They were never “pro life;” They are never “protecting” us.
As I referenced in my last post, I’m over here living the post-vaccine life and enjoying its spoils. In fact, this upcoming Friday marks 7 weeks since our second dose. Yesterday, Ronald and I got home from our first vacation since October 2019. The trip was awesome and a welcome reprieve from the monotony of pandemic life and the everyday worries of my anxious brain. I’m beyond grateful for modern science and all the privileges that allowed me these moments of joy and exploring Arizona and New Mexico, places I’d never seen before.
I’m trying to think of an elegant pivot toward what I really wanted to write about today. I could say that “while I was away” the politics of my city and state went to shit, but that would be a disingenuous pivot, given that the politics I want to complain about is probably as old as the Republic of Texas, herself. So instead, I’ll just cut to the chase and say that there’s been some shit going down that I can’t escape into a vacation to ignore at the moment:
In the May 1st election, Austin voters reinstated the camping ban and so we will apparently be back to criminalizing homelessness and poverty. Really a step back for the city on this topic, and a devastating loss for anyone here who actually cares about this community.
At the Texas legislature, cruel and hateful anti trans bills continue to gain attention. They want to see gender affirming care as child abuse under law. And they are also targeting the trans children themselves, the latest of which related to restricting sports participation. (As of an hour ago, it has thankfully stalled.)
And never far from misogynistic state policymaker’s minds in Texas, the current anti abortion legislation in play is a serious threat to choice in this already hellscape of a state for anyone seeking an abortion.
Image is tweet from @TumaTime which reads, “Okay, here we go. I'll live-Tweet : The Texas House is now taking up #SB8, a six week #abortion ban that amounts to a near-total ban. It would grant breathtaking authority to *anyone* interested in suing a provider or a group/person that "aids and abets" abortion care. #txlege
Read that whole Twitter thread for the latest updates today (5/5/21.)
It’s disgusting, y’all. This legislation a gleeful slap in the face of anyone who cares about abortion access in Texas, a place that has been the epicenter of anti choice zealotry for a long, long time. A place where access to reproductive care has already been eroded such that there are only 5 clinics that serve a population of 27M, where it takes up to 13 hours to drive east/west across the state or north/south.
Time after time after time after time, the thing that gets me perhaps the most upset about laws and policy that are driven by the conservative blowhards like this is the hypocrisy and outright lies. These people who prop up causes like criminalizing homelessness, criminalizing caring for your trans child, or criminalizing abortion access have become too skilled at packaging their hateful views as ““““““““““““““protecting women and girls”””””””””””””””” or (the ever dreaded and fully inaccurate) rhetoric of being “““““““““““““““““““pro life.””””””””””””””””
Why do we let this be?
I’m just so tired of us taking our collective cues for how to talk about these issues from the people who are acting with violence and malice.
I’m tired of allowing people who would rather see their neighbors jailed than housed to turn toward other issues and pretend that they care about “protecting” anyone and being unchecked on these blatant lies.
I’m tired of us entertaining, for even a moment, that laws which would subject children to horrors like genital exams (in order to participate in sports) are for even one moment about “protecting girls.”
Genital exams, y’all.
On children. (Should I have to say more?)
I’m tired of troglodytes on the right pretending they care about something like human trafficking, while electing human traffickers and worshipping rapists (not linking to a source on that last point, because you all know who the fuck I mean.)
I know it’s like so 1999 to trot out a “they’re not really pro life!!!!” argument (or in my personal case, so 2010), but I can’t help it. Because at the same time that I’m trying to process all of this terrible, shitty legislation, I’m also catching a lot of chatter about this news story:
Image is tweet from @nytimes which reads, “Breaking News: U.S. births declined for the sixth straight year in 2020, as the pandemic accelerated a trend that has been building for the last decade.”
Of course, much of the chatter on my Twitter feed in regards to this story is a lot of, “how the hell are we supposed to have kids when we are all broke?” But seeing it took me back to a moment about 3 years ago, that I hadn’t thought much about since.
