Period

Period

No, it’s not the one that comes at the end of a sentence. It’s the one that comes about every 28 days to women of particular ages. In a post Roe v. Wade world, there is increasing fascination about menstruating people.

This has nothing to do with the health of those menstruating people.

Rather, it is about controlling their bodies. It is about limiting access to abortion and birth control. It is about usurping agency from their own being. A total of 41 states restrict access to abortion in some way. Some states, like Alabama and Arkansas, make no exception for rape or incest. Other states allow abortion under specific circumstances such as fetal viability, gestational duration, or threat of harm/death to the pregnant person. Even in states where there are exceptions for rape or incest, they are essentially meaningless. In order to qualify under the law, the sexual assault must be reported within forty days. Incest must be reported to law enforcement within one hundred and forty days. According to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, 63% of rapes are not reported. Only about 12% of child sexual abuse is reported to law enforcement. With such a dismal reporting rate, and the stipulations imposed, the rape/incest exception is useless. Further, even if the criteria for pregnancy termination are met, there is often no one to perform the procedure. This means travelling to another state, which is not an option for many poor pregnant people, who are disproportionately BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color).

In other states, abortion care must happen before six weeks of gestation. Most pregnant people do not even know they are pregnant at that time. It is another “allowance” that is essentially meaningless.

According to http://www.ReproductiveRights.org, Project 2025 outlines a detailed plan to limit access to abortion care and other reproductive services. This includes but is not limited to:

• Ending access to medications like Mifepristone, which accounts for 63% of all abortions.
• Allowing hospitals to deny medical care to pregnant persons in crisis.
• Prosecuting people for shipping or transporting abortion pills and supplies across state lines.
• Establishing an abortion surveillance system requiring states to report personal data of all patients receiving abortion care.
• Restricting access to birth control, emergency contraception and other reproductive health services.
• Tracking pregnant persons who are “at risk of having an abortion” (Missouri).
• Paying a bounty of $10,000 to individuals who report a person seeking abortion care by crossing state lines (Texas).
• Tracking pregnant persons through their internet search histories and social media. (Platforms track data using algorithms and selling the data. Setting up a Virtual Private Network (VPN) and using encryption can limit access to search history, but it isn’t foolproof. A public computer is a better choice.)
  
  

These tactics are front line ammunition to control menstruating people who may unintentionally get pregnant. They also feed the larger goal of keeping those who give birth subservient to and dependent on men (though there are few consequences for men who do not support the children they create). 

While access to reproductive health services is being severely limited, social safety net programs are being slashed: WIC, SNAP and Early Intervention to name a few. As a result, persons with children, particularly BIPOC people are trapped in a cycle of poverty that is almost impossible to escape.

Sr. Joan Chittister writes, “I do not believe that just because you’re opposed to abortion, that makes you pro-life. In fact, I think in many cases, your morality is deeply lacking if all you want is a child born but not a child fed, not a child educated, not a child housed. And why would I think that you don’t?” Because you don’t’ want any tax money to go there. That’s not pro-life. That’s pro-birth.”

For many conservative evangelicals and white Christian nationalists, all their anti-abortion rhetoric is wrapped in a neat little package, branded with a Jesus sticker and called Christian. In truth, Jesus was unwaveringly concerned about and committed to the poorest and most vulnerable members of society. What was true then is still true…the most vulnerable among us are women and children.

You would think the government has better things to do than peer in the windows of women’s bathrooms and see who is peeing on a stick. But it is all part of the re-entrenchment of a patriarchal society where white, cisgender, heterosexual men are in charge. Whatever progress we have made in dismantling the patriarchy is on the line in Project 2025. And it all begins by trolling your social media.