Texas women are telling their stories about their troubled and forced pregnancies under their state's strict anti-abortion laws, through tears and even vomit. They are testifying that they do not feel safe to be mothers in Texas, because it is not a safe state to be pregnant if abortion care does not exist there. It is a brutality that they have to tell these deeply personal stories under derisive and uncaring questioning under the assumption that the state's penalizing of fertile women for the heartbreak of reproductive mishap is not responsible for their misery is appalling, but worse is that they did undergo unnecessary injury, expenses, pain and suffering, because surgical options they could have had were made inoperable for them.
Texas has a shitty record for maternal mortality. Let's get that upfront. Infant mortality as well. An actual pro-life position might well include trying to improve these stats with better health care access. But the rate of uninsured, access to hospitals for rural folks, and cost of getting medical care in Texas isn't a priority. I mean, not for the supposedly pro-life psychopaths in charge like Abbott, Patrick and Paxton.
Figuring out ways to punish women and doctors for even having abortion as an option, apparently is.
If you value motherhood, or families, or want to get sentimental over what you "think" the definition of "woman" is, how about not traumatizing women who were having wanted pregnancies that for reasons entirely beyond their control, weren't viable, weren't safe, and were going to result in lasting harm to them? What about figuring in also people with female bodies who can't control being female bodied, and find themselves with pregnancies that are, in fact, deeply damaging to them, physically, economically, in relation to their unique abuse or victimhood? (Pregnant women have a higher rate of homicide.)
That some human being has to testify to their own pain-capability and suffering to counter the imagined "holocaust" of the fetuses affects me strongly. This is never about the babies that would be--not when mothers are made to be traumatized for the sake of children who were never going to be.
It is about cruelty and control and telling female people they are subordinate to the whims of the shitty God the pro-lifers have dreamed up. The punisher of the daughters of Eve.
These women are brave to tell their stories, and I hope they are heard. But I know many of the so-called "pro-life" people have no interest in listen to live people who are already born.
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