None of Us Should Know About Kate Cox
What does it mean that a woman's medical condition is up for public debate?
You’ve probably already heard about what is happening to Kate Cox because it has been all over the news so I won’t rehash it all here. But that’s exactly the point: The fact that we even know about her and her nonviable pregnancy is sickening. We now live in a country where a woman's medical condition and her bodily autonomy are being debated in the public square; a country where a woman is forced to go to court over a painful medical decision she should be free to make in consultation with her doctor. For those who thought Margaret Atwood’s “Handmaid’s Tale” was farfetched, it’s getting closer everyday.
Kate Cox fought in Texas for the right to have an abortion of her wanted, yet doomed, pregnancy to avoid putting her life and future fertility at risk, and so she wouldn’t give birth to a child who would suffer terribly in the mere hours or days it had to live. This calls to mind Samantha Casiano, forced to carry her baby with fatal fetal anomalies to term, who vomited on the stand as she recounted the trauma of watching her doomed baby gasping for air as she died.
The indifference to life after birth is staggering. How have we become a country that advocates for such inhumane treatment of women and babies— forcing women like Cox to become “walking coffins”, denying ten-year-old rape victims an abortion, forcing mothers who can’t afford another child to have one, forcing women who don’t want children or may well die having them to carry a pregnancy to term, and prosecuting someone for having a miscarriage—and then suggest this is pro-life?
Half of congress is advocating for abortion bans in a country that makes life after birth unnecessarily onerous for women, children, and families with its unsubsidized childcare, unpaid maternity leave, no sick leave, and women judged against impossible standards of motherhood. Banning abortion sets women up to suffer and fail, which is precisely the point.
While many of the anti-choice folks on the ground believe they’re saving babies, it’s clear that for those at the top this fight is not about life. It is about bringing this country back to a time when women did not have the autonomy to shape their own lives, and were punished when they did.
Sex is natural and healthy.
People who use protection still get pregnant.
Abortions will always happen. Banning them will just bring about methods far more perilous for women.
No longer willing to put her health at risk, Kate Cox left the state to seek an abortion elsewhere. But taking off work and traveling out of state is an obstacle for many women. And if the the Republican legislators and anti-abortion activists get their wish for a nationwide 15-week ban on abortion (also with no exceptions for fatal fetal abnormalities), that will no longer be an option and the Handmaid’s Tale will no longer be just the brainchild of a fiction writer.
Life as we know it is on the line.
The good news is that the majority of Americans report broad support for abortion rights. But we all need to show up at the polls every single time so that women like Kate Cox and you and me and our daughters can create families when the timing and circumstances are right to bring a child into the world. Or not.
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This post is a little off-brand but I’m recycling it because the holidays are upon us and therapists are often flooded with calls from people whose holidays didn’t live up to their expectations or they stirred up hard feelings and conflict.
Jo-Ann, amen.