The War on Pregnant Women

Even my feel good reading doesn't always leave me feeling good.

I try to keep abreast of current events without being in danger of winning a Breaking News-Off, and I continue to dig into historical topics, in part because it affects my fiction, in part because I have a responsibility to know what came before me, and in part because it's genuinely interesting. But I will be the first to admit that it can wear on one's psyche, and my reading list isn't the first thing I'd recommend to anyone feeling Age of COVID, Corruption, and Fascism Angst. I think there is cause for hope in history -- humanity has endured so far -- but it's hard to criticize anyone for focusing on, for example, genocide. It's a lot for anyone.

I am not, however, traumatized by the news (just incredibly annoyed with its simplistic delivery). Who knows why -- everyone's triggers are different -- but part of the credit also goes to the other things I read, including news from other countries (particularly South Korea), business and economics (boy, has that been fun lately), and science news. I don't call those things light, and it would be a mistake to say that none of it is influenced by the larger conditions around us (for some reason, a lot of science news seems concerned with the effects of rising temperatures), but there is less of a sense of doom in all of those, and it's also fair to say that business and economics is actually a place where you can sometimes find better if not good news. I think those topics give me a psychological buffer, and I encourage people who want to be "informed" but not traumatized to, generally, look at those sources.

So you can imagine how genuinely upset I was when I came across this piece a few months ago about maternal deaths in the United States two months ago. 

Did you guess that Black women died at disproportionate rates during their pregnancies and in the six weeks after? And that the problems -- the racism -- in our system make this discrepancy worse? And that the pandemic didn't do anything to alleviate those problems? Good guesses, and what I would have surmised going in.

What stopped me cold was that for all of the inequities in the medical care that so many pregnant women are subject to, what kills them and new mothers more than anything else is homicide. Raise your hand if you did not know that in the majority of those cases the perpetrator is an intimate partner, but you already know that what they are killed with more often than not is a gun. And being pregnant makes you uniquely vulnerable, in case that wasn't obvious -- women in the same age range who aren't pregnant do not die in the same numbers.

(Now just throw in that another leading cause of death for these women is suicide, and you can appreciate why this science news was more disturbing than "current events".)

This doesn't present a question, and this isn't a topic that anyone needs to "have a serious discussion" about. We do not need to ask why it is that some of the most vulnerable people among us live in such great danger and so frequently don't survive it. We need to do something about it, now. And we are doing something...it just happens to be exactly the wrong thing.

Serious question: which one is more important to you?

Our Supreme Court, which last year overturned the right to abortions and upended the lives of millions, is poised to rule on a case about -- you guessed it -- whether or not someone who has a restraining order for domestic violence against them can keep their guns. This nightmare comes from the Fifth U.S. Circuit Appeals Court, who held that the federal law violated the Second Amendment. (Fun fact: the Fifth Circuit ruling cited a dissent written by Judge Amy Coney Barrett when she was on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals.) 

No, who am I kidding, this comes from the Supreme Court of the United States and their originalist ruling in Bruen last year, which set the standard the lower courts are using now. Since everyone is doing so well with my quizzes, do you remember who is responsible for the current composition of that court? I'll wait.

I was born in the Seventies, and I know what sexism looks like. I appreciate that women have made some genuine gains since then, but it is impossible to look at recent legal decisions and not see much of them being reversed. Not only is it more difficult for women to exercise agency over their bodies and protect their health -- really, what is the medical justification for forcing a woman to remain pregnant with an unviable fetus? -- these same people will not protect pregnant women. I don't need to explain it along a fascist metric; it is callous and cruel to the point of being monstrous, and we have to stop it. In other words: go vote.

Excuse me, I'm going to read more about the bizarre culture of collecting and collectors. We get our feel-goods where we can these days.

Deb in the City