I’m watching a tv show right now about a haunted house (yes, we’ve been here before, I do this all the time), which sat abandoned for three years and the couple had a bad feeling about it, but it was affordable, and so they bought it, only to find out some really horrible things happened there. The haunting unfolds slowly, slowly enough that they can dismiss it as just new house things, until they can’t anymore, which made me think of what I want to tell you this week. (Before that, DUMBO.)
Last week, we started looking at abortion abolition, including some tactics and how those manifest, directly and indirectly, in violence. It should not come as a surprise that abolitionists are super mad that abortion continues to exist in any way in the US after the 2022 Dobbs decision, and while it’s easy to deride them as being too far right for anyone to take seriously, doing so would be a very bad idea. (A lot of us thought a lot of things were too insane/fringe to happen, and then they did, and continue to.)
Abolitionists are behind personhood amendments, as well as that bounty-hunting law in Texas (another thing we thought was too ridiculous to pass) and bills that would make room for the death penalty for abortion, aling with other attempts to not just stop abortion from happening, but to punish people for in any way enabling them to happen, and that doesn’t just mean literal abortion. Personhood is the belief that an embryo/zygote/fetus has all the same rights as a actual person, so yes, abolitionists are coming for birth control and IVF. (This is a great article if you want a deeper dive into the politics of abolition, and how it's different from the “mainstream” antichoice movement.)
So what are we doing about this?
Action items: First, we are going to stop dismissing these bills that sound completely unhinged as completely unhinged, as in “that will never happen.” We don’t live in that world, and we can’t pretend to. Then, we are going to learn about these bills, the vocabulary that’s in them, who is sponsoring them, who is working against them, and how. And while we are doing this, we are going to be thinking about abortion stigma and how the concept of personhood has and does impact it.
Next time: I have a weird idea, stay tuned.