The Texas ban on abortion after six weeks from conception (when few know they are pregnant) is a moment in the history of patriarchy that is so outrageous that the American Medical Association (AMA) abandoned its usually staid demeanor and called it “an egregious law” that “interferes in patient-physician relationship and places bounties on physicians and health care workers simply for delivering care,” the AP reports.
It’s a law that sanctions a terrorist zeal in private citizens in Texas who identify with “right to life” politics, giving them the authority to investigate and sue anyone they accuse of providing abortions after six weeks when a fetus is assumed to have a heartbeat. It conjures the image of fanatic anti-abortion vigilantes intimidating abortion care providers and their vulnerable patients, not unlike burning crosses on their lawns.
That the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, chose not to stop the ban from disenfranchising most women of the right to make decisions about their own lives and reproductive health allows the Texas ban to reinforce the patriarchy’s sadistic, demeaning insistence that women’s lives — actual lives — are less important, less valuable, less meaningful that the potential life of a fetus.
This is male supremacy in its most ferocious and despicable form. And it still infects a large part of America’s population, as Republican Texas demonstrates so frighteningly.
The patriarchy’s hatred of women, its misogyny, has always seemed to me to be a root source of all prejudice, the primal bias, the foundational bigotry.
As writer, feminist and activist Margaret Randall observes in her deeply engaging and insightful new book called “Thinking About Thinking,” we must never lose track of the issue of “patriarchy itself.” In a time of intense focus on misogynistic behavior energized by the #MeToo movement’s calling out of sexual abuse, we can see more clearly now how patriarchy “shapes society, conditioning every one of us from before we were born — males to inhabit a sense of entitlement and females to submit to their unwanted advances, to the extent that they often believe this to be the natural state of affairs, something to be borne in silence, ‘our cross to bear.’ The abuser inevitably wields the additional weapon of fear: ‘Tell, and I will kill you or those you love,’” Randall writes in an essay called “Our Time Has Come…with a Few Caveats.”
And now, the state of Texas has given the patriarchy and its anti-abortion automatons a new weapon of fear. As President Biden said last week, the Texas ban “blatantly violates the constitutional right established under Roe v. Wade and upheld as precedent for nearly half a century.” The AP quotes him as saying “the law ‘outrageously’ gives private citizens the power ‘to bring lawsuits against anyone who they believe has helped another person get an abortion.’” Biden went on to say the Texas law “unleashes unconstitutional chaos and empowers self-anointed enforcers to have devastating impacts. Complete strangers will now be empowered to inject themselves in the most private and personal health decisions faced by women.” The President said he had ordered the Department of Justice and the Department of Health and Human Services to make sure women in Texas can still have access to abortions.
This all seems to me like a sexualization of the concept of a SLAPP suit (a strategic lawsuit against public participation) or what Wikipedia calls an “intimidation lawsuit…intended to censor, intimidate, and silence” people “burdening them with the cost of legal defense….” An anti-abortion vigilante, for instance, could dream up any kind of accusation, couched in abortion terms, and take after health care providers or hospitals just out of pique and force them to waste time and money defending themselves. False accusation is often as powerfully damaging as one based on “probable cause.” And as the president implies, fanatic busybodies could intolerably insert their nastiness into a woman’s, and a family’s, life without even knowing anything about who they are or why she, or they, made the decision to have an abortion.
While the Supreme Court voted not to stop the implementation of the Texas ban, it left itself room to further consider the law’s constitutionality and did not bar challenges to the law in Texas state courts. With Chief Justice John Roberts siding with the minority, it seems likely the Texas law will appear before the Supreme Court again, but not before it wreaks havoc on the lives of thousands of Texas women.
In dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the five-justice majority “opted to bury their heads in the sand” as Texas “flouts nearly 50 years of federal precedents” by “outsourcing the enforcement of unconstitutional laws to its citizenry….(t)he Texas Legislature has deputized the state’s citizens as bounty hunters, offering them cash prizes for civilly prosecuting their neighbors’ medical procedures.”
What she describes is the hidden face of the patriarchy in the state of Texas. Thank heavens we live in New Mexico where last year the Legislature passed and Governor Michelle Lujan-Grisham signed into law a bill that overturned a dormant anti-abortion law created in 1969. Governor Lujan-Grisham told the media recently that “draconian laws” in other states would not prevent New Mexico from providing reproductive health care to women who seek help in our state.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
(Image by Steven Rainwater)
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