I can’t be the only woman who has listened to the title track of this blog multiple times since Texas announced its abortion law and the Supreme Court declined to block it, just like I can’t be the only woman who has questioned exactly what it means to be pro life after hearing so many stories I can only classify as anti life coming out of the same state in the days and weeks that followed.
Yet here we are, nearly a month later, persecuting women, denying both COVID-19 and the vaccines proven to prevent it, and abusing immigrants in our country’s second largest state. God’s work, right?
As a refresher, the new Texas law, one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country, bans abortion procedures as early as six weeks into pregnancy and makes no exceptions for rape, sexual abuse, or incest. What’s more, it not only allows but incentivizesprivate citizens nationwide (to the tune of $10,000) to sue Texans for helping someone get an abortion. The law is in direct violation of the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that marked a woman’s access to abortion, and it’s a law the highest court in the land rejected when reproductive rights groups filed an emergency application to block it, citing the failure on the part of abortion providers to address “complex and novel” procedural questions in the case.
To put it bluntly, the Supremes took the coward’s way out and effectively deemed Texas women unfit to govern their own bodies. To put it much more eloquently, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor said in her dissenting opinion, "Presented with an application to enjoin a flagrantly unconstitutional law engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny, a majority of Justices have opted to bury their heads in the sand.”
Needless to say, it’s been a rough month for women seeking to do what’s best for them in Texas and a discouraging and perhaps foreboding one for women nationwide. And all the while, there’s still a global pandemic that should continue to be a priority, but that Texas officials seem to forget is a thing.
So far, 63,622 people have died of COVID in Texas. According to the Texas Tribune, less than a month ago the state reported 13,932 hospitalized patients, only 286 patients less than the highest number of hospitalized patients in the state (14,218) on Jan. 11 during the deadliest wave of infections in Texas since the virus was first reported in March 2020. Additionally, between February and July, roughly 99.5% of the 9,000 Texans who died from the virus were unvaccinated. On the mask front, Gov. Greg Abbot and the state’s attorney general refuse to enforce their own mask mandate through local district attorneys.
But remember, vaccinations aren’t a priority in Texas. Masks aren’t a priority in Texas. Hell, DEATH isn’t a priority in Texas. It’s the unborn who are the priority. Those who can’t talk, vote, or disagree; they are what matters even in the midst of a pandemic that’s killing thousands.
There’s also the approximately 13,000 Haitian refugees who have fled to the southern border of Texas to escape poverty, natural disasters, and political unrest. Here, in the land of the free, we haven’t been very welcoming. Since arriving a little more than a week ago, Haitians have been living in migrant border camps with little access to food and water as authorities process asylum paperwork, make arrangements for deportation, or release them to families already living in the U.S. Meanwhile, the Texas governor stepped up border patrols, which has led to agents on horseback chasing and whipping migrants as they attempt to cross the Rio Grande into Texas. But again, please continue to tell us how pro life you actually are.
When I first started writing this blog on Sept. 1, the day the Texas abortion law went into effect, I was writing on behalf of women and women alone. The new abortion law is a flagrant attempt to control women’s bodies out of fear that we already control too much. Sure, it was done in the name of pro life, but it’s an effort rooted in male authority that’s been in existence for as long as I can remember. While it doesn’t make it any less infuriating, it’s still nothing new.
But now, nearly a month after the fact, as people continue to die from a virus that, while not entirely preventable, could have been slowed through more diligent, sincere, and scientifically based public health outreach from elected officials, I can’t help but think it’s not just women these people are trying to control, but the entirety of humanity: living, breathing, aching, tired, struggling, opinionated, hard working, worried, underestimated human beings who are in desperate need of helpful direction. Unfortunately, representatives like the ones in Texas are not guiding people to live long, fulfilling lives. Rather, they’re encouraging them to potentially become seriously ill by advocating against vaccines and masks. The rhetoric is veiled in freedom when it’s actually apathy toward whether a person lives or dies. It is, quite literally, the antithesis of pro life.
With that said, I can understand how someone who thinks differently than I do about the COVID-19 vaccine may think people like me are trying to control them by encouraging them to be vaccinated. But please know that my encouragement to do so comes not from a place of control, but a place of concern for your health and well-being. It’s the same concern I have for women struggling to make difficult decisions about an unplanned pregnancy. Both are pro life. Pro your life and pro HER life, too.
When it comes to immigration, I must admit that I’m not even remotely capable of having all the answers. What I do know though is that effective immigration strategies are not the result of makeshift camps under bridges or whipping refugees into submission. These acts are simply inhumane and disgusting and, again, not at all what I imagined pro life to be.
I suppose what I’m having the hardest time understanding is, if women don’t matter, and sick people who government officials could have helped prevent from getting sick don’t matter, and immigrants who are seeking a better life don’t matter, what does it mean to be pro life anyway? Whose lives matter? Hasn’t the conservative rallying cry for the last two years or so been that All Lives Matter? Because if they do, I have to ask: do they really?
Title Track: “Killing in the Name,” Rage Against the Machine. Listen here.
