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TygrBright

(20,733 posts)
Mon Apr 29, 2019, 11:20 PM Apr 2019

If the forced-birth cult wins...

...they will not like what they win, ultimately.

The problem is, most of them are not old enough to remember what that form of slavery cost last time.

They were not young nurses working in hospitals watching other young women die.

They were not teachers finding the empty desks in their classrooms.

They were not grieving parents attending their daughters' funerals.

They did not see that quiet holocaust.

I'm old enough to remember.

And I remember the Litany of the Unnamed that I heard again and again, from other women. The haunted eyes while they told the stories in soft, anguished voices.

I remember finding out that my devout Catholic grandmother was not part of the cult. She had her own Litany of the Unnamed. There were parts of it she wouldn't tell me about.

Many years later, I recognized that same shut-down, refuse-to-talk-about it response from veterans who'd come back from a combat zone with PTSD.

Back then, there were far more levers of control to keep the conspiracy of silence and to keep the holocaust under wraps.

There were far more conscienceless cult members in positions of power who were willing to lie on death certificates and push alternative explanations for those deaths.

There was a robust infrastructure of institutions that absorbed despairing and vulnerable young women and coldly forced them to carry pregnancies to term while abusing them, shaming them, silencing them. And then taking their babies from them.

There was a mainstream media-wide collaboration with the silence and the shame and the coercion.

There were laws defining who had control over women, and it was not the women.

Banks did not allow women to open their own accounts or apply for credit. There were few avenues of escape or independence.

And a misogynist patriarchy on one hand treated their female chattels like disposable sex toys, and on the other, punished them brutally with forced birth when, with almost nonexistent access to birth control, the inevitable happened.

But that bottle has been shattered into millions of pieces and not even the most dedicated forced-birth cultists can stuff the genie back in.

Women will not stand for it.

If the holocaust starts up again, it will not be quiet this time.

They are sowing the wind.

grimly,
Bright

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jmowreader

(50,453 posts)
2. That cult only wants to force YOU to give birth
Tue Apr 30, 2019, 12:28 PM
Apr 2019

Google “the only moral abortion is my abortion.” It was written by a doctor who works at a women’s health center. One of the services they offered was abortion, so obviously they had protesters...who would seek abortion care when they had unwanted pregnancies in their own families.

If abortion was outlawed, the people who want YOU to carry the result of your sin would go to their own doctors for “menstrual extraction” or take “vacations” to exotic locations, as the rich used to do before Roe was handed down.

murielm99

(30,657 posts)
3. There were a couple of girls in my high school like that.
Tue Apr 30, 2019, 12:34 PM
Apr 2019

Both were from wealthier families. They went away for "vacations."

jmowreader

(50,453 posts)
5. Banishment also used to be a thing
Tue Apr 30, 2019, 12:59 PM
Apr 2019

Some rich people who couldn’t get their daughters’ “sins” erased would take them to their vacation homes three states away until the baby was born, then have the babies put up for adoption.

Which makes me wonder if the girls’ parents taught them to “never let your husband see you naked until you’ve had your first child together.” That way, they’d have a plausible cover story for the stretch marks and darkened areolas that come with having had a baby.

murielm99

(30,657 posts)
7. One of my friends and contemporaries
Tue Apr 30, 2019, 01:04 PM
Apr 2019

was talking with me recently about banishment. Some girls "went away somewhere" and never came back. Many of them were hastily married or did not ever finish high school.

Others went to school in another district. We had a family who moved out of town and came back after the baby was born and adopted by another family.

There were a couple of families who adopted the baby themselves. The grandmother became the mother and the mother became a big sister. Sad.

No matter how repressive the times were, I remember a lot of teenage pregnancies.

Hekate

(90,202 posts)
10. Lots of white teen pregnancies that fueled the white adoption industry.That dried up rather abruptly
Tue Apr 30, 2019, 08:50 PM
Apr 2019

It really dried up, you know.

murielm99

(30,657 posts)
17. Right.
Wed May 1, 2019, 05:03 AM
May 2019

Black girls kept their babies. Hispanic girls did, too, and they got married young. At least that is how it was where I grew up.

Things changed when most white girls started keeping their babies. And so many white women my age were forced to give up their babies. They did not want that. It was heartbreaking.

Opel_Justwax

(230 posts)
4. If Roe Vs Wade is overturned it goes back to the States. Many States have now legalized abortion.
Tue Apr 30, 2019, 12:56 PM
Apr 2019

For states that don't allow it a ballot measure can be used to make it legal in that State. Women will be able to cross State lines to have an abortion also. But to tell you the truth I don't think Roe will be overturned.

jmowreader

(50,453 posts)
6. I don't think the GOP wants it overturned either
Tue Apr 30, 2019, 01:03 PM
Apr 2019

A lot of people join the GOP for this one reason. If the reason disappears, a substantial part of the Party’s cash flow (and of the churches that are most violently anti abortion) will end. Not that many people will continue to shower money on that “party” out of gratitude for “savin’ the babies.”

Hekate

(90,202 posts)
11. That problem is twofold: one is that many states have pre-emptively banned abortion by...
Tue Apr 30, 2019, 09:04 PM
Apr 2019

...forcing clinic closures and demanding that doctors at women's clinics have admitting privileges at a hospital; ensuring that pharmacists and hospitals can refuse to fill whatever medications offend their personal consciences. And on and on and on.

Another is that many states never repealed their old laws when Roe vs Wade was handed down, and those laws, tho unenforced all these years, are still alive. If Roe is overturned, there they are.

Reproductive rights, aka the full range of women's medical care, hang by a thread.

Hekate

(90,202 posts)
12. Re crossing state lines: it falls hardest on rural women, the poor, teens, the abused...
Tue Apr 30, 2019, 09:13 PM
Apr 2019

Women who cannot easily explain to other people why they have to be gone for a day or a week. Bosses, teachers, husbands, boyfriends, their mom and dad, their own children who need care.

The hurdles are monumental already in Texas, a geographically vast state.

DonCoquixote

(13,615 posts)
8. I would love to agree with you, but
Tue Apr 30, 2019, 08:26 PM
Apr 2019

sadly, I think the machinery by which consevrtaive men and women has been fine tuned. Many of them will look upon the horros you described as God'swill.

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