How a few well-placed Fascists can undo the Right to Safe and Legal Abortions
This week, a Texas judge heard a case which could result in mifepristone, a pill used for abortions, being taken off the market. At the whim of this Trump-appointed puppet, safe, legal abortions could very soon become far more difficult to have countrywide and in some places virtually impossible. The decision of the U.S. District Judge, Matthew Kacsmaryk, has the potential to completely change lives and reshape the country. Which is exactly the intention of the fascist cabal which put him into his position. This case, and whether and how it can be countered, will determine the next steps of the anti-choice movement.
This is not the end of the story. Just as the overturning of Roe v. Wade wasn’t the end. The anti-choice movement has been playing a long game in their decades’ long battle to restrict and ultimately eliminate the right to safe, legal abortions. It’s important to specify that their efforts will never end abortion completely; they will merely ensure that people are forced to do so secretly and by often dangerous and potentially deadly methods. They will continue to remove legal protections and replace them with legal hurdles for abortion providers and people who want or need abortions. If mifepristone is successfully outlawed, other drugs and methods will follow.
Mifepristone is only used within the first ten weeks of a pregnancy. Two months and two weeks, generously. If you’re even sure that you’re pregnant at that point, you are not carrying a baby. You’re not aborting a baby. You’re deciding that you don’t want an unfeeling, unthinking, non-living, little grape-sized, shrimp-shaped clump of cells and goo to proceed growing inside of you. The anti-choice movement always makes their messaging about “life” and “babies.” Chemical abortion, like the majority of abortions, has little to do with either. Forcing someone to keep a pregnancy and bring it to term at that point is only a couple of steps removed from forcing the initial insemination upon them.
Mifepristone is not the only drug used for abortions. It is perhaps the most effective, when used with another drug, misoprostol, and among the safest. Misoprostol can be used alone, but with less effective and more painful results. While I suspect that inflicting suffering and the anxiety of uncertainty will please the selectively moralistic right wing anti-freedom cabal, that doesn’t mean that they won’t target misoprostol, and every other abortion drug, and every other tool used in abortions, as well. They will continue to chip away until legal abortion is eliminated and safe abortions are virtually impossible. It is not an issue of “states’ rights,” as falsely claimed by the fascist tools on the Supreme Court, but a mission to end safe and legal abortions nationally.
This, too, is only part of the fascists’ ultimate agenda. The abortion movement was never about life or babies, but power, and it is part of a larger movement. They will not be satisfied until they end any semblance of democracy, strip the freedoms of any not adherent to their perverse ideology, and dominate the nation. And even then, they’ll find more crusades to wage and enemies to punish. The hateful ideology of white supremacy, under the umbrella of which patriarchy, capitalism, and a corrupted distortion of Christianity copulate, is voracious and impossible to satisfy.