Yeah, I mean, I’ve been trying to stay on the abortion beat because here we are in 2023, andis still overturned, and every state plus the federal government are still freed by the Supreme Court to do whatever they want on abortion. And everybody’s moving in different directions—some toward greater reproductive freedom, a lot toward less, and that is where we get to Virginia.
Virginia has a split government right now. The governor is Glenn Youngkin, a Republican. The house is controlled by Republicans, but the state Senate is controlled by Democrats. In fact, on Tuesday, a Democrat flipped another seat in the state Senate in a special election, so Democrats have a comfortable majority there now. And yet Republicans in the Virginia legislature have decided to prioritize a ban on abortion at 15 weeks of pregnancy. They introduced the bill the moment they could, on Jan.
, even though Alabama’s anti-abortion law was supposed to carve out the punishment of women as not going to be part of their abortion regime. Now they’re saying, “Oh yeah, what we meant was we don’t want to go after women, except for when we do,” and they’re using this unbelievably convoluted chemical endangerment law. But it’s of a piece with what you’re describing, which is that medical decisions now have to get filtered literally through the criminal justice system.
And in a way, this sounds maybe sort of grim, but I almost was glad to hear this guy admit that women could be prosecuted—because it’s this elephant in the room that anti-abortion folks are denying. And it’s about time that the people in power step up and acknowledge what they plan to do, because the laws are right there. Even before, prosecutors sometimes charged women under these codes for using medication abortion illegally.
Wonder how women came to wear full body coverings in the Middle East? This is how. Christofascism is a plague in American politics and it must be dealt with swiftly, before it's too late.