I never thought I’d be grateful to the Alabama Supreme Court for anything, but now I am. With its decision deeming frozen embryos to be children under state law, that all-Republican court has done the impossible. It has awakened the American public, finally, to the peril of the theocratic future toward which the country has been hurtling.
Actually stopping that means both volunteering and, if you can afford it, donating
If they were still asleep after the death of Roe, why would this wake them up?
The problem is the public at large is like a kid trying to stick a penny in a light socket. You can tell them again and again and again and again that it’s going to hurt, but they’re not going to learn the lesson until they actually feel the shock.
Only after they experience the pain do they feel the urgency to do something. Only when “politics” stops being a feed they look at on social media and actually affects their lives in a direct and obvious way do they seek to do anything.
Because people see other peoples’ abortions as evil. People don’t view IVF or contraceptives or sex for fun in the same way, even if the anti-abortion movement does.
Recommended reading: https://joycearthur.com/abortion/the-only-moral-abortion-is-my-abortion/
It’s going to be this way until we figure out a better way to cultivate empathy at a huge scale. Between technological isolation, increasing scarcity, and the divide-and-conquer tactics of the power players in our society, we seem to be going the wrong direction fast. We’ll continue to collectively stick the penny in the light socket until we are able to appreciate the experiences of other people enough to learn something from them.