The War Against Women is Raging.

The bad news just keeps rolling in: The war on women is raging and it isn’t over by a long shot.

But let’s imagine what we are facing. 

In mean-spirited Republican states, already dominated by good ole boys with their minds on what they think is freedom and a beer or a Bible in each hand, men have decided that women really are a means to an end and they are going to insist on it.  The end they desire is their domination, access to sex on demand, and a home-cooked meal by a submissive, quiet woman when they come home from their dead-end jobs or from managing another hostile corporate takeover.

So, let’s imagine that the next thing these men won’t allow those out-of-control women who complain about “rights” is birth control. No way should the “sexual revolution” be allowed to continue.  Look what it has done for women – encouraged them to no longer fear pregnancy as they take control of their own sexual behavior.  Can’t have “wanton women” and all that.  Women who choose their sexual partners and choose whether to have sex. Look where that has got us. A freer society is not good for those who wish to dominate and who think it is their God-given right to do so.

Contraception is a woman’s job. She must be in charge of it because there is very little else she can do to prevent pregnancy other than refusing sex. Good luck with that! But contraception, the most reliable kind, is really expensive. The best the uninsured, or insured but working for a corporation that does not “believe” in birth control, can hope for is a man who uses a condom -- that she’d better be ready to provide – properly and honestly. But, ugh, that means she is thinking ahead about the possibility of consensual sex. I mean, ugh.

These men, all the way up to the judiciary, make light of women who say they have been raped, and tell them it’s their own fault for being tempting.  For being intentionally vulnerable to predation because of their appearance or behavior. Because, you know, men are not expected to control themselves.  Women must not look tasty, or they’ll get what they are asking for.  Without fear of repercussion, a man can ‘just chat a girl up in a bar (where she wouldn’t be if she were a “nice” girl) and then “give her a good time” using her for his pleasure and to enhance their masculinity. She knows reporting an assault is a farce.

She keeps forgetting that her plans and dreams are not up to her. Her destiny is up to other people who have no investment in her or her future.

Or maybe her boyfriend or husband demands she submit her body to him whenever he wants it, as his “holy” scriptures and masculine pride says he is entitled to. Maybe she tries to keep him from impregnating her because she does not need an unwanted pregnancy. Since few men care about a woman’s biological functioning and do not know how it works (and as many women don’t with our despicable lack of sex education from parents or teachers), they also think it is her problem to deal with. His “problem” is his wants and needs.  Hers is to manage the results, with or without birth control – the female issue that is up for any corporation to deny her should she have the misfortune to work for one of those.

She’s pregnant.

Maybe she will try various avenues she has heard about from other desperate women, or searches the internet for how not to have to carry the fetus and end up with a baby at the wrong time in her life.  She will be tracked by some ‘cool’ algorithms that tag her, identify her, surveil her and the police will be after her for daring to assert her right to her life as she wants it to be. Just because. Just because some fundamentalists, some men, have decided patriarchy is worth fighting for and women are to be kept in their place.

She won’t be able to get an abortion and continue living her life as she hoped to, so she’ll have to have the baby. The man in her life couldn’t care less. She’ll manage; women always do it seems. Or he’ll be so proud of what he has accomplished and remind her by his behavior that she now is playing the role that God or men believe she exists for. But he won’t help out unless he wants to or is forced to by law to at least provide money for her and their baby’s survival.

If she isn’t under someone else’s insurance plan, she won’t have decent or any health coverage so she will get by with the least amount of prenatal medical care she can find or afford.  One day she will bleed as her pregnancy threatens to end on its own, but no one will see her in the ER because she’s not anywhere near enough to dying. So, she’ll get sick, and maybe still lose the fetus or maybe it will be impaired. No one but her mom and sisters (or loving husband/partner) will comfort her through the pain and frustration, because after all, she’s female and that is what females are for.  Shut up, go home, and deal with it.

She’ll go into labor and go to a hospital which will try to pawn her off on a public hospital rather than deal with an uninsured patient.  We all know that before anyone even asks for your name in the ER, they ask for your insurance card.  What matters is that you can pay for your care before it is provided.

Since she didn’t have good or any prenatal care, she won’t really understand what is happening. She will suffer the incredible pain of labor for a dozen or more hours in a room where no one does anything but wait for her to call on her carers when she needs something.  When her overworked carers and medical practitioners whose time is tightly scheduled think her labor has gone on long enough (for them), they will call for drugs to force the labor to move along more quickly or cut her abdomen open to get it all over with. It is such a time suck and hassle waiting for the natural process to unfold.

She is in so much pain that she no longer cares, she just wants the pain to stop.  No one who hasn’t given birth has even the slightest idea what this is like for her, so they treat her as a piece of flesh they must move from bed to gurney to table, call in the troops, operate all of 20 minutes, and schlep her back on the gurney and back to a bed until she can balance while standing and then be sent home.  Another pregnancy ended properly, another invoice for thousands upon thousands of dollars being prepared.

She and her bundle of joy are sent home within hours or a day and wished good luck and happiness. Their responsibilities to her are over. Her government has no responsibilities to her now that she delivered a baby. And no requirements to help her out of the problem they nurtured while she had to nurture herself. Let’s hope she doesn’t have post-partum death-provoking complications as a despairing number of women in American do have.  What joy lies ahead!

If proud daddy isn’t in the scene or isn’t giving her money to live on, she will have to find ways to adjust because her government that doesn’t give a fuck about women having children sure won’t be helpful.  After all, it is because of her behavior that she has a baby now.  She certainly made her bed. The day she opened her legs she should have anticipated her destiny. The day she couldn’t prevent a man from impregnating her by using contraception or because she was forced into sex, she became her destiny.

People – patriarchal men and their complicit women -- so certain that not giving a woman a choice in whether she carries this seeded ovum to eventual personhood is right and good will point to her and her kid as drags on the system, taking, taking, taking. She may need food stamps, welfare, things for the baby, formula if no one taught her about breast-feeding. The man who thought it was all in fun to impregnate her? He’s fishing, or bar crawling, or busy impregnating other unsuspecting girls. He has no responsibility and is accountable to no one – no woman, no baby. 

I have quite the imagination, no?

How’s that working out, multiplied by thousands upon thousands year after year? In a land of uninsured people living paycheck to paycheck, women with multiple mouths to feed already, with a maternal mortality rate the same as in countries we wouldn’t even visit, with a failing social safety net that sees people in need as parasites, and no public childcare system that enables her to earn a living for the baby these men forced her to have because the fetus is so much more important than she and the resulting baby are?

Luckily, women on the whole won’t stand for it. They will find their sisters and they will be angry.  If there is anything men don’t like and don’t want, it’s angry women. A whole passel of angry women won’t be easy to shut down.  So, short-sighted, fearful, tough guys, bent on domination of women and a Christian world order will keep at it. They won’t win this. Women will cut them off from their bodies, and not be nice about it, like they often are now.

These mean-spirited men and complicit women will find that women will just not let this go.  We can’t.