The End Is Near

Oh, these times we live in!  War in Ukraine, climate change, a lingering pandemic, a rapid erosion of democratic norms in the U.S. and abroad, and an out-of-control gun obsession in the United States manifesting as school shootings, church massacres, and daily murders.  

And now, an out-of-touch Supreme Court, which includes justices seated as long ago as 1991, has overturned Roe v. Wade, ending nearly 50 years of woman's reproductive rights. For the first time in my life, the court is literally taking away our freedoms and liberty, and the grand trajectory of events is moving towards authoritarianism instead of a more libertarian state.

You can argue all you want about what point a fetus becomes a "person" (however you define that) or about the rights of an unborn child versus the rights of the mother.  But look at it another way: if an infant needed a bone marrow transport, and that infant had a very rare blood type and you were the only person who could donate the marrow that baby needed, the government can't - and won't - insist that you must donate the marrow.  It's the donor's choice, and it doesn't matter if the reason for the donor's refusal is existential ("I'll die from the procedure, and I don't want to die") or trivial ("Nah, sounds like a hassle. Who's got time for that?"), the government shouldn't force you to donate, just like it can't force you to donate organs.  Hell, even if you're dead and not using the organs anymore, your organs can't be harvested if you haven't signed an organ-donor card.

A woman should have the same choice as to whether or not her uterus should be used to incubate a fetus.  Most women choose to do so most of the times, but if she doesn't want to, either for reasons good ("Doctors say I'll die in childbirth, and I don't want to die") or poor ("Nah, sounds like a hassle. Who's got time for that?"), it should be no one's choice but hers.  That's what the courts decided in 1973, and that's been the law of the land for the better part of a generation.  Until today.

Now, women have been reduced to mere brood-mares, handmaidens forced to surrender that bodies, interrupt their lives and careers, and bear the financial burdens of childbirth and most likely child rearing, just because their bodies have the baby-incubating parts.  Possession of a viable uterus negates your right to choose your own destiny.

Justice Clarence Thomas, the judge appointed by George H.W. Bush back in 1991 and the author of yesterday's ruling that the states can't restrict people from carrying firearms in public, said that access to contraception and same-sex marriage will be overturned next.  

I'm not sure this is a world I want to live in, but given everything else going, from climate change to diseases to a looming third World War or a possible new Civil War, I'm not sure living much longer in this world will be an option available to most of us.

Meanwhile, a large area of disorganized showers and thunderstorms over the eastern Atlantic appears conducive for development of a tropical depression by the early to middle part of next week.  The system is moving westward at 15 to 20 mph toward the Windward Islands.