What’s shocking is the realization that we are living in a country that now boasts some of the world’s most misogynist and repressive laws.
You really do need to have a little look around the world at what abortion laws are elsewhere. That vile suppression of abortion in Dobbs was, in many ways, still more liberal access to abortion than France currently has. Given the ease – and illegality of trying to stop someone – of crossing state lines even the trigger law bans still leave the general situation more liberal than that of perhaps Poland.
Seriously, get a grip.
But what shocks me most is the fact that, according to surveys that keep surfacing and being reported, a substantial majority of Americans support abortion rights and oppose the outright ban.
And now the issue is part of politics again, so folk will vote for their state legislatures on the basis of what they want the law to be. The outcome will be – as it usually is with democractic decisions – that democratic balance of what the people want the law to be. It might be messy, time consuming and disruptive and yet this is why we actually have the system itself. Pretty crap in many ways but it is the only known method of sorting through these hugely divisive societal questions.
What’s noteworthy is not that high number so much as the discrepancy between that figure and the substance of supreme court ruling. What’s shocking is yet another fact that we have known or suspected for some time: that we are living under minority rule, that, in some of the most essential ways, the wishes of the majority no longer determine government policy, and that it has become a kind of joke to suggest that our government, at the highest level, is responding to “the will of the people”.
And that’s just being fuckwit stupid. The Supreme Court just announced that abortion is nothing to do with them, it’s a matter for the will of the people now.