Why have so many American women become so afraid during the past week? Is there any unspoken rationale behind this crippling frozen dread? Or is it just another of those unfounded female apprehensions and really there’s nothing to worry about, so let’s all be good girls and give the new administration a chance, and go back to our little American Dream homes and bake some cookies?
Let’s start .with one of those little phrases I heard Trump mutter during some interview or another: “When Roe Vs. Wade is overturned, women will have to go to other states to get abortions.”
Now let me, a physical womanoid, flesh out some of the unspoken implications behind that little phrase and perhaps bring to light the valid and potentially devastating fears behind the dread.
Essentially what Trump has said is that once reproductive rights have been gutted by a “Women’s Dred Scott” type of Supreme Court, suddenly many states will reinstate everything from forced ultrasounds to total bans on abortion or even birth control. Don’t like it? Go to another state if you can afford it?
That means his stated policy is to force some states to suddenly take on the entire health care needs of every woman from another state In other words what is being set up are waves and waves of gynocological refugees needing to flee home states to completely unfamiliar places if they need any kind of health care at all. I live in Maryland. Is my little state ready for an influx of women in medical need from perhaps Virginia, or the Carolinas too, because their health needs have suddenly become illegal to treat?
Think about it. One effect would be that obstetricians and gynocologists would, with reason, be reluctant to set up at all in a forced birth state. It’s hard enough to study women’s biology, but to have to negociate the labyrinth of each state’s restrictions and find which ones whose political mandates make it impossible to practice if it clashes with their knowledge will have the effect of a severe women’s doctor shortage for anything. This could also mean risking their lives every day lest a prescription suddenly gets the doctor charged with accessory of a crime. Or the doctor could be murdered by zealots. This is not a good recommendation to set up practice in such hostile atmospheres.
What of the economic consequences? How can any state economy flourish if every woman in the workforce has to travel hundreds of miles for a cancer screening? She will have to choose between her job and her health. Think of hundreds of thousands of women never being able to return because of an ovarian cyst. They are the gynocological refugees.
Has Big Pharm thought about the hit to their profits? Imagine the new restrictions and the additional record keeping and logistics trying to figure out where their birth control medication is still legal and where the morning after pill is categorized in the same group as heroin. But it’s not just birth control medications. Anyone, man or woman, who has ulcers, irritable bowel syndrome, colitis, or any other digestive or intestinal tract malady may also find access to their medication severely restricted lest any woman misuse it for other personal purposes. Those companies better sit up and take notice of this threat to their bottom line.
But what of the incredible strain on the pro-choice states whose medical resources are suddenly stretched to the breaking point by the refugee influx of reproductive patients? Should Obamacare be repealed many of them will no longer have health insurance at all. Our emergency rooms will be crammed. Even a large and wealthy pro-choice state will find it impossible to sustain such an uncompensated burden, and this could be a factor...how shall I put this?...of this middle-aged artist contemplating the possibility of outliving the existence of these United States.
Because a country that is half slave and half free cannot stand. Congradulations most white women, you did it! By voting the way you did, we now face the very real threat of existing in a country where only half of our girls could stay free, while every girl in the other half are potential felons from the moment of their birth. Whose a cute little gender thug now?
Have I made some of this dread clear?