There is forever, to my mind, something creepily off-colour about male indignation over abortion. So, obviously, Donald Trump this weekend has underlined his hard stance against it. More accurately, Trump has this weekend firstly been inveigled into the greatest rabble-rousing photo opportunity of Nigel Farage’s life, before sitting down with the CBS’s 60 Minutes to underline that he’ll help overturn the 1973 Roe v Wade decision. This means some states could ban abortion. But where does this leave women seeking a termination, he was asked? “Well they’ll perhaps have to go…,” he said, “...have to go to another state.”
And off we go again, backwards into medieval mire. The deep irony of “abortion” is that if men as well as women were able to get pregnant, this tedious issue would have fizzled out circa-1100, possibly around the time of the establishment of universities. At this junction, the planet’s most erudite, power-hungry and world-altering menfolk would have quickly sussed the deep ridiculousness of one drunken back-alley bonk ruining one’s path to great work and personal fulfilment. The following thousand years of religious, scientific and philosophical debate would have been tapered towards the belief that ditching an early-stage cluster of cells is a virtuous and commonplace bodily function, probably for the greater good. Put more succinctly: if men got pregnant too they would not have put up with this endless sh*t.
Trump’s views on women over the past two decades are excruciatingly documented. He has no time for fat beauty queens, no time for uppity female news anchors, no time to check that a woman even wants his fingers in her crotch because he’s a big star. So it’s no huge surprise that he has no time for the quibbling of women in far-away states who are knocked up, stymied, desperate. How could he? How could he even imagine their plight. Trump was born into enormous wealth and has never waited more than, I’ll guess, a day for world-class medical treatment. His favoured clinic full of physicians clapping like seals at the thought of his credit card, I’ll guess again, will be on his personal assistant’s speed dial.
Trump has never experienced a long, spirit-zapping and bank-breaking clandestine public transport journey across Mississippi to the state’s one remaining clinic to secure life-changing treatment. He would prefer that clinic – now serving 1.5 million women – was closed and the woman travelled further. Trump will now inflame Christian religious zealots to act this out. Trump, it should be pointed out, is simultaneously furious at Islamic religious zealots and is sending buses soon to have everyone in a hijab deported.
“I’m pro-life,” says Trump, because they always do, these sort of men. As if I’m pro-death. As if I’m sat here dressed like the Grim Reaper, punching the air about some desperate woman with a faulty coil, no cash and four kids saying “enough.”
“Pro-life” is a neat, prissy phrase that amounts to nothing. I am not pro-life, but I am pro the lives of all the uneducated women living in rural America who decide to visit illegal unqualified abortionists, rather than face their Bible-bashing families or run the gauntlet of abuse outside the last fleeting clinics. I’m pro the lives of all the women threatened with deportation who got accidentally pregnant aged 15 and are now wiping other women’s children’s arses, while their own unplanned baby lives with an auntie in Leon, Guanajuato. I am fiercely pro all young girls who have just watched an election battle between the most qualified presidential candidate in history versus a pantomime reality TV character, only to be informed that the clever, accomplished woman was not as good as the man with no experience whatsoever of politics. Am I fiercely pro a cluster of cells attached to the female innards shortly after fertilisation? Well, I can’t get that het up.
And neither could most pro-life men, because this whole merry-go-round is never about God, or the sanctity of life, it is merely about controlling women. Keep them pregnant, keep them in the kitchen, keep them scared of being thought of as slutty, keeping them God-fearing and law-fearing.
Keep women on the back foot. It distracts them from realising they’re your equal.
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