Op-ed: Vote – your freedom depends on it
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If you have a uterus and live in the state of West Virginia, the state legislature has just made clear that your reproductive organs are no longer yours to control exclusively. Your bodily autonomy and personal sovereignty are no longer protected by the laws of this state. Extremist Christians in the Republican supermajority (along with six Democrats) have decided your life, liberty, and socioeconomic well-being are dependent upon effective birth control or abstinence and that, if you're sexually assaulted and become pregnant as a result, there better be a paper trail for your trauma or you'll be having your rapist's child.
The people who wrote and passed this law (House Bill 302) are not just myopic, they are dangerous. These are people who espouse ideologies that reject medical science in favor of religious orthodoxy and true freedom in favor of patriarchal tyranny. These are people who place political expediency above the lives, health and safety of persons capable of becoming pregnant. What they call "pro-life" is what any person capable of empathy and rationality calls pro-birth--the notion that a child must be born regardless of surrounding circumstances.
A child born is not a child fed, clothed, housed, educated, provided with healthcare, properly nurtured, loved, or even wanted. Fostering and adoption are expensive, time-consuming, difficult processes that can often be dangerous for a child. Given the ongoing opioid epidemic and the prevalence of substances like methamphetamines and fentanyl, how many children are being born addicts? How many are being cared for by family members who are not the biological parents; family members who may be of advanced age and financially strained, even with the assistance the state and other entities try to provide?
There are exciting things happening in West Virginia, like a $500 million investment at the former Century Aluminum site outside of Ravenswood by BHE Renewables, a Berkshire Hathaway Energy business. The 2,000-acre area will be a renewable energy microgrid-powered industrial site and the first business on the site will use 100% renewable energy to manufacture titanium aerospace products, a company called Precision Castparts Corp. (PCC). That is amazing news. But who in their right mind wants to move to or remain in a state that tells half or more of its population they can't make a private medical decision in consultation with a physician of their choosing?
I'm a father and a stepfather. In the cases of both of my children, their mothers had a choice. It wasn't my choice; it was theirs and theirs alone. If the state is so determined to control bodies and end abortions, let's start with forced vasectomies. A vasectomy is a non-invasive and reversable procedure. Let's regulate those male reproductive organs for a change. Doesn't sound good, guys? Well why not? Because you don't want the state telling you what to do with your vas deferens? But come on, we're talking about potential life here! You house within you the ingredients necessary to bring about other human beings and, based on what we've seen with HB302 and before that the decision by the U.S. Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, the state has a compelling interest to make sure procreation is carefully regulated.
It is beyond absurd that women and trans persons capable of becoming pregnant have to deal with this in 2022. We live in a nation faced with climate breakdown, global pandemic disease, massive wealth and income inequality, and institutionalized and systemic oppression, but outlawing abortion makes for a very useful political distraction. U.S. democracy is teetering on the brink of collapse and fascist decay has set in and the passage of HB302 is just more proof of this.
Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) has introduced legislation to ban abortion at the federal level. With congressional majorities (at least majorities large enough to make Joe Manchin irrelevant), Democrats can instead pass law that nullifies what West Virginia's legislature has just done and codifies abortion protections nationally. Vote (while you still can) like the freedom, life, safety, and health of you or someone you love depends on it, because it does.
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Eric Engle is assistant state director for American Atheists in West Virginia.