The Wahkiakum County Eagle - Established as The Skamokawa Eagle in 1891

To The Eagle:

As the Taliban’s fanatical woman hating religious zealots conquered Kabul, America’s own political terrorists, Republican misogynists, captured the Texas legislature and passed the most draconian anti-woman law in this country, known as the “heartbeat bill.”

That new law has as much to do with saving babies as rape has to do with sexual gratification. Both are actually all about overpowering, humiliating, and punishing women.

The so called “heartbeat bill” criminalizes abortion after six weeks gestation, when a woman doesn’t even know she’s pregnant, and gives short shrift to inconvenient facts--something the Republican leadership does instinctively, frequently, and unconscionably in this era of Their Big Lie, which is what this oppressive law is.

At six weeks gestation there is no fetus. There is a microscopic aggregation of cells called an embryo. No heart exists yet, thus there can be no pulse. Those cells have more in common with a small undetectable tumor than a potential human. Their existence is tenuous and might yet be rejected, and ejected by the host body, as often happens. It is certainly not a baby by any definition, except as anti-abortionist’s emotionally fraught propaganda.

Recognizing the shady nature of their new law, Texas legislators have placed the responsibility of enforcing this absurd legislation not in the hands of state law enforcement agencies, but into the hands of anti-abortion, anti-women’s rights vigilantes. What can possibly go wrong with that?!

Texas has essentially declared open season on women’s reproductive rights by inviting anyone, from anywhere, to become a bounty hunting vigilante who will be rewarded by that state for persecuting and reporting, through a dedicated website, any woman in Texas suspected of seeking abortion services.

Such insidious “right to life” crusaders are more likely to bypass tedious legalisms and revert to mob justice, as Texans did during their Jim Crow heydays.

Welcome to a grim new era of Jane Crow, where women will likely be left hanging like strange fruit from the trees of Texas as a warning to their sisters who might think they, too, should have a right to life and its difficult choices.

JB Bouchard

Puget Island