In Alabama, the state which takes The Handmaid's Tale not as dystopian fiction, but as an instruction manual about the proper care and management of those pesky females, this happened:
Marshae Jones was five months pregnant when she was shot in the stomach. Her fetus did not survive the shooting, which the authorities say happened during a dispute with another woman.
But on Wednesday, it was Ms. Jones who was charged in the death.Ms. Jones, 28, was charged with manslaughter and booked into jail on a $50,000 bond, according to the authorities in Jefferson County, Ala. The police have said she was culpable because she started the fight that led to the shooting and failed to remove herself from harm’s way.
My dear readers, welcome to a taste of the wonderful world where egg-Americans have full human rights and therefore their carriers do not*.“The only true victim in this was the unborn baby,” Lt. Danny Reid of the Pleasant Grove Police Department, said after the shooting in December, AL.com reported. “It was the mother of the child who initiated and continued the fight which resulted in the death of her own unborn baby.”
To see how that will work in the glorious future, should the forced-birthers get their way, consider this manly opinion by Lt. Reid:
“When a five-month pregnant woman initiates a fight and attacks another person, I believe some responsibility lies with her as to any injury to her unborn child,” Lt. Reid said then. “That child is dependent on its mother to try to keep it from harm, and she shouldn’t seek out unnecessary physical altercations.”
She probably shouldn't drink alcohol, either, or smoke tobacco. She probably shouldn't go scuba diving or mountain climbing, she shouldn't travel to dangerous places, and she probably shouldn't be allowed to be in the military or the police or the fire brigade. What if she goes out alone, at night, in a potentially dangerous area? What if she eats too much tuna? Fails to take folic acid?
Duh, some of you might say. It's only for nine months per child. Isn't a healthy child worth a few restrictions on your life?
And most women do make those restrictive choices on their own. But this is not about their decisions. It's about the society decreeing that they cannot have the same rights as other adults do. In other words, human rights for egg-Americans will remove at least some rights from adult women that adult men get to keep.
It could get even worse:
Because any fertile woman is potentially pre-pregnant, and because pregnancy is invisible to outsiders in the early stages, this way of thinking can easily slide into the policing of all women between the ages of, say, ten and fifty, including keeping them away from dangerous occupations and hobbies and scrutinizing every miscarriage for possible evidence of a homicide.
That's the dystopia we might one day live in if the forced-birthers have their way. I don't think it will become reality, because most people don't want to see that world realized. But the doctrine of full personhood of egg-Americans will unavoidably lead us there.
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* Quite a few women, often women of color, are already familiar with that world.