and we know this happens regularly

Every hour, almost 4 women are raped in India. Every day, almost 90. Every year, over 31,500 women are raped, according to NCRB.

In 96.6% of rape cases, the rapist is known to the victim.

Our outrage must not stop this time.

“Indian staff from the Indian Space Research Organisation celebrate after the Mars Orbiter Spacecraft entered Mars’s orbit.

On November 5, 2013, a rocket launched toward Mars. It was India’s first interplanetary mission, Mangalyaan, and a terrific gamble. Only 40 percent of missions sent to Mars by major space organizations—NASA, Russia’s, Japan’s, or China’s—had ever been a success. No space organization had succeeded on its first attempt. What’s more, India’s space organization, ISRO, had very little funding: while NASA’s Mars probe, Maven, cost $651 million, the budget for this mission was $74 million. 

This was not the only success of the mission. An image of the scientists celebrating in the mission control room went viral. Girls in India and beyond gained new heroes: the kind that wear sarees and tie flowers in their hair, and send rockets into space.”

My name is Jessica Valenti and since Roe was overturned, I’ve been documenting the harms caused by abortion bans in a newsletter called Abortion, Every Day. I cover everything from legislation and court battles, to anti-abortion strategy and language, but the topic that I find myself writing about most, I’m sorry to say, is suffering. 

And while Americans know about some of the suffering caused by abortion bans, thanks to the bravery of women like Doctor Dennard, there are hundred of other stories that go unreported. I have spoken to a 21-year old woman in Texas who was denied an abortion even though her fetus developed without a head, and a hospital worker in South Carolina who watched a college student die after attempting to end her own pregnancy. I get more messages every day than I could ever possibly answer. And while I could share stories that would shock and sicken you in the way that I am shocked and sickened every single day doing this work, I wanted to use my time here to stress that this incredible suffering, this cruelty that treats American women as less than human, is all by design. 

Despite Republican assurances that cases like Doctor Dennard’s are the result of legislative growing pains, or doctors simply not understanding the law, despite claims that their bans just need to be tweaked or clarified. I want to make clear that all of this pain and suffering was not just expected. It was planned for. Anti-abortion lawmakers and activists would have voters believe that they had no idea that this is what post-America, post-Roe America would look like, but they had 50 years to plan for this moment, and they made that plan carefully, strategically, and callously. 

Every raped child forced to give birth, ever cancer patient denied care and every woman arrested after having a miscarriage was accounted for and strategized over. But with Americans getting angrier and angrier at what abortion bans are doing to their families and communities, Republicans are desperate to hide that truth from voters. They need us to believe that they’re not the cruel extremists that their laws show them to be. And they certainly don’t want us to know that they planned for women’s deaths in the same way they strategize over a talking point or a poll. And I mean that literally. 

For months I have been tracking a conservative campaign to sow distrust in maternal mortality numbers. Republicans know that the data is going to show that their laws kill women, so they’re preemptively claiming that maternal death numbers aren’t accurate. Some states have even disbanded their maternal death review committees entirely, and because the people most likely to die are the most marginalized among us, their hope is that no one will care. 

I’ve also documented how the anti-abortion movement laid the groundwork over months to blame doctors for women’s deaths, as if the people working under threat of losing their license or jail time are the problem, and not the laws that prevent them from doing their jobs. All of which is to say, when Republicans feign surprise or compassion over post-Roe horror stories, they are lying. They knew that women would suffer and die as a result of their laws. They decided it was a trade off worth making, and everything they’ve done since Roe was overturned has been in service of hiding that fact. 

Most of those lies are hiding in plain sight. When Republicans tell Americans that the national fifteen week ban they’re proposing is a reasonable middle ground, they leave out the fact that the law would force women to carry non-viable pregnancies to term. Their compromise would do to any American capable of pregnancy, what Texas tried to do to Kate Cox and again, this is not an oversight, it is a deliberate part of a much broader extremist strategy. 

Right now, there is a quiet but well-funded campaign led by the most powerful anti-abortion groups in the country, that is focused entirely on pressuring and forcing women to carry doomed pregnancies to term. They’re not only trying to do away with exceptions for non-viable pregnancies, they’re trying to eradicate prenatal testing altogether. It’s a lot easier to force women to carry a dying fetus to term if they never get diagnosed to begin with. 

When I tell people about this, the question I get asked out often is “why?” Why would anyone want to deliberately create a world where women are forced to be walking coffins? It is inexplicable until you understand that this has nothing to do with families or babies but enforcing a worldview that says it’s women’s job to be pregnant, and to stay pregnant to matter what the cost or consequence. But because Republicans don’t have the bravery to admit that truth, and because they’re afraid of voters who are more pro-choice than ever, they lie. They talk about compassion because they know that their laws are cruel, they use the word consensus while passing bans that voters don’t want, and they call Democrats extremists while fighting for the right to deny women life-saving abortions in emergency rooms. 

And because Republicans know that votes overwhelmingly oppose their bans, they claim to be softening on abortion by pushing one of the biggest lies in abortion politics, exceptions. Again and again, Republicans propose and pass exceptions that no one will ever qualify for. The only purpose they serve is to allow extremist lawmakers to feign moderation, or pretend as if they’ve conceded something. 

And frankly, any Republican who claims that exceptions are real should have to do so in front of all the people who’ve been told that they do not qualify for care even as they went septic or had their uteruses removed. They should have to defend themselves in front of women like Kate Cox and Doctor Dennard, or Brittany Watts, who wasn’t just denied care by by religious hospital when her water broke too early for her pregnancy to survive, but was arrested when she miscarried at home. 