For a few years, I was a member of this weird, borderline culty professional development group. Overall, I was not a fan of this experience, and I complained about it amply. The other people in the group were all white men, 5-35 years older than me who held senior level roles at for-profit companies of various types, many of whom were ex-military. I was a “diversity” add to the group (as a white woman, this is pathetic to know, but it’s true) who got to attend on “scholarship.” Said scholarship was considered a personal gift of the guy who ran this group. Sadly, it became clear to me that I did add “diversity” because of my gender, age, income/SES status, and industry...and as I quickly learned general personal values/political views, which is probably a “diversity” they didn’t necessarily welcome, but I brought nevertheless.
I can’t recall a situation where I was more of an outlier in a group. In fact, now that I reflect on it more, I was also the only person in the group who is childfree, which will become relevant in just a moment. But I would say that the biggest way I routinely felt “different,” was my scary, radical leftist view that (wait for it) the pursuit of more and more money at all costs is not, nor should be, a universally held human value. Or, put another way, they believed in finite power that they must try to gain and horade at all costs and I believe in a world of expansive power that everyone can hold and is entitled to.
This basic, yet massive, gap in worldviews felt legitimately hard for them to even become aware of, let alone process. And yet, for the majority of my time with them, I was never unaware of it and I was constantly holding back my specific, personal views. More often than not, it felt to me like we were speaking different languages. One component of the group was that we were supposed to help each other process professional conundrums. So often I would hear their “hardest work issues” and they were, to my assessment, some pretty straightforward interpersonal conflicts. My advice was usually some version of “Well did you TELL them how you felt?” and they stared at me like I had a third arm. I began to surmise that their baseline behavior was devoid of emotional intelligence 101. They regularly positioned sharing how you really felt as revealing too much, or weakness, and would be noticeably disinterested in my suggestions that treaded into this space. I don’t say this figuratively or flippantly, I mean it literally. An example: they told one of our classmates that it would be easier for him to leave the family company he’d been with for his entire (20 year) professional career to show his dad what he had lost than it would be for the guy to sit down and talk with his dad about his growing dissatisfaction with work and desire to take over for him. And he did. (It didn’t go well for him last I heard, but maybe he’s since found work.)
And their “advice” felt as unhelpful to me, too. They would literally make a passing comment like, “well it may be a little shady, but it will make you more money and who doesn’t want that?” and all chuckle capitalistically. Whether they noticed it or not (I’d wager: not) I quite often stared at them like they were the ones with a limb to spare.
Over and over again, I was left reeling that they couldn’t even for a moment consider that someone may not see life as a series of events where you are trying to get ahead of someone else. You may be able to guess, it was the only space I routinely entered into in the 4 years that we were under 45’s tyranny where I would hear any positive comments about that garbage can’s so called leadership. It was disorienting and frustrating overall, but sometimes I valued that it at least broke me away from an “echochamber” that many of us find ourselves in these days.
Anyway, the moment that is standing out to me amid the current news and social media chatter is related to a day toward the end of my tenure when I was starting to really feel the “I can’t fucking take it anymore energy.” That day we had a guest speaker who presented research about the worldwide declining birthrate. Please forgive my overall foggy memory, but the highlights I recall are these:
He had done some work or another in the Reagan Administration back in the day so all the dudes in this group were creaming their jeans about having him present.
His thesis was something like how every civilization that has had a birtrate that dipped below a certain threshold has collapsed because you need young people to work to prop up all the old people, and UH OH, the US was at this threshold.
In my view this was, ya know, the usual stuff that rich, white Baby Boomers talk about these days because they know that they are a demographic anomaly, rapidly aging, who killed the economy with unsustainable practices of money hoarding and are now like “oh shit” about that very fact. He was, of course, warning us all that we’re all SUPER FUCKED unless we get our silly, selfish white women back to the task of mindlessly pumping out some babies and QUICK.
