The road to Gilead runs through Red State Republican men (and women) who want to criminalize not just abortions, but miscarriages and contraception too, resulting in women filling for-profit prisons for "reproductive crimes" if they get their way.
A businessman turned state representative from rural Oil City, Louisiana, and a Baptist pastor banded together earlier this year on a radical mission.
They were adamant that a woman who receives an abortion should receive the same criminal consequences as one who drowns her baby.
Under a bill they promoted, pregnant people could face murder charges even if they were raped or doctors determined the procedure was needed to save their own life. Doctors who attempted to help patients conceive through in-vitro fertilization, a fertility treatment used by millions of Americans, could also be locked up for destroying embryos, and certain contraception such as Plan B would be banned.
"The taking of a life is murder, and it is illegal," state Rep. Danny McCormick told a committee of state lawmakers who considered the bill in May, right after the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade was leaked.
"No compromises, no more waiting," Brian Gunter, the pastor who suggested McCormick be the one to introduce the legislation, told the committee.
Only four people spoke against the bill during the committee meeting— all women. They pleaded with the lawmakers to grasp the gravity of the proposed restrictions, which went farther than any state abortion law currently on the books, and warned of unintended consequences.
"We need to take a deep breath," said Melissa Flournoy, a former state representative who runs the progressive advocacy group 10,000 Women Louisiana. She said the bill would only punish women and that there wasn't enough responsibility being placed on men.
But in the end, only one man and one woman, an Independent and a Democrat, voted against it in committee. Seven men on the committee, all Republicans, voted in favor of the bill, moving it one step closer to becoming law.
A faction of self-proclaimed "abolitionists" are seeking to make abortion laws more restrictive and the consequences of having the procedure more punitive than ever before.
Emboldened by the overturning of Roe v. Wade, they say they will not be satisfied until fetuses are given the same protections as all US citizens — meaning that if abortion is illegal, then criminal statutes should be applied accordingly. While major national anti-abortion groups say they do not support criminalizing women, the idea is gaining traction with certain conservative lawmakers. And the activists and politicians leading the charge are nearly always men, CNN found.
This year, three male lawmakers from Indiana attempted to wipe out existing abortion regulations and change the state's criminal statutes to apply at the time of fertilization. In Texas, five male lawmakers authored a bill last year that would have made getting an abortion punishable by the death penalty if it had gone into law. A state representative in Arizona introduced legislation that included homicide charges — saying in a Facebook video that anyone who undergoes an abortion deserves to "spend some time" in the Arizona "penal system." And a male Kansas lawmaker proposed a bill that would amend the state's constitution to allow abortion laws to pass without an exception for the life of the mother.
While most in the anti-abortion movement believe that human life begins at conception, "abolitionists" are particularly uncompromising in how they act on their beliefs — comparing abortion to the Holocaust and using inflammatory terms such as "slaughter" and "murder" to describe a medical procedure that most Americans believe should be legal in all or most cases.
Bradley Pierce, the attorney who helped draft the Louisiana bill, said his organization has been involved with many of the "abolition" bills that have been introduced in more than a dozen states. All of this proposed legislation would make it possible for women seeking abortions to face criminal charges.
An overwhelming majority of Americans said in a Pew Research Center poll they don't believe men should have a greater say on abortion policy, but that is what is happening. Experts told CNN that the male dominance fits within the anti-abortion movement's current framing as being focused on "fetal personhood" and "fetal rights" as opposed to maternal rights.
This movement to criminalize women who have abortions even to save their own lives? That's 100% men wanting control of women, full stop. Reducing them to birthing units, and if they die in childbirth, that's God's will. Or, you know, the will of the state putting them in jail for decades if they survive it.
"Maybe women shouldn't be having sex, the dirty sluts" is the inevitable response, never mind the rape and sexual assault millions of women go through each year.
That really is the road to the fictional Gilead from The Handmaid's Tale, complete with raging white supremacy on top of the misogyny, because it would be Black and brown women suffering the most from laws like this, when Black and Native women in particular have astronomical birthing mortality rates as it is.
No, this is about control. Dobbs was about putting women in their places, beneath a man that they serve.
Vote these assholes out.
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