Why I’m leaving Tennessee over its abortion laws.
This is me screaming.
I am leaving Tennessee.
This place is my home. I grew up here, learning to ride horses and play music in the rolling hills around Nashville, boating on the TVA lakes in Celina and Gallatin, going to Opryland, and mentoring Girl Scouts at Camp Sycamore Hills. I am entirely educated by Tennessee schools. I am an alum of Brentwood High School, UTK, MTSU, and Vanderbilt. I have been able to reach a high degree of success and contentment here, in Tennessee. The place I call home.
Recent events mean that I cannot stay. I must flee.
Growing up in the South meant growing up hearing legends of a time before Roe, when women did not have the legal right to make decisions over their own bodies. Horror stories of women who were raped, women who were forced to have children, women who physically tortured themselves (or their teen daughters) into miscarrying, women who were subjected to horrifying treatments from illegal procedures performed in sketchy, dirty clinics operating in back alleys.
My whole life I have heard these tales. Sometimes they are warnings, whispered in women’s only spaces, shameful relics of a past that was, until this summer, the past. Sometimes they were odes of gratitude for the now old world where women had the right and the freedom to choose for themselves. Lately, women are standing on rooftops, loudly screaming the horrible things that used to be the past, but are now happening again. This essay is me screaming.
The choice of if, when, and who to have a child with is one of the most personal, valuable decisions a woman can make. Tennessee has ripped this right away, in its draconian forced birth law that goes into effect today. Tennessee law now bans all abortion, with no exception for rape, incest, or the health of the mother.
Tennessee no longer recognizes my right to plan for my own life, because I am a woman. Not to decide if I want to be a mother, not to decide when I’m ready, not even to decide who I will be forced to co-parent a child with.
As a woman of child-bearing age, I am not safe here. So I must flee.
On losing the right to decide who to have a child with:
1 in 6 women is raped, according to RAINN, but only about 6% of rapists are ever prosecuted for the crime. At the last reported statistic I could find, Tennessee has over 9000 open, unprocessed rape kits. In the extremely unlikely event that a woman manages to get her rapist prosecuted in Tennessee, rape is only a class B felony, punishable by as few 8 years in prison and a fine maxing out at $25,000. To contrast how lenient Tennessee’s treatment of rape is with other states, in nearby Georgia, the punishment for rape is at least 25 years in prison followed by a lifetime of probation.
Despite how lenient Tennessee is towards rapists, how is the state punishing the women who get raped in TN? Well, besides the 18 years and estimated $270,000 it takes to raise a child that she did not want nor consent to, she is now forced to co-parent with her rapist, who very likely hasn’t been prosecuted or punished in any way, and therefore still has his parental rights.
And still, just adding a rape or incest exception to abortion laws is not enough, because that would suggest a conviction is necessary, and it’s absurd to think that TN can process a rape kit, investigate, and get a conviction in the 9 months it takes to carry a pregnancy to term. And even if this process were instilled, it has no respect for the victim, who has been stripped of her right to process what has happened to her.
That makes us broodmares.
There’s no real hope that this is going to change for Tennesseans, either.
On the pro-rape Tennessee Republican party:
As far as I can see, the Tennessee Republican party, which has an iron grip on the politics of the state, is pro-rape. At the very least, rape isn’t disqualifying of office or deserving of punishment in the TN GOP. There’s no better example than David Byrd, a legislator from Southern Tennessee. In 2019, Byrd admitted to sexually assaulting his high school girl’s basketball players while he was their coach. First, nobody in the TN GOP “leadership” forced him to resign. Then his district re-elected him again, anyway. Now, he sits on the committee AND subcommittee that makes decisions about what bills to push to the General Assembly on women’s health.
And let’s not forget about “Grab ’em by the pussy’ Donald Trump, whose flags and banners hang all across the state. For all the hullabaloo the Republican party makes about regulating bathrooms and drag queens to “protect children from predators and groomers,” they certainly have plenty of predators openly hanging around their ranks.
Tennessee Republicans cannot effectively legislate this issue, when men who wantonly abuse women are rewarded with continued power.
And so, I am leaving.
I am pissed. I feel betrayed by the state that raised me.
But I am blessed to have the resources available to enable me to leave. There are millions of women across Tennessee who no longer have a choice but to live under this oppressive regime, that will force women to sacrifice their health to birth their rapists’ babies.
’Cause I loved you, I swear I loved you
’Til my dying day…
And I can go anywhere I want
Anywhere I want, just not home
And you can aim for my heart, go for blood
But you would still miss me in your bones
-Taylor Swift
