American freedom is going downhill fast—and picking up speed. When the radical, right-wing, activist Justices of the Supreme Court trashed a woman’s right to control her own body, they opened the door to even more assaults.
Let’s get one thing straight: the anti-abortion crowd doesn’t care about life. They only care about forcing a woman to give birth. After that, she’s on her own. The Red States of Gilead offer her no help or support. In the service of controlling a woman’s actions, however, they have no limits.
Restrictive State Travel Laws
The Red States don’t just want to keep their own citizens from having abortions: they also want to keep those women from obtaining them anywhere else.
- Texas is trying to ramp up its anti-abortion law to allow its citizens to sue anyone anywhere who helps a woman to get an abortion.
- The National Association of Christian Lawmakers, an anti-abortion organization led by red-state lawmakers, has begun working with the authors of Texas’s abortion ban to draft model legislation aimed at impeding travel for abortion to states without bans.
- Lawmakers in Missouri attempted a legislative effort to keep women from traveling out of state for abortions and to permit any citizen to sue anyone in a blue state who helped a woman attain one.
Back to the 19th Century
Restricting interstate travel for abortion takes us back to the 19th century when we had Slave States and Free States. Legal maneuvering among them led to the enactment in 1850 of the Fugitive Slave Act. This law was passed to counter free-state laws that provided safe harbor to slaves who escaped from southern states. The Fugitive Slave Act required that slaves be recaptured and returned to slave states.
With this antebellum law, people in free states risked being arrested for helping enslaved people to freedom. It created anger and resentment that contributed to the Civil War.
New Ways to Control Women
You think this is a step too far? Buckle up, friends, because the Gilead Police have just gotten started. Right now, they operate in state capitals, passing draconian bills and coming up with ever more ways to force women to give birth.
I wonder how long will it take before:
- Pregnant women have to wear a yellow circle on their sleeves for identification
- Red State police set up roadblocks at the borders and force women to take a pregnancy test before allowing them to continue
- Women’s groups smuggle pregnant females out of state in the trunks of cars or lead them cross-country to avoid the roadblocks
- Red States demand control over the U.S. Mail so they can check for shipments of chemical abortifacients
- Neighbors and “friends” report a girl who travels out of state to visit her grandparents
- Red States monitor airline ticket purchases to countries where abortion is legal.
- Red State police visit the home of any girl who stays out of school sick for more than a day
- A girl/woman/female/uterus bearer is murdered because a man thought she had an abortion
The New Underground Railroad
In response, the blue states will create a new underground railroad that gives aid and comfort to desperate women. And women will move from the same southern states to the same northern states, from restrictive laws and control by others to freedom of action and bodily autonomy.
So, here we are in the 21st century reliving the laws and animosities of two centuries ago. And we may eventually arrive at the same place. Only this time, the slaves are America’s child-bearing citizens. We are wives, mothers, sisters, daughters and granddaughters at the mercy of men who want absolute control over women.
We don’t call them the Christian Taliban for nothing. Only their tactics go back further than that.
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