Labor: to exert one’s powers of body or mind especially with painful or strenuous effort : WORK 2: to move with great effort 3: to suffer from some disadvantage or distress labor 4: to be in the labor of giving birth
Merriam-Webster Dictionary
I hear there’s a bounty on my womb. A high price in the currency of power and control. In the currency of violence and cowardice.
excerpt from a poem by Gina Puorro
I want to focus on writing, but as is too often to case, other matters burden my mind. I’d feel remiss if I kept those thoughts to myself. Angry Girl Summer is apparently going to segway into Angry Girl Fall. So much of the current news cycle feel like a remix of all the garbage that came before.
Last year, several men threatened and tried to abduct the governor of Michigan (a woman) over Covid precautions. Some were charged with criminal conspiracy. This year, several men threatened and tried to abduct a principal in Tucson over Covid precautions. Only one of those men has been charged, for trasparrassing. Speaking from personal insight, this lack of regard for the woman in danger is not as shocking as it should be. It’s also why so many of us are unimpressed by the cries of “but who will protect you?” whenever the topic of police reform comes up, specifically re-allocating some funds to programs proven more effective for addressing issues like poverty, mental health, and school safety.
And then there’s Texas.
As far as I can tell, the governor of Texas has been competing with Florida for worst Covid response (Arizona is a distant third). In Florida, schools lose funding if they try to enforce things like mask mandates even though several schools have had to shut down due to infections, closings that could have been prevented by those same mandates. A Florida MAGA group is rallying “manly” men to group up and yell at people in school board meetings. So manly. The Texas government has had less success at banning mask mandates, and not for lack of trying, but they have other means of recklessly endangering the public. They just passed one law allowing unlicensed open carry, and another law deputizing private citizens to pursue a cash bounty on anyone who helps girls or women abort after six weeks of pregnancy, even in cases of rape or incest, or life-threatening complications.
These people consider a license a threat to the Second Amendment, but multiple Constitutional amendments are broken when you interfere with private healthcare decisions. Speaking as a former fetus who didn’t consent to being conceived in the first place, I do not appreciate being born into a world where I’m continually reminded how little my existence matters to those who only feign concern about life until they’re confronted by a living, breathing person with a mind of their own.
There’s no consequence for men whose bodily fluids are responsible AND the law is supported by so many of the same people demanding the freedom to spread other bodily fluids with impunity. If a woman gets infected with Covid and miscarries, can she sue?
These people are not pro-life. They’re not even pro-birth. I’ve talked about this before. Texas has pitiful infant and maternal mortality rates, especially for minorities. The real purpose of laws limiting women’s healthcare is to maintain the vicious cycle of poverty, further criminalize it, and provide bodies for the school to prison pipeline. The wealthy and powerful will be unaffected. If they really didn’t want people to have more children than they can afford, they would support proven measures like birth control and education, but they build their wealth and power off the backs of the impoverished.
It’s not unlike people who decry a living wage for the service industry and tell people to get better jobs only to gripe when jobs go unfilled. They want people to fill those jobs, and they want to dehumanize them for it. Meanwhile unprofessional businesses post that tacky cut-and-paste “nobody wants to work anymore, but also be nice to the people who are” letter, and wonder why they can’t find bodies. Having to ask for (un)common courtesy should be a big clue. Cruelty, dishonesty, and unoriginality are like the ultimate triumvirate of evil. As I’ve also talked about before, these low wage jobs are mostly filled by women, and it’s mostly women who were pushed out of the workforce by Covid to care for their children. Are you starting to see a pattern here?
I don’t think it takes an ADHD brain to make these connections, I really don’t.
I’ll try to close with a positive. Last month the NY attorney general Letitia James completed her investigation into our former governor for sexual harassment and he was pressured to resign because some people still value people over party. Nonpartisanship is ideal, but absent big changes in human nature, I’ll settle for people that don’t allow partisanship to cloud their judgement. Compare the principled actions of James to those who go on the defensive when people point out wrongdoing within their party instead of working to correct it, reminiscent of men who take personal offense when women share experiences regarding sexual abuse instead of saving that energy for abusers (#notallmen, but definitely that guy).
Anyway, state leadership was lacking going into the new school year but our new governor Kathy Hochul has been more proactive. Predictably newspaper headlines claimed parents were “enraged” when she put a mask mandate in place for schools because the media continues to treat a vocal minority as the rule rather than the exception. Most people I know were either relieved or resigned, but that doesn’t move papers the way sensationalism does. Look, I said I’d try to close with a positive, but the world is making it difficult.
