Suzanne Harrington: US patriarchy propelling women into nightmarish Handmaid’s Tale
Suzanne Harrington: "If the US was in any way genuinely ‘pro-life’, it would start with gun control, so that children – the born ones – were not shot dead during their school day." Picture: Denis Scannell
Wow, America. Are you having some kind of breakdown? How else to explain your proposed lurch back to the 1950s, where men did as they liked and women did backstreet abortion?
Ploughing through the shock and fury at the Supreme Court’s imminent attack on the fundamental rights of women – from Kamila Harris’s repeated calls of “how dare they” to Roxanne Gay’s heartfelt essay, It’s Time To Rage, in the New York Times - perhaps the most resonant commentary comes from a Methodist pastor in Alabama called Dave Barnhart.
He wrote the following in response not to what Roxanne Gay terms the “hollow theocracy” of the Supreme Court idealogues, but several years earlier in relation to the pro-birth lobby of Alabama – those who eschew comprehensive sex education and access to contraception, preferring women to give birth at all cost. Here is what he said:
“The unborn are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don’t resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don’t ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don’t need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens [undocumented immigrants], they don’t bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn.
“You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologising, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus, but actually dislike people who breathe. Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn.”
If the US was in any way genuinely ‘pro-life’, it would start with gun control, so that children – the born ones – were not shot dead during their school day. It would not cage ‘alien’ children at its borders. Basics like statutory maternity leave and universal health care would not be considered communist. Puritanical absurdities like sexual abstinence as valid birth control would not exist. But just as rape is never about sexual gratification, banning abortion is never about protecting anything except the power of those who seek to ban it.
Those who bang on about the unborn do so because, as Pastor Barnhart says, it’s easy. You don’t have to do anything except heighten emotion. How about instead heightening the tax on wealth, to properly fund sexual health care and sex education, so that low-income women – the ones this Supreme Court outrage will most affect - have agency over their own lives and bodies? But why would American patriarchy do that, when it can propel American women backwards into a nightmarish Handmaid’s Tale?