Disclaimer, disclaimer, that last sentence is a crass oversimplification of what the discussion was, but as the only person in the room who had a uterus, that’s sure as fuck what it felt like. Everything that was said maintained basic white-dominant culture’s standard of professional decorum, but if you ask me to cut through the polish, spin, and framing, we were about two steps away from a mention of “white genocide” or someone asking how we can gain better control over all the uteruses out there whose owner/operators are not complying with this important information that they had just been imbued with.
After the speaker spoke his speech, and we moved into a more casual discussion period, processing and debriefing about the content shared, I could feel my hackles raising more. Would one of the other dozen or so participants, who rarely cared about my contributions on other topics, notice that someone among them probably has one of those rogue non-baby producing uteri? I won’t leave you hanging! Of course they did! So this room full of dudes, most of whom could be my father’s age, turn toward me and someone asks some equivalent of the “professional” way to say, “Hey what do you think about all of this and why hasn’t your uterus produced us some kids toward this important need so that YOU help society NOT collapse??”
I don’t remember exactly what was said, honestly. I do remember commenting on how money was a challenge, after I made a joke about how one of the other guys in the group (who had 6 kids he talked about all the time) had done his part and then covered for my part too. (Gotta love that “using humor to diffuse situations that make me super uncomfortable” coping skill.)
I could have told them so many things.
I could have started with how it was really fucked up to shine a light on the only woman in the group in this moment, who already doesn’t feel welcome or comfortable in this group (but then they’d have to be aware I felt that way). I could have told them that boiling down a nationwide statistical fact to my individual reflections on a deeply personal thing (having kids or not) was inappropriate and a microaggression (but then they’d have to both understand microaggressions AND care about them.) I could have pointed out how different the economics of the average American home is today than in 1980 or in 1950 (but then they’d have to start thinking critically about unchecked capitalism and how folks like their boy Reagan caused that.)
But at that point in my journey with this group, I was feeling done with a capital D already and plotting my exit, so I didn’t consider this moment worth trying to make “teachable.” I think that all of us have to walk a careful tightrope balancing act of trying to speak out about what we see that we think is fucked up while maintaining our own well-being. In my split second calculus of that equation in the moment, the scale tipped waaaaay over to “avoid and diffuse” and away from “actually answer and educate.” (In fact, that was the session that broke the proverbial camel’s back, and it wasn’t too long until me and the leader had the private discussion where we both said the shiny, polished, professional version of “it’s not me, it’s you” to each other. )
I don’t regret my decision that day…mostly because I am sure my words would have landed to no effect. But when I saw that New York Times tweet floating around, my mind returned to this situation and my REAL answer about why I am a part of the nation’s declining birthrate.
What is the real answer? It’s complicated, but I suspect that it is not that rare. You see, I am 36 and happily childfree, but I still feel like I will NEVER actually know if I truly chose not to have children of my own free will. Because the crushing realities of capitalism, really. Because I knew with total clarity that I couldn’t EVER in a million years afford to do some of the life stuff I REALLY WANTED and also pay for all the stuff kids need and have enough time to spend with them like I would want. I couldn’t make the math add up and I always made the choices that steered me away from having kids. I was neutral on them for so long thinking “hmm maybe someday 🤔” but over the past few years I changed to: nah, never because the variables I had at my disposal told me my answer for me.
I’m notoriously pregnancy-phobic…well, all medical procedures phobic, but especially pregnancy, which my anxiety has picked to fixate on through nightmares, intrusive thoughts, and passing fears for as long as I’ve understood the basics of the “birds and bees.” I have a condition that made me less likely to ever be able to get pregnant, too.
