New Oklahoma abortion law will publish patient information.
As of November 1, doctors in Oklahoma will be compelled to post the details of every abortion they perform online. Part of this information contains the patient’s age, marital status, and race; her financial condition; her education; and the total number of her previous pregnancies.
Two Oklahoma women are challenging the law in court. Go sisters!
Even putting aside the absolute outrageousness of forcing a doctor to publish this patient information at all, the amount of information being published about the patient could be used to identify her in a small community.
So, will the good Christians of Oklahoma start engaging in “honor killings”? We’ve already seen abortion providers being shot–it only takes a small rationalization to start calling the women getting abortions “murderers”.
You know this isn’t really about publishing the information so people can have the information, although that’s pretty bad right there. The idea is to make it so hard and so dangerous to get an abortion in Oklahoma that no one will do it. They’ll make it to where it’s “legal” but almost unobtainable.
Oklahoma is a hard place to be female. Oklahoma actually has a law on the books that says that a “man is the head of the household”. They tried to repeal the law in the ’80s–and they couldn’t repeal it because the Christians wanted it kept there, and they had the votes.
I grew up in Oklahoma. It’s a scary place to be different from the norm. And religion is firmly entrenched there. There’s different denominations of Christianity but most people profess to be a Christian of one kind or another. Baptists predominate but there’s plenty of Pentecostals and Churches of Christ and various other forms of Protestants–not so many Catholics but they’re there.
People in Oklahoma are pretty friendly until or unless they find out you’re different from them in some way. Then you’re going to hell. When they’re not telling the unbelievers that they’re going to hell, the different churches tell each other that they’re going to hell.
I guess you have to be there to know what it’s like to grow up there. Imagine that nearly every single person you come across at church or school or in your neighborhood all believe the same basic myth. God created the world and there’s a heaven and a hell, etc. To profess to think something else is to invite ridicule and argument and perhaps even ostracism.
Some churches are worse. You can tell the women in the Pentecostal churches ‘cuz they weren’t allowed to cut their hair or wear makeup or pants. Ever.
I knew this girl whose parents were Pentecostals and when she tried to date a Catholic boy, they sent her away to Alabama to live under virtual house arrest with another Pentecostal family. As if she had stolen a car or something.
I was also taught in church that black people weren’t supposed to marry white people. No Bible reference, they just insisted it was a sin.
You can get life for a pot plant there. Think about that. Life. For one plant. Life.
Not everyone is into that religion stuff, I guess, but when I wasn’t hanging around religious people, everyone I met was constantly griping about how bad they wanted to get out of Oklahoma.
If the Christian dominionists ever take over a significant section of the United States, I would bet it would be in Oklahoma. I’m sure they’d love it if they could pass enough horrible laws to drive out every freethinking non-Christian from the state.
Hopefully they won’t but I sure as heck wouldn’t live there again as long as they have so much influence. Just like I wouldn’t want to live in Iran, or Saudi Arabia, or Afghanistan, or anywhere else that religion has too much influence.
The plight of women in Afghanistan and the plight of women in Oklahoma are similar–the one thing that keeps the women of Oklahoma from being treated as badly as the women of Afghanistan is the fact that Oklahoma is in the United States, and we still have freedom of religion here. The preachers in America have power but they don’t yet have official power. For now.
I think these draconian anti-abortion laws demonstrate that if our government really was run according to “Christian values” or the “laws of God” or whatever the euphemism is, we would have a lot more laws, not less, and the government would be much more involved in our private lives.
(On a side note, maybe we should let them have Oklahoma. It’s hot as hell in the summer, prone to tornadoes and the occasional huge winter storm, and mostly pretty flat and featureless. And the Ogalala aquifer is running out of water, but since a lot of them don’t believe in global warming anyway, they won’t realize that they’re sitting on a doomed area until it’s too late.)
I wish we could run something like an underground railroad, in both Oklahoma and Afghanistan, and help all the women who want to leave to get out. Just drain those places of their women. Picture some Taliban/Christian jerk coming home from a long day of oppression in the name of bullshit to discover an empty house.
Eh, you no like your women no more? You want to treat ’em all bad? We fix it, we take ’em away for ya…
The one big problem with that idea is that we’d have to take those women somewhere else–presumably in a rational state in America. But we don’t support women in those states either; support for women in our “reformed” welfare system is a lot like Oklahoma’s abortion laws–legal but nearly unobtainable.
Offstage Murmuring 