Surfacing after the usual intense week at work to catch up on news from outside my professional area of concern. And good heavens, the new Texas law on abortion, which the U.S. Supreme Court has declined to annul, is a truly horrible development.
My own position on the overall issue is that pregnant people should be trusted to make their own healthcare decisions, and the legitimate role of the state in intervening is very little indeed. I set out my thoughts in some detail before the Irish referendum in 2017:
However, even if you describe yourself as pro-life, surely you cannot support the Texas law that criminalises victims of rape and incest, and people whose medical situation requires that the pregnancy cannot go to full term. Rachel Cunliffe writes about the biology of this in the New Statesman.
And in particular, surely you cannot support the vigilantism of the Texas law, where anyone is entitled to sue anyone else who they suspect of being involved with an abortion. As Sue Halpin points out in the New Yorker, it will (as usual) be non-white people who bear the brunt of it, just as they are penalised by the new voting laws in Texas.
David Frum in the Atlantic thinks that Republicans have over-reached, and will pay the price for it, drawing a historical parallel with Prohibition. I do hope so, but I certainly feel for those who will be and are already being directly affected by the new law in Texas, and in the other red states that are rushing to follow where Texas has led.
Not much I can do from here other than write about it, so that’s what I have done.
I actually found in my last job it was a lot more difficult to fit in, to know what was going on (really going on), etc because I only had to be there once a week. Although there are certainly advantages when you can work from home, working in an office certainly has advantages as well.