So I’ve known I never wanted bio kids with quite a bit of clarity. But adopting? Adopting was always on the table for me when I was younger. And yet it has felt forever inaccessible to me, too. Out of financial reach. “Not for someone like me.” It’s so fucked up to think about how difficult it is for someone like me to adopt. Just one barrier is the fact you have to have $20-30k just sitting around waiting for the process. Most of the formal, private agencies that manage it in Texas are religiously based. In my own eyes, I check so many boxes of an ideal adoption candidate but a few classist (and ableist too but that’s a tangent for another day) pieces of BS make it feel completely inaccessible to me.
And that’s only the barrier to the act of adopting…what about all the financial barriers along the way that would prevent me from parenting. Where is the quality, affordable childcare I would need to access? Healthcare for my kid? Extra money for food? Education?
Therefore I don’t explore it. Ronald and I “decided” we don’t want kids.
But how can we ever say we really didn’t?
I just didn’t want kids in the conditions and rules I was trying to navigate and had no say over.
This is a nuanced 301 level discussion under the umbrella of reproductive justice.
This is not simple. It’s not just “abortion is bad” spoonfed talking points. It’s drilling down to a theoretical question of how a modern society can open and empower reproductive freedom by supporting its citizens at the most fundamental levels.
These men, who viewed everyone as their inherent competitor to step on to get ahead, now wanted to talk about this societal, collective challenge of the impacts of a declining birthrate.
How could I ever fit in the time to tell them that they’re so wrong about…well…everything? How could they actually hear that? How could I ever get that room of men in 2018 to really pause and think about these facts? How could they ever connect that their own worldviews and actions have put us here? Are they capable of understanding that their blatant worship of money, their “me first” mentality, their racist, ableist, sexist, power-hungry behaviors en masse have had an incalculable impact on this exact issue and forced the exact circumstances and situations we are in?
I still don’t know the answer, but that’s what is on my mind today.
Policies and views which come from a punitive space, designed to punish/shame/control someone who is experiencing homelessness, or a parent who affirms her trans child’s gender, or a person who needs an abortion………are evil. That’s the best word I have at the moment. In each case, they kick someone who is down. A person who is homeless needs help getting a home, not locked in a jail cell. A child who is trans desperately needs a parent who will love and support them, as it could literally save their life—they don’t need that parent fearing the removal of their kid from their home. A person who is seeking an abortion needs unencumbered access to that procedure, not a jail cell. And shock of all shocks, a person who is pregnant and wants to parent needs a society that they can feel safe giving birth in.
It is well past time that we stand firmly again the distortion of language and the disingenuous claims that anti abortion or anti trans legislation will “protect” women or girls. It is well past time that we refuse to accept claims that unhoused members of our community are a threat; they are the exact people who need our help.
Conservatives have never cared about women (yes, that includes even the conservative women themselves.) If they have, they would be supporting universal healthcare, childcare, equal pay, or the ERA. Conservatives have never cared about protecting girls. If they have, they would support harsher penalties for the abusers who routinely hurt them, usually a family member. Conservatives have never been pro life. If they were, they would support UBI or expanded social safety nets for food, or even just covering the basics one needs for babies, like diapers or formula.
Now, this…this is very easy logic to follow.
At a gut level, we all know that social programs would be an antidote to high homelessness or the declining birthrate. But instead we let voices on the “right” bemoan these issues, use “protecting” women and girls as props, while opposing policies that would actually improve their lives…over and over and over and over and over.
I’m tired of it. At this point, I would genuinely prefer that conservative politicians would own their true, disgusting views. Just say “I want to control women’s bodies” or “I hate trans people” and be done with it, right? Except putting their bigotry right out there would remove any remaining plausible deniability by the people like the men in that group. It’s a lot harder to ignore that your beliefs and how you vote is directly, tangibly, and strongly hurting other people in that world.
This plausible deniability is so important to the US Republican voting block. It’s how “good Christians” can do things like vote for a rapist for president or celebrate police officers who kill innocent black people and still feel sanctimonious in their actions and try to claim a monopoly on morality.
Are you good with this?