The Single Most Effective Pro-Choice Lever

Unless you’ve been in a coma for the last few years, you must know that women’s’ rights are under brutal attack across the United States.

I am, frankly, very surprised that cities aren’t being burned to the ground. I was very shocked when Texas passed its inhumane and cruel anti-abortion law with hardly any protests in the state. Women in Texas just woke up the next day and went to work as if nothing had changed.

And with Roe vs Wade about to be overturned, it’s still looking as if any protests are going to be so small and disorganized as to have no effect.

There must be some systemic dysfunction that is preventing the organization of large-scale protests by women – you know, the kind that rock cities to their core and bring them to their knees.

Can you imagine if women just stopped going to work for a couple of weeks? What would that do to a state? They don’t even have to go out and protest – just sitting home and catching up on Netflix will be effective.

In many cases that could bring critical supply chains across the entire US to a grinding halt in just a few days. The chaos would be astronomical after only two weeks and take months to recover even after workers return.

But no one seems to be able to create enough momentum to pull that lever.

I guess it is just very very difficult to organize millions of women (and humans in general), especially when many of those women are in the lower economic strata and cannot afford to be without an income.

So, we just need to find a different lever to pull – one where you only need to organize a small subset of workers. For example:

  • How about if women stopped going to work at signature companies such SpaceX and NASA? That alone would have drastic implications for national security and other space-based critical infrastructure companies – the kind that of companies that make headlines every day.
  • How about if they stopped going to work at the NSA, CIA, FBI and HOMELAND SECURITY?
  • Or stop working at Amazon, Fedex, UPS and USPS?

Maybe with these companies/industries too, there would be far too many folks to efficiently organize.

So, we just need to find lever that is far more efficient – one where you ‘only’ need to organize 100,000 workers or so.

Answer: Healthcare Workers!

Imagine a situation where all doctors, nurses, pharmacists and health-care technicians simply refuse to go to work until politicians stay out of private health-care decisions…

No state or political system is likely to survive that more than a couple of weeks.

This is a much smaller group who are already forced to play a major role in implementing anti-choice laws anyway – so they have a major incentive to take a stand.

But Think About The People

Oh, but “Nigel – that will cause people to die”.

Oh, really? You Think? That’s the whole damn point. PEOPLE WILL DIE. Medical workers are being FORCED to allow patients to die under most anti-choice laws.

Let me repeat that for those of you who didn’t get that last sentence- with anti-choice laws, PEOPLE WILL DIE.

Medical workers are being FORCED to allow patients to die because politicians with no medical expertise are dictating medical care.

That’s a damn good reason to shut the system down until politicians and their supporters get their heads out of their asses.

(Or until they realize that their god is perfectly happy to let people die indiscriminately.)

In Your Face

Under this type of activism, potential deaths are staring you right in the in the face – you can’t run away or hide.

Right now, politicians create their anti-choice laws and all the resulting deaths are spread out over time – there’s no aggregation that can make people sit up and take notice. The scope of their cruelty is known but ‘hidden’ from most people.

How many folks are really paying attention when a random person dies of an ectopic pregnancy?

With this approach politicians who decide they know better than doctors and nurses and other medical professionals can go right ahead and take the place of licensed medical professionals. See how that really works out for everyone in their state.

Alternative

So, you think this will cause a lot of deaths, huh? You know what will cause even more deaths? A civil war. Women who finally organize and decide to burn cities to the ground. A disruption to the food and medical supply chain because women just walk off the job for a month.

You think those things can’t happen?

When was the last time major social changes occurred without major violence and death?

If you think your anti-choice folks are going to listen to your peaceful protests you’re still living in la-la-land.

Peaceful marches don’t do anything other than make headlines. I think a lot of conservatives have forgotten that. And even those that haven’t somehow think their guns will win any physical battle that comes their way.

But they can’t really win a battle with guns when medical facilities are closed and no one is shooting. Or when your supply chain is screwed up because half your critical works are nowhere to be found.

So, yeah, this idea, cruel as it is, causes the least amount of deaths and forces politicians hands faster than anything else.

Don’t like it? Well, you can always try organizing a long term walkout of critical sectors. But I suspect it’s a lot less work and far more effective to get the medical folks to use their underutilized significant leverage and take a stand.

Wrap up

Whether you like it or not, people are going to die one way or another under these laws that are just getting more and more cruel every day.

This idea likely forces a resolution of the issue faster than most other approaches with the least amount of deaths.

Sigh…unfortunately it’s likely too ‘in your face’ to be practical…

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