I'll Be Silent When I'm Dead

This morning, during the anti-choice fuckery in North Carolina, I was tweeting about the enforced silence in the General Assembly:


Also this morning, in Texas:

Texas activists, who have been working to defeat a package of abortion restrictions for the past several weeks, are back at it now that their lawmakers are taking up the measures yet again in a second special session. On Monday, an estimated 5,000 activists rallied at the state capitol. And on Tuesday, thousands of protesters registered to testify against the anti-abortion legislation.

But early on Wednesday morning, a Texas House committee ultimately cut off the ongoing public testimony and voted to advance the contentious abortion restrictions, which would ban abortions after 20 weeks and shut down the vast majority of the abortion clinics in the state. According to the Associated Press, Republicans in the House also imposed "strict security precautions" to prevent women's health advocates from disrupting the vote.

More than 3,500 people flooded the capitol on Tuesday to register their opposition to the abortion restrictions. The AP estimates that about 1,100 of those people also signed up to testify before the House committee, although Dallas News reports that figure was actually closer to 2,300. The protesters filled up about seven overflow rooms in the capitol.

"In terms of witnesses, the system has never seen overload like this," Rep. Helen Giddings (D), the vice chairwoman of the House State Affairs Committee, noted.

Nonetheless, fewer than 100 people were actually given a chance to express their views before the committee.

They don't want to hear the truth. They don't want to acknowledge the voices, or the humanity, of the people over whose bodies they are trying to legislate governance. They want to protect the little bubble of bullshit fantasies about abortion and who gets abortion and who performs abortions in which they exist. And when we refuse to be silent, they try to forcibly silence us. Because they don't want to hear the truth about what this legislation actually means for real people.

Fuck them. And fuck their desperate desire for silence. I will be silent when I'm dead. Until then, I will make all the noise I can.