They Simply Don't Care

 There was a lot of discussion on various platforms about Time’s report that came out yesterday about a 13-year-old from Clarksdale, Mississippi (the town where blues legend Bessie Smith died in a fatal car crash back in 1937), who was about to start seventh grade and was already a mom. She was a mom thanks to a rape, and she was unable to get an abortion in another state. Since all of the surrounding states have also put severe restrictions on abortion access, this little girl, called Ashley in the article, had to suck it up and deliver the baby. As we know, her case is hardly unique, but it is still an outrage nonetheless.

Ashley couldn’t marry her rapist, whoever this was, so that time-honored “solution” to “giving the baby a name” was out of the question. Adoption wasn’t a solution, either. The baby, nicknamed “Peanut” in the article, would not be the most desirable child for adoption because he is presumably Black, and we know white couples prefer little white infants to anything else. The only solution was to simply raise the child with the help of Ashley’s mother and other relatives. Of course, having children young is physically dangerous but also extremely limits the mother in terms of her future, both economic and educational.

However, you can mention this and the 10-year-old Ohio girl who was raped and got an abortion in another state in 2022 and dozens of other examples, and it won’t matter to the antiabortion crowd. Women’s function in life is to be fucked and have kids, and to them, if even a minor child is raped and is forced to have a baby, she is fulfilling her destiny. She isn’t a person in their eyes. She shouldn’t have been outside in the front yard to tempt a filthy rapist. It was her responsibility and her mother’s to see to it she wasn’t harmed. After all, men can’t control themselves according to the antiabortion mindset.

Abortion has never been about “saving unborn children.” The antiabortion crowd doesn’t care about that. What they want to do is control women and girls and bring back an era most of them never experienced, which is the 1950s. These people think it was some kind of golden age, but it was a time where men benefitted greatly at women’s expense because the latter were kicked out of the labor force make room for the returning servicemen after World War II. It was all about what men wanted. Millions of women were forced out, so there had to be something created in order to fill the time available to women stuck in the home; hence, all the “homemaker” nonsense. Corporations jumped in flooding the market things these “homemakers” could buy, this helping the economy since women were allegedly the chief consumers. Since men ran the corporations, they benefitted. The federal government helped patriarchy along as well, with the GI Bill, tax laws that for the first time gave bennies to married people and parents—prior to 1948, people filed individual returns—and of course Social Security gave greater bennies for women as dependents to get a share of a husband’s benefit (even divorced women after ten years of marriage could collect on a husband’s benefit) and get the entire benefit upon his death. They would never have to work for a paycheck in their entire lives and get more per month than many women who worked decades. Those are just a few of the many bennies the federal government provided to encourage marriage and the “traditional” nuclear family. All of these factors, plus the ever-looming threat of nuclear war with the (then) Soviet Union, helped created the baby boom of 1946-1964. People retreated into the home, with women required to be central to it. And women had babies, lots and lots of them. Not one or two or three, either. It was more like five, six, or more children. It was nothing when I was a young girl in school to be around other kids who were products of big families. I was one. There were many others. Very few families had just one child. It was unusual to the point of being rare. Few people were “childless.” Fewer still were people who chose to remain single, especially women. The stigma against single people was intense.

One of the reasons for families having only one or two children or even none being rare is that birth control, or, more accurately, contraception, was difficult to come by, and, if used, had a fairly high failure rate. The Pill didn’t hit the market until 1960. Contraception was almost all barrier methods like diaphragms or condoms or people played reproductive roulette (the so-called “rhythm” method advocated by the Catholic Church). What about single women having “premarital sex”? Are you kidding? Again, the stigma against it was tremendously powerful. Until the Eisenstadt v. Baird decision by the USSC in 1971, single people did not have a constitutional right to contraceptive use. In the 1950s mindset, women were to “save themselves” for marriage; failing that if pregnant, their choices were to either marry the father or to give the baby up for adoption. Shotgun marriages were rampant, as were adoptions. Until Title IX became law in 1972, schools could force teenage mothers out while allowing fathers to continue their education. Young girls keeping their babies was all but unheard of then. For all the movies, articles, and tv shows romanticizing the 1950s (basically, the postwar era of 1945-1975), it was anything but good for women.

However, millions of people want a return to it, especially among those panicking over declining marriage rates, declining birthrates, and especially declining white birthrates. It isn’t just the panic over those motivating the push to criminalize abortion. There are also millions of men who think they are entitled to sex and domestic servitude from women, and they are furious women aren’t doing this in sufficient enough numbers anymore. They are also angry women are “taking” those jobs away from them, and men, as we know or should know, are entitled to anything they want at women’s expense. In other words, patriarchy is on the ropes. In truth, the abortion issue is over whether we keep patriarchy and men’s control over women’s reproduction, or whether patriarchy should be consigned in the trash heap where it belongs.

You would think that after all the setbacks on the state level regarding abortion where the issue got brought up for a vote, the antiabortion crowd would face the fact the general public does NOT buy what they are trying to sell. However, as long as they can buy off legislators in a lot of the states to do their bidding and control the courts with their Federalist Society hacks, they don’t care what the general public thinks. They want women back in the home in a subservient role catering to men. They will never stop until they get their wish. Their new target is contraceptive access, misnamed by Jessica Valenti and many others as “birth control” access. Abortion, in fact, is a form of birth control, with both contraception and abortion forms of it. This misnomer abortion is not birth control has been repeatedly used over the years, and it is wrong. The fact the antiabortion crowd wants to go after contraception as well gives the whole game away as to what their agenda is really about. They don’t care about “life”—they want desperately to control women, especially single women who are rejecting the traditional script of marriage and babies. They want to force women back and roll back as many of their rights as possible.

When it comes to women and girls, they simply don’t care.