Eaton Hamilton

How could this week be about anything but the erasure of of half the US population’s bodily autonomy, and how the populace is angry, rattled and terrified for their own and others’ futures, including their children’s?

I’ve been around long enough that I was a teen before restrictions on abortions began to ease in Canada, replaced by a Draconian system where someone had to petition three (white male) doctors and say they’d kill themselves, and then their “case” would go before a hospital board. Needless to say, all these stalling tactics often meant second trimester abortions, through no delay on the pregnant person’s part. Later, Canada repealed this dangerous nonsense, and we now have no law at all. Abortion is provided piecemeal by hospital boards–or often not. In my opinion, our right to it needs to be codified by legislation and enshrined by our Supreme Court. The legislature could ask questions of the court to make this happen.

Canada too has taken and is taking a frightening turn to fascism. We need to be alert and wary and start fighting back–hard–against misinformation and lies propagated by the right. People are, as we’ve seen during the pandemic, repulsively swayable toward doing to wrong thing.

This week we writers are sharpening our pens so they can do double-duty as alphabet-daggers. I send heartfelt warmth and wishes for safety to the USians dealing with this appalling situation. It’s a little like sending throughts and prayers after a school shooting–useless–but so it’s on the record: I will always support your fight for justice.