Almost exactly a month ago, I wrote a post that began like this:
At first glance, today’s two biggest Texas news stories are perhaps not meaningfully related. But stick with me here.
That post was about the news that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton had finally made a deal, years in the making, to get his felony fraud charges dropped so he could avoid going to court. I connected Paxton’s ability to skirt consequences for his felonies to the biggest national abortion news of the day — oral arguments in the Texas-based case brought by anti-abortion lobbyists hoping to outlaw medication abortion. The tl;dr was: Paxton gets off easy, while pregnant people are punished for, well, just being pregnant.
Allow me now to, I suppose, plagiarize myself.
Because … at first glance, today’s two biggest Texas news stories are perhaps not meaningfully related. But stick with me here.
Texas was — by proxy — back at the Supreme Court today, for oral arguments in a case out of Idaho that mirrors our own Fifth Circuit saga, wherein anti-abortion politicians are arguing that Idaho doctors must not provide life-saving care to pregnant people because it violates the state’s abortion bans.
And Texas was also back in the national news for other reasons today, as Gov. Greg Abbott sicced goon squads of state troopers on peaceful, pro-Palestinian demonstrators on the University of Texas at Austin campus. As of tonight, more than 30 folks have been arrested, and I think it’s safe to say that many hundreds of UT students, who have the right to demonstrate on their own campus, were threatened and intimidated by mounted troopers and cops wearing breastplates packed with ammo.
I am struck once again by the contrast.
Republican politicians openly flouting the rule of law — skirting fraud charges and refusing to provide medical care to pregnant people. While regular people bear the burden of our supposed elected representatives threatening, intimidating, and denying us our rights — whether it’s pregnant people seeking care or students gathering on campus to oppose genocide.
A refrain echoing in my head: You have the right to die if you don’t comply.
That’s the message sent by abortion bans. Stay pregnant or die trying.
It’s also the message sent by state troopers armed to the teeth, mounted on horseback, plowing through peaceful protests. Speak up for what you believe, and risk your life.
You have the right to die, if you don’t comply.
This is modern necropolitics in the United States. Weaponized abortion bans and militarized police responses to peaceful protest serve the same goal: to make the public fearful. To make us compliant with the restriction of our rights and our bodies. To make us second guess the normal, agent decisions we have every right to make — to decide if, when, and how to have children, and to decide if, when, and how to speak up for our beliefs. To make us comfortable and compliant with state-sanctioned death.
Abortion bans and militarized police are agents of terror, both. To resist that terror is an act of incredible bravery.
To be pregnant under these circumstances is unimaginably brave, and to end a pregnancy is just as courageous. To gather with your community to speak out against genocide is brave, and to stand up to armed police — the very same cops who were too cowardly to even try to stop one man with a gun in Uvalde, TX — is the very definition of fierce resistance.
These brave actions are a long time coming; they also shouldn’t have to be so. But this bravery is not demeaned by the circumstances that demand it, only amplified by it.
In Austin today, student demonstrators chanted: “Who failed Uvalde? DPS!” They chanted this in the presence of the very same law enforcement operation that failed to stop one man with a gun from killing nineteen children and two adults in May 2022, 160 miles from DPS headquarters in Austin.
Young people know. Young people remember, though they should not have to.
Pregnant people know. Pregnant people remember, though they should not have to.
They have been given the directive: You have the right to die, if you don’t comply.
Did nineteen children fail to comply in Uvalde? Are pregnant people failing to comply when they seek emergency treatment in hospitals across the country?
Of course not. But the division between those who have to comply — kids, pregnant people, regular Americans — and those who believe themselves exempt from compliance — men in power, and the insufferable, simpering women who support (and sometimes lead) them — is only becoming more stark.
You have the right to die, if you don’t comply.
But this threat has only one logical end: when people are so angry, so fearful, so downtrodden, so frustrated, so enraged, so oppressed, and so resistant, they will eventually come to their own conclusion: If we are going to die anyway, why comply?
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