The Misogyny Election

Women are dying from abortion bans while conservatives are angry about their wives voting for Kamala.

Photo by Aiden Frazier on Unsplash

Josseli Barnica is dead because Texas criminalized abortion. Texas was able to criminalize abortion because the Supreme Court refused to overturn Texas’s abortion ban, and later the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and allowed the states to set their own abortion laws. The Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade because Donald Trump won the 2016 election and appointed right-wing judges hand-picked by his anti-abortion advisors, who everyone knew would overturn Roe v. Wade if given the chance.

Now, Josseli Barnica, the 28-year-old mother of a toddler, is dead because she had the bad luck to have a miscarriage in Texas. Instead of treating her — the standard of care for a late miscarriage (Josseli was 17 weeks pregnant) is to offer a termination of the pregnancy — doctors told her they couldn’t do anything as long as her fetus still had a heartbeat. And so Josseli’s cervix was open “as wide as a basketball,” leaving her open to infection. She waited and waited. She waited for 40 hours. An infection predictably came. And it killed her.

The “pro-life” movement killed Josseli Barnica. An abortion ban killed Josseli Barnica.

She’s not the only woman who has lost her life because of an abortion ban, and she will probably not be the last.

Women (and good men) the nation over are outraged at these bans. But still, Republicans claim that these bans are “pro-life,” when they talk about them at all. Texas politicians claim that reporting on dead and injured women is fear-mongering. Conservatives generally claim that these bans aren’t about controlling women or curtailing our access to healthcare, but that they’re about preserving life.

But they’re also telling on themselves.

There is, first, the total silence about the women who have been killed and injured by these bans.

There is also the conservative rage and panic over the prospect of their wives voting for Kamala Harris and simply not telling them. Harris supporters have launched a strategy of telling women that their votes are private, and no one has to know who you cast your ballot for — including your Trump-supporting husband. Fox News’s Jesse Waters griped that a woman voting for Harris and not telling her husband is “the same thing as having an affair... that violates the sanctity of our marriage.” That, he said, “would be D Day.” (Waters, it’s worth noting, divorced after he had an affair and is now married to his former affair partner).