Where is Stand Your Ground equivalent for women?

One example of the obvious and worsening power disparity taking shape between men and women in America is the evolving legal environment surrounding what appears to be each gender’s most defining right.

For some significant portion of American men ‘freedom’ is most embodied in an ever more loosely interpreted 2nd Amendment. This plays out by making ‘any gun for anyone’ a dangerous reality. By example, Republican-run states are moving towards ‘no license, no background check’ policies. And in Congress, prohibitions against the mentally ill owning firearms are regularly ‘shot down’. Additionally, ’Open Carry’ has become a ‘must have’ expression of liberty, even if such complicates police work, making ‘someone being shot to death’ as the only ‘trigger’ that activates law enforcement intervention. ’Brandishing’ and ‘intimidating’ are apparently now honorable expressions of constitutional privilege.

Finally, many states have granted ‘Stand Your Ground’ statutes, perhaps better named the ‘dead men tell no tales’ law, in that only murderers get to say in court that they felt ‘threatened,’ not those who died in the armed encounter. What we have here is a ‘get out of jail free’ provision, a crowning ‘freedom’ legitimizing lethal force. The point is, that with the male version of ‘defining rights’ there is even an ‘out’ for the the most extreme expression of such—murder. All one need do is add ‘I felt threatened’ to one’s story….and you walk.

On the female side, the world opening before us offers no provision for the most extreme expression of a woman’s reproductive vulnerability, the equivalent of protection granted men under Stand Your Ground. Rape, incest, dangerous pregnancies, embryos that cannot flourish, economics, none of it matters once the state has decided on the non-personhood of women. Women may even be charged with murder for taking steps regarding any of these circumstances.

And yet at this moment in history men are granted not just personhood but super-personhood when holding the lethal sacrament. When properly played, Stand Your Ground, as eagerly embraced legal loophole, sanctifies the taking of a fully expressed human life, even as women fall under a legal sledgehammer for actions involving tough decisions and the circumstances of their own body.