The Techno-Witch-Finders' Guide to Hunting Recalcitrant Femmes

 

Police have new tricks to land convictions for miscarriages.

People waiting at a clinic, scrolling their phones, get served ads from “crisis pregnancy centers."

When it comes to repro rights, your digital trail matters more than you know. https://t.co/9axoi4WDUb

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) May 7, 2022

We are supposed to pretend that laws against abortion are not supposed to affect people who aren't seeking abortion care for their pregnancies, but anti-abortion laws are increasingly about outlawing being female-bodied or childbearing. Take the laws discussed regarding banning IUDs or Plan B. You aren't supposed to try and fool Mother Nature, you are supposed to eventually get caught with child and deliver unto Ceasar his civilians. Don't you even like people? Why aren't you making them? 

And as for any law that provides no exception for rape? I mean, don't people know not every rape is even charged or alleged? But what about people who are victims of sexual assault but can only try and research ways to not be a victim of their rapist for the duration of an unwanted pregnancy? What about people who can't prove it--and will simply have to bear their rapists' baby? And live in fear that he will have rights over those children to be exercised--rights to be flung into the face of the female-bodied person who carried those children for several months, and bore those changes to hir anatomy?

I despise thinking about this, but there are reasons why women are being told to delete their period-tracking apps.  You are no longer looking forward to when to start taking analgesics or to start wearing period-panties, or even to track whether the menopause-fairy has taken away your monthly visitor yet. Your journaling of your hormonal rhythms is a cue to the pee-parts police as to whether you are doing anything amiss with your "means of reproduction." 

I don't have any sense of humor about the various "what abouts" when the gripes sound like this:

There it is. pic.twitter.com/cwFDezMPRY

— Dr. Lindsay Stallones Marshall (@lindstorian) May 7, 2022

If we have a problem with being seen as mere vessels for procreation, should we be denied our place at the table where our bodies are being served up as factories to make up for the dearth of the national infant reserve? 

There are ways we can be traced to our search for reproductive care, and they will try to punish us for it. We will need to create new connections for ourselves to assert our rights, if we cannot assert them at the ballot box.

But I will insist if we all participated, we certainly could push back. I think the strength of women who care about out reproductive future and that of our daughters and female bodied enby children and trans masc children is an awful lot. We could be fierce in numbers if our numbers chose to amass themselves. We are the descendants of the witches they did not burn--but also, we are people who now have jobs and credit and shit our grandmas never did have. 

Let's wreck the techno-witch-finders. They want little girls to bear their blood siblings, but claim learning about Jim Crow will fuck them up? Such so called adults haven't anything adult about them. They tolerate Nazi flags at Disneyworld. They want to groom our kids to be fash. 

Nope. Forever nope. Eternal nope.