The only Republican exception that holds an iota of truth is the one about women’s lives, though not in the way that they think. When you look at any Republican “life of the mother” exception, they all contain a caveat. And that caveat says that when women’s whose lives are at risk can be given abortions, unless the risk is because she’s suicidal, and I want to stress how telling that is. Republicans know that forcing people to be pregnant against their will, will make them want to kill themselves, and they enshrined, into law, that they don’t care. In a moment when we are hearing so many extreme horror stories it can be difficult I think to get back to that foundational cruelty. That to force someone to be pregnant against their will, for any reason, at any point, causes profound existential harm. Abortion is health care, but it is also freedom. That’s why every abortion denied is a tragedy, and increasingly Americans understand that. They don’t want the government involved in their decisions about pregnancy at any point. 

But five days before Nicole Simpson was murdered, she knew, for sure, she would die. How? Why? Something had happened: a confrontation, a threatening phone call, an unwanted visit, an aggressive act from Simpson directed at her. She told no one, because, after seventeen years of torment, she knew there was no one to tell. The police virtually everywhere ignore assault against women by their male intimates, so that any husband can be a brutal cop with tacit state protection; in Los Angeles, the police visited Nicole Simpson’s abuser at home as fans.

Remember the video showing Simpson, after the ballet recital, with the Brown family—introduced by the defense to show Simpson’s pleasant demeanor. Hours later, Nicole Simpson was dead. In the video, she is as far from Simpson, physically, as she can manage. He does not nod or gesture to her. He kisses her mother, embraces and kisses her sister, and bear-hugs her father. They all reciprocate. She must have been the loneliest woman in the world. What would Nicole Simpson have had to do to be safe? Go underground, change her appearance and identity, get cash without leaving a trail, take her children and run—all within days of her call to the shelter. She would have had to end all communication with family and friends, without explanation, for years, as well as leave her home and everything familiar.

With this abuser’s wealth and power, he would have had her hunted down; a dream team of lawyers would have taken her children from her. She would have been the villain—reckless, a slut, reviled for stealing the children of a hero. If his abuse of her is of no consequence now that she’s been murdered, how irrelevant would it have been as she, resourceless, tried to make a court and the public understand that she needed to run for her life?

Nicole Simpson knew she couldn’t prevail, and she didn’t try. Instead of running, she did what the therapists said: be firm, draw a line. So she drew the sort of line they meant: he could come to the recital but not sit with her or go to dinner with her family—a line that was no defense against death. Believing he would kill her, she did what most battered women do: kept up the appearance of normality. There was no equal justice for her, no self-defense she felt entitled to. Society had already left her to die.

On the same day the police who beat Rodney G. King were acquitted in Simi Valley, a white husband who had raped, beaten, and tortured his wife, also white, was acquitted of marital rape in South Carolina. He had kept her tied to a bed for hours, her mouth gagged with adhesive tape. He videotaped a half hour of her ordeal, during which he cut her breasts with a knife. The jury, which saw the videotape, had eight women on it. Asked why they acquitted, they said he needed help. They looked right through the victim— afraid to recognize any part of themselves, shamed by her violation. There were no riots afterward.

The governing reality for women of all races is that there is no escape from male violence, because it is inside and outside, intimate and predatory.

While race-hate has been expressed through forced segregation, woman-hate is expressed through forced closeness, which makes punishment swift, easy, and sure. In private, women often empathize with one another, across race and class, because their experiences with men are so much the same. But in public, including on juries, women rarely dare. For this reason, no matter how many women are battered—no matter how many football stadiums battered women could fill on any given day—each one is alone.

Surrounded by family, friends, and a community of affluent acquaintances, Nicole Simpson was alone. Having turned to police, prosecutors, victims aid, therapists, and a women’s shelter, she was still alone. Ronald L. Goldman may have been the only person in seventeen years with the courage to try to intervene physically in an attack on her; and he’s dead, killed by the same hand that killed her, an expensively gloved, extra-large hand.

Though the legal system has mostly consoled and protected batterers, when a woman is being beaten, it’s the batterer who has to be stopped; as Malcolm X used to say, “by any means necessary”—a principle women, all women, had better learn. A woman has a right to her own bed, a home she can’t be thrown out of, and for her body not to be ransacked and broken into. She has a right to safe refuge, to expect her family and friends to stop the batterer— by law or force—before she’s dead. She has a constitutional right to a gun and a legal right to kill if she believes she’s going to be killed. And a batterer’s repeated assaults should lawfully be taken as intent to kill.

Everybody’s against wife abuse, but who’s prepared to stop it?

Can't make it to women's land but want to support it? Want to support global majority women/women of color? Please share this post:

Empower Women of Color at Big Mouth Girl!

We’re raising funds to ensure that Women of Color can attend Big Mouth Girl (BMG). Your contribution will make it possible for Women of Color to access this event without the undue burden of financial constraints.

Racism coupled with misogyny result in an uneven playing field that disadvantages Women of Color. This becomes evident when Women of Color are trying to safely access nature and lack the transportation and funds to do so. We are dedicated to ensuring that Big Mouth Girl is a multi-racial event where Black, Indigenous, and Women of Color (BIWOC) are not financially hindered in coming together for support and celebration of their culture and identities.

How You Can Help: 100% of your generous donation will go directly to a needs-based scholarship to help Women of Color attend BMG 2024.

Your contribution isn’t just financial; it’s a statement of solidarity and a commitment to equity.

Please donate now. Together, we can help level the playing field for Women of Color!

Click on Fig Ally, then BIWOC fund to donate.