Ladies, Please Step Out In the Parking Lot to Die

Texas Chain-Saw Misogyny

Yesterday was a busy day for the vindictive elves channeling the oaf-in-chief’s retribution fantasies. They handed Dear Leader a pile of hateful new edicts to sign, including:

• Rescinding federal guidance requiring hospital emergency rooms in abortion ban states to treat women with life-threatening pregnancies or miscarrying and in need of emergency abortions.

• A gratuitous, nativist-pandering “We Don’t Want Them Here” Travel Ban on citizens from 12 countries, including Afghanistan – where thousands of men and women who worked for and with the Americans to fight against the Taliban for two decades are either imprisoned or living in hiding.

• An order to investigate Biden and his staff for allegedly doing exactly what MAGA elves do every single day: putting a piece of paper in front of the old guy while snapping a picture and giving him a cookie and milk after he scribbles on it.

• An order further weaponizing the State Department against Harvard and the international students who spent their young lives working harder than most adult MAGAs to get into the university.

The timing of this outburst of headline-grabbing hatefulness is no accident. It provides cover for extremely bad news that will, if Americans are paying attention at all, cost MAGA the midterms. This week, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office confirmed what numerous other independent economic analysts have found: Trump’s budget will increase the deficit by $2.4 trillion over the next decade, give the top one percent a $600 billion tax break, a gift paid for in part by throwing almost 11 million Americans off health insurance. It is said to be the largest transfer of wealth from poor to rich in U.S. history.

Your Freakshow Guide has previously spotlighted the two men most likely behind the flurry of diversionary executive activity yesterday: lifelong DC critter Russell Vought – Trump’s wan, transparent seaworm of an Office of Management and Budget chief – and Trump’s deputy White House chief of staff Stephen “Goebbels” Miller. If you wish, you can revisit our Freak of the Week profiles of these two conniving creeps here and here.

We could expend energy examining all the weird impulses – racism, projection, vengeance, and misogyny, just to name a few – behind each of yesterday’s assaults on American norms and human decency. But I’ll confine myself to the part of the program foremost on my mind lately: the Trump administration is really sticking it to women.

Since so many of the abuses emerged from the test kitchen of woman-hating that is the Lone Star State, I call this Texas Chain-Saw Misogyny. Texas is always trailblazing new territory in using state power to control women’s bodies. They’ve had on the books for years a sick, Stasi-like bounty law that grants $10,000 to any citizen who reports a woman who gets an abortion, anyone who provides or aids and abets in one, or provides medical abortion drugs. The state even allows men to sue their partners who receive an abortion, as well as any friends who help them do so in court.

Last week, 404 Media reported that a Texas cop used a national license plate tracking program called Flock to track the movements of a car carrying a Texas woman believed to be seeking an abortion in a LEGAL abortion state. The program relies on hundreds of thousands of cameras that record passing car plates on roads across the country. Remember that as of right now, it is entirely legal for a woman from a ban state to travel to a state where abortion is legal, get the procedure, and come home.

Back to the feds: Miscarriages without medication are common – according to the National Institutes of Health, there are 750,000 to one million miscarriages annually in the U.S.. Sometimes, these events require after-care, which can include a common procedure called a D&C to make sure all tissue is expelled in order to avoid infection. Under Dobbs, health care providers who perform them could be technically charged with a crime – even in some states, murder.

But with abortion bans, 90 percent of elective abortions in ban states are induced by a combination of two pills, which stop the pregnancy from growing and then induce a miscarriage. Women who choose this route miscarry at home, and in ban states, are advised to tell no one.

Ban states are now criminalizing miscarriage, or legally treating miscarriage materials as dead humans, requiring reporting and burial, and charging those who do neither with “abuse of a corpse.” Besides Texas, other states, including South Carolina, Georgia, Ohio, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Oklahoma, have been arresting and jailing women who miscarry.

After the Dobbs ruling (in which, Opus Dei-linked, trad-Cath Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s draft referenced a 17th-century witch-hunter for precedent), the Biden Administration had instructed hospitals that they had to continue treating bleeding and otherwise endangered pregnant women under the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, or EMTALA..

Yesterday’s Trump edict repealed the Biden administration guidance to hospitals on EMTALA. The meaning of the repeal is explicit: American women are on their own, and the government would rather they bleed out in a parking lot or face a lifetime without working reproductive organs than tell a health care worker to help them.

The assault on bodily autonomy has observable ripple effects on the social, cultural, and legal status of girls and women. Surveys find young men’s support for equal pay for women and girls has dropped significantly since 2018.

Last week, the New York Times published a story about changes at Trump’s FBI, giving just one sentence to this eye-popping fact: “A succession of top agents, all women, were given an ultimatum: Take a different post or be asked to retire.”

Not long ago, such an edict would have garnered a headline. Now: crickets.

In the era of Texas Chain-Saw Misogyny, we hear open discussion of electoral disenfranchisement of women, quotidian public humiliation, and threats of violence against women in power – both active and passive moves to reduce women from economic agency to isolated baby-making.

Why do they hate us so much? It’s all payback for women’s gains in education and economic agency, achieved in the last half century. White men still control everything from Silicon Valley to the financial industry to politics and government. But an aggrieved minority is batshit over seeing their entitlement ever so slightly diminished.

Last month, one of the giants of second-wave feminism, Susan Brownmiller, died. Her biographer, Claire Potter, shared this clip from The Dick Cavett Show in 1970 of Brownmiller standing up to Hugh Hefner. I recommend watching and sharing. No man on national television, not even a Fox anchor, would today talk to a woman with the level of condescension and scorn these women endured.

We owe it to them to remember and hold the line.