Counter-spells

Call it the forced birth movement please thank you!

As the dead rise, so does this newsletter!  Greetings from the beyond, good people!   

It would be so fun to delve into the theological origins of All Hallows Day.  (Oh hey, Samhain!)  Alas, thanks to the state legislatures eroding our democracy, I’ve got a different (skeletal) bone to pick.  And in so doing, I’ll wade into the tradition of femmes burned at the stake across Europe for centuries, so at least we’re still on theme!

Let’s talk about theocracy.  Republicans aren’t redesigning our legal code to reflect religious law per se, but they are engaging a time-honored tradition: Using Christianity as cover for some evil-ass bullshit.  And - (to keep it witchy, because spells are nothing more than words with intention) - they are winning, using the greatest weapon in their arsenal: rhetoric.

So.  First of all?  It’s not a fetal heartbeat, so let’s stop fucking saying that.  And no, they’re not pro-life.  They’re pro-forced birth, so let’s start saying that.  And no, the forced birth movement is not biblical.  The word “abortion” does not appear in the Hebrew Bible, and Jewish law explicitly permits it.  As for the New Testament, “abortion” - ektroma in the Greek - appears exactly once, when Paul likens himself an “aborted fetus” (1 Cor. 15.8).   Isn’t that rich?  The only aborter in the New Testament is God, you guys.  And the aborted fetus is Saint Paul - you know, the one who wrote all those letters professing God's boundless grace?  And wow did he need it.  My dude persecuted a lot of Christians before his little moment on the road to Damascus (Acts 8:1).  I wonder if Paul got paid to hunt down the Christians?  Like, you know, any of us could get paid for hunting down reproductive justice advocates in Texas?  

Another quick word on theocracy.  You may remember that Amy Covid Barrett belongs to a secretive Catholic group of laypeople called the People of Praise.  This group used the term “handmaid” until Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel got too famous.  Now they say “women leaders.”  Because that’s so much better.  Fun fact alert: Public records confirm that Justice Barrett lived with one of the founders of this, ahem, group.  She lived in his seven bedroom home through law school, as did the man who later became her husband.  Defectors confirm that the People of Praise have “well-developed courtship and marriage traditions” in which a person’s decision to marry is guided by their “head”- you know, their “man-leader.”  Theocracy is never about God.  It’s about men systematizing their power over others on the pretext of religion.  

Speaking of!  When, exactly, did this forcing-birth-via-laws bit become a thing?  Let us turn to one of the most fatale of femmes in the entire academy: Sylvia Federici.  Her seminal book Caliban and the Witch is enjoying a resurgence these days.  It’s awesome-sauce.  Quite dense, so here’s the skinny.  Or, rather, one of many skinnies to be gleaned from this thick-ass, orgasmically academic text.   In the 10th - 14th centuries, we have these grassroots heresy movements all over Europe, loosely united by “the belief that God no longer spoke through the clergy.”  These movements are more political than religious, because the church is the biggest landowner in Europe, hence most responsible for exploiting the serfs and peasantry. You find an extraordinary number of actual women leaders in these sects, which tend toward free love and feeding the poor.   Federici says that “heresy was the equivalent of ‘liberation theology’ for the medieval proletariat” and asserts “it is no exaggeration to say that the heretic movement was the first ‘proletarian international.’”  So, imagine villagers across Italy, France, Flanders, Germany and Spain enjoying sex with multiple partners, organizing communities to protect the most vulnerable, and smuggling each other across borders when they get into trouble.  And now for one of my favorite details.  We have these documents from the 14th century municipality of Frankfurt - which had a public healthcare system, like all the other German municipalities at the time - that records the hiring of sixteen female doctors.  Many of them were Jewish, and many were surgeons.  And.  “After the Caesarian cut was introduced in the 13th century, female obstetrics were the only ones who practiced it.”  To reiterate: In Europe in the 1200’s, not only are women being hired by the state as surgeons, but they’re the only surgeons allowed to operate on women giving birth.  Mkay?  

But THEN.

“Bring out your dead!”  Bubonic Plague hits.  One third of the population: gone.  There aren’t enough peasants to work the land.  And wouldn’t you know, suddenly, the church criminalizes reproductive “heresies” like abortion, contraception, miscarriage, even sodomy. Because yes the bullshit about the gays originates alongside the bullshit about abortions and all of it is about ensuring that enough poor people are born to keep labor cheap.  Seriously!  This is well-documented stuff!   All the European nations adopt “proto-natalist measures that, combined with Public Relief, formed the embryo of a capitalist reproductive policy.”  And we still enjoy the fruits of those policies today, married people!  That’s when premiums for marriage show up in France and England, penalizing the (Christian) practice of celibacy.  But they take it a step farther:

“The main initiative that the state took to restore the desired population ratio was the launching of a true war against women...waged primarily through the witch-hunt that literally demonized any form of birth-control and non-procreative sexuality...Thus, starting in the mid-16th century, while Portuguese ships were returning from Africa with their first human cargoes, all the European governments began to impose the severest penalties against contraception, abortion and infanticide”(88).

