Risk Management
Mass book bans are difficult. Life-threatening abortion bans are unpopular. Vague GOP-authored laws enact those policies without naming them, by threatening prison for librarians and doctors.
A new bill that passed in the West Virginia House of Delegates this month would threaten prison time for librarians, teachers, and museum staff who make “obscene” material available to children.
Years into a right-wing crusade against library books, West Virginia House Bill 4654 is familiar in its language and its likely application. Similar new legislation in other states has led to librarians preemptively removing titles related to race, gender, and sexuality, for fear of the books being challenged as inappropriate (as books on those topics disproportionately are). It’s hard to ban whole fields of literature outright; it’s easier to raise a vast, vague legal threat and force educators into compliance with its most draconian interpretations.
I’ve been thinking about the West Virginia bill in light of recent moves against women’s medical and reproductive autonomy in states like Alabama, where the state supreme court issued a ruling imperiling in vitro fertilization. The Alabama ruling fell short of officially banning IVF, but went far further in its implications for women, using the extreme language of supposed fetal personhood to argue that frozen embryos constitute living children with rights on par with (and sometimes in excess of) pregnant people. While the ruling didn’t criminalize IVF outright, it has already had the effect of shutting down IVF programs in the state, as well as out-of-state embryo transport programs.
These rulings and laws function as part of a minoritarian power grab. Faced with the legal challenges and electoral unpopularity of explicit book bans and reproductive restrictions, lawmakers and politically minded judges have instead drawn up larger and murkier frameworks of prohibition, making individuals police themselves according to unclear and sometimes impossible standards.
In Florida, which recently passed a law similar to the West Virginia bill, librarians face five years in prison for offering content deemed to be objectionable. Other new Florida laws require schools to immediately pull and review books that receive complaints, prompting members of right-wing groups to report thousands of books at a time. That hefty workload is compounded by a mandatory new Florida librarian training program that instructs librarians to “err on the side of caution” by adopting a maximalist view of unacceptable literature. Some librarians have simply quit, rather than continue to comply with what they describe as a censorship campaign.
Other professions have seen similar departures as workers find themselves in the crosshairs of conservative campaigns to restrict women and children’s choices. Obstetricians have departed red states en masse, citing inability to comply with new anti-abortion laws. Those states’ abortion bans technically provide exceptions for patients whose lives are at risk. But like librarians instructed to err on the side of caution, many doctors who remain in those states are incentivized to use a conservative interpretation of the abortion provision.
A new ProPublica investigation found that, in Tennessee, doctors and medical ethics boards are forced to make hair-splitting decisions that weigh a patient’s risk of death against a doctor’s risk of ten years’ imprisonment.
“Without clarification from legislators and prosecutors on how to handle the real-life nuances that have emerged in hospitals across America, doctors in abortion ban states say they are unable to provide care to high-risk pregnant patients that meets medical standards,” writes ProPublica reporter Kavitha Surana. (As Surana noted on Twitter, she published the investigation on her own due date, which is hero shit.)
“Under threat of prison time and professional ruin, they are finding their personal interests pitted against their patients’ and are overriding their expert training for factors that have nothing to do with medicine, like political perceptions and laws they aren’t qualified to interpret.”
In Alabama, IVF facilities are similarly tasked with parsing their state’s new supreme court ruling, and are erring toward policies that limit staffers’ liability, with some clinics even refusing to release frozen embryos for transport to other states. (“The clinic is afraid to even release the embryos to us for transfer to another state,” one patient told NBC News. “I’m like, ‘Well, theoretically, aren’t you kidnapping my children?’ How far are we taking this? Can I claim them as dependents on my tax return?”)
At their worst, these laws weaponize networks of care, turning our connections into liabilities. The librarian who offers resources to queer youth might become subject to arrest, as might the doctor who provides a lifesaving abortion, as might the person who drives someone interstate to receive an abortion.
They introduce fear and rigidity into the relationships that most require trust and nuance: between doctor and patient, student and teacher, between a pregnant woman and her own body. The law might be unclear, but transgressions stand to be prosecuted to its fullest extent.
Hey, thanks for reading MomLeft! Speaking of obscenity panics in libraries, check out this police footage from inside an Idaho library, plus some more stories I’m reading this week:
-404 Media has obtained police body camera footage from Kootenai County, Idaho Sheriff Robert Morris, who joined the leader of censorship group CleanBooks4Kids on a tour of a local library. The footage shows Morris flipping through teen books, while the group’s leader complains about “a preponderance of demonology and witchcraft” in the library’s young adult section. After paging through a graphic novel that shows two androgynous-looking people kissing, Norris suggests that the book’s entire shelf be labeled as a “dedicated 18 and over” section, or covered with “PVC pipe, a drape, or something.”
-A transgender child, Nex Benedict, is dead after an assault by classmates in their Oklahoma school’s bathroom. Body camera footage from a hospital shows Benedict telling officers that classmates had bullied them over clothing, leading to a fight in which Benedict was “jumped.” Benedict’s mother said the bullying began in 2023, shortly after the passage of a bill that prohibited Oklahoma students from using bathrooms that correspond with their gender identity. (Benedict used he/they pronouns, NBC reports. The Oklahoma policy forced them to use the girls’ bathroom.)
Oklahoma’s right-wing school superintendent has made transgender children central to the state’s educational culture wars, doubling down on his stance in an interview with the New York Times after Benedict’s death. “There’s not multiple genders. There’s two. That’s how God created us,” Oklahoma superintendent Ryan Walters told the Times, adding that Oklahoma schools would not allow students to use names and pronouns that differed from those given at birth. Walters recently appointed anti-transgender “Libs of TikTok” creator Chaya Raichik to a state library committee. Raichik, who does not live in Oklahoma and has no educational credentials, has previously targeted a teacher in Benedict’s school. In 2022, Raichik shared footage of a teacher telling students that “if your parents don’t accept you for who you are, fuck them.” The teacher resigned after subsequent backlash. “Nex was very angry about it,” Benedict’s mother told the Independent.
-Facing inhumane conditions and mass death of family members, Gazan children as young as five have told aid workers that they do not wish to live, the head of Médecins Sans Frontières told the United Nations Security Council last week. "Children who do survive this war will not only bear the visible wounds of traumatic injuries, but the invisible ones too," MSF International Secretary General Christopher Lockyear said.
-On the It’s Going Down podcast, moms in Redlands, California discuss forming an anti-fascist bloc against a far-right coalition that’s targeted their schools. The district has seen a surge in organizing by right-wing religious interests and fascist groups like the Proud Boys, which have pushed book bans, targeted LGBTQ+ rights in schools, and expressed overt racism at school board meetings (“an individual shouted ‘heil Hitler’ at the beginning of the meeting,” one mom recalled).
“It took almost nothing for you guys to jump to death threats. That’s when something switched in my brain: these are not petty squabbles. These people are wishing harm on me,” one Redlands mother told It’s Going Down.