Quick Hit: Time to Start Sewing Your Red Robes, Ladies.

Maybe its because I’m staying up into the wee hours of the night reading Margaret Atwood’s dystopic novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, about a fascist theocracy that enslaves women according to their reproductive abilities (in it, women with viable ovaries, a “national resource,” are placed in a specific social caste, the Handmaids, forced to try to become pregnant with the men who own them and are required to wear red robes to mark their position) that I’ve become slightly paranoid, but the last 24 hours have contained some frightening attacks on reproductive justice.

Despite the fact that tax paying citizens that live in a democracy have very vocally denounced the forced trans-abdominal ultrasounds prior to receiving an abortion bill in Virginia, our dear theocratic governor Bob McDonnell (he of the senior “thesis” that stated women should stay in the home and homosexuality is a crime against the state) signed the bill yesterday.

In their best efforts to prevent unwanted pregnancies, Utah has passed a bill that prohibits both talk of contraception and homosexuality in the state’s classrooms.

Arizona has also passed a bill that allows doctors to not inform pregnant women of pre-natal health because this information may lead to an abortion (never mind if these conditions could put the mother’s life at risk.)

Since controlling one’s own body is obviously not something a citizen in a free country can be tasked with, its a small gift from god that “small government” is here to do that for us. I’m sure that some other news has passed me by, if so, post it in the comments section!

In parting, a quote from Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale: “Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it.”