Hi y’all. I am Tami Rose and I love Mississippi. I love our beautiful wide-open spaces and all our amazing waterways. I come from a beautiful state where the people are so precious and kind to one another in everyday life. We hold doors for each other and make eye contact and speak to strangers. We are the hospitality state, and we try to make everyone feel welcome.
Yet at a political level, especially when history gets involved, we can be unspeakably cruel to each other.
I cannot say how ashamed I am of my state today. It grieves my soul that Mississippi will play an instrumental role in overturning Roe v. Wade.
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This opinion is a nuclear bomb to the health and autonomy of women. Additionally, it will roll back all of the gains our society made over the last half-century—especially as it is couched in this blistering opinion by Justice Alito that has been leaked from the Supreme Court.
The Alito opinion as written does not just roll back Roe v. Wade—it severely limits what rights the 14th Amendment can protect.
For those of you who do not know me, I own Romantic Adventures, an adult store in Jackson, Mississippi. And I know a thing or two about the 14th Amendment. It’s the only reason I am in business.
I have had government agents come in and seize toys off the wall as evidence in a case we tussled over for two-plus years. The only reason I have toys on the walls at all is that they were placed under the protection of the 14th Amendment by a case in Texas which is also in the Fifth Circuit.
The 14th Amendment is more important than you think.
This decision as leaked from the Supreme Court will wipe out the porn industry and the sex-toy industry in this country—not to mention rolling back our civilization by 200 years.
The legal theory—as presented—is that we should go back to a time when women were chattel and could be burned at the stake for witchcraft if they were too opinionated. This is a time when constitutionally the votes of Black men were counted at three-fifths the worth of a white man. (Neither white nor Black women could vote.).
Yet Alito urges us to make sure our laws align with those values. He argues that abortion is not “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition,” before taking us back to 1868 and the origins of the 14th Amendment, which guarantees “equal protection of the laws”: “By the time of the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, three-quarters of the States had made abortion a crime at any stage of pregnancy, and the remaining States would soon follow,” Alito wrote.
I think the mists of time have rounded off a few rough edges of the situation you would like to drag us all back to. This is really a backdoor way to keep basic health care from being available to half of the nation. The female half.
The real crime of this decision is that women and children will suffer under this cruel policy of state-enforced ignorance and neglect.
If you do a bit of basic investigation into the numbers of women who were sterilized by untrained technicians before the Roe v. Wade decision, they were astronomical. After Roe was passed, infant mortality went down in this state by 50 percent—because women were getting better care and were better able to care for their children.
Do you think unwanted children forced into families have a higher chance of being abused? I do.
How many marriages will break up when extramarital affairs result in children, and how will men keep up their child-support payments?
If every child was precious in our eyes, there wouldn’t be any children in foster care. Trust me, there are plenty of kids in the system in Mississippi.
What really concerns me is that once we choose to go backward in time and take this compassionless route, people who do know how to give proper care to an abortion receiver will move out of the system and be lost.
Tami Rose and her store Romantic Adventures
HandoutIt took years of professionals creating proper procedures and codifying standards so that women could receive professional, compassionate treatment and not be endangered or traumatized. All those codified standards will be lost, and the talent will move on.
Women will be forced to carry every pregnancy and denied contraception, which is the logical next step and is already being codified into law in Louisiana ( HB 813). These women will live much shorter life spans.
My heart grieves that Mississippi, which is the poorest state in the country with the worst level of education, an abominable health record and an extremely high infant mortality rate, is being allowed to lead the rest of the nation into such an ill-advised scheme.
The Alito opinion is super dark and will plunge our country into poverty and ill health. It will also potentially devastate my industry. Sex is about to be a lot less fun. And I would imagine with consequences so dire, there will be less of it.
Way to go, Mississippi! You just ruined sex for everybody.
America we either need to wake up, or we need to dream better dreams. We can do better. We do better when we value and love one another and want the best for each other.
As a nation, we should be supporting mothers, feeding children, making better jobs available for our people, and restructuring our society so that all are happy and prosperous and want to have the joy of welcoming more children into the world.
Let’s dream that we can leave this world a little better for them. Then let’s collectively wake up, quit dreaming about the past, and go out and make a better future.
