I see your wide Alabama smile, your face all apple pie and good Christian values, your voice a rolling tide of Deep South charm and hospitality. Gosh darn it if you aren’t just the sweetest thang, Kay Ivey, using your pen and your position as Governor to preserve life and protect all of God’s innocent children. You’ve swooped in on a bald eagle, the stars and stripes fluttering from your javelin as you fly down from the heavens to pierce the dark heart of corruption that’s been pumping liberal poison into the veins of your state. It’s all in a day’s work, isn’t it? Serving Christ and the Creator, one nation under God, legislating in the name of religion to save those too feeble-minded to save themselves.
That’s what you tell yourself at least. It’d probably be totes awks to take a proper look in the mirror and see the seething fundamentalist hate-monger you truly are staring back at you. It doesn’t matter if it looks like a rosy-cheeked Mrs Doubtfire and serves up tastier darn grits n’ gravy than even your dear old momma ever made. You and your kind are the Taliban with a tithing plate, the foulest of hypocrites going, pushing the most vulnerable and desperate into unthinkable suffering. That you do it all in the name of a carpenter who wouldn’t have existed at all had Mary had enough Plan B to cover up the fact she boffed a Nazarene builder on the side would be hilarious if it weren’t so tragic.
It’s tricky to pick out just one face in the tide of growing evangelical anti-abortion sentiment in the US, such is the force of the shrieking torrent. Alabama is far from the only state now looking to roll back women’s reproductive rights. It’s just that your legislation is the most sweeping and restrictive, removing exceptions even for rape and incest and unviable pregnancies, actively endangering lives and punishing victims in its horrific push towards challenging Roe vs Wade. Every old white man voting it through is as culpable as you are, dusty old hypocrites signing away women’s rights whilst more than happy to push their mistresses in the direction of a chemist whenever their hips seize up and they fail to pull out. Nevertheless, there is something uniquely grotesque about a woman willing to go along with that tide of oppression, selling out her own gender and ignoring the reams of scientific evidence that undermine their misogynistic bullshit with a sweep of her pen.
Removing access to abortions doesn’t prevent them happening. At all. Countless studies prove it. The suffering inflicted by pro-life dogma nullifies completely any sanctimonious bullshit about the preservation of life, the fevered willingness to terrorise and condemn the most vulnerable about as un-Christian as shitting in the Pope’s hat at a Cradle of Filth concert. This legislation does nothing but punish women and children, endangering both quality of life and life itself. Even ‘heartbeat bills’ themselves are a grotesque attempt to rephrase the legal consensus, seeking to create a mental image of viable life when no such thing exists outside the womb at a stage when most women haven’t even realised they’re pregnant yet. They reduce women to incubators with no personal autonomy and that’s before we even consider the worst-case scenarios they could find themselves in.
That anyone could even consider forcing pregnancy on women and children raped and brutalised by men who would carry none of the burden is one of the sickest ideas imaginable, to the point that even desiccated evangelical testicle Pat Robertson himself thinks it goes too far. This hysterical bullshit, enabled and empowered by a shameful grab at the power balance of the Supreme Court, tilts America so far towards Gilead that the current vision of its moral future is truly terrifying. The difference is that at least Atwood could write a three-dimensional villain, rather than a series of cartoon vultures picking at the nation’s uterus.
As for you, Kay Ivey? A day after signing this bill, you signed another. It’s about time your supposedly Christian principles were truly tested.
I see you, Kay Ivey, whistling as you shut your office door behind you. I see you stop in the corridor, looking at your forearm as something shifts in the air. I feel the static prickling across your skin, lifting the tiny hairs, the air suddenly tasting of hot metal. I see the hot white suddenly flash around you, consuming you, tearing you away from reality and throwing you elsewhere.
I see the woman in the street, Kay Ivey, stumbling for no reason and falling against a wall, her chest heaving up and down as she struggles to breathe. It’s you, yet it isn’t you; something drastic has changed, something in reality shifted and placed elsewhere. You’re outside but the billboards, the clothes, the people… it’s all so different.
It’s 1977, Kay Ivey, and across the street a teenage girl cries as her mother tries to shield her with her jacket as she walks her past a crowd of snarling protestors and into a clinic. I see you look up and staring at you from the sidewalk I see the man in the red shirt and the colourful tie. I see him pressing buttons on the device in his hand.
Al and Ziggy are here to guide you through, Kay Ivey. To help you make the right decision on every leap. Today you’re a pregnant Alabama woman in 1977, standing outside a clinic, the life of Michael Brandon Samra growing inside you. He’ll kill four people in his lifetime and in 2019 you’ll sign the paper condemning him to death. This should be the easiest one, surely? A life you’ve already ended, this way saving four others. Unless you’re actually a shameful hypocrite.
Strap in, Kay Ivey. After this it only gets more complicated. After this there’s the ectopic pregnancies, the assault victims, the terrified twelve-year old girls. You think you know what’s best for each of them? Time to prove it, to live their individual horrors in the face of legislators and politicians so far removed from their struggles that they couldn’t possibly comprehend them.
I see you, Kay Ivey. I fucking see you.
