Thursday 6 September 2018

Within Their Sights

So, just a reminder: This awful administration is going to damage all of us, even you have not yet internalized a sense of being squarely within their aim.

My baby was delivered by midwives. My husband has a foreign accent, and is an immigrant even if he is also a US citizen. It would be convenient to imagine his documents would be respected, if we were afforded due process, but we are actually seeing US citizens with legitimate birth certificates deported right now because federal agents independently decided they were insufficiently American.

The erosion of due process has already begun. That applies to all of us.

I already know they are coming for me. I know it as a woman, as a protester, and as a traveler. This is a misogynistic, xenophobic, insecure government, and I tick all of the boxes to trigger them. They will come for my bodily autonomy, but they will try to restrict my rights in other ways first, I have no doubt.

I have also been worried about my family, knowing that my husband would present as foreign first, and there might not be an opportunity to protect him with papers. One of my contractors told me that one of his employees, Irish by birth but a US citizen, was rounded up at a job site here in San Francisco and taken to an unspecified detention center because he forgot his ID at home one day. He also has a family and children.

I must admit, however, that the stories of border region midwife deliveries being called into question open up a new avenue for concern. It hadn't occurred to me that my child's citizenship might be on the block. Here it is, though.

And it makes me so angry. I chose to give birth in the wonderful care of our midwives because they are excellent, attentive, and diligent, offering practical and supportive care to pregnant women and newborns. That the professionalism of these women would also be called into question, while simultaneously throwing children into bureaucratic chaos, is yet another reminder of the pernicious attitudes of this administration and its supporters.

I know they are coming for me. But you shouldn't have to know they are coming for you to push back against this.

This woman's story could easily become my own. This is how the slide into statelessness begins, and threatening citizens in such a manner is chilling, racist harassment: https://nyti.ms/2PvdXnN

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