Yep.  Male doctors invade the delivery room and it becomes commonplace to police the behavior of child-bearing relatives.  At one point, in Germany, women could be punished for not pushing hard enough during labor, or for not expressing enough excitement about their babies.  

To synthesize: in medieval Europe, the church persecutes activists fighting church corruption, a lot of them women.  Fine.  Then, after the plague, the church introduces new heresies that render any woman accused of using birth control or having non-procreative sex a heretic.  And that - ladies, gents and nonbinary geniuses - is the toxic combo that creates the torturous genocide we call the witch hunts.  But here’s the part I really want us to focus on: 

“While in the Middle Ages women had been able to use various forms of contraceptives and had exercised an undisputed control over the birthing process, from now on, their wombs became public territory, controlled by men and the state, and procreation was directly placed at the service of capitalist accumulation” (89).

The slave ships and the witch hunts are two heads of the same monster: a theology which sees all beings as “raw materials, workers and breeders for the state.”  It’s a theology we continue to live and breathe.  You know it, you love it, give it up for: extractive capitalism!  One of Federici’s central claims is that capitalism cannot sustain itself without intense violence, because it requires the extortion of the most labor from the least protected people.

Once you know the history, it’s not at all confusing that this year, in 2021, we see more abortion restrictions enacted across the US than ever before.  This onslaught is right on schedule.  We’ve had our own plague, our own labor shortage, and now our legislative bodies are legislating our bodies, again, in a way that “every day becomes more unreasoned, inconsistent and impossible to defend,” to quote Justice Kagan.  

Once you know the history, it’s not at all confusing that there are 2.3 million people in our prisons and jails, representing 20% of the world’s incarcerated population.  Our carceral system is an industry founded by an administration that now openly admits to launching the drug wars to incarcerate the people originally brought here as chattel, who still - (to bring it all the way back around) - are two to three times more likely to die in childbirth than white people.  This horrific stat holds for only one other group: American Indian and Alaskan Native women, in whose name I’ll go ahead and remind us that our homes are built on stolen land, based on a concept of private property invented by the same folks that launched the slave trade and legislated our wombs into public property “placed at the service of capitalist accumulation.”

Once you know the history, it’s tragically simple.  The forced birth movement is about producing and oppressing enough bodies to keep our fields and factories, our prisons and kitchens, our Walmarts and warehouses full. Enough bodies to clean our office buildings, to tend to our toddlers and our elderly.  It’s about the moneys, honeys.

I’ve been thinking a lot about extractive capitalism in the terms of Leslie Marmon Silko, who, in the novel Ceremony, names this system white witchery: it’s a spell, a curse, that has us all entranced, that will eventually destroy us unless we find the ceremonies to heal ourselves.

First, it was spices.  Then gold, then oil.  And now - and oh how fitting, how perfectly aligned with the cannibalistic madness Marmon Silko describes - it’s our attention.  Our thoughts, desires, identities: the newest commodity is our very interiority. 

I’ve also been thinking a lot about those medieval heresy movements, these precursors to liberation theologies and international labor movements.  Federici labels them as political rather than religious - a distinction I find striking.  It seems to me that only under this curse can our religious beliefs exist as something separate from our politics.  Indeed, our spiritual orientations, like everything else about us, have been reduced to social currency.  Food for thought for our friends’ and followers’ consumption.  We’re spiritual, but not religious, we say over drinks after the nine-to-fives we perform to make the money we can to buy the things we want while the Earth continues to burn like the witches who warned us.  

Is your spirituality political?  If not, then what is your spirituality?  Whom does it benefit?

The real question, though, is what ceremonies - what ritualized actions - can heal us?  Vandana Shiva urges us to plant gardens.  Another great place to start, I think, is with the spell-casting power of language.  How about we commit to calling this movement what it is: the forced birth movement.  Tell your friends in Texas.  And Oklahoma.  And Idaho.  And South Carolina.  Kansas and Kentucky.   Arkansas, Indiana, Louisiana, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Arizona, South Dakota, and West Virginia. 

And here’s my final call to action:  I implore you.  Take twenty minutes (because it takes that long) to scroll through income inequality in the US shown at scale.  White witchery wins when we conflate extractive capitalism with our own prosperity.  Girl.  In this current system, Beyonce is poor.  We can all enjoy our lives and re-cast ourselves in alignment with the poorest among us.  According to the numbers, we’re much closer to them than to the psychos building space-dicks and metaverses.  Take a look.  We’ve got some counter-spells to work.