The Texas Abortion Bounty Law is as American as Slavery and Murder Pie

The Texas abortion law, Senate Bill 8, which essentially puts a 10k bounty on any woman or girl of childbearing age and anyone kind and reasonable or simply circumstantially positioned to help her, is disgusting and fitting with United States’ culture. If a woman or girl in the state makes the decision to have unwanted genetic material removed from her body six weeks or more after being unwillingly inseminated, she and everyone from the doctor to the cab driver to her family to some dude that held open the door for her on her way into the clinic can have their lives ruined by civil law bureaucracy.

It’s a sneaky tactic the Texas legislature has taken, not making a criminal law against abortion but one which can be filed by literally any jackoff in civil court. It’s a stupid stretch, since the foundation of civil cases is generally that one party has harmed another. Any rancorous dipshit can now sue any woman in Texas who’s gotten an abortion without even knowing her, let alone having been harmed by her. They can’t have been harmed by her abortion. No one is harmed by an abortion. The aborted embryos and fetuses have no pain receptors, consciousness, or any ability to experience pain, and whatever “harm” could be argued by anyone else, like a maliciously litigious self-righteous shitsmear, is harm to their beliefs, their feelings, or sensibilities, and fuck their feelings, beliefs, and sensibilities. It’s none of their fucking business to begin with.

For all the rhetoric of patriotic propaganda about the US being a free society, prizing personal liberty above damn near everything else, this law is but the latest example of our nation’s hypocrisy. It is not at all out of character. As apt as some quips about the Texas legislature being akin to the Taliban may be, there’s nothing foreign about this law or the men who’ve imposed it. It’s got nothing to do with Islam or middle-easterners. It’s a patriarchal assault founded shakily in the interpretational grounds of religious fundamentalism, and that’s where the comparison ends. The crackers who drafted and passed this law needed no inspiration from any alien source; it is quintessentially American.

Hapless liberals have made a mantra of the phrase, “This is not who we are,” of late. Whether in response to slaughtering innocents in wars abroad, brutalizing and killing civilians at home, ripping children from their families who come from abroad seeking a home or simply sanctuary here, or restricting or stealing the rights of people here and there based on their gender, sexuality, skin color, or whatever else, however some protest that “this is not who we are,” it all very much is. We are what we do. We have always done and continue to do horrible shit. Rather than pretending to be something better than we are, we should be working towards the goal of being that better country the delusional claim us to be. That path requires at its start, especially in this case, understanding a few basic facts.

Everyone has, or should have, the right to do whatever they want with their bodies. More than anything, certainly more than property, this nation’s great greedy obsession, every human being should have full autonomy over their own bodies. It is ourselves, the only thing that is truly us. It should be the choice of no one but the single owner of their body to dress it however they like, tattoo it up if they wish, fill it full of drugs, pleasure it, destroy it, do whatever they want with it, with themselves, including removing any unwanted parts from it.

Embryos and fetuses are not human beings. No more than caviar are fish and whales or the random notes you scribble on the backs of receipts are novels and songs. Maybe, if the conditions are right and a lot of work is put in, they could one day be humans and whales and novels, but before reaching that stage they’re nothing but a little mess and it’s their owner’s right to keep them, eat them, or throw them away as they see fit.

In the interest of fairness and justice, if this law is going to stand, then it must bring with it a suite of other laws. If ten-thousand dollar bounties are put on women who get abortions, the bounty laws must be broadened: there must be bounties on rapists, molesters, assholes who can’t get laid without plying a girl with alcohol or drugs, and shitheads who refuse to wear condoms. Since the whole anti-abortion movement is predicated on the false claim of caring for children, there must also be bounties put on the heads of any persons or organizations who endanger or harm the health and wellbeing of children. Politicians who cut aid to food and healthcare programs for children, industries whose products and byproducts make children ill and poison their world, gun manufacturers, candy and soft drink companies, the Catholic church, peewee football, the Republican party, everyone whose actions harm children ought to have a bounty on their heads.

But of course that won’t happen. It won’t happen because those are the scum behind this insidious law and the anti-abortion movement. They’re not going to put bounties on their own heads, especially not when they truly don’t give a shit about children to begin with. They only care for the “unborn,” and only insofar as the unborn can be used as a pawn to exercise their power over women and stroke their self-righteous egos. It’s about controlling and punishing poor women, particularly, because the degenerate men and the Aunt Lydias alongside them who passed this law have the means to fly their wives, mistresses, daughters, and whoever else they knocked up over to a better state, or down to Mexico, to get their abortions. As always it is the poor and the desperate who will suffer most.