According to Jessica Valenti, the author of the Substack ‘Abortion Every Day’, from a piece entitled, ‘This Is How They Kill Us’, the anti-abortion forces want to remove the idea of abortion as health care in people’s minds. They want to erase the thought that abortions can be life-saving in the case of pregnancies that go awry and threaten the health of people.
As we know by now, given all the horror stories in the news about women unable to get medical care for their problem pregnancies in states that ban abortions, many things can go wrong in a pregnancy. Approximately one-fourth end in miscarriage. By forcing a pregnant person to undergo labor or a C-section, even in the case of a fetus with fatal conditions that will cause it to suffer and die soon, or when it’s too early for a fetus to survive outside the womb, or even in the case of a dead fetus, they can claim abortion isn’t necessary. According to Valenti, they want ‘to force doctors to end deadly pregnancies in any other way—even if it means torturing women in the process.
They are trying to change medical practice to normalize such procedures, and have these procedures replace the far safer abortions that have been standardized medical care for generations. As Valenti says, ‘dystopias aren’t created in a day. They’re built, law by law and talking point by talking point, through medical regulations, bureaucracy, and fear.’ ‘The anti-abortion movement has carefully disguised radical calls to hurt women as simple scientific recommendations.’
I recommend you read Jessica’s Valenti’s article for a more complete picture of what I am describing here. https://jessica.substack.com/p/this-is-how-they-kill-us.
Karel Riley works with the People’s Tribune, and its bilingual sister publication, Tribuno del Pueblo, as a writer and contributor on human rights and women’s issues. “I’ve been a feminist since early adulthood. As a clerical worker, I joined a union drive with AFSCME seeking comparable wages to men for female-dominated jobs, and we were partially successful. In the mid-80’s our union participated in the historic Hormel strike in Minnesota. Later, I joined others in support of a local welfare rights organization,” she says.
