The Road to Splitsville JUST VISITING

The Newsletter for Subscribers to THE SPLIT

Pop quiz, asshole. (Sorry. We sometimes like to talk like Dennis Hopper in Speed.) What do these countries have in common with the United States of America?

1. Andorra
2. Dominican Republic
3. Egypt
4. El Salvador
5. Haiti
6. Honduras
7. Iraq
8. Jamaica
9. Laos
10. Madagascar
11. Malta
12. Mauritania
13. Nicaragua
14. Palau
15. Philippines
16. Republic of the Congo
17. San Marino
18. Senegal
19. Sierra Leone
20. Suriname

Go on. Guess. You’ll never get it.

You’re right! They’re all countries in which abortion is either entirely illegal or very restricted. Talk about an exclusive club! If you’ve ever thought, “Gee, I wish the U.S. were more like Sierra Leone,” your wish has been granted.

Regular readers of The Split (you know who you are—and so do we) are familiar with the following scenario: A woman gets pregnant. She does not want to carry to term, or have, a child. She wants an abortion—a procedure that is, thanks to our lying and perjurious Supreme Court, completely or mostly illegal in the state in which she lives. So she makes plans—or plans are made for her--to travel to another state (or, cf. The Split, another entire country).

Let’s call that Scenario A. (This, in contrast to what the writer and director Preston Sturges used to refer to as “Topic A.” Although Topic A leads to Scenario A, if you know what we mean and we think that you do.) It’s the most obvious abortion-related situation, the one that comes immediately to mind when we consider what we can call “reproductive rights.” At its heart are such issues as self-determination, control of one’s own body, the ability to define and control one’s own family, and that thing the political right is always yammering about as it seeks to destroy it: freedom. (Such people seem to believe that a zygote has a soul and that a blastocyst is a “person.” It wouldn’t surprise us to learn that such people also believe in the existence of angels. (Ever wonder how many blastocysts can dance on the head of a pin?)

“Okay,” you may be thinking. “But how many women really do travel to a different state for an abortion?”

Last year? According to the New York Times? Try 171,000. You can see an animated map of their movements here. We include this, because among other things it provides sort of a depiction of what, in The Split, we call The Great Moratorium: a two-year period, commencing with the separation of the red and blue states into two distinct countries, during which citizens of either nation could emigrate from one to the other without red tape or immigration-type fuss. This—people fleeing red states for blue—is what we say took place, mainly. (Yes, the parents of Lorinda Moon, our heroine, went the other way, leaving a rural, low-population-density—i.e. red—area of New York State for Texas.) Note that this Times map is only an approximation of it: that large influx of women into Florida, for example (with some coming from California!), would certainly not have a Great Moratorium analogue, which we insist on spelling with the final u-e.

Then there’s Scenario B, in which the pregnancy entails a (possibly fatal) risk to the health of the pregnant person. States that outlaw abortion have—grudgingly—sometimes made exceptions to preserve the life, or, to appease a whiny bunch of feminist soreheads, the health, of the mother. You don’t so much want an abortion as, for medical reasons, you need one. The Times map doesn’t distinguish between Scenarios A and B, so we don’t know how many of those 171,000 women hit the road out of medical necessity. In any case, Scenario B, like A, is easy to imagine.

But now comes Scenario C. And it’s not so obvious.

You just discovered that you’re pregnant. It’s a high-risk pregnancy, but the state in which you live still allows abortion, so that’s not a problem. The problem is, for one reason or another you’ve already committed to travel to a no-abortion state, and you cannot be sure, once there, of the care you’ll get—if any—if something goes wrong. And if something does go wrong, and you discover that you’re visiting an American version of El Salvador, what then?

For a first-hand description of this vexing situation, we have Aubrey Hirsch and Vox to thank. Her account of grappling with it, along with her helpful visual aids, is here. It is very enlightening, and makes a great point.

But we have a complaint.

Ms Hirsch says that, in South Carolina, it is illegal to abort a collection of cells from which “cardiac activity” is detectable, usually around six weeks—at which point the pre-fetus is “about as big as a grain of rice.” This is journalism of the shoddiest kind. We must ask: What kind of rice? Short-grain? Long-grain? Basmati? Arborio? Jasmine? Brown? Wild rice—which isn’t even rice? (Every idiot knows that wild rice is really an aquatic grass with an edible grain, duh.)

Perhaps it’s this kind of lack of precision (about the rice) by a woman, that prompts so many pro-life men to believe that they know what’s best (for “life”) and selflessly step in and pass laws that control women, and their bodies, and what goes on inside them. For which they have our sympathy. It can’t be easy, crafting legislation that aims to (or pretends to) protect life, knowing that it could result in the death of a pregnant woman if she happens to be visiting her sister in Texas or her mother in Mississippi. But somebody has to do it.

Or maybe it’s easier than we think. Maybe to be pro-life is not necessarily to be anti-death, as long as the death is visited upon women who are willing to extinguish the life of a clump of cells even bigger than a grain of Uncle Ben’s converted rice—which, in rice terms, is pretty huge. And yes, we know he’s not “Uncle Ben” any more. It’s “Ben’s Original” rice now. To which we also object. This elimination of uncles is a bad thing. The next time someone says, “Do X, and Bob’s your uncle,” are you going to say, “Not any more. From now on he’s Bob’s Original”?

You know, sometimes you’re driving, and you realize you don’t know what road you’re on. You search in vain for a sign. Is that what we’re wondering now—how we can know if we’re actually on the Road to Splitsville?

Look at the Times map.