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Laws making abortion and contraception illegal are the right-wing's version of 'Jane Crow', designed to nullify women's rights and appease the Evangelical Party, which was incensed by the desegregation
of blacks but unable to do anything about it. Instead, they then directed their ire toward women's rights that ran contrary to their religious beliefs, seeing in them an easier target to control. Women won the right to be full-fledged citizens with the right to vote in 1920 with ratification of the 19th Amendment. 100 years later those rights, and all that followed, are being hollowed out by the religious right in an attempt to enforce conformity with the religious beliefs of the men ruling their churches. While the theocrats haven't been successful (yet) at legislatively overturning those rights at the federal level, their focus on nullifying women has steadily eroded them by refusing to accept their rights as full and equal citizens by allowing unequal pay and the protection from discrimination based on gender, delivered under the guise of 'religious freedom'. The right-wing refusal to accept the Equal Rights Amendment is a glaring example of their belief that women are only 2nd class citizens in a patriarchal society, and how they believe women should accept the role assigned to them by men and the religions they control. Keeping a woman 'barefoot and pregnant' was the standard call-to-arms by men in the 1960s and 70s, and nothing in their mindset has changed in the 50 years since women gained the right not to be kept pregnant, and thereby not financially barefoot either. In the theist's view, women are not equal to men, and it violates their religious beliefs by attempting to 'be' equal. The economic effect Roe had on the US GDP was inarguably massive. With women able to prevent or end unplanned pregnancies, their increased participation in the labor force became the main driver of record GDP growth and increased family disposable income for two generations, vastly increasing the size of the new two-paycheck middle class. Only the Industrial Revolution had such a major impact on the economic growth of America, and nullifying women will have an equally profound affect on its decline. Birth control and abortion are reproductive rights women won in their fight to wrest control of their own bodies from men. These rights were established by Roe v Wade in 1973, setting off a 50-year fight by churches to regain authority over women's lives, based on their religious beliefs. Now that right-wing men have forced the overturning of Roe, the onus of financially supporting a child will fall on the woman, because those same men refuse to provide the financial support their mandate requires. All states have laws requiring some level of child support, but none come close to the level needed for women themselves to survive without working while having to stay at home to care for a child. The reality is that, without affordable and adequate child care, women are forced into poverty because their ability to work has been taken from them by the men who get them pregnant. The mother of that child still needs somewhere to live, food to eat, ongoing medical care for herself and her child, and some form of transportation, but has no way of providing those for herself if she can't work due of a lack of affordable and available child care, unless they're provided by the government, which the right-wing vilifies as a 'socialist program' and refuses to fund. If abortion and contraception are illegal, the men who get a woman pregnant should be required to pay for all of the woman's living expenses, not some token child support payment that doesn't the cost of raising the child, but men would never allow a law like that, so the woman and child will most likely live in poverty. This is their basic blueprint for nullifying women. If a woman is kept in poverty, she won't have time or resources to vote or run for elected office, won't 'take men's jobs' away from them (a common 1960s refrain), and will once again be forced to submit to sex on demand (risking yet another pregnancy) in order to survive. Women are required to be subservient in their religions, and the theocrats will ensure it's enforced by our legal system too. In their theistic world, marital sex is a man's God-given right, explaining why the right-wing doesn't believe that marital rape is even possible, while extra-marital sex is excused with a wink as 'boys will be boys' and the women who get pregnant by them are penalized by an 18-year sentence of raising an unwanted child in poverty. Her inability to work reduces the GDP while costing the taxpayer for social services, a clear lose-lose situation. Even worse will be the return to having women refused employment on the basis that they might get pregnant and have to be replaced, a common event before Roe that subsequently ended because of Roe. Just to get hired, an employer could require a woman to prove she can't get pregnant by demanding her medical records or a letter from her doctor. The Supreme Court decision also directly attacks privacy as well, claiming that there's no 'textual' basis in the Constitution that confers a right to privacy, thereby allowing states to enact intrusive laws that impose religious restrictions on women's lives by claiming they have no right to privacy in their bedrooms or doctor's offices, laws that can even make certain sexual acts and positions illegal based on the religious beliefs of the people in office. So-called 'personhood' laws are extremely dangerous to privacy. By establishing that a fertilized egg is a person, the state creates an oversight ability that can only exist without privacy, such as a daily monitoring of women's sex lives to see if they got pregnant in the past 24 hours. If conception creates something controlled by law, the law assumes a legal right to intervene from the moment it occurs, begging the question 'how would they know?' if they aren't watching? This can lead to the creation of 'bedroom police' to monitor compliance, since a woman can outwardly hide a pregnancy for several months, so the state must monitor her body daily or the law is ineffective. A plethora of laws exist that already do that, such as speed limits and food safety, where constant monitoring by the government is the norm. Under that theory, the state can require that women take a daily pregnancy test and submit the results to the state. Since the GOP's formal position is that decisions about women's reproductive care is not between women and their doctors, but between women and the state, right-wing states will force religion-based 'medical' decisions on women, regardless of their mental/physical health or lack of consent to a forced birth. The entire issue of abortion and contraception is nothing more than a religious sham, designed to control women through fear and intimidation, the standard tools organized religions have successfully used for centuries. The right-wing zealots are fully on board with this tactic, and will never stop using their religion to nullify women's rights to control their own bodies, and to violate their rights to privacy in the most private of all matters possible, even by passing laws giving her neighbors, coworkers, and total strangers the right to act as vigilantes for monetary gain, such as Texas and other states controlled by religious extremists have already done. This also subjects women to 'witch-hunt' criminal prosecution for manslaughter for miscarriages - Oklahoma has already sentenced a woman to 4 years in prison for the crime of having a detached placenta. Medical research has shown that as many as 80% of all pregnancies spontaneously abort, or miscarry, but they blame the woman for her 'behavior', such as having a social drink, or lack of prenatal care affecting her pregnancy, before most women even know they're pregnant. In fact, research also shows that 25% of all pregnancies end in miscarriage in the first trimester, so a quarter of all women who become pregnant in those barbaric states will become felons every year, and subject to years in prison or even a death sentence, as South Caroline is trying to impose. There won't be any shortage of women to throw to the so-called 'Christians' in the arena. Women should never assume they're safe, or that such invasive, draconian laws won't be passed or enforced, regardless of their legality. Religious extremists will always ignore the law if it conflicts with the beliefs of their cult, and continue to prey on the weakest victims - women and children. Nullification not only makes all of this possible, but highly probable, in the theocratic society America is becoming.
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