Well, then. Shit just got very real, didn’t it?
As in—wow, this is really real. And it’s really shit. But dealing with reality is what we do… along with changing it. And right now, it needs changing as bad as ever.
This week, LPJL’s Vagical Mystery Tour touches down in boot-stompin’ Nashville, Tennessee on Thursday, 6/28. Before the show, we wanted to tell you all about the State of Reproductive Rights in the State of Tennessee, and we’re gonna do that right now, goddammit! Because the situation in Tennessee might be an indication of where the whole country will soon be if we don’t crank up the resistance meter a few notches.
Tennessee is instructive because it has the whole shitty smorg-ass-board of laws, rules, regulations, and general mind-fuckery that the fetal fun bunch like to use to maintain control. Oh, and one very prescient booby trap that will get sprung if and when Roe v. Wade is overturned.
That little nugget of nasty is Tennessee’s Amendment 1, which stripped the right to an abortion right out of Tennessee’s state constitution by dictating “Nothing in this Constitution secures or protects a right to an abortion.” That reduces the chances that restrictive laws can be challenged under state law. But more to the evil heart of the matter, it means that if Roe v Wade is successfully shredded by some as-yet-unknown new ogre on the Supreme Court, Tennessee is poised to make abortion a felony for providers and/or patients any time the politicians decide they want to.
Gee, you ask, is voting important? Here’s your answer—Amendment 1 passed with only 53% of the vote (and with enough sleazy voting methodology that it was hung up in the courts for over three years.) So by all means, VOTE!
But while they bide their time before any Roe v Wade reversal of fortune, anti-choice Tennessee pols are busy messing with the unfortunate people of Tennessee with the usual list of repro rights torture techniques: over-the-top TRAP laws, mandatory and wildly fictional anti-abortion lectures, a 48-hour waiting period that means patients have to make two trips, and an ultrasound bill that’s a pared down version of a “heartbeat” bill that will undoubtedly be back again under Amendment 1. In Tennessee 96 percent of the counties do not have a clinic that provides abortion care.
Oh, and they went out of their way to address the drug problem—by criminalizing new mothers who use drugs while pregnant. Thanks for having your baby—you are under arrest!
This week was a get-woke call for us all. The good people of Tennessee have been woke to all of this for some time. LPJL is here to help them resist and to enlist them in the fight that we all have coming. Somebody set the alarm!
