBI, they pretend to be the party of “law and order.” A party that claims to be supportive of women also has decided to control women’s bodies at a most intimate level. That guns have are now the leading cause of death among children in the US is met with a chorus of more civilian guns are the answer. Clearly the GOP’s “right to life” has been relegated to a meaningless slogan.

By the standards of the developed world, where there is virtual uniformity even in Roman Catholic countries, of a right to an abortion, the United States is moving ever closer to a barbaric theocracy, which fosters teaching “ethnically cleansed” false historical narratives, allows discrimination against LGBQT+ under the color of law, and where disenfranchising non-White traditional voters is the focus of so many red states. Who are we kidding? Every day we move away from the edicts of Western democracy and closer to an intense personal control maintained by the religious zealots in Afghanistan.

Our neighboring Canada and Mexico have embraced a woman’s right to control her body, even as that right has been taken from American women. Even devoutly Catholic Mexico? “Mexico’s Supreme Court decriminalized abortion nationwide Wednesday [9/6], two years after ruling that abortion was not a crime in one northern state… That earlier ruling had set off a grinding process of decriminalizing abortion state by state. Last week, the central state of Aguascalientes became the 12th state to decriminalize the procedure. Judges in states that still criminalize abortion will have to take account of the top court’s ruling… Wednesday’s sweeping court decision comes amid a trend in Latin America of loosening restrictions on abortion, as access has been limited in parts of the U.S.

“Mexico City was the first Mexican jurisdiction to decriminalize abortion 15 years ago… The Information Group for Chosen Reproduction, known by its Spanish initials GIRE, said the court decided that the portion of the federal penal code that criminalized abortion no longer has any effect…. ‘No woman or pregnant person, nor any health worker will be able to be punished for abortion,’ the non-governmental organization said in a statement… The ruling also means the federal public health service and any federal health institution must offer abortion to anyone who requests it, GIRE said. The court ordered that the crime of abortion be removed from the federal penal code.” Associated Press, September 7th.

Indeed, in June of last year, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the US Supreme Court reversed the almost half-century right-to-abortion of Roe v. Wade, telling us that the matter of any right to an abortion would be relegated to state law. Virtually every red state legislature, mostly with vast majorities of older White men, negated abortion rights as quickly as they could. Rightwing religiously driven zealots in some of those legislatures promised to hunt down offending women, their abortion enablers, even if they had to cross states lines to implement enforcement. Criminal statutes, even including “murder,” were rapidly embraced. The GOP, in contravention of Dobbs, is now seeking to impose a national ban on abortions.

With this level of explosive imposition of a purportedly religious fatwa against abortion, including limiting the use of a morning after pill that had been safely on the market for decades by judicial fiat, you’d think there would be fewer abortions as a result. While the above chart from the New York Times (9/7) shows a steady decline in abortions since 1990, that trend just reversed. That NY Times presentation was puzzled. “How is that possible? New data from the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit specializing in reproductive health, implies that more people are traveling across state lines or using telemedicine to get abortions, including through the use of abortion pills. The increase in use of those options has offset the decrease in abortions resulting from new state bans, [Times writers Amy Schoenfeld Walker and Allison McCann] found.”

The above map, put together by the Guttmacher Institute and reproduced by the Times, shows where abortions have increased – states bordering states banning abortions and states where voters rejected the anti-abortion fatwa from their legislatures. Guttmacher was not able to collate statistics on illegal abortions in those abortion-banning states, so the numbers are clearly under-reported. The Times continues: “For abortion rights advocates, this is a mixed outcome. Not everyone can afford to travel across state lines or access telemedicine, so it’s likely that some people who want to get an abortion still cannot do so. And while the overall count is up, abortions were rising before the Supreme Court’s decision. ‘They may have continued to rise even more steeply than observed if it weren’t for the bans,’ Caitlin Myers, an economist at Middlebury College, told Amy and Allison.”

It's not as if a fair vote of American voters would sustain the repeal of Roe. Consistent credible polling suggests that such would be the clear majority result. But through red state gerrymandering and voter suppression aimed at non-White Christian nationalists, all of which is on the upswing, the Supreme Court has opened toxic and polarizing wounds that make the United States of America an increasingly religious theocracy ruled by a minority of zealots.

I’m Peter Dekom, and the 2024 election is about preserving a democracy with majority rule (while protecting minority rights) as opposed to opting out of the democratic model into a religiously driven minority autocracy.