I don’t know how to write about all the things that have not happened in the year since Roe v. Wade was overturned. (That isn’t quite right; that makes it sound like a thing that happened, instead of a choice that people made, high-handedly, breezily, cruelly. It makes it sound like a natural event, an act of God. But the arc of the moral universe, bent ever so slowly toward justice, did not simply snap back. It was yanked.)
I don’t know how to write about the things that haven’t happened. It is heartbreaking enough to know the things that have happened. The woman forced to give birth to a baby whose short life was spent with eyes shut, gasping for air. The woman forced to wait until she entered life-threatening sepsis before getting proper care. The 10-year-old rape victim whose state would have forced her to give birth. These stories are maddeningly cruel. They have made me want to chew glass. They have made me want to scream until my throat was raw and my voice was utterly gone.
You know how ... in a nightmare, when you are screaming, and it doesn’t make a sound? That sensation, but all the time. Whenever cruel new laws are passed. Whenever rusty antique laws snap into place. Time after time, touching millions of lives. Every day, someone’s life is ruined.
Around the country, every day, people are living the nightmare experience of having their lives, their autonomy, taken from them, and then being forced to live those altered lives. Robbed of the most basic control over their bodies, the most basic ability to make decisions for themselves. Robbed of their lives by being robbed of their choices. Now, you can be forced to live out the consequences of someone else’s choices for you, someone who will never meet you or understand what you are sacrificing. Someone for whom this is all theoretical.