Lately there have been people at the corner of Union and … Claybrook? I can’t remember … around the clock, holding anti-abortion signs. (The only one I recall being able to read said, “Pray to End Abortion.”) I’ve seen an eclectic group of folks holding those signs. Saturday at nearly midnight, I saw a group of young white men in collared shirts holding the signs. My blood pressure, predictably, spiked.
Abortion’s been on my mind lately. It’s one of those issues — the issue — that people get all worked up about, and will actually go and vote based on. John McCain may be a crotchety, senile old turd with a serious inability to tell the truth, and Sarah Palin may be the biggest joke to have ever crossed the border of Jokeistan, but a lot of people are going to pull the lever for them because they like to harp about the sanctity of life and the barbarism of babykilling and by all means, that’s clearly the only pressing issue of our time.
We like to feel secure in the status quo, in the feeling that we can’t possibly take a step backward to a time when abortion wasn’t available. And yeah, wah wah, who wants to talk about body sovereignty when the fucking economy is collapsing and we’re all going to lose our jobs and die and eat out of garbage bins and do humiliating things for rich people to earn cash. But it could happen. It might happen. I would hope that the people would rise up and pitch an unholy fit to protect our rights, but I’m scared that this country’s fit-pitching days are behind us.
Linda Hirshman has a column in the Washington Post on how a McCain presidency could endanger Roe v. Wade, and it’s got me worried.
It seems a long way from McCain’s bold statement that life begins at conception to police cars waiting on an abortion clinic side street in Granite City. But it’s not. If the law were to take this post-Roe course, Americans’ lives would be determined by their state citizenship in ways unseen since the Civil War. Professional legal scholars have traced the developments step by step. As constitutional scholar Richard Fallon of Harvard said recently, “If Roe were to go, it would not go gently.”
I just get so angry when I think about this shit. I can’t possibly be eloquent or even coherent about it. I just think about the people who don’t understand why the fuck compulsory pregnancy is wrong and I want to chuck lamps through windows. I think about the people in this video that I’m having to link instead of embed, who have never actually considered what should happen to women who have illegal abortions. Because, you know, it makes total sense to lobby for laws and then not ever think about what should happen to the people who break them.
I don’t know. I’m just so sick and tired of having to have this conversation. Sick of feeling like my personal liberty is just a crotchety old man’s whim away from being completely up in the air.
Anyway.
As always in a just world, George Carlin gets the last word:
I couldn’t agree more. I saw them this morning on the way to work. I yelled at them and gave them a “thumbs down”. I wanted to flip them the bird, but chickened out. The whole thing makes my head want to explode.
He’s eating Fig Newmans in heaven right now.
i see them everday. i had to start taking a different way home so that i wouldn’t be driving down their side of the street when the temptation to chunk a brick at their heads would most likely overpower me. see, it’s smart that they go in pairs. it always leaves one guy to write down the license plate number.