In the midst of the Vice Presidential debate, Mike Pence dropped a brief statement that I considered to be extremely creepy:
PENCE: ... bring the -- let's welcome the children into our world. There are so many families around the country who can't have children. We could improve adoption...
KAINE: But, Governor...
PENCE: ... so that families that can't have children can adopt more readily those children from crisis pregnancies.
Put in stark terms, Mike Pence wants women with unwanted pregnancies to serve as broodmares for childless couples. Forget any agency, jezebels, you're just here to serve as wombs for the righteous. Also, if these children should have congenital medical conditions, you're on your own, Pence's favored couples don't want a baby that looks like that.
This particular stance on forced birth to provide children for childless couples (this being Pence's stance, LGBTQ couples need not apply) is straight out of Margaret Atwood's 1985 novel The Handmaid's Tale. Just like conservatives tend to view Orwell's 1984 as a how-to manual instead of a cautionary tale (they even adopted Newspeak, so to speak), the fundamentalist evangelicals see The Handmaid's Tale as a blueprint for their ideal society. While Donald Trump is running on the 'Make Donald Trump Great Again' platform, Mike Pence's secret platform is even more troublesome... 'Make Gilead Great Again'.
You are right. He seems to also be commodifying the children of persons without necessarily implying they receive any recompense or accommodations for their actual labor. He isn't concerned with whether they have medical care or are safe in their employment (after all--wouldn't the religious freedom he promotes mean that an employer could look at an unmarried pregnant individual as a vessel of sin?) He just wants to promote that forced-birth life, where pregnant people make those babies to become the prizes of adoption-seeking (and obviously straight) couples, regardless of how this impacts them, their feelings, or whether they are having a healthy baby at all. His predecessor ruined the Indiana safety net so badly that call centers were telling folks to abandon their disabled kinfolk. How would the congenitally disabled fare in his bravely ignorant Christianist New World? Slaves to fate, wards of state?
ReplyDeleteHe lied about whether Trump ever said pregnant people should be punished for seeking abortion--but the story of Purvi Patel is a story about how much he lied. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purvi_Patel Pence is as big a monster as Trump, only mild in tone and flavor. But he is definitely a monster.
One more month. One more month. One more month.
ReplyDeleteHe seems to also be commodifying the children of persons without necessarily implying they receive any recompense or accommodations for their actual labor. He isn't concerned with whether they have medical care or are safe in their employment (after all--wouldn't the religious freedom he promotes mean that an employer could look at an unmarried pregnant individual as a vessel of sin?) He just wants to promote that forced-birth life, where pregnant people make those babies to become the prizes of adoption-seeking (and obviously straight) couples, regardless of how this impacts them, their feelings, or whether they are having a healthy baby at all.
ReplyDeleteYep, babies as commodities, women as unpaid service providers.
One more month. One more month. One more month.
Yeah, I can't wait for mid-November, for a bunch of reasons.
My first thought was "Gilead? The biotech drug company?"
ReplyDeleteBut of course, it's Pence.
~