The Texas Lies About Abortion – Rebecca Solnit

Ever since Donald Trump appeared on the political stage to lead Republicans to the promised land of their unstoppable impulses, the US right has become drunk with the freedom to lie and commit violent acts. Usually anyone who belongs to civil society imposes limits on their actions as a sign of respect for the rights of others and for the common good. But these already vague limits have been largely overcome by some prominent Republicans – from Fox News host Tucker Carlson to Senator Ted Cruz – and their followers.

We have seen people drinking lies ranging from pizzagate (according to which leaders of the Democratic Party have participated in esoteric rituals and violence against minors in the basement of a pizzeria) to the conspiracy fantasies of the Qanon movement, from the denial of covid-19 to the electoral lies of Trump. We saw mistreated journalists, Black Lives Matter anti-racist protesters run over with cars and intimidated with guns (at least from Charlottesville onwards), assaulted government buildings, doctors and school boards talking about public health threatened and a conspiracy to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, for imposing pandemic prevention protocols.

The Texas abortion law that the conservative-majority Supreme Court refused to block, even if it goes against the judicial record, is based on a mountain of lies. The language he uses is a heap of untruths: he repeats the story, which has now become familiar to us, according to which six-week-old embryos are fetuses and the group of cells that is not yet a heart and does not yet feed a circulatory system is attributed a beat. Behind this idea are other lies, according to which women abort because they are reckless, lascivious and cynical and not, as is the case most of the times, because contraception has not worked well or they have been forced to have sexual intercourse or to have sex. medical problems, including threats to the mother’s health, unsustainable pregnancies, financial problems and responsibility towards existing children.

But the novelty of the Texas bill is that it invites its citizens to become vigilantes, bounty hunters and spies. This will likely prompt a woman who suspects she is pregnant to behave with the utmost secrecy, because anyone can profit from her condition and anyone who helps her, from the driver to the doctor, is prosecutable. This law makes pregnancy a crime, because it risks criminalizing the many pregnancies that end in a miscarriage. It will lead women – particularly those without documents, poor, young, under the control of violent spouses or family members – to die of dangerous pregnancies or clandestine abortions or to commit suicide. A vigilante who targets a woman is also willing to see her die.

The right-wing stance on abortion is often seen as a contradiction to a political party that sings the praises of unlimited freedom to do what one wants, including carrying semi-automatic weapons in public. But like the attack on the right to vote in Texas, contemporary with the attack on reproductive rights, it is obviously a way to expand the freedom of some by taking it away from others. The attack on reproductive rights aims to make women less free and equal; the attack on the right to vote aims to make non-white people less free and equal; and non-white women get a double dose of injustice.

These are the logical consequences of the fears of a party that, a few decades ago, began to see a country less and less white and decided to try to cancel the votes of non-white people instead of winning their consent. Its enemy is not only the Democratic Party, but democracy itself. In this world where some animals are more equal than others, someone has the right to establish what the truth is more than others, and even the facts, science, history are chains to be dissolved in search of one’s own version of reality to impose. to others, even with violence.

What was the coup attempt on January 6, if not a grand demonstration of this project? A mountain of lies about the election result was used to incite a crowd of vigilantes to not only attack the congress, but also to challenge the ratification of the election results and threaten Vice President Mike Pence and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi with death. Their violence was unbelievable: mostly middle-aged, mostly white men trampled on each other as they yelled and sprayed pepper spray in the faces of MPs and people guarding the building.

Their leaders have told lies that instigated violence, lies to justify that violence, lies to deny the existence of that violence, and then lies to fuel further violence. House minority group leader Kevin McCarthy, who at the time begged Donald Trump to recall the attackers, later tried to sabotage the investigation. As the New York Times wrote on Sept. 1: “Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader in the House, has threatened reprisals against any company willing to cooperate with the congressional commission on the Jan. 6 riot, after the commission asked dozens of company to keep the phone number and the posts on the social networks of eleven far-right parliamentarians who tried to overturn the results of the 2020 elections ”. He’s basically trying to keep congress and people from knowing what happened.

Madison Cawthorn, the young Republican congressman in North Carolina who was in the front row inciting the crowd on January 6, calls the rioters “political prisoners” and still lies about the 2020 election: “If our electoral systems continue to be rigged , if the victories continue to be stolen, it will only end in bloodshed, ”he said. Cawthorn, like Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, and like Justices Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh, whose votes allowed Texas abortion law to pass, has been charged with sexual harassment in the past. Even though men across the political spectrum are accused of such crimes – Andrew Cuomo’s conduct led to New York’s first governor last month – in the case of Republicans it’s all about ideological coherence. The premise is that one’s rights matter so much that those of others do not matter at all, and that goes for rape, mask and vaccine policies, and gun deaths in recent years.

It is not clear whether the right is so bold because in the last five years it has always gotten away with it or because it is desperate and gambling. But both are probably true. If the United States defends its democracy and protects the right to vote for all adults, the right will continue to be an increasingly small minority. Its only chance to reverse the situation requires the reversal of democracy itself. To achieve this, she is willing to use violence and is no longer afraid of lying.

(Translation by Bruna Tortorella)