Even before this month’s Supreme Court attack on women’s bodily autonomy, doctors in conservative states were refusing or delaying care for women having miscarriages, and with the legality of basic medical care in question, things are about to get a lot worse. Several Kansas City hospitals have already stopped providing emergency contraception for fear of lawsuits. If the history of other places that have banned abortion is any indication, we’re about to see teen suicides rise even beyond their current elevated levels.
Republicans will almost certainly push for a nationwide ban next, which makes you wonder how much more polarized things can get. Ron Brownstein, writing in the Atlantic, sees two historical parallels. The more recent is Jim Crow, when the states of the old confederacy took a “defensive” approach to their anti-rights agenda, enforcing segregation in-state but not trying to codify it nationwide. The other is the “offensive” runup to the Civil War, when the states of what would become the confederacy tried to spread slavery nationwide. Brownstein is careful to note he isn’t saying we’re doomed to an actual all-out war, but offense seems inevitable. As state-level voting rights violations, a hard-right Supreme Court, and the regressive nature of the US Senate itself lead an extremist minority to national power, we’re going to see a good deal of offense and escalation.
We’re already seeing stochastic terrorism. With Iowa and other states making it legal to run over a protestor with your car, for example, it was pretty much inevitable that we’d see some dude driving his F-150 Raptor into a Cedar Rapids pro-choice protest. Nobody died this time, fortunately, but the driver did not face any immediate consequences, which doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the next time.
And there will be a next time.
Clipping Service
Bill McKibben in The New Yorker on yet another in the apparently interminable series of monstrous decisions:
But, of course, the Court has also insured that “getting a clear statement from Congress” to address our deepest problems is essentially impossible. The decision in Citizens United v. F.E.C., in 2010, empowered corporations to game our political system at will. That explains, in part, why Congress has not passed a real climate bill in decades. The efforts that Democratic Administrations have made to try and control greenhouse gasses have mostly used provisions of the Clean Air Act because it is the last serious law of its kind that ever came to a President’s desk (Nixon’s, in this case).
The Imperfectionist on how to give yourself a break about a challenge that seems difficult but is in fact impossible:
Here’s a surprisingly useful question to ask yourself next time you’re stumped by a problem, daunted by a challenge, or stuck in a creative rut: “What if this situation is even worse than I thought?”
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Imposter syndrome? Worse than you think – because you think the issue is that you don’t yet have the qualifications to hold your own among your colleagues, when in fact the truth is that everyone is winging it, all the time, and that if you’re ever going to make your unique contribution to the world, you’re going to have to do it in a state of unreadiness.
Ali Griswold on abortion care as a corporate perk (and the hypocrisy of companies offering it):
It should go without saying that turning access to basic life-saving women’s health care into a corporate perk to attract and retain talent is the sort of perverse and dystopian outcome you’d only encounter in a country like the U.S. In addition to making people more dependent on their employers, it’s also a band-aid available to a tiny percentage of the working population and a potential privacy nightmare.
Michelle Wilde Anderson at Lithub on the the downward spiral of insolvent cities:
In public services, as in so much of life, you get what you pay for, which drives the gaping inequality among cities. Decades into a process of fiscal decline, a local government will have no more loans to take, taxes to raise, services to privatize, or assets worth selling. As the city reduces or eliminates staff, local government seems less competent and more irritating. Infrastructure and public space decays. “It’s death by a thousand cuts,” says Reverend Joan Ross of Detroit, referring to the city’s collapse in services. “It takes you a long time to bleed to death. But you do.”
Secretly Ironic 