Abortion Legislation is a Sign of a Suffering Society
Healthy people vote for healthy laws.
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There is a lot being said about Alabama, Georgia, and Ohio with their recent anti-choice legislature.
Much of this focuses on the action itself, the politics, and outrage over the policing of women’s bodies.
I want to speak about the layers beneath the “politics,” what I see as the conditions that cause the symptoms which express as authoritarian political decisions.
Not that a woman’s right to control her body or her future is a matter of “politics” but rather I am speaking to the way we address our legislative process and the direction of our society.
When I sit down with a client I know that the challenge they are trying to address goes beyond the parts of life they are addressing it in.
They come to me for smoking, anxiety, that last cup of wine they can’t say no to or a feeling of not knowing themselves.
Usually, they are well versed in one or two methods to work on this struggle.
Few people struggle against a thing without trying to understand it. The trick to their healing is in realizing that the thing they are struggling with has ties to many other parts of their life.
There is the physical; nutrition and exercise, the care for the brain and body.
There is the emotional; stress and traumatic triggers, our ability to cope and manage our emotions.
There is mindset; the stories we tell ourselves, the way that we think of ourselves, the way that we make our choices.
There is deep conditioning; the unconscious aspects that cause us to choose a thing we don’t want to choose anymore.
Anti-choice legislature goes deeper than the laws themselves; these states are suffering.
Alabama, Georgia, and Ohio are not the healthiest, happiest places.
My theory is that just like the people I work with when we’re stressed or ill, when our nutrition is suffering or our mental health is suffering, we don’t make the best decisions.
