The Trump administration and Trump’s surrogates have proved callous to the pain of the children and parents they’ve been dividing up and shipping all over the country. (Listen, if you haven’t already, to former Trump campaign chief Corey Lewandowski groaning “womp, womp“ when informed that a 10-year-old girl with Down syndrome had been separated from her parents.) No plea for humanity rang true to the dozens of people behind the “zero tolerance” border policy—not the medical argument that the trauma could harm these children for the rest of their livesand reverberate for generations, not the human-rights argument that people seeking asylum shouldn’t be treated like criminals, not the family-values argument that parents and children should be kept together whenever possible. To justify the policy, Trump, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen invoked the same simplistic rationale. People crossing the border are breaking immigration laws. People who break laws get jailed. People who get jailed lose their kids.
The inaccuracies in this line of reasoning aside—for one, people seeking asylum aren’t breaking any laws—it was a useful bit of evidence that Trump and his cronies view children, and the pain they can cause their parents, as a disciplinary tool. For this administration, the cruelty of the family-separation policy was its primary selling point. In order for the policy to serve as a deterrent, it needed to be so inhumane that potential migrants would be scared into staying home despite the risk of extreme danger. (The fact that migrants haven’t been deterred from crossing the border demonstrates just how horrific the violence is in many parts of Central America.) The fact that children would suffer was a feature of the policy, not an unfortunate side effect.
Deterrence is also a key element of the right wing’s philosophy on contraception and abortion. Some anti-abortion activists argue that permitting women to terminate their pregnancies encourages wanton behavior—specifically noncommittal, unprotected sex. In this sense, the prospect of forced pregnancy and childbirth, and the physical and/or emotional pain that goes with them, is meant as a punishment for the crime of promiscuity.
Denying women abortions isn’t, as anti-abortion advocates often claim, just about saving the lives of unborn children. It’s also about imposing a moral judgment on women for having sex. Pro-lifers tend to frame childbirth as a consequence any sexually active single woman should be ready to assume. The phrase abortion on demand, a popular encapsulation of the presumed position of the pro-choice set, suggests that certain women, by virtue of their reasons or circumstances, deserve abortions more than others. Many, but not all, right-wing politicians make room within their anti-abortion frameworks for exceptions in cases of rape and incest. Their thinking goes something like this: A woman who was raped had no ability to prevent her pregnancy. Every other woman who gets pregnant bears the responsibility for doing so, and their bodies must suffer for failing to accept that responsibility, even if it means bringing a child into a family who is unable or unwilling to properly care for it.
Consigning a woman to pregnancy and childbirth against her will is not a physically neutral act. It is corporeal punishment with lasting bodily impact. A woman who gives birth is 14 timesmore likely to die during or after labor than to die from complications of a legal abortion. Pregnancy, labor, and recovery all carry with them the inevitability of discomfort and, to varying degrees, pain. When the state forces a woman to give birth, it is extracting pain as a physical penalty—a price no cisgender man who has sex for nonprocreative purposes will ever have to pay. During his presidential campaign, Trump envisioned a world in which women who assert control over their own bodies would also have to pay a price. If Roe v. Wade were to fall, he told Chris Matthews, there would need “to be some form of punishment” for women who get illegal abortions—an “if she breaks a law, she must pay the price” philosophy that echoes the administration’s justification for family separation.
This has been the GOP goal for decades now, but Trump's personal animosity towards women, African-Americans, Latinx and Hispanic Americans, and LGBTQ Americans I think goes back to Trump's treatment by President Obama at the 2011 White House Correspondents' Dinner. Donald Trump has never, ever forgiven Barack Obama for publicly embarrassing him seven years ago and Trump swore revenge not only on Obama, but Clinton, Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and everyone who voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012.
He's wanted to punish the Obama coalition for years. He's now been given the chance to do exactly that, and the first 18 months of his term has been utter rancor against Obama voters, seeking our destruction and surrender at his feet.
But Cauterucci is absolutely correct: Trump is all about punishing women in the most brutal fashion imaginable, with their own bodies as prisons, and with their own families as collateral damage.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment