They’re Just About Ready to Destroy Roe v. Wade

Militarism, consumerism, and racism have drawn alongside, and even to, misogyny and anti-immigrant hate. The juggernaut of greed, power, and hate may be impossible to stop at this point in U.S. history.

Those of goodwill have been fighting the good fight against these regressive forces for decades. When the Vietnam War ended, only a brief hiatus of warmongering took place before the right was drawing up its vicious plans again.

Racism has never had a vacation in the U.S. Slavery led to Jim Crow, and that turned into mass incarceration and white supremacy.

Now, the landmark case from 1973, Roe v. Wade, is on the precipice, with the recently passed anti-abortion law in Alabama set to go into effect in six months. The Alabama law is only the latest in decades of attacks agains Roe. Challenges to that law that make it up to the U.S. Supreme Court may in fact close off a woman’s right to abortion guaranteed under Roe. States like New York, Massachusetts, and Maine, among others, have and will take strong action to protect a woman’s right to access abortion, but huge swaths of the U.S. exist as women’s health-care deserts, just as food deserts exist in many ghettoes.

The political and religious right have always targeted women. Trump’s grotesque misogyny is not some chimera. It has been a focused effort to harness the right, and particularly the religious right, to cast women’s lives into the realm of second-class citizenship. Women, in Trump’s universe, are there for sexual exploitation. When Trump the pariah could not get what he wanted with words, the record shows he would have his way with money and force. The latter is the typical pattern of a male-dominated repressive political and social universe.

Women’s organizations that support women’s health care and reproductive rights have long fought a rear-guard battle against misogyny. The right is well-funded and has led the repressive fight against women since Roe became U.S. law. Their shock troops are most apparent at women’s health clinics where those seeking routine health treatment experience the horrific screaming, taunting, and ranting of those who hear the supposed voice of God driving them on.

All of this is a sideshow of the wealthy and the few who couldn’t care less about those who need to access health care, which those on the right have always had as a given. The last vestiges of anything resembling fair access to health care are slipping away, as are other traditions of fair play and fair treatment. Federal funds aren’t available for abortion services and overseas agencies supported by U.S. funding can’t even mention the word abortion. It is no accident they have enacted so-called fetal heartbeat laws while the misogynist-in-chief sits in the White House. It’s all about control of women and their lives.

 

Howard Lisnoff is a freelance writer. He is the author of Against the Wall: Memoir of a Vietnam-Era War Resister (2017).