A Sick Nation (Part 2 of 4)
The coordinated strategy to keep women sick and how women pay the highest price.
Keep Women Sick
⚠️ Trigger Warning: This article discusses pregnancy loss and medical trauma ⚠️
This is part 2 of my four-part series A Sick Nation (see part 1 here). It looks at the coordinated strategy to keep women sick and how women pay the highest price. A price that is being collected by our legislators.
The United States is actively trying to make residents sicker. Our health is being attacked on many fronts.
Reducing Access to Care
Reducing or eliminating access to Medicaid and Medicare
Making health insurance unaffordable and unattainable
Increasing the difficulty of finding healthcare providers with hospital closures (Medicare/Medicaid impacts)
Cutting off a pipeline of professional care workers by changing their classification
Undermining Knowledge & Safety
Reducing or eliminating funding for critical medical research
Creating chaos by giving inaccurate information about vaccines and other medicines (ex Tylenol)
Eliminating food safety requirements, testing, and reporting that makes us aware of dangers
Increasing Exposure to Harm
Allowing increased exposure to toxins in our water, air and soil
Rolling back decades long environmental protections including allowing chemicals that cause cancer and many other diseases used in and on our food
Undermining Ability to Meet Basic Needs
Making access to food subsidies less available to the most vulnerable among us
When you place these actions side-by-side, you begin to see the pattern. This is our government’s coordinated attack to make us sick. None of these actions are taken in isolation.
Women carry the heaviest burden of the outcomes these actions initiate. The destruction to our health has been engineered to cause the greatest impact to women, people of color, LGBTQIA, and the most economically vulnerable.
Women Will Carry the Burden
A sickly population will need to be cared for in the absence of our government’s ability to provide reasonable healthcare access or safety measures.
An already overworked and stressed mother, daughter, sister, friend will be called upon to provide solutions to illnesses she hasn’t been equipped or trained to treat. She’ll carry the emotional burden as the primary medical caretaker of her loved ones, creating a never-ending cycle of stress, causing additional health impacts that come with the caretaker role.
Her ability to contribute financially will be reduced as she becomes the person designated to miss work to care for and take her loved ones to get healthcare. Medical care that will be less available. The seriousness of sicknesses and diseases will increase as medical care comes at a premium, not just in cost, but time, energy and effort.
The agony and guilt watching her loved ones suffer will be intolerable. The management of her own health will be deprioritized as she loses sleep and goes without in service to those she loves.
There will be a disproportionate impact on single mothers, low-wage workers, and BIPOC women. The trauma women will experience as legislation whittles away her freedoms won’t be able to be calculated. The repercussions will be handed out like punishment. A sick nation becomes an unpaid economy upheld by women’s labor.
But their punishment won’t stop at the emotional and physical. Across the nation they are criminalizing women.
The Criminalization of Women’s Health
Between June 2022 and June 2024, there were over 400 pregnancy-related criminal cases, including those for miscarriages, stillbirths, and pregnancy-related behavior prosecuted nationwide.1
In the year following the overturning of federal abortion rights, there were over 200 pregnancy-related prosecutions in only six Southern states.2
Consider the case of Brittany Watts from Ohio.
Brittany miscarried in her home on September 22, 2023. In the days leading up to it, her doctors told her the devastating news that her fetus was nonviable.
Brittany spent two days in the hospital, waiting 19 hours to get care. She begged them to save her life. She needed to be induced. Because of Ohio abortion laws, Brittany’s routine care was not provided. She likely waited while hospital executives, lawyers, and medical staff debated whether to save her life.
She left the hospital. I imagine Brittany felt like staff members were going to kill her. She was forced to live in a horror movie in real life. Fleeing must have felt like survival.
She miscarried at home. She survived something that could have easily resulted in her death, causing her body to be septic.
Seeking medical care, she went back to the hospital. Staff called the police. Her home was searched and they ultimately charged her with abuse of a corpse.
