This week in MAGAstan
Heather Cox Richardson examines the Civil War-era law just reactivated to legislate how Arizona can use women’s bodies:
In Arizona, Pima County Superior Court Judge Kellie Johnson has restored a law put into effect by Arizona’s Territorial legislature in 1864 and then reworked in 1901 that has been widely interpreted as a ban on all abortions except to save a woman’s life. Oddly, I know quite a bit about the 1864 Arizona Territorial legislature, and its story matters as we think about the attempt to impose its will in modern America.
In fact, the Civil War era law seems not particularly concerned with women handling their own reproductive care—it actually seems to ignore that practice entirely. The laws for this territory, chaotic and still at war in 1864, appear to reflect the need to rein in a lawless population of men.
The context of the original law was punishing male violence involving “cutting out tongues or eyes, slitting noses or lips, or ‘rendering…useless’ someone’s arm or leg,” Richardson writes. With regard to “miscarriage,” the law targeted using secret poisons or instruments intended to produce one. Those found guilty would face two to five years in prison, “Provided, that no physician shall be affected by the last clause of this section, who in the discharge of his professional duties deems it necessary to produce the miscarriage of any woman in order to save her life.”
The law that is currently interpreted to outlaw abortion care seemed designed to keep men in the chaos of the Civil War from inflicting damage on others—including pregnant women—rather than to police women’s reproductive care, which women largely handled on their own or through the help of doctors who used drugs and instruments to remove what they called dangerous blockages of women’s natural cycles in the four to five months before fetal movement became obvious.
The rest of the code of laws drafted by one judge and passed by twenty-seven other men in the Arizona Territorial legislature of 1864 included allowances and prohibitions that today would be considered beyond the pale. Including discriminatory laws regarding race and defining “the the age of consent for sexual intercourse to be just ten years old,” Richardson notes.
In the context of reactionary, right-wing backlash, the Arizona code that once sanctioned pedophilia has been repurposed in 2022 by vocal foes of pedophilia to allow the state to appropriate women’s bodies for reproduction. Whether or not they “consent,” at whatever age they conceive, and even if through the criminal behavior of men.
There would be irony in that if irony were not outlawed in MAGAstan.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us