Mandatory Donation, out now at Martian Magazine, is the first story I’ve written as a direct response to an event.
When the right wing ideologues that hijacked the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade in June 2022 and stripped women of the right to control their own bodies, I was infuriated. I added my voice to the outrage, and opened my wallet to those defending a woman’s right to choose.
Mandatory Donation is a small literary effort to express some of that outrage.
While not about abortion per se–as a man I don’t feel that I could incorporate that into a story without a great deal more research and care–it does address the growing cancer that too many in power think they have the right to control other’s–especially women’s–bodies. In many states this is already manifesting as the “criminalization of pregnancy” through the use of “fetal protection” laws. Alabama’s Attorney General recently asserted (and then subsequently backed away from) the position that women in the state could be prosecuted for taking legally prescribed abortion pills.
Mandatory Donation posits yet another step in taking away one’s control of their own body, not just asserting that one no longer has the right to control what one does with their organs, but that proper lifestyle “care” of them must be taken under penalty of law; reducing a person to little more than an organ bank.
Legislating that people do not have the right to control their own bodies is not just “un-American,” it’s an affront to humanity.
Click to donate to Planned Parenthood.
And here for Alabama’s Yellowhammer Fund, an organization dedicated to abortion advocacy and reproductive justice in the southern United States.
Kickin' the Darkness 