The Ohio grand jury declined to indict her.3
This time.
That’s the point. The terror is effective, even if the system backs down.
This time, the grand jury didn’t indict her. Will the next Brittany Watts end up in prison? Or will she be a statistic in the second-biggest cause of maternal deaths?
The sheer volume of women being prosecuted for health outcomes beyond their control is staggering — but it’s not accidental. It’s intentional and strategic.
The medical abuses inflicted upon women through the reduction of adequate care combined with the prosecution of women is a level of cruelty that should be criminal.
The current regime in power is tactically challenging a woman’s right to access healthcare, therefore eliminating bodily autonomy completely and making her criminally accountable for outcomes she cannot control and for medical results that could have been cured.
Consider RFJ, Jr’s statements about Tylenol. The US’s Secretary of Health and Human Services at a press conference announced the decades long over the counter medicine caused autism with no studies, history, or data to substantiate his claim. He was flanked by POTUS himself and Dr. Oz.
It’s not a far-reaching conclusion to assume with RFK Jr’s recommended health tracking and other available data on women’s health, unstudied false conclusions about the health conditions and the causes, women will be increasingly accountable for health outcomes out of their control.
Once we normalize false medical claims not substantiated by data and science, but delivered with drunken authority, it makes weaponizing health data against women easy.
An additional intended outcome is to make women suffer needless when there are solutions available.
Under their control (“under their eye”), the number of crimes women will be responsible for will undoubtedly increase as they tighten the rope around our necks, imprisoning us in our own bodies.
If by some miracle we can stop these actions and begin to treat women like human beings again, it will likely be decades before we eradicate the cancer in our government and repair and re-fund our systems.
And beneath all of this is a truth women have always known: none of these policies exist outside patriarchy’s design and execution of these inhumane tactics. When you take a closer look, the devastating outcomes of a broken system reveal themselves as anything but accidental.
The Feminist Perspective: Cause and Effect
The patriarchy believes that sick women cannot rise. Sick women cannot resist.
Keeping women sick and exhausted is an attempt to keep us from fighting. It keeps pushing money up the capitalist ladder on the backs of women’s free labor. This strategy keeps women relying on a system that doesn’t care if she lives or dies. If she thrives or suffers.
Women and men alike are smothered by patriarchy and authoritarianism, impacting our financial independence by feeding the ladder of fascism.
It’s been determined already who is dispensable in this system; and who they deem worthy to trade our suffering and servitude to the patriarchy.
Let’s use this platform to share experiences and create solutions. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic in the comments.
In Part 3, we’ll talk about exactly who is harmed and who profits when a nation chooses sickness over care.
Author’s Note
My reflection and commentary come from seeing patterns, lived experience, and observation. Project 2025 is nothing if not the most complicated project plan I’ve ever seen. In my over 30-year corporate career I’ve seen and created many. I see the army of project managers approaching or meeting all their milestones.
It starts with flooding the airwaves with rhetoric, bringing test cases through the conservative states, then attempts to make their policies nationwide. Everything is meticulously planned. Schedules were created. Timing is choreographed. Risks are mitigated and solutions implemented when resistance is effective in the forms of protesting, legal challenges, elections, speaking out, boycotts, and building community.
And I see the cliff this country is driving us to. I see the systematic destruction of our health at the hands of our government. And I see the first and most affected populations of women, children, BIPOC, LGBTQIA, and the economically disadvantaged being pushed over the edge. I believe that silence is complicity. My hope is that by using my voice to show patterns, impacts, and bring humanity to those being treated inhumanely, together we can resist and rebuild a system that doesn’t harm us.
References:
1 Pregnancy Justice, Criminalization of Pregnancy Report, 2024.
2 Pregnancy Justice, Southern States Criminalization Analysis, 2023–2024.
3 CBS News, “The Ohio Woman Charged with a Felony After a Miscarriage Talks Shock of Her Arrest” (Brittany Watts), 2023.