By Sikivu Hutchinson
Atrocities like the Alabama abortion bill are one of
the reasons why I’m an atheist. Barefoot, pregnant, and bombed back to the Stone
Age continues to be the clarion call for dominionist lawmakers who are bound
and determined to hijack women’s rights.
It was no surprise that twenty-five
Republican white men (one of whom is Dr. Larry Stutts, a freshman senator
and OB-GYN who was dubbed
Alabama’s 2015 “Scumbag of the Year” for seeking to repeal
a law named after a patient who died in his care shortly after giving birth) in
the Alabama state legislature were the linchpin for passing the most draconian
anti-abortion bill in the nation and shepherding it to the desk of Alabama Governor
Kay Ivey, who dutifully signed it into law. These are the same kind of men who queue
up in front of abortion clinics to hound and demonize pregnant women. They are
the same kind who lock and load at the mere mention of “abortionists” and think
chastity belts are long overdue for a revival. The same kind who howl, piss, and
moan about their immoral “God and Country” and foment Christian fascism based
on a deeply misogynist fear of women’s bodies, sexuality, and reproductive autonomy.
They are also the same kind of men whose protected white families systematically
benefit from Black, Latinx and Indigenous peoples’ poverty, segregation, and
criminalization by gutting social welfare funding and anything that supposedly “reeks”
of wealth redistribution. As it stands, the Alabama “Heartbeat” bill—which was preceded
by similar bills in Georgia, Mississippi and Ohio—has been framed as one of
the most potent threats to Roe vs. Wade. But it should be also be viewed as a bellwether
of economic injustice. Far too often, the focus on abortion rights, rather than
on reproductive justice, does not adequately address how abortion is a powerful
force for women’s economic liberation.
As other abortion
rights’ advocates have pointed out, these bills are most prevalent in states
that have some of the worst health and poverty indices for women of color and
children in the nation. Georgia has the
second highest black maternal mortality rate in the country (According
to the Centers for Disease Control, Black women died at a rate over three times as high as white women
during childbirth). Alabama ranks 49th in infant outcomes
due to poor scores in infant mortality, low birthweight, neonatal mortality,
and preterm birth. Poor and rural women constantly struggle to find adequate
maternal care providers in these states, further belying the claim that Heartbeat
laws “protect” children. Alabama also
has the sixth highest poverty rate in the U.S. with
over 17% of Alabamians living below the federal poverty line. 250,000 Alabama
children live below the poverty line and the state’s child food insecurity rate
is 22.5%, well over the national average of 17.5%. Predominantly African American
counties
in Alabama have the highest poverty rates in the state. Despite all their
claims of Christian charity, poverty, child care and social welfare have never
been of concern to the Religious Right theocrats who passed this law on the
backs of women of color.
The South and the Midwest’s anti-abortion assault
fundamentally undermines women’s right to self-determination by jeopardizing
their earning potential, job mobility, and ability to access child care. Nationwide,
communities of color disproportionately rely on family planning providers like
Planned Parenthood for counseling, screenings, contraception, and abortion
care. The closure of family planning clinics across the South and Midwest has
forced women to travel hundreds of miles for care; further endangering their
lives, families, and incomes. The Alabama bill stipulates that doctors who perform
abortions could be charged with up to 99 years in prison, a provision that criminalizes
health care practitioners and lays the foundation for a dangerous pre-Roe era
underground abortion economy. The bill’s prohibition on abortions for rape and
incest victims would also heavily impact Black and Indigenous sexual assault victims
(who have some of the highest
rates of sexual assault and rape in the U.S.), condemning them to relive
the trauma of their assault through forced pregnancy and government invasion—a prospect
that hearkens back to the sexual terrorism of slavery and colonial occupation
of Native land.
The white fundamentalist Christian stranglehold on
Southern and Midwestern legislatures has proven to be a national cancer which further
exposes the dangerous lie of a God-based, biblical morality. The Alabama bill
is yet another wake-up call for why theocracy, and all its amoral patriarchs,
must be aborted.
