By Karen Rubin, News-Photos-Features.com
I’m wondering if the Christo Fascists have fully thought out the consequences of forced birth and imposing Sharia-law like proscriptions on secular life. I wonder if they have fully comprehended the impact of effectively ending the concept of public health by allowing soulless corporations that people depend upon for health insurance to opt out of paying for preventive care like vaccinations, HIV medication, contraception. Indeed, have they contemplated the impact of banning contraception altogether on top of ending sex education in public schools and replacing it with religion-based “abstinence”? (Good luck with that).
They might diabolically imagine that forcing every woman and child to give birth might result in more subjects for their flock and more voters for their “team”, and lots and lots of cheap labor, but the opposite could unfold. If only the people who shared their view and therefore chose not to abort a fetus after being raped or a fetus that would require a lifetime, however short, of expensive health care, well, those people might be their voters, while imposing a fortune in health care costs on society – but these people already are their voters and already have that choice.
Or they may salivate at the prospect of these baby factories producing inventory for adoption. They want an inventory of babies for adoption? There are presently 407,000 children in foster care, 9100 in orphanages but only 135,000 children are adopted each year. And there is a cost to society in maintaining them.
And since Americans seem to be obsessed with “economic” issues – inflation in the cost of eggs and gas – more than their fundamental rights, well, abortion is an economic issue, a genuine kitchen-table issue.
Who will pay for the neonatal care, the delivery, the post-natal care, or will people just be forced to fend for themselves? Giving birth costs $18,865 on average, including pregnancy, delivery and postpartum care, according to the Peterson-Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) Health System Tracker. And what of a difficult pregnancy, when too many of these women don’t have the money to travel out of state to obtain a legal abortion.
How many mothers will die in childbirth, leaving their living children motherless? How many teenagers will be forever harmed, perhaps rendered infertile or permanently disabled? How many women, forced to undergo pregnancy until they are at death’s door, may survive but suffer permanently? How many single mothers will fall into poverty – the image in “Les Mis” comes to mind.
And of course, just like access to abortion at all, the impacts fall most heavily on the most vulnerable, women of color, women already struggling to make ends meet.
And how many women will see their lifetime earnings, their Social Security (if the Republicans don’t take that away altogether), their pensions suffer, the lack of resources the family has to provide for their children – to go to college, for example.
The Institute for Women's Policy Research found in 2021 (before the fall of women’s constitutional reproductive rights) that restrictive abortion laws cost state and local economies $105 billion annually by reducing labor force participation and earnings while also increasing time off and turnover among women ages 15 to 44 years old. Now multiply that for federal taxes and the GDP.
Society will be deprived of the productivity, creativity, innovation of those who are forced to give birth, whose ability to fulfill their own life’s goals are curtailed (no different than when women were barred from voting and jobs). Their progeny, so many of whom will not have the resources or loving attention, may well go on to become burdens on society – not just in health care costs, but may well become the mass murderers and criminals that gun activists insist are the product of bad parenting rather than the easy access to weapons. How many of these unwanted children will be abandoned (there are more of those century-old baby boxes being put at churches and firehouses)?
It is not a coincidence that the (red) states where abortion bans are most extreme also have the highest rates of maternal and infant mortality, poorest health care, poorest public education, poorest everything. Most have even refused to adopt Obamacare and expanded Medicaid. Because their interest is simple: punish the vulnerable, because they can. The Republicans are even out, yet again, to repeal the Affordable Care Act which enabled tens of millions to access health insurance. Cruelty and control is the feature, not the bug.
It’s almost as if these Christo Fascists believe that women need to be punished for having sex at all, that the only pure birth is the Virgin Birth - the rest is sin. The sex-obsessed repressed Puritans believed that, hence the witchhunts, which also served to give men complete control over women.
And if health care continues to be bound up in the control of private employers, rather than a public, universal-access system, and a corporation is deemed by the Christo Fascist SCOTUS6 to have religious rights, then huge swaths of Americans will not have the same access to care (or jobs, for that matter). Not only will women not be interested in pursuing work at those employers, or even live, go to school or work in states where women are deemed second class citizens without reproductive rights or equal right to self-determination, but those employers may well be “entitled” to discriminate against hiring single mothers, LGBTQ people or any others they have branded as insufficiently religious. It will be no different than living in a theocracy where people are forced to follow a state religion. (In Iran, a woman was beaten to death by the Morality Police who claimed she wasn’t properly dressed.)
Young women now have to take into account what states they will apply to college or pursue jobs, what employers they can work for – in effect, limiting opportunity.
Think about this: a man (let’s say his name is Trump) can take the 5th amendment against self-incrimination 400 times, another man (let’s say George Zimmerman or Kyle Rittenhouse) can murder another but claim the Stand Your Ground defense, but a woman does not have the same right to self-defense or to make a decision to save her own life.
What about the cost of prosecuting these new crimes? “Concerns about women’s liberty during a pregnancy aren’t theoretical. Already, between 2006 and 2020, more than 1,300 women have been prosecuted for their actions during pregnancy, according to the data from NAPW,” Sophia Bush writes in Glamour, “Why the Right to an Abortion Matters for Every Person”. States including Texas have even proposed a death penalty for women who obtain abortion.
“They intend to treat us like fugitives if we make decisions about our bodies and our families. And none of these policies mention what lawmakers think should happen to the men who impregnate women. Which is particularly cruel, as we certainly don’t get ourselves pregnant.”
‘It’s infuriating to watch lawmakers tune out the cries of medical professionals and to see women treated—in the halls of a government that purports to be founded on ‘liberty and justice for all’—as less-than, as though their needs and their lives don’t matter. And it is deeply painful to see people consigned—legislated—to suffering. Our right to reproductive choice is fundamental to our democracy, so much so that one of the societal changes that signifies a backsliding democracy, one of the surefire things that happens anywhere when equality is being chipped away, is the rollback of the rights of women, and particularly those relating to bodily autonomy. Without reproductive choice, we have no autonomy.”
But if you want to insist that someone else’s religious “freedom” has more validity that yours or your own civil rights, Jews are standing up for woman’s right to life as a religious tenet.
“It is a violation of reform Jewish principles to usurp a woman’s right to self-authority in the matter of abortion, and no governmental decree can be accepted that violates the moral integrity and religious integrity of reform Jews,” Rabbi Sara Y. Sapadin declared in her gripping Yom Kippur sermon at Temple Emanuel in New York City.
“On this Yom Kippur we challenge this assault to our rights and our faith by heading the call at the core of this sacred day. ‘I have set before you life and death, choose life, that you may live’. Yes we challenge this ruling by choosing life - that phrase so closely associated with antiabortion activists does not belong to them.
“Yes, today we choose life, to safeguard the health, dignity and future of the pregnant person. We choose life to prevent another pregnant person from dying of ectopic pregnancy or life threatening sepsis after an incomplete miscarriage, and choose life over the pain of pregnancy that is not viable. Choose life over carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term, choose life for those impregnated by rape or incest, choose life that the pregnant person might live, take care of themselves, their existing children, families and dependents, that they might continue with their schooling or career paths. Choose life to honor the hope and promise of a bright future.
“On this Yom Kippur day, as our Torah calls out to us, ‘I have set before you life and death,’ may we do everything in our power to choose power for every pregnant person across the nation, may we strive relentlessly to insure all pregnant people have the right to make their own moral, ethical, faith-based decisions about their bodies, their health, their futures. Our Jewish values grounded in the preservation of dignity, justice, demand nothing less. Today we choose life. Tomorrow we fight for it.”
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