Right now, Kentucky is a state without abortion access. I shouldn’t be shocked. But I am.
I shouldn’t be shocked.
Abortion access has been the number one target of Republicans in Kentucky for a long, long time, in the sights of not just people here in the state but long-reaching networks across the country that have been disciplined in message and action.
The General Assembly easily overrode Gov. Andy Beshear’s veto of House Bill 3. It has an emergency clause that takes effect immediately and so Kentucky is either the first or second state to effectively ban abortion, both with a 15-week ban and onerous new requirements aimed specifically at the last two clinics offering abortion care in the state. We might be tied with Oklahoma.
I shouldn’t be shocked, but I am. We are in a post-Roe world, a new Gilead of misogyny where women and their doctors cannot make decisions that affect them most. At this moment in Kentucky, a 12-year-old girl raped by her father could not end a pregnancy with the safe and effective drugs that are available. A woman living in poverty will have to figure out how to get somewhere people will help her.
Wait til they come for birth control. Or decide that removing an ectopic pregnancy is somehow an abortion. Yes, that sounds melodramatic, but it’s hard not to feel that’s where we’re headed. The Republican Party, which by the way, ardently embraces the death penalty despite its well-documented history of error, thinks it should control women and their bodies. Personal autonomy is only for men, apparently, who get to decide what we read and learn and how our healthcare should work. As Rep. Susan Westrom, D-Lexington noted on the House floor on Wednesday: “The vast majority of people sitting here today tell me, ‘Don’t you tell me I have to get an inoculation. Don’t you tell me I have to wear a mask.’ And yet you’re the very people who are telling women how to meet a health care crisis in their lives. I’m speechless and appalled.”
By the way, this session may have outlawed abortion, but hasn’t done much to improve the lot of living children. More will go hungry, thanks to the ending of SNAP benefits and shorter unemployment insurance. Abortion should be “safe, legal and rare” and could be if logic or justice were applied.
Maybe those two concepts can be applied in court, where the indefatigable defenders, the ACLU and other advocacy groups are headed to fight HB 3. (It’s also where a good many of the GOP’s priority bills will end up.) But until that time we live in a state where women are definitively second class citizens in a country where abortion is still allowed. For now.
Thursday looked equally depressing, with a secretive budget process that was adding items at the last minute to ongoing bills.
This 2022 session of the General Assembly has had a terrible process with many horrific results. Unless Oklahoma and Mississippi are your role models. If you care about any of this, there’s only ever been one answer: Get active and vote.
This story was originally published April 14, 2022 at 10:50 